Isaacson Rowan - The horse boy: a fathers quest to heal his son

Copyright 2009 by Rupert Isaacson

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First eBook Edition: April 2009

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The author is grateful for permission to use an excerpt from One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss, copyright & copyright by Dr. Seuss Enterprises, L.P., 1960, renewed 1988. Used by permission of Random House Childrens Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

ISBN: 978-0-316-05325-9

ALSO BY RUPERT ISAACSON

The Healing Land

For my son

And for Kristin, for her unrelenting bravery

T HE HORSE DIGS its back hooves into the dirt and gives one last, scrambling effort to reach the top of the rise. I lean forward, taking weight off the horses straining back, trying not to crush my little boy, sitting in the saddle in front of me, trying not to look down at the dizzying chasm below. For one terrifying moment, the brown-and-white horse slips backward. Then, with a final heave, we are up on top of the high mountain pass.

Hit Daddy! My five-year-old son, Rowan, whips round, laughing, and aims a smack at my sore, bleeding lip. I flick my face away to the side. Above us are clouds and cool, rushing air. Behind us, and thousands of feet below, the great Siberian forest, stretching to infinity. To our front, a bare wilderness of mountain tundra.

Snow! Rowan points at the wide streak of white still clinging to the higher tops above us, where a pair of ravens fly, cawing madly on the wind. Get down! Get down and play in the snow!

Like a normal kid. Almost.

The horse, which Rowan has christened Blue, dips its head, stretching its neck after its effort. Before us rises a great stone cairn set with animal skulls, blue prayer scarves, and prayers scribbled in Cyrillic script on loose sheets of paper weighted down by heavy rocks, fluttering in the wind.

Somewhere ina this mountain vastness is the shaman of the reindeer people. Half a year it has taken to track him down. Will he heal my son? Will he even know how?

I N APRIL 2004 my son, Rowan, was diagnosed with autism. The feeling was like being hit across the face with a baseball bat. Grief, shame this weird, irrational shame, as if I had somehow cursed this child by giving him my faulty genes, condemned him to a lifetime of living as an alien because of me. Of watching, horrified, as he began to drift away to another place, separated from me as if by thick glass, or the see-through barrier of dream.

I had to find a way into his world, into his mind. I found it, amazingly, through a horse, Betsy.

But lets start at the beginning.

DECEMBER 27, 2001. A year when the world was still reeling from the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York. My tall, dark-eyed, dark-haired and eight months pregnant wife, Kristin, and I were at a friends house, having tea, when, like something straight out of a movie, she suddenly went pale and stood up.

Oh God! she said, looking down over her swelling belly. A pool of fluid lay thick and clear on the parquet flooring.

Jesus! I said, and reached for the phone.

One high-speed rally drive up the rainy freeway later (commuters honking and flashing lights at my crazed lane changes), we were being fast-forwarded through reception to an emergency C-section. Kristin was screaming as the contractions began to come so fast that there was no trough between them, only one long, endlessly drawn-out, tearing agony that brought shrieks of an eerie, crowlike intensity from somewhere deep in her suffering body. She wasnt dilating properly, and Rowan was lying breech. Wed meant to have him turned that week. No time for that now! quipped the doctor as Kristin was wheeled into the operating room. Then, to me: Want to watch?

Out the window went all our holistic natural childbirth ideas. It could not have been more clinical. And I, usually too squeamish to look at blood and guts, found myself watching intently as the doctors sliced Kristin open, moved her innards to the side, and pulled out a blue, surprisingly large human being, my only thought being Please, Lord, let him be in one piece.

A short time later, while they brought Kristin around from the anesthetic, I stood alone in the private room with Rowan (almost seven pounds, despite being a full month premature), looking down at him as he lay, belly up, wrapped in towels, in a kind of plastic tray. His blue eyes were half open, looking into mine; his tiny right hand clasped around my index finger. The clock on the wall showed a few minutes past midnight.

Which meant, I realized with a start, that Rowan had decided to come into the world exactly seven years to the day that Kristin and I first met, and almost once Id figured out the time difference to the very hour that we had first spoken.

Which was surprising, because when I met her, she hadnt wanted to talk to me at all.

Oh God, another hippy, shed thought to herself on seeing me, and turned away. It had been in southern India, in the town of Mysore. Id been hired to write a guidebook to the region. She was there doing research for her psychology Ph.D. I, with hair down to the middle of my back, had been trekking up in the rainforests of the Western Ghats, staying with hill tribes. She had been interviewing Indian girls bound for arranged marriages, trying to find out at what point they put aside their natural sense of what was fair and accepted a system in which wives must bow to their husbands every whim. Though we had not yet become acquainted, we could not have been more different Kristin was a suburban girl from California, and I was British, born to southern African parents, brought up partly in the center of London, partly on a remote farm, training horses.

But the moment I saw her, stretched out in a beach chair by the pool of the Southern Star Hotel, all long-legged, tan, and languid, like some fashion model on the beach at Cannes, with strange sparkling lights dancing in her black eyes, a voice in my head, accompanied by an almost physical pull of intuition under my diaphragm, said, clear as day, Thats your wife.

No, I thought; cant be. And I jumped into the water.

But when I surfaced, the voice was still there. That is your wife. Go talk to her. Now.

In fact, it took a full twenty-four hours before she deigned to talk to me. By then I had only one day left in that town, being honor-bound to move on the next day to continue my guidebook jobs busy itinerary. I went into a charm offensive, tinged with desperation, and managed at last to get her to spend an evening with me. Unable to resist the impulse, I told her what the voice in my head had said, bracing myself for the inevitable Youre crazy. Which, predictably, was the first thing out of her mouth.