My wife's dream farm is a horse farm. She states emphatically, not a horse ranch. The point of the farm is horses, somehow, rather than a ranch that produces cattle, say, for which horses are part of the service equipment. So horse farm it shall be in its Platonic conception. She, my wife, has been infatuated with horses since she was a little girl on her parents' farm. Horses were the supreme ontological example of the reality of Being. The horse was the presence of the world for her, in the way, I suppose, that the mountains and sea were for the ancient Greeks. Her love has shifted from one breed to another, from thoroughbred, to warm blood, and now to draft. On a whim, she went to view draft horses at a farm that imported the animals from Amish farms in Iowa. These were draft horses that, for some reason, did not work out as draft animals. She bought a wonderful, huge gray gelding, of Percheron/Thoroughbred mix. He epitomizes the term, gentle giant. She clipped him, removing his shaggy coat of cold-weather Iowa hair, groomed him, and taught him manners. She trained him in dressage, which is the ultimate in equine fitness training. Dressage training is for horses the equivalent of Pilates training for humans. It brings to complete fitness the essence of all the deep muscles and shapes the horse in its essential equine traits. Necks that were muscled upside down get retrained. Backs that scrunched up pulling a plow or wagon were re-sprung. Rear legs that dug like tractor treads and hung back were muscled and trained to reach forward toward the front legs. Her huge draft horse did all this, lesson after lesson, until its transformation amazed even the most passionate lover of Hanoverians.
I have loved horses, too; but not with the same identification of my essential nature as my wife. For one thing, I am a poor equestrian. I loved riding, jumping, and hoped some day to do eventing, but my coordination and timing was poor and I fell off the horse too often to entertain serious competitive riding. I had an Arab mare, who had the characteristic Arab floating trot and was hot as a pistol to ride, especially when she was in season. I had a young gelding of Arab-Quarter mix. He was a wonderful, brave horse, who went anywhere on trail that I requested, with complete courage. But I had to give up riding, simply because I had no time, raising children and advancing my career.
It was nearly two decades after I gave up riding that my wife purchased her Percheron--her "Perchathauraus" as she calls his huge majesty. I fell in love with him, too. He touched a deep chord in my life, for Percherons had been an important part of my childhood. My father's family logged in northern New England. My father's father, that is, my grandfather on my father's side, used horses in the woods in the winter and he used Percherons. As a young boy, I went with my father, in the 1940s and 1950s, to the winter logging camps and watched the drafts work. It would be freezing cold, of course, feet of snow on the ground. The animals were hitched to logs that had been cut down in the woods. The hauler stood on the logs, as if they were a wagon, and drove the horse or team from that precarious perch. It was cheaper to use the horses, than tractors, because the tractors required a road, while the horses could follow a path. In the Winter, these enormous, powerful animals sweat and puffed, pulling logs. Sweat poured down their chest and foamed from their muzzles. Their breath condensed in the freezing air, so that they looked for all the world like a railroad steam engine puffing on the tracks. The loggers, often French-Canadian, swore in French at them and snapped the reins to urge them to their strenuous tasks. The animals grunted and heaved as they yanked and hauled the huge fell trees along narrow snow trails, across New England's rocky mountain sides, to the built-out skidways.
These magnificent beasts were ontological reality for me. I could never be a mystic, I could never doubt the reality of the physical world, I could never doubt the immanent presence of the force of nature, watching them, as a boy, perform their heroic labors.
It was easy, from this deep, emotional chord in my life, to confirm my wife's desire to have a horse farm in West Virginia built around magnificent draft horses. Our farm would be a horse farm; goats, chickens, Angus, merely decorative add-ons. Such a farm would be coming home.
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