Last post of the Horse trip
Aug. 27th, 2007 10:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumMonday Maia and I took a ride. Gary had gone home (by plane) because he had things he was committed to before we left. Pat wasn’t up for it. It was going to be a longish ride. Out to Morgan Horse Station, then along the waterway to Arch Rock, and then back. Round trip, about 16 miles.
We got out latish. We did, however, get recommendations which let us turn it into a loop, and cut about four-miles off the trip. All was uneventful. She was on Ice, and I was on Leus. We ran, some, through the pastures and Ice tried to run-away with her. He wanted to pass Leus (who is more than a hand shorter than he is) but that wasn’t happening. I pulled Leus off the trail (one sided stop, and up the hill) and we walked to the next gate.
The slot along the creek was incredible. It took me awhile, because of the trees, and ferns, to notice just how wide, and deep, the “V” of the canyon is, the more notable because the water in the bottom, which; perforce, cut it out, was so small and slow. There were several places I’d like to take some pictures. If it were more private there are some naiad/dryad shots I’d like to try, but even on a weekday, late in the afternoon, the traffic was too steady to make that really practical.
Then we cleared the last bit of trees and the ocean was spread out before us. There were some sea-going raptors hovering on the wind rising up the bluffs.
Ice, it turns out, hates the ocean. He was restive and fractious as Maia and I took turns going out to the end of the trail, onto the promontory.
As we turned up the Coast Trail he was pushy. He stayed pushy, pressing Leus to a faster walk, or even a trot/gait, for so long as he could see the water, even when the water was so far away as to be nothing but a vaguely visible presence at the horizon.
Up hill and down, through overgrown paths, and past bowls of pale green; with trees rising out of them. Pine and mesquite, Madrone and chaparral.
Then came the fading of the light.
Riding in the twilight is one thing. Riding in the dark another. Riding in the gloaming through the woods, is something completely different. The colors fade away, and the sounds too. Everything is flattened. It gets to a point where the only thing one can do is trust the horse. The road ahead curves to the left. No, it doesn’t. That’s a small patch of grass, which looks as a road would look.
The dim slice of grey, which creeps lower, and right; that’s still the road.
There is no sense of depth, and the trees become a presence. Every so often a distant light intrudes, when the lines of the giants all around conjoin to allow a sliver of some inhabited place; some other world, to sneak through. And then it’s gone again, as if it never were. Those are memories of some other time, when there were details in the world, and something other than the path was there to give definition and meaning to things.
Conversation is hard; because so much effort (though it’s passive) is being spent just to know what is; forget what might be.
And the little nuisances (those giant nettles, to which horses are particularly sensitive) now loom large in the minds eye, because they have become invisible. They might be anywhere. The edge, where the ravine falls to distance unknowable, is where the horse wants to walk. So; for fear’s sake, one spends the effort to keep him to the center of the trail (because the nettles and the poison oak are to the other side; and he will want to crop the grasses, where the former would be disaster), even though you know he has better eyes in the night, you are afraid that the small places where the edge crumbled when you could see will be repeated, and you will overreact in the gloom.
Eventually, the trail bottoms, and the dark is almost complete. The trees thin. There are campsites, and fires, and people. The dreary terrors and the joyless pleasures of the trees are left behind. Life resumes.
For those who are of a mind to know what it was like to ride through Mirkwood, this is how you do it, because that is what it was.
We got out latish. We did, however, get recommendations which let us turn it into a loop, and cut about four-miles off the trip. All was uneventful. She was on Ice, and I was on Leus. We ran, some, through the pastures and Ice tried to run-away with her. He wanted to pass Leus (who is more than a hand shorter than he is) but that wasn’t happening. I pulled Leus off the trail (one sided stop, and up the hill) and we walked to the next gate.
The slot along the creek was incredible. It took me awhile, because of the trees, and ferns, to notice just how wide, and deep, the “V” of the canyon is, the more notable because the water in the bottom, which; perforce, cut it out, was so small and slow. There were several places I’d like to take some pictures. If it were more private there are some naiad/dryad shots I’d like to try, but even on a weekday, late in the afternoon, the traffic was too steady to make that really practical.
Then we cleared the last bit of trees and the ocean was spread out before us. There were some sea-going raptors hovering on the wind rising up the bluffs.
Ice, it turns out, hates the ocean. He was restive and fractious as Maia and I took turns going out to the end of the trail, onto the promontory.
As we turned up the Coast Trail he was pushy. He stayed pushy, pressing Leus to a faster walk, or even a trot/gait, for so long as he could see the water, even when the water was so far away as to be nothing but a vaguely visible presence at the horizon.
Up hill and down, through overgrown paths, and past bowls of pale green; with trees rising out of them. Pine and mesquite, Madrone and chaparral.
Then came the fading of the light.
Riding in the twilight is one thing. Riding in the dark another. Riding in the gloaming through the woods, is something completely different. The colors fade away, and the sounds too. Everything is flattened. It gets to a point where the only thing one can do is trust the horse. The road ahead curves to the left. No, it doesn’t. That’s a small patch of grass, which looks as a road would look.
The dim slice of grey, which creeps lower, and right; that’s still the road.
There is no sense of depth, and the trees become a presence. Every so often a distant light intrudes, when the lines of the giants all around conjoin to allow a sliver of some inhabited place; some other world, to sneak through. And then it’s gone again, as if it never were. Those are memories of some other time, when there were details in the world, and something other than the path was there to give definition and meaning to things.
Conversation is hard; because so much effort (though it’s passive) is being spent just to know what is; forget what might be.
And the little nuisances (those giant nettles, to which horses are particularly sensitive) now loom large in the minds eye, because they have become invisible. They might be anywhere. The edge, where the ravine falls to distance unknowable, is where the horse wants to walk. So; for fear’s sake, one spends the effort to keep him to the center of the trail (because the nettles and the poison oak are to the other side; and he will want to crop the grasses, where the former would be disaster), even though you know he has better eyes in the night, you are afraid that the small places where the edge crumbled when you could see will be repeated, and you will overreact in the gloom.
Eventually, the trail bottoms, and the dark is almost complete. The trees thin. There are campsites, and fires, and people. The dreary terrors and the joyless pleasures of the trees are left behind. Life resumes.
For those who are of a mind to know what it was like to ride through Mirkwood, this is how you do it, because that is what it was.
