There are reason s to want to escape into the wilderness. Upon some particularly bad news, I found myself yearning to rush out into the Appalachian Mountains with a pack strapped on my back, but a weather forecast and some rational thought kept me from camping in a tent on a mountain in the middle of thunderstorms.
Instead, we decided to tack up some horses and take a trail in. The knowledge of these creatures astounds me. My mount, TJ, a chestnut thoroughbred, eyed me up with a quick glance, assessing how green I was to the back of a horse, but once tacked, despite the tossing of his head, it was smooth riding.
The forest is always ten degrees cooler like a cellar, but the branches always reach out at riders, and TJ is never aware of the branches that reach out to snatch me from his back. It takes careful ducking and rein manipulation to keep from being ousted from the saddle.
The fields beyond the forest are so tall that the grass smacked at my boots. I cringed simply imagining the ticks which were waiting at the top of each tall blade to crawl onto my skin.
But the breeze cut through the blades and they undulated in beach-like waves towards us, and the cattle dogs cut in through the fronds and weaved with us in our cyclical path as we rounded toward our destination back at the barn.
It isn't until TJ decides to break into a trot that I realized I'm daydreaming about Jeff's brain tumor, and he yanks me back to reality as I jerk back his reins.
I'd like to run. I'd like to gallop across the fields carelessly, without a mind to the groundhog holes or the ticks, but in an English saddle I feel weak, insecure, and when be break back into the forest, there are so many branches to begin ducking again.
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