AUGUST 2, 2022 – (Cont.) At the time, I knew nothing about homeowner’s insurance, but as I now reflect on the event, I understand why horse people who invite their friends along should have plenty of liability coverage.
Unlike Mother, who was fond of horses and had some riding experience in her upbringing, Dad was no Marlboro Man. He smoked Viceroys before he switched to ERIK brand cigars with an image of a Viking ship on the packaging. I don’t think Dad knew much about horses. On that particular outing, he was simply “along for the ride,” you might say. In fact, I was a little surprised to see him astride one of the bigger, feistier horses. He and Fred were good friends, and in each other’s company, they were a couple of jokesters. For his own amusement and Fred’s, Dad put on a good cowboy act, sitting and talking as if he’d grown up on some ranch out West.
But suddenly, to everyone’s horror, the act went off script. Without warning or reason, the horse decided to imitate greased lightning and gallop from zero to 60 in three seconds flat. The grown-ups who were left behind—Mother, Fred Moore, and Ruth, his wife—uttered shouts and cries of the helpless. Dad was entirely on his own, and his immediate prospects didn’t look good: the cloud of dust that was a man on a horse was headed straight for a high fence.
When Dad retold the story to me decades later, he revealed what was going through his mind: sheer terror.
“The horse was traveling so fast,” he said, “nothing I did slowed it down. I pulled on the reins. I yelled, ‘Stop!’ and ‘Whoa!’ but it only ran faster. I thought I’d get seriously hurt if I fell off, so sticking with the horse seemed to be my best choice. But then I saw that we were headed for the fence at the end of the pasture. The horse was going to take a flying leap! I’d never been in such a predicament. Should I jump off at the last second? Should I try to hold on? What if the horse stumbled? I decided to hang on and hope for the best. I grabbed the mane and leaned forward until my face was touching my hands.
“Just as we were about to go airborne,” Dad said, “the horse made a 90-degree turn so hard, it nearly threw me off. After this sudden maneuver, the horse slowed to a canter along the fence, then dropped back to a trot, finally a walk. I managed to ride it back to where everyone was gathered.”
I don’t think Dad ever rode a horse after that, but he did nothing to discourage Mother from taking my sisters and me to “Circle Pines”—even after Buster decided to run a horse race . . . without me. The closest Dad got to a horse in the years that followed was in the basement of my grandparents’ house. Occasionally, during our Sunday visits while my sisters and I watched TV (a special privilege, since we didn’t have a television at our house), Dad helped Grandpa, a violinist, re-hair our violin bows, using . . . hair from a horse’s tail.
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
