Pleasant undulations. Pleasant undulations between my legs. Crisp air and greenery overhead, high-fiving its arboreal friends from the other side of the crimson dust road. I didn’t expect it to be pleasant. I had seen it on TV, elated humans in awe at their momentum, kicking up a churning dust cloud. They always grin wide as they ride that cloud like a wave on which they seem to surf using a board tricked out with turbo engines.
Somehow, I thought it would hurt, bouncing on this infernal vehicle. But no. Just a person, careening through space-time at immeasurable speed with hardly an adjustment in elevation while a mass of muscle, bone and collagen destined to be Jell-O spasmed frenetically below.
Oh shit. Snap out of it! My awakening was definitely rude, as my eyes which had never closed refocused in the sunlight after my peaceful trance broke. All I saw were trees and a path hemmed by two parallel rows of make-shift, gnarled fence posts and homemade barbed wire. I looked down and remembered why my hearing roared like I was a NASA prototype getting tested in a wind tunnel. I was hurtling at about 30 miles per hour on a horse in the process of going berzerk, its clenching muscles making it look like it doped with Olympic athletes.
This is not 30 miles per hour.
I had never galloped this fast on a horse before. It’s what had induced my momentary lapse of presence. Horse-riding can be painful. For example, while science has yet to develop male birth control, trotting on horseback has to be partly effective due to the havoc it can wreak on a man’s nether regions.
But galloping. The speed, the seamlessness of the four-footed rhythm…like riding a sweaty, corporeal motorcycle made up of a mattress and pillows. It is sublime.
My fun was quickly cut short, however. I remembered how I had gotten there. The remainder of the family which hadn’t headed off to the fields that morning, most vocally my host mother, had expressed doubt about my ability to ride what they had labeled the “caballo bravo”. I scoffed and hoisted myself up. As soon as I had done this, the horse had taken off at breakneck speed.
Wish I had listened. This horse was quickly taking me into parts unknown, places where I had never been and had never known a single human to have been either. What’s more is it was not responding to the traditional methods of bringing these beasts to a stop.
Man, people really like thumbs-up over here. And that is the demon horse.
My mother in America had taught me when I was younger that horses will never run with their head down, so the best way to stop a runaway horse is to pull on its bridle until its gaze points to the ground. This seemed difficult, since I was riding bareback and feared that releasing any of the titanium grip I had with my legs would send me bouncing off. After a few tries, I managed it, and then realized the fallacy of the folk-wisdom. How much stronger do you think a horse is than a twentysomething? And beyond that, this horse was the juiced-up Schwarzenegger among stallions, the equine Barry Bonds with a steroid syringe in his ass, although with decidedly larger balls.
My last hope was a hill that lay within eyeshot. He would have to slow down to charge up that steep-ass slope, and that’s how I would stop him. As he started up it, I pulled back on the reins. No dice. His frenzied panic only made his neck nods dip up and down more severely, without any reduction in movement or effort. Fuck.
A road on the side of this hill…the slope of that thing is no joke!
At this point, I began to unload the decades of dirty insults I had learned from my father and friends growing up. Also useless. The horse didn’t speak English, I guess.
As the hill started to plateau, I recognized the coming fork in the road. To the right was a village with people I knew in it only about a half mile away. Maybe someone there could help. To the left, was…nowhere and nothing. Just a road splitting a dense jungle that led to the End of the World as far as I knew. The horse went left.
Now it was decision time. There was a solid 90% chance that I was not ending this without at least 2 broken bones. Of course, if that happened, I wouldn’t be able to move, and the further this horse took me into the jungle, the less likely someone would find my crumpled body and save me from a slow death due to exposure. On the other hand, if I unclamped my legs, it was also extremely possible that my fall would be less graceful, and one of those minimum 2 broken bones would be my skull. This was also not optimal.
As these thoughts raced inside that bone covering my brain which might potentially break, I almost didn’t notice the movement in the distance on the road ahead. As the figures neared quickly due to the whirlwind velocity of the horse, I could just barely make the shapes out. I saw an oxcart, and a man on horseback following behind. Clearly the road was narrow, not big enough for the both of them, and definitely not for the three of us. I immediately recognized their faces: my host brother, Ricardo, in the oxcart and my host father on the horse, both with expressions of pure shock.
As I neared the oxcart, the oxen bellowed and moved to the side like triceratopses in a herd as a T. Rex approaches menacingly. This caused my horse to snake between the cart and my host father. I passed him with a canter, and I don’t even remember if he said anything, due to his inability to speak Spanish which made us nominal deaf-mutes in each other’s company. But we did not need language. The message was clear: throw me the reins! I threw them to him, which he caught with one hand, holding tight as he spun the runaway horse in a circle, using his own animal to bring my panicked kidnapper to an eventual stop.
Silence. It was so quiet, I could hear the noise the dust particles made as they floated through the air around me, the remnants of a great struggle, now concluded. I took a few short breaths, jumping quickly off the horse, and looked at my host father’s disapproving stare, barely choking out “Gracias…”
For that whole trip, I had wanted nothing more to impress Papá. I was the pinkish boy of privilege, the soft, pudgy leech that was an extra mouth, siphoning off a significant portion of what little yucca root his family subsisted on, and despite all my big city knowledge, here I was utterly useless. I couldn’t milk a cow, I had no idea how to gather firewood, and now this. Something this absurd was probably analogous to a grown man back home getting the bus doors closed on him while it starts moving: I couldn’t even ride a horse without almost dying.
But maybe I could hold on to my last shred of dignity. I could show a serenity worthy of a real man, someone unfazed by things that would bother others. I would show him. I wasn’t worried, I wasn’t scared. The horse and I had just had a misunderstanding, and now the conflict was resolved.
Nope, scratch that. I managed that for about 2 seconds until I socked the horse point blank in the neck, impulsively wreaking vengeance on the innocent beast that through sheer, inculpable terror had carried me off into the wilderness and had toyed with my prospects of living.
How young Paraguayans learn to ride horse…nah, just kidding!
Papá and I switched horses, and I went on to do whatever duties I had in the village on the top of the hill. Dumbstruck by the tame demeanor of this new horse, I cooed praise to it every other minute and stroked its neck tenderly, clearly still in post traumatic stress mode.
As night fell, I headed back down the hill with my good boy horse. In near pitch darkness, he committed his one and only transgression against me, stepping on my foot and staying there after I got off his back to lead him into the yard. While painful, this was but a sliver of the potential danger I had faced earlier in the day, and with a firm shove, the horse stepped off. As I showed my face to the people slated to take care of me, the worried-sick face of my host mother was at once heartwarming that she deeply cared for her coddled, useless charge as well as a serious reality check to how grave that potential danger had been.
My program had forbidden us from drinking while in-community, the penalty being an immediate removal from the country, and I had not taken this admonition lightly. Yet as Mamá railed against me for being so foolhardy, for taking the craziest horse in the village up the rocky mountain where one of her uncles had cracked open his skull and died after being thrown from a horse…I needed a beer. I sat dazed, sucking slow sips from my drink, wide-eyed and back in a trance, her diatribe barely penetrating the dark cloud of “what-ifs” I had dragged myself into.
There really needs to be a word for the anger a parent feels which is based less so on actual ire and more so on how worried you made them. Mamá was angry-worried, and the only happy moment came from knowing this was all because deep down, I was her son too.
A year and a half later, I returned to my little village to relive former happy memories, and check on my people down there. One afternoon over chilled mate, enjoying the sun in the front yard, Ricardo, ever trying to one up his big brother from America, launched into the giddy recollection of seeing me charging through the jungle, scared shitless. He commenced the knee-slapping at his favorite part: “If I could just have a picture of your face in that moment! Bahahaha!!!” I just looked sheepishly at the floor, reminded of my past humiliation.
Host siblings. Ricardo (the supreme joker) on the left.
The mood returned to seriousness when I asked about the horse. In my absence, cattle rustlers had stolen it, causing a significant financial loss to the family. I took a deep breath, and turned my gaze away from Ricardo, fearing that he would see one of the corners of my mouth turn up as I desperately fought to force down the smile building on my face. Yea, good riddance you psycho beast of Hell.
Lesson learned: Recognize that, when out of your element, you are as helpless as a newborn baby. Listen to those entrusted as parental units because they don’t want you splattered somewhere like a spilled red Slurpee anymore than you do.
–Peter, 35, (Tempe, AZ), back again with tales of narrowly avoided Paraguayan bloodbaths