When in elementary school, I would walk over 3 miles every Tuesday after school to ride at a rental barn and I rode some of my friend’s horses, too. Finally, when I was 12, I got a horse of my own, a 14.3 1/2 hand part quarter horse, buckskin, to learn to care for and retrain from being ‘wild’ and always wanting to run and jig, to a horse that would walk and canter just from a lift on the reins. My first saddle was a hard McClellan Army saddle that I hated, so I rode bareback most of the time until I finally got Western saddle, then an English saddle in my later teens.
I would do everything on my horse ‘Scottie’ (short for Great Scott – I renamed him from Apache) – riding for miles all around my family’s 30 acres in the woods of Jacksonville/Mandarin/Greenland/Bayard Florida area, going swimming bareback in the clear water of the barrow pits that were dug to build I-95 next to our land; I would jump over 2 long pieces of skinny baseboard moulding spread out over the long side of 2 sawhorses that I set up as a jump; I would gallop over a 24+ natural jump course I made of piled up tree limbs and logs, spanning a couple of miles, weaving in and out of trees, ducking under low-hanging branches, sliding down a steep embankment, and generally being a adventurous, horse-loving teenager.
I would run barrels and do pole bending and competed at a saddle club where I would ride to on Friday nights with a group of others. The saddle club was about 8-10 miles from my house. I would meet up with the other riders about 3 miles from my house & we would all ride together. Then, I would ride back home in the dark by myself – something you would never let a young girl do in today’s world…
Tags: a horse fanatic, bareback riding, equine, horse-back riding, horses
