Sarah Maslin Nir - Horse Crazy ; The Story of a Woman and a World in Love with an Animal

Simon & Schuster

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Copyright 2020 by Sarah Maslin Nir

Merry-Go-Round from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF LANGSTON HUGHES by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition August 2020

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Interior design by Carly Loman

Photo on by Diana Zadarla

Jacket design by Alison Forner

Jacket photograph by Tom Chambers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Nir, Sarah Maslin, 1983- author.

Title: Horse crazy / Sarah Maslin Nir.

Description: First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. | New York : Simon and Schuster, 2020. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2019058615 (print) | LCCN 2019058616 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781501196232 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501196249 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Nir, Sarah Maslin, 1983- | Horsemen and horsewomenUnited StatesBiography. | Horse ownersUnited StatesBiography. | Women journalistsUnited StatesBiography. | HorsemanshipSocial aspectsUnited States. | Human-animal relationships.

Classification: LCC SF284.52.N57 A3 2020 (print) | LCC SF284.52.N57 (ebook) | DDC 798.092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058615

ISBN 978-1-5011-9623-2

ISBN 978-1-5011-9624-9 (ebook)

To all the horses Ive loved, Amigo, Willow, Trendy, Bravo, Stellar, and every single one Ive ever set eyes on.

In the decade Ive worked for the New York Times, Ive reported across the country and around the world. And as soon as I file each story, I do one thing before I head home: I search for the horses. The rider in me wants to gaze at them, stroke them, gallop with them, but the reporter in me has only one goal: to know their stories.

And so Ive found myself, notebook in hand, interviewing the keepers of the street horses of Senegal, West Africa, as the animals slept in corrals of parked cars. Ive traced the Viking history of the canny Norwegian Fjord horse who extracted us both from a peat bog in the Scottish Highlands. And Ive quizzed Indian soldiers about the indigenous battle horses I charged through a quarry in Rajasthan.

For my entire life, Ive sought out horses endlessly, even in the urban world in which I grew up. As a girl, I found them hidden between the townhouses of Manhattans Upper West Side, underneath the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge in Harlem, and stampeding through Central Park.

And yet, all this time, I never asked myself why I love horses. Thats because the answer has always been because horses. Its a response that anybody who has ever felt the ineluctable tug of their big amber eyes, in which you see something much more than your own reflection, or who knows the peace of their breathing, and the shattering wildness of their gallop, immediately understands.

Because horses. Answer enough.

But while to me horses feel like an inevitability, a part of my body and life in a way I dont question any more than I would the rise and fall of my own chest, the reporter in me is plagued by and duty-bound to ask. In fact, Why? is the sum total of my job description. So it was only a matter of time before I turned the query on myself.

That quest became this book, and expanded far beyond just me, because Im not alone. As I sought out the horses, I found their humans. The two teen sisters who bought a wild pony only to set her forever free. The executive who left corporate America for a life patrolling Central Park as a mounted ranger. The Pennsylvania man who ran an equine version of the FBI. The fox hunter who galloped away from a crumbling marriage. The diplomats stepdaughter who wanted forbidden horses so badly she smuggled their semen across the sea.

Horses lend themselves to stories, I once wrote in the Times. In the United States in particular, horses, their manes streaming, nostrils flaring, hooves thudding, carry with them something of our projected national psyche. There are over 7 million horses in America, far more than even when they were our only way to get around. They are not necessary at all, yet for many they seem more so. Here, they are furls of an American flag in equid form, imbued with our narratives of national identity. They carry on their backs the tales we tell ourselves about who we are.

Who I am.

When I finally asked myself why, the search grew epic. I dug for the reason in the belly of a 747, huddling with a trio of Dutch warmbloods as we crossed the Atlantic in the cargo hold. I looked for it floating in the dawn waters off the coast of Virginia as all around me ponies swam in the salt. I sought it underneath their thick lips and listened for it in the syncopation of their seven-league strides. In the science behind their piano-key teeth and the music of their bugling whinnies.

There are theories: a horses stride replicates an essential rhythm we all felt for those first nine months of our lives, rocking within amnion as our mother went about the world. Another posits power: horses lend us their own, extend our feeble human legs with their muscled limbs. They allow us to tap into their strength and seize it as ours, to feel speed and might far beyond our capacity, to touch something close to the infinite. On my own two legs, Im just Sarah. Lent four more, Im formidable.

Both theories seem rightyet both dont come close to capturing what it is I feel when a horse snuffles my palm or graces me with the perfect jump, or simply stands still in a paddock in beauty that hurts. At last, I realized that the only one capable of answering my question would be those who know me best in this world: the horses themselves. Horse Crazy is structured around the lifelong dialogues Ive had with these animals, each chapter named after a horse who told me its story or helped write my own.

I dont believe that riding a horse is a dance, as some say, with a partner who enjoys the experience the same way I do. Instead, I believe it is a conversation, an intimate dialogue between a creature that over the millennia has become a perfect foil, partner, and complement to humankind. To me.

I realized Ive been having that conversation all my life. Here, Ill tell you what Ive heard.

I dont remember the first time I was on a horse. I remember the first time I was off one. I recall the shape of the rocks in front of my eyes, my scraped cheek pressed to the ground. Those stones come to me in a silhouette of massive, misshapen pebbles. They loom large, like a city skyline gone sideways.