Living Off Grid – Horse Adventures (humor)

Reader Contribution by Ed Essex
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Childhood – When I was a kid I loved to ride horses. Okay, there was this one time I was riding my friend Mikes horse when I was about nine years old and he took me under the apple tree to see if he could scrape me off his back. He couldn’t. I sure showed him! It took me weeks to heal my back, and I had to get a new shirt. Not that it was my only shirt. I had another one. Anyway, that’s what being a kid is all about right?
I guess I got better because I spent the summer at my cousins and rode their horse all summer. I never got scraped off once.

Twenty’s – Smart, no horses.

Thirty’s – Can’t say I’ve had a stellar horse career as an adult though. A friend of mine took me elk hunting on horseback. He had two horses. He chose the older one for me to ride. Said she was steadier. He said the young one got easily distracted and would walk right off the cliff if you weren’t watching out for him. Then he took us on the hairiest mountain trail ride I have ever been on. All I could think about was walking over the edge of the trail and plummeting down the mountainside.
To make matters worse, a friend of mine had just lost a mule over the side of a mountain. A fighter jet from Whidbey Island Naval Air Station decided to go on “low altitude maneuvers” in the North Cascade Mountains. The mule owner actually demanded to speak to the base Admiral and darned if he didn’t get a new mule, compliments of the US Navy.
Anyway, this article is about me. After we got back from that hunting ride my friend admitted that was the worst trail he had ever been on. I hunted on foot the rest of the trip. I was getting older.

Forty’s – I went to Mexico on vacation and decided my horse career needed a refresher. I signed up for a horseback ride on the beach. They separated us into three groups. Expert, intermediate, and beginner. I claimed to be intermediate and they gave me a horse named Rice. He had short bristly hair that looked a lot like rice.Well I handled him pretty well, like riding a bike right? I was the only one to stay on a bareback horse in the ocean. We swam about three feet and came back. I was King!
Right after that we saddled back up and it was time to let them run but only if you volunteered. Of course moi being so experienced compared to the others, I was game. We took off at a dead sprint. I have never felt so much pain in my legs in my life! No one told me not to ride a horse with sandpaper fur while wearing shorts! It took months for the hair to grow back on my legs. It was embarrassing. I’m sure everyone who saw me the rest of the vacation thought I waxed!

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