Book review

What is it about horses?

Conversations with a Prince; A year of riding at East Hill Farm by Helen Husher,
published by the Lyons Press of Guilford, Connecticut, 182 pages, hardcover, $19.95

Reviewed by Bethany M. Dunbar

For those who have always wondered what it is about horses, Conversations with a Prince by Helen Husher provides some clues.

This book is not a how-to, nor is it preachy, nor is it trying to sell anything.  Instead it’s sort of a story and an extended essay in one.  It’s about one woman’s experience getting back into horseback riding after a long gap in time. The author is 50-something and the narrative recounts her relationship with a small horse named Prince and with other horses she has known in her earlier years as well as the horses and people she gets to know at her new lesson barn.

All the while that she is taking riding lessons she is asking questions about these relationships.

Ms. Husher is eloquent in her exploration. As a horse owner myself for a number of years, I have asked myself many of the same questions and had many similar thoughts. There is something about the combination of beauty, grace, power, and acceptance in horses that makes people — especially women — want to be with them.

“Horses, it seems to me, know how to relinquish power without being diminished, and there is something important and instructive here, something to be grasped, something to be sustained and labored for,” she writes.  “It could be that girls and women yearn for horses because horses, on some level, show us what to do. From them, we learn how to avoid too much compromise, watch for predators, get home safely, soar with our eyes closed, and remain beautiful indefinitely.  These things offer a coating of spiritual preservative against a corrosive world.”

Ms. Husher is an accomplished writer if not rider. Her descriptions of her experiences with horses are often funny and self-deprecating, never stuffy.  There is a moment when she watches a video of herself on the school pony, Prince, and realizes that she is too big for him. That’s embarrassing.

She manages to figure out a lot about the various horses with whom she associates, and these gems of understanding sparkle brightly in the book.  Though the book is not a how-to, it still might give horse people some ideas or at least a chuckle of recognition at a situation or a problem solved.

One reason why horses manage to keep people’s interest for a lifetime is that the challenges are endless. In one passage, Ms. Husher interviews an accomplished dressage competitor named Ruth Hogan-Poulsen, who compares riding to golf. She says that she’s not really into golf but playing it a few times made her see that you could do the basics fairly quickly, but soon you wanted to just do a little better, then it becomes, as she put it, “this mini obsession.”

“I began to see that this is how people get engaged, this is how they connect,” Ms. Hogan-Poulsen says in the book.

Ms. Husher asks her “whether she has ever gone into that riding trance where everything goes perfectly. ‘Yes,’ she said, instantly recognizing what I mean. ‘Those happen, and all you can say about it later was that it was beautiful. You kind of fall into it, it becomes this ball, this package, and it isn’t about any individual movement but more a singsongy thing, and a pattern, and you feel like maybe you’re watching yourself at a distance, and it’s beautiful.”

After considerable lessons the author is put back on Prince and realizes that the conversation has changed. She realizes that it’s more of a two-way conversation now.

“Prince lowers his head and begins to listen, and I am suddenly riding every angle of this unusually squirmy and opinionated horse,” she says.  She says that even though her performance in the lesson might still not be perfect, “I have an idea that I’m now failing in more interesting ways.”

In the end — when trying to do something difficult and worthwhile — failing in more interesting ways seems rather a decent accomplishment.

Ms. Husher lives in Montpelier, and has written for Seven Days, Vermont Life, and Vermont Magazine.  She has written two earlier books, A View from Vermont and Off the Leash: Subversive Journeys Around Vermont.

Her recent riding experience is at East Hill Farm in Plainfield, and she offers particular gratitude to her riding teacher there, Kathie Moulton, co-owner of the farm with Con and Jeanette Hogan.