EQUESTRIAN CENTER

from The Plaid Horse April 2023 - The Wellness Issue

Good Boy, Good

JOIN US AT THE BARN!

• Founded in 1869, Stoneleigh-Burnham School (SBS) is a boarding and day school for girls in Grades 7-12 and Postgraduate (PG).

• Located in historic Greenfield, Massachusetts, SBS has been a member of the Interscholastic Equestrian Association (IEA) since its official inception in 2002.

• T he School boasts five National Titles featuring Middle School and Upper School IEA teams that compete within the largest zone in the country.

SCHEDULE AN IN-PERSON OR VIRTUAL VISIT AT SBSCHOOL.ORG/ VISIT

• SBS is the first and only secondary school equestrian facility in the United States to achieve prestigious certification as a British Horse Society-approved Livery Yard, Riding School, and Facility and offers the esteemed British Horse Society (BHS) Certification Program which is recognized in 35 countries worldwide.

• Offering 7-day boarding, 5-day boarding, and day enrollment options, we invite you to explore SBS!

So, the fact that most of the farms in this country cannot be accessed by any form of public transportation or method other than driving make this statistic… scary. It’s hard to welcome people to our sport when they can’t get to the barn.

But thinking beyond the practical, I appreciate how much my treks across large swaths of North American have brought me incredible solace in my life. The time to consider and be alone has been invaluable to my mental health. Independence, confidence, and their related mental health advantages are so sorely needed in the upcoming generation.

There is something about time that you cannot be doing anything else other than focusing on the open road—admiring landscapes, seasons, and the passage of time. Seeing barns fall down, new barns built, flooding, dry prairies, snow, leaves, and the sweet tall grasses of late summer. The way Harrisburg marks the change of seasons. When you are stuck in your own mind and have to live with yourself, your mistakes, your triumphs, and when you have the time to be grateful for all the people and horses that surround your dreams.

I have found that the people I connect with the most are also road warriors. Going from horse show to horse show, undaunted by hours in the car or trailer, the miles clocking by are unable to be hurried. The road is such a challenge. Whether you are bored, tired, hungry, impatient, or whatever, the road doesn’t care. You make mistakes. You don’t refuel at opportune times. Something goes really wrong. Things need to be handled. It’s all awful. But you handle it, you learn to handle it, and you make it to your destination. You gain the confidence that you might handle the next thing that goes wrong. You see the good in people all over this great country and make small talk with folks. We all have so much in common.

I think of the times I pushed my limits. Like working all day at Lamplight in 2014 and driving all night to the (short lived) Gennesee Derby, chasing for months every single Derby Kelley Farmer did. It was a bizarre hunt in my car through the country in what seems like a different world from this decade and I learned so much. The time I was at EAP Finals all day in Ohio and then wrote my cover story in a Panera and drove straight through to Miami. The times I decided to drive home Sunday night instead of Monday morning. The swerves from deer, hitting ice patches, and that time I determined that below -20 degrees you chap your bare hands getting a coffee from the McDonald’s drive through. The calls that came through my headset that broke my heart, seemed like the end of the world, or things I really just couldn’t deal with.

I think about this as my familiar 3 a.m. alarm goes off on a recent Sunday morning so that I can be in the car by 3:30 to drive 90 minutes from Salina to Wichita, Kansas to catch a flight. The comforting feelings of a dark highway contrasted with the feelings of piloting an unfamiliar rental car and wishing I had a coat. An hour and a half—a short drive by any metric—was all I needed to consider my trip, thaw out with the heat blasting, evaluate my performance, and plan what I can do better. It let me accomplish something by 5 a.m., arriving on time to move onto the next stages of my day. I listen to music, play through podcasts, and contemplate. I never give myself time to contemplate. The road seems to force it. I can’t be asleep or taking notes. I just simply have to be in the moment entirely with myself.

There is rarely a time I can be in the car for over an hour without really getting lost in the beauty of this country and thinking on a larger scale than myself. Passing through farms and landscapes and zones of people who live differently than I do in all manners, over bridges, curved through rock faces, and seeing the spring melt rushing down as waterfalls all around me.

In addition to all the things we need to teach and inspire the next generation, if you can, offer to help teach someone to drive. Practice driving with them to help them with that same confidence we bring to a jump-off. It is so essential for young people to have the confidence of autonomy, the ability to trek and build their lives and businesses in the form they want, to be able to pursue so many kinds of work and opportunities. And most importantly, it’s how they’re going to get to the barn.

We all have a responsibility to help the next generation take the best care of the horses that we can. This life is not for the faint of heart and the people who leave our ranks for a more normal lifestyle will always be a high number. We serve our horses by making the barn as accessible as possible and retaining the most committed and interested people to care for them. Let the driveways around the farm serve yet another learning purpose.