Horseback Swimming

Horseback Swimming

“There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.”

Winston Churchill

In the summer of 1977, we took the last of our Model A trips across the American West. Technically there were five trips in all, if you count the initial “shakedown cruise” of the Model T trip we took to Colorado in 1972.

If you are a regular reader of my posts, you will recall that my cousins and several close friends owned Model A Fords of all sorts and varying degrees of restoration. Most of us learned to drive in the same, beat up but lovable, 1929 Model A pickup, on the dusty dirt roads around Incline Lake, Nevada, my favorite place on earth. Aunt Janice and Uncle Gordon had a cabin there, and they were the driving force of all our Model A trips.

Our final trip was one of our most adventurous, driving from Los Angeles to Yellowstone National Park and back. It was two thousand miles, in cars nearly fifty years old, designed for less than fifty miles per hour. See The Dance for more detail on this extraordinary journey.

On our way back, we stopped at the cabin for a few days’ rest before continuing to Los Angeles. My aunt loved horses and kept a barn with four to six horses at the cabin. A horseback ride through mountain and stream is a wonderful way to relax after a long trip.

So, at the end of our trail ride, after the road trip, we rode the horses down to the lake for a cool drink of water, and as usual, one thing led to another.

We unsaddled the horses, observing, though not following, instructions from my aunt not to go in deeper than the reins, instead riding the horses straight into the lake. The island you see in the picture above is about thirty yards off the shore, and this was, of course, our destination all along. As the shore fell away, the horses began to swim across the gap, with us having an incomparably fine ride to the remote haven.

We felt like explorers of a new land, kings of all we surveyed. Wonderful, blissful… for a few moments, until my aunt noticed, and rightfully started giving us what for and telling us to get the hell back on shore.

She didn’t use those exact words, but that was the general idea. So, we dropped the blissfulness, but it was still wonderful.

-Hank

Photo Credit: Stephen MacLean