To pull a stump out of a swamp with a horse, first you harness the horse. Then you hang the reins, singletree, and a chain on the hames, grab the halter rope, and lead the horse to the swamp where the stumps are. You back the horse up to the stump, hook the singletree to the traces, and attach the chain to the singletree. You grab the other end of the chain and loop a couple of half-hitches around the stump. You slap the reins on the horse’s rump, and she pulls ahead until the chain snaps taut. If the stump moves, she pulls harder. If it doesn’t, she quits and looks back at you.

You tell her to back up and she does. You take the shovel and axe that you leaned against a tree at the end of yesterday’s stump-pulling session. You dig down to the stump’s big roots and chop a couple of them in half. You slap the reins again. The stump moves or it doesn’t. You pull, stop, chop, pull. Repeat as necessary.

 

Julie and I both grew up taking care of horses, and neither one of us wants to get in a saddle again. I had hay fever as a child, which meant that feeding corralled horses made me snotty and miserable. Julie grew up on a ranch in the desert of eastern Oregon, where her family, on horseback, drove cattle from winter to summer pasture and back, across miles of sagebrush, through clouds of gnats and dust.

Both of us made what bargains we could with our parents.

Julie volunteered to cook for the cattle drives, which meant that at twelve years old she was driving a pickup and trailer on boulder-strewn roads, charged with getting to the night’s destination and having dinner ready and waiting when the rest of the crew arrived with the cows.

In return for not having to break bales and fork hay over the corral fence, I watered the horses through our central Idaho winters, which meant that every evening I chopped ice out of the horse troughs, filled them with water from a hose I ran from a tap in the basement of our house, and then disconnected the hose, drained it, and put it back in the basement before it froze solid.

Julie tells a story of riding a horse for hours in the heat and the gnats, and when it was finally noon, finding a baloney-and-mayo sandwich and a can of hot salty V-8 juice in her sack lunch. I simply say that if you need horses on a job, the job doesn’t stop at quitting time.

Neither of us questioned our families’ need to have horses, or that we had to do our part to take care of them. If they sliced their legs open on barbed wire, we had to help doctor them with powdered Neosporin and neatsfoot oil. I knew about proudflesh and broken legs and worming and the knacker’s truck before I was in junior high school.

That’s not to say that I treated the horses as machines. They had names, and I knew their quirks and gaits and the things that spooked them. I knew how to walk up to them. I knew most of them were family members in good standing, maybe even in better standing than I was.

I knew if you failed to take care of them, they would starve or sicken or die. I knew if I didn’t take care of the fences, they would get out on the road and get hit by a pickup.

I knew they didn’t live as long as humans, and that they would die before I did, and that I might have to have something to do with their deaths, even if it only meant a consent to involve the knacker.

I knew that with horses, you didn’t suffer needless suffering. That was reserved for human beings. I also knew that the kind of responsibility I had been saddled with as a little kid was usually reserved for adults.

As a general rule, I stayed away from people who abused their horses, or worked them too hard, or kept them too long on chewed-to-dirt pasture. People who didn’t take care of their horses wouldn’t take care of their families, their finances, their machinery, or anything else.

 

Julie went to high school in Vale, Oregon, a small agricultural community fifteen miles from the Idaho border. Home economics was required for all genders at Vale High School, and one of the assignments was to pair up with another student and have a baby. The baby was only a chicken egg, but the couple had to carry it everywhere and not break it for two weeks. They also had to develop a household budget for the egg (the teacher assigned jobs, work schedules, and salaries) and put aside money for a college fund. Julie got two eggs because she and her spouse had twins.

When the teacher informed Julie and her high school spouse that one of them had become unemployed, the eggs broke their budget. Julie doesn’t remember what happened to the eggs (just one sign among many that it’s a good thing we didn’t have children), but she says the class, along with a classmate who had a real live baby her sophomore year, convinced her that having kids was the literal end of carefree existence.

Her reasoning was that children were like horses. If you had them, you had to take care of them. If you weren’t sure you could take care of them, you shouldn’t have them. My career as a teacher had convinced me of the same thing. It was a good thing we found each other.

Most of the students who graduated from Vale have had kids, budgets and eggs notwithstanding. When we went to Julie’s 30th high school reunion, we met people deep in the middle of longstanding home economics lessons. If they were carefree, Julie and I couldn’t see it in their faces.

 

My first teaching job was in Sun Valley, Idaho, at a small private school. Some of my students rode horses. They also wore jodhpurs, knee-high black boots, tweed jackets, and black hard hats. They had riding instructors who had been on Olympic equestrian teams. Their horses were boarded at the Sun Valley Stables. If they fed them, they fed them carrots and sugar cubes. If they worked them, they worked them in an arena. The configuration of horse and rider was always at the center of their thinking.

When I had only a learner’s permit, I had driven trucks full of horses up and over Galena Summit in the spring and back to their winter corrals in late fall. With my family, I had built trails in the Sawtooths using horse-drawn plows and graders, walking behind Dot, our old, bony, long, awkward-looking part-Percheron mare. I had brought in our camp supplies on pack horses, traveling eighteen miles up the South Fork of the Payette from the transfer camp at Grandjean.

In eighteen miles, you can configure horse and rider in a lot of ways, none of them remotely familiar to Olympic qualifying judges. But in those same eighteen miles you begin to appreciate the sturdy good will of the animal carrying you and you realize that whatever you’re doing, you and your horse and pack string are in it together.

Our trail-building job was where I learned to pull stumps. Dot was my teacher. She would back up on command, pull forward on command, and stop when she knew her strength wouldn’t budge the stump. If I told her to pull and she wouldn’t, I knew it was time for me to get to work. By the end of the summer she had me trained pretty well.

Dot and I pulled many stumps out of many swamps. My father and I built corduroy bridges over mud where spruce and alpine fir thickets had been. Eventually, the trail was finished. We kept Dot for another winter, but we no longer needed a workhorse, so we sold her to someone who let his kids ride her, four at a time. She was a gentle old soul and I think she lived longer than she would have if we’d kept her pulling stumps.

My students who were training to be equestrians rode expensive show horses. Their parents had invested huge sums in their success as riders. They, and their classmates who were ski racers, were under tremendous adult pressure to succeed. Regardless of their talent or enthusiasm, their coaches always told them they could make Olympic teams. Their parents kept reminding them of what it all cost. Most of them quit as soon as they could.

 

Taking care of horses was good preparation for teaching. It was, to my mind, a bit like pulling stumps, where you and the student had a job to do, and the more clearly and simply you defined that job and assigned the labor it required, the better it went. You had to know what each other was doing, and when you were doing it, and how much force to exert when force was called for, and when to quit and try something else.

Dot, had she been able to get through the door of my classroom, would have succeeded in my classes. She would have quickly figured out what we were doing, her part in it, and how to get it done, and made it clear that she expected us to do our parts as well.

Not all my students were that smart.

I exaggerate. A little. But I did believe that if somehow I could be forced into an equestrian outfit and Dot’s big brain could be forced into the sleek skull of one of the Thoroughbred show jumpers I saw at the Sun Valley Stables, the two of us could have gone to the Olympics. It was only a matter of knowing what to do, and we would have already looked at the game films. We would have had the winning configuration of horse and rider figured out.

 

Lately, equine therapy clinics have shown up across Idaho. They are places where damaged and traumatized human beings are introduced to gentle and kind horses. They’re told to touch those horses, groom them, lead them through pastures, and, when it’s not too scary, ride them.

It’s easy to see how working with a horse could be therapeutic, because you’re dealing with a tremendously powerful animal, one who could kill you but usually chooses not to. That same animal is tremendously vulnerable to your human depressions and rages, unable to speak, subject to your mercy or cruelty. Your job, should you choose to get well, is to achieve equality in a relationship where power imbalances have previously meant you were either master or slave, bully or victim, or all of them at once.

Trust, restraint, cooperation, kindness, the ability to put yourself in somebody else’s horseshoes—all tools for shaping a good, mutually respectful relationship. With humans, the material is harder to work with, but the step-by-step is basically the same.

 

Long ago Julie and I looked at each other and decided that if our families’ early confidence in us meant anything, we could trust each other. If we had a job to do, we could do it. We could find a balance between power and vulnerability. So far we’ve spent thirty years dancing on that tipping point, helped along by Julie’s cooking and my deep appreciation of it, and more than a few unexpected moments of laughter and joy.

We’d like to continue for another thirty, but the knacker’s wagon will arrive for one or both of us before that. At that point, our job will be done, at least the job described in our wedding vows.

Those of you familiar with my writing know there’s a shadow hanging over these thoughts and their bright-lit vision of how people should behave.

In my memoir, Traplines, I describe a nineteen-year-old boy, blind with rage, beating a mule half to death with a two-by-four. The mule was a Forest Service employee named Festus. The boy was another Forest Service employee—me—and the reason I was enraged was that Festus had just kicked me in the knee and I didn’t think I would walk again.

I did walk again, and Festus eventually healed up from the cuts and bruises I had inflicted upon his head and shoulders with the two-by-four. He became a better mule and I eventually became a man who would never again beat a horse, or even a mule.

But for one small moment of my life, I was somebody who couldn’t be trusted to care for an animal, and that’s a terrible kind of human being to be. It’s a memory that flashes into consciousness when I find myself self-righteously prescribing the way people should act toward horses and each other. It’s reason enough not to hold power over the vulnerable and the mute, if all the other reasons aren’t enough.