The Day of the Horse

With all of this Olympic hubris flying about, horsemanship et al, I have begun to recall an event many, many years ago when I found myself in company with a horse. By this, I do not mean standing on one side of a fence with Dobbin safely tethered on the other. No, I mean in the actual presence of a horse, standing right up close and personal to the beast while he restlessly whinnied and his hooves – the diameter of dinner plates – roved about on the ground. Even though there were other people well used to horses in control of him, I was petrified, electrified. Friend, the beast was magnificent, on a scale I had never before witnessed. The ‘dip’ in his back – don’t know the jargon, I’m afraid – was roughly on a level with my head. And at 5’8’’, I don’t stand small. Presently, I got used to this exposure to danger and forgot my fears and began to consider Chappie’s other dimensions; the unbelievable undulation of his flank, the proportionally huge haunches, the preternaturally long legs. I longed to stroke his silky mane but I was in terror of a nip from those teeth – on calculation, I would say the distances from the top of his head to the tip of his nose was at least three feet – more than half my height. Instead, I reached out and tentatively stroked his flank. Once again, I was electrified. Instead of being cold and hard, like the dark-brown, shiny coat suggested, Chappie’s flank was warm, alive, throbbing with the power that had led us, for decades, to define our engines in terms of horsepower. Now, I understood the magical, mystical connotations that, for centuries, attached themselves to horses, why we painted their forms on the walls of caves and carved them on the sides of chalk hills. It was an experience that I will never forget. It was, in a word, awesome. But in spite of his magnificence, the memory of Chappie is sad and sweet. What place does the horse have in this world of super fast trains, planes and sky rockets? In aeons to come, I hope humans remember the beast whose power gave rise to the automated age and continue to find a place for him in their mythology – if mythology hasn’t died out either, that is.