Riding Horses to School (or Not)
I was reading an article the other day about a mom in England who let her young daughter ride her horse to school one morning. The mom rode along, too, on her own horse, and led her daughter's pony home afterwards. The main issue with this was the fact that the school children all gathered around the pony, just outside the school gates, to pet the horses. When one entitled eight-year-old insisted that she wanted to ride the other girl's pony, the horses' owner let her know that it wouldn't be safe for her to do that, since she had no helmet or prior experience. Upon hearing that response, the girl's equally entitled mother pitched a fit, insisting that her daughter be allowed to ride and, when that failed, she complained to the school authorities that horses should not be ridden to school unless everyone (especially her darling daughter) was also allowed to ride.
I guess that riding horses to school has become a novelty.
I've ridden horses since before I could walk, but the closest I've ever come to riding to school was on the last day of fourth grade, when someone's grandpa brought a Shetland pony so everyone could take turns riding, on a lead, up and down the alley behind Eastward School. I was never one to turn down a horse ride, even though I was perfectly able to ride by myself, as fast as any pony would like to go.
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| My little sister, Laura, thought she was hot stuff when she got to hold the reins as she and I posed for this picture with Ginger at Crystal Springs, outside of Fairbury. |
My dad and his siblings rode their horses the three or four miles to their country school (first through eighth grade) every day all school year, rain or shine. As they rode along, they picked up several neighbor kids who were also on horseback. When they arrived at school, which didn't start until around 9:00 a.m., they had to take care of their horses, removing saddles and making sure the horses had fresh water to drink. The horses had a pasture to graze in, and hay available during the snowy winter months, as well as a four stall barn, built by the kids’ dads, for those bad weather days that were inevitable in northeastern Nebraska. At the end of each day, the horses had to be saddled up again, and the kids rode home.
Obviously, kids were much more self-sufficient back then, in the 1940s and '50s.
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| Dad as a teen, on his horse, Ginger |
As the older kids moved on to high school in Bloomfield, ten miles from the home place, they were unable to ride their horses that distance every day, twice a day, so they drove an unheated Jeep when the roads were somewhat passable, and boarded with a family in town during the week in the wintertime, going home only on weekends, if the roads were mostly clear. Sometimes, they went for weeks without seeing their families, especially during the winter of 1948-49, when all of Nebraska was inundated with massive amounts of wind-blown snow.
Recently, when I asked my Aunt Marj to share some memories about riding horses to school, she told me that she only remembers one time when their dad took her and her brother, Lyle, to school instead of letting them ride their horses as usual. That was the morning of the first day of the Blizzard of 1948. She doesn't know why he decided to take them to school that particular morning, since he had no way of knowing that such a dangerous storm was approaching.
The school children, and probably their teacher, too, spent the next two nights at the house across the road from the school, where my Aunt Rose's family lived. Then, Grandpa trudged a couple of miles across pastures to get the kids and walk them back home again, through treacherous fields of deeply drifted snow. If Lyle and Marj had attempted to get home by themselves, they might have fallen into one of the many snow-filled canyons, where they would not have been found until spring. And, if they had ridden their horses to school that day, they may have decided to ride home as usual, with tragic results.
Sometimes, God watches over us in ways that are hard to explain.
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