Growing up, my brothers and I never lacked access to a valiant stallion.
We grew up in rural Oklahoma where the amount of equestrian life often rivals the human population. My brother Caleb got his own steed in junior high after choosing horsemanship as a primary vocation—with roping and football kicking as subsidiary incomes. His paint horse, which he named “Byrd,” graced our back pasture as long as his penchant for adventure and near injury could be tolerated.
Parenthetically, we can mention the basketball goal. Caleb tied up Byrd to the basketball goal one moment, and in the very next, hung on to the goal’s base as Byrd barreled down the driveway. I remember looking down with a start to see Caleb quickly vanishing into a cloud of dust.
We can also mention when our oldest brother Josiah hopped on Byrd from behind, without a saddle, only to be bucked off next to the barbed wire fence. He had to crawl under the wire to escape the incoming hoof kick from the irate beast.
Josiah also rode a horse once that dragged him underneath a bodark tree, the thorniest sort of Oklahoma growth. He had to lay back all the way so he almost fell off the creature’s haunches, grunting in discomfort as the thorns scraped his stomach. He survived.
Byrd escaped his enclosure a couple of times and once wandered miles down the gravel road by the conveyor belt that ran by our house. We looked for him well into nightfall. Byrd mowed the back pasture with his jowls better than any mowing contraption. He stood in sunset silhouettes better than any comatose statue of similar height and girth. To sit, as twelve-year-old, on Byrd’s unpredictable back, put a germ of terror in the soul. But it also manned me up. Made me a real Oklahoman. A real cowboy.
But that is a joke; I was never a real cowboy. Not even close. This was to become clear.
Caleb, though, seemed to have a way with horses. He wasn’t afraid to clip their hooves or saddle them up for a ride. He patted their munching jaws and hopped on them with the ease of a cat leaping for a familiar sill. And he rode with ease, confidence, surveying the landscape with a gristly glint in his eye.
We all knew Caleb was a horseman, beyond a shadow of a doubt, when we discovered Turbo. Byrd would often loosen up into a gangly trot, but he would never sprint. Turbo, a sleek brown beauty out at the local ranch north of town, had no prejudice against kicking it into high gear.
I don’t remember how exactly we met Turbo or why Caleb decided to saddle him up and take him for a spin. Our friends from New Mexico, the Smiths, were visiting us and came out to the ranch that day; on their previous visit, Geof, the father of the clan, got himself kicked squarely in the sternum by a donkey when we went out to the same ranch. Why? Only because Geof had the gumption to try and mount the sturdy ass for kicks (no pun intended). Now he was back on treacherous ground, searching for another wound.
I remember it so clearly. Caleb mounted the mystery horse next to a long fence line, planning on getting Turbo to gallop around the big field. For a moment, all was normal. Caleb got situated, smiled down on the onlookers, and verbally wondered where he might go first. And then, an invisible hand laid a firebrand on that horse’s glorious butt.
To say Turbo “shot off” like an arrow does a disservice to our modern notions of speed, velocity, momentum, and vector. This horse was Hermes in equestrian form. He was the winged horse you see in the Colombia Pictures logo. He was a violent storm, tearing and flying and snorting down the fence line, putting big yardage up before any of us could even gape. Would Caleb go flying? Would he lose a stirrup and get dragged to death? It was possible. Turbo thundered off, grinding earth like a plough of hooves, but Caleb, though startled, stayed fastened to the saddle like a soda cap.
He came back wide-eyed yet exhilarated, hungry for more. He’d managed to gain control of Turbo and slow him down to a stop near our little crowd, but it wasn’t long before the horse took off again for another searing burn down the field. It was fun just watching the dynamic duo. Man and horse twined together in the ripe summer dusk.
Of course, watching the beauty in motion wasn’t enough for Geof Smith. It was time for Caleb to get a little more democratic. Geof would ride the horse or go home forever regretting the lost opportunity.
Now, this part I only heard about. I must have gone up to observe the pigs in the animal pen near the main barn. But according to the lore, now immortalized, Geof mounted Turbo, began to happily trot among the other riders in the company, but was soon subject to the same bestial madness. Turbo lit out for the far forests on the edge of the field. And it’s not at all Geof’s fault that the saddle started to slip. Things like this happen when you’re riding insanely fast horses like Sir Turbo. It wasn’t Geof’s fault that he slid off the side of the horse and cranked his toe the wrong way in the stirrup while Turbo kept caterwauling and flying. Au contraire, it was to Geof’s eternal glory that he found himself lying, broken toed but beauteous, on the grass of destiny. Turbo, though he’d been ridden, would not be tamed.
Whether cowboyed or inflicting a KO, Turbo wowed us all that day. The horse left such an impression that Geof’s big toe remains irreversibly crooked to this day. He wears it as a badge of honor, of course, along with the memory of that burro’s hoof on his chest. And yet, there’s something missing in the story. Yours truly didn’t dare to mount the mighty.
Caleb had asked me if I wanted to ride Turbo. But in all seriousness, I barely summoned the courage to ride Byrd, the pacificist. The mammalian world is filled with terrifying energy, and I didn’t want to trifle with the power of the beast. In retrospect, though, I tell this tale as a mere observer. Josiah, although he had to scramble under fences to avoid getting trampled to death, at least hopped on a horse when it counted. Caleb can say he rode Turbo. Geof can say he fell off of Turbo. I can only say I watched Turbo. It’s a trite metaphor, maybe, but why do we avoid the possibility of injury? In doing so we forego the possibility of adventure, of buoyant jubilation. And yes, by extension, we avoid the possibility of broken toes, but only to maintain a caked-up heart that doesn’t care to risk it for the biscuit.
Kudos for the horse riders of the world, and for people who are courageous victors at customer service or marriage or beating cancer. Props to the people who keep getting out of bed and mounting their mopeds to drive to nursing school. And to the garbage men who hurl their own weight in crap block-by-block every morning. I see them as cowboys flying down the fence of life, sometimes staying on, sometimes falling off, but never failing to saddle up. Kudos for me, maybe, for lining this page with just one more word, again, and again, and again.
Turbo burns in my imagination. But I can only imagine now in hypotheticals. Would I have fallen off? Would have I have jumped off? Or would I have kept my head, buried by feet into the stirrups, and realized that thundering through the wind, liberating the latent joys of the chase, inviting danger into my comfortable corner of the universe, might hint at the great goal of life?
Whatever the outcome, with me on or off, ready or not, I’m sure Turbo would have kept on running.
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