A Walkin’ Ten

A Walkin’ Ten

An Exercise: The story behind a photo

On a blistering day in early September, I step into the bookstore in Hanover, NH in search of air conditioning. I go to the biographies, to the bathroom behind the biographies, and wipe my face with paper towels and swab another layer of deodorant under my arms. I look in the mirror at my red cheeks, my moist brow, my clinging t-shirt, and wish I could be out of this town and back in the mountains where it is cool and breezy. I wish for the knot in my stomach to loosen. I wish for someone to take me by the shoulders, look me in the eyes and tell me that the 1,000 college freshmen soon headed into my care will be happy, healthy and safe; that it will all go beautifully. That the mountain lodge where we’ll host them will remain functional; that no student will get a concussion on our mega slip and slide; that no crisis will occur while my co-chief and I host and feed Dartmouth’s incoming class. That nothing will befall these students on my watch.

We are in Hanover today, my crew of fourteen, my co-chief, and I, for a supplies restock and a visit to the orientation program’s home base. We’ve been playing like children all afternoon, running, dancing, tumbling, laughing. But the heat is uncomfortable and I feel huge. Huge and sticky. Huge and lethargic. Hugely inept. The collar of my damp shirt tugs at my neck and my skin bubbles. I think of everything we need to do before the freshmen arrive at our lodge in two days, and suddenly I’m too dizzy to stand. So I have left my excitable crew and am hiding in this bathroom behind the biographies, wiping sweat from my brow, waiting for it to regather, wiping it off again, and trying to ward off a panic attack.

I haven’t had one since high school, but this is how they start. At my senior athletic awards dinner, I nearly missed receiving an award because I was in the bathroom, clenching my fists until they were purple, crying and sputtering. I had been forced to wear a skirt and was missing a swim training session; physical insecurity combined with guilt to produce crippling anxiety. I remember standing in the bathroom, thinking I might die there, exploded with tension. I remember knowing that, really, nothing at all was wrong. My mother found me in the bathroom, gave me bewildered look, patted me on the back, and told me to return to the ceremony. I accepted my award with red eyes and a thin smile.

Here, in this blandly pleasant book store, I try not to cry and reprimand myself for unraveling. My skin feels like a million marching ants and my limbs won’t bend, but really, there is no crisis. I self-soothe, but I wish there were someone to do it for me. Then, my phone rings.

“Hello?”

“Will? How’re you doing?”

It’s my mother. The sound of her voice buckles my knees, mobilizes me, and I stumble into a stall and sit on a toilet.

“Fine. Stressed.”

“Things out of control?”

“No, just… hard.”

“Mmm. Well, I just wanted to catch you before you head back up to the Lodge and we lose contact…. It’s beautiful here today.”

“It’s so hot here, I’m sweaty and gross and overwhelmed.”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine.” She’s silent for a moment. “Well… your father didn’t want me to tell you, but Tenny died last night. Colic.”

And now, I am twenty-two years old, sitting on a toilet and sobbing. Not only because the death of my horse seems monumental. It isn’t really; I’d been too heavy to ride her for years. Not only because Tenny’s absence is one more thing that will mark the difference between my childhood home and the present; that rift started many years ago. And not only because I didn’t get to say goodbye to the pet I rode, fought with, adventured on, and loved for ten years. I summoned false tears to bury two of our dogs and wondered if I was a monster as my sister wiped globs of snot and tears from her own face. Perhaps I’m too cold; or perhaps, as a child, I saw enough lifeless baby goats to learn that pets die.    

I cry now because, in this warped panic, I feel I’ve been carrying the worries of a mother with 1,000 children. I keep dreaming of injured students, legs broken, fingers sliced, concussed, maimed students. And I cry because the death of a pet gives me an acceptable reason to cry. My horse died, and now I have an excuse to release everything else.

Somewhere in the tears, I sob extra hard a few times, realizing that the backhoe will have come, dug a hole in the low pasture, and buried Tenny’s bloated body before I get home. That our equine trio is down to two. That Bubba and Mary will go on grazing and fighting over grain and hardly notice she’s gone. I cry a bit for Tenny, but mostly I cry for myself.

I give myself five minutes in the stall, then wipe my face again with water and paper towels. I go to the main floor of the store, and buy a standard Dartmouth t-shirt, on sale for $7 dollars. I go back to the bathroom behind the biographies and change.

*****

           

After two months in Chile, when Mathias and I have grown close and stay up late at the dinner table, talking about the horses and riders, Chile and America, our adventures, our curiosities; when we both feel my being here is more than a footnote in Antilco’s history, that I have come home, he begins to tease me.

“Man, you got here that first day,” he says, “with that gloomy look on your face, I wanted to put you on the bus and send you home. You walked around for days, so polite and quiet, so withdrawn, I thought, ‘ughh, I don’t want to deal with this for three months.’”

This is not the first time I’ve been told my at-rest face is one of anger and sadness, so I return the serve to Mathias, “I was just being polite! This isn’t my house. You LOVE rules, Mathias, I was just trying to figure out what they were so I could follow them. Would you rather have some crazy, laughing fool who followed you around all day, giddy and talking?” His face drops; the thought horrifies him.

“Well, you’re lucky I let you come. It was only because I didn’t really have another option.”

“Oh- Because it worked out so terribly?,” I ask.

“No. Of course, we’re thrilled you’re here. But let me just say, next time you apply for a similar job, my god, send some better pictures! That poor, skinny sweating horse- so ugly! And you, scowling and so…”

He stops himself before he calls me ugly too. He isn’t being mean and I’m not offended. But my stomach flips when he mentions the horse.

When I applied for the position I had to scrounge to produce a few pictures to satisfy his demands of ‘three pictures of the applicant on horseback.’ In my months with Mathias, I have been asked to opine about potential guides. I have seen how he scrutinizes the photos, at times too judgementally, looking for character details in the rider’s posture, smile, hands, feet, the cock of their head, the style of their hair. He mines the snapshots for information, hoping they’ll tell him whether the applicant is cut out for three rough months alone on a ranch in Chile, battling bamboo thickets, stubborn horses, and even more stubborn riders. He thinks he knows, but he’s just guessing.

In the end, the only photos I found were several years out of date and not particularly nice. In the one he mentions I am sixteen. I wear a volleyball team jacket, a Hamptons Shakespeare Festival Sweatshirt, jeans and boots. My hair is pulled into the severe ponytail I wore everyday until I started college. Black athletic sunglasses hide my eyes, which are my softest feature. If they were visible, Mathias may have looked at them and thought of me as sweet, or potentially warm. Tenny sweats beneath me, her chestnut coat frenzied into a lather as it always was, even in winter, which it must be in this picture, judging by the barren trees and the extra jacket tied to the back of my saddle. My torso bulges, my thighs are meaty and spread against the saddle; I look big atop the horse. The tool shed behind us, small, weary, shingled, seems to lean. The photo flatters nothing and no one. It depicts a lifeless backdrop, a frightened horse, and a stern rider.

Mathias smiles lovingly at me and continues teasing. “I saw that picture and thought, ‘Well, at least she’ll be used to riding skinny horses,’ and that outhouse is the same as ours so I figured you wouldn’t have a problem with that either.”

“So really, the picture worked then, didn’t it?” I say, not mentioning that the tool shed is a tool shed, not an outhouse. “It showed you I’d fit well here. And I do!”

“Yeah…,” he says, “But it’s just not a nice picture.”

What he means is it isn’t a pretty picture. I do not look beautiful. The horse does not look handsome. Attractiveness weighs heavily in Mathias’ analyses, and I can admit it is an unattractive shot. I decide not to argue further, or tell him that this photo expresses exactly the causal, gritty riding style that my family shares with Antilco and as such served as a perfect application supplement. With his German stubbornness, he can be unshakeably resolute.

Throughout my second stint at Antilco, only months after that sticky, panicky day in September, he mentions the picture often, referring to the poor, skinny, sweating horse. For Tenny’s sake, my heart quivers. I want to tell him that that skinny horse lunged, fought, struggled, pawed herself free of quick sand that swallowed her past her belly. I want to tell him she wove poles and circled barrels with deft, prize-winning speed. I want to tell him that she flew across sand flats with a lengthy, beautiful, grace that his stocky criollos horses can’t even fathom, that she skimmed the terrain and his horses scuffle. I want to tell him that even though my mother passed her up for a lumbering Appaloosa, and I was near driven to tears at times by her high-strung, incessant prancing, we both know she was a a horse of dignity and integrity, a queenly horse. I want to tell him, that if he had raced her down a beach, and felt the searing intelligence of her strides, the wrenching commitment of her run, then he would realize that beneath him was a true horse. That next to her, his were mere meat-headed ponies.

But I don’t tell him anything.

I laugh, and agree that the picture is ugly, because it is. I don’t tell him anything, because I know Tenny was superior only among our backyard pets. She is idolized by me because she was mine, because she is the horse that taught me to ride, to keep my hands quiet on the reins of an anxious mount. And although she was once captured as a skinny, sweating horse, it was on her that I learned everything I need to know to ride his criollos through rainforests and over mountains. That she, like the photo, is a reason I am here. 

Tenny, Bob, Ralph and me ~2004