You're up against: Too many horses And mysterious forces You're not gonna win, but still You're the luckiest man -- The Wood Brothers, "Luckiest Man" Introduction I don't remember the precise phrasing, but the gist was clear: "Get up, get back on, do it again, and do it right!" The part about cutting it out with the crying was, I think, just implied. Strongly. Those were the words by which my daughter Ada and I received our welcome into the world of equestrian sport. Ada was five. Already her fascination with horses had consumed over half her life. For at least a year she'd pleaded with us to sign her up for riding lessons. This moment was the near-culmination of her campaign. It was 2006, and still the early days of the internet, so simply locating a lesson barn took some effort. Neither my wife Lea nor I were horse people, and we had only recently moved to Milwaukee. The phone book (remember those?) was only minimally helpful. A combination of Google searches and word of mouth netted me a handful of leads, most of which didn't pan out. One barn no longer existed. The others wouldn't take a student who was only five-and-a-half years old. "We find that they just aren't able to pay attention," one instructor said to me. Only Bernadette Ruckdashel, owner of Appy Orse Acres in Fredonia, Wisconsin, seemed totally unfazed by my request. She invited us to come out to watch a lesson. Then, if we were still interested, we could get Ada on the schedule. I was confident that it was not a matter of "if," but I imagined there must be kids out there who turn out to like the idea of riding lessons more than the reality. And this was all new to me. If watching a lesson was what you did before taking a lesson, then that is what we would do. Appy Orse is about a thirty-minute drive from our house, not far away from where Lea's sister and her family lived at the time. We had driven by the farm a few days earlier when we were in the area, our entire family of five--Lea, me, Ada, and her three-year-old twin sisters Audrey and Laura--piled in our minivan, trying to imagine what this next step would hold. It was, I later realized, kind of like visiting a college as a prospective student. You're looking at an unfamiliar set of buildings in an unfamiliar place and trying to imagine what it's like to be a part of the community that fills those buildings. You might become part of that community, or you might not. Will this be a place where my life will be transformed? Or will it be a place I never visit again? How do I know which one it should be? I don't know what everybody else was thinking as we drove back and forth along Willow Road that day. I was focused mostly on trying to stay between the ditches while following the directions that I didn't do the best job of transcribing. That didn't leave much room for me to let my brain stretch into the future, let alone to gauge the family mood. But the excitement was palpable. It seems strange to say it now, given how quickly the years have flown by, but at the time this moment seemed to have been a long time coming. Finally, at long last, it would happen. Horses. Ridden. By Ada. A step into a great, exciting unknown. We could hardly wait. When the big day came our instructions were to go into the barn and ask for Bernadette. Over the coming months and years we would come to know the people of Appy Orse--the boarders and lessoners and their parents, grandparents, and friends--as a second family. And so it's a little puzzling to me that I don't know who it was who greeted us when we first walked into the barn, and I'm not sure that we ever saw her again. But she was clearly no stranger to the place. Bernadette was in the indoor ring, the woman told us, teaching one of the two consecutive hour-long group lessons on tap for that morning. She would take us there. We followed her up a slight hill across the yard to a green and white corrugated steel building perhaps seventy-five yards from the barn. The building's door featured a sign asking entrants to sound their voice before entering, which was not something I'd seen before. "Door!," the woman called out. A beat or two later we got an "OK!" in response. We stepped in, closed the door behind us, and got the signal to wait right there. Just then a rider started from the far end of the ring down a line of two or three jumps. We watched her ride, and moments later watched her fall. It happened right in front of us, and it wasn't a gentle fall. When the rider hit the ground her body was a lot closer to horizontal than to vertical. As a newcomer, unaccustomed to how these scenes play out, it registered mostly as a blur. Now, with the benefit of experience, I can confidently guess that it was the sort of fall where a little bit of the riding surface, known as footing, ends up in the rider's mouth and a lot of it ends up in her waistband, with bruising likely to follow. Experience also tells me that she didn't immediately get up and get back on. Falls turn out to be a very common part of riding, and at Appy Orse, in particular, the rule is to stay on the ground as long as necessary to confirm that there are no serious injuries. But in the moment Bernadette's reaction seemed instantaneous, and not what I would have expected. The rider would not be taking a break, or pausing to collect her thoughts, or walking off the minor wounds to her body and pride. She would get back on, and she would do it again. This time, if things went according to plan, she would do it right. I said nothing. What I thought remains one of the more vivid parts of the memory. It began with "Holy" and ended with a series of exclamation points. From there the lesson continued with no sense that this was anything other than business as usual. Bernadette directed us to take a seat in some chairs in a corner of the ring. There were blankets if we got cold--it was early February and well below freezing, and the ring was not heated. Horses cantered past just a few feet in front of us, stirring up cold air and sometimes showering us with footing as they made the turn. Other riders made mistakes, then repeated whatever it was they had been doing until they got it right. Bernadette did not soft-peddle her critiques. I spend my days as a law-school professor, and so I'm familiar with teaching methods that aren't exactly soft. But this was truly old school. I wasn't sure how Ada would react. I now appreciated the reluctance of the other trainers I had called, and the wisdom of Bernadette's inviting us to watch a lesson before signing up. The idea of taking lessons might have been one thing and the reality--with its falls and mistakes and critiques--something entirely different. But Ada was transfixed. "I want to stay," she told me as the first lesson wrapped up. I promised her we would stay as long as there was something to watch. We sat through the next lesson, which featured no dramatic falls but otherwise more of the same. After an hour or so the lesson wrapped up and I broke the news to Ada that it would soon be time for us to leave. But then something unexpected happened. Bernadette asked the youngest rider in the lesson to dismount and take off her helmet. Then she invited Ada over to where she stood, and placed the helmet on her hed. An adjustment or two later Ada was climbing a mounting block, and a moment after that she sat on the horse, for the first time in her life riding one that wasn't being led or attached to a walker. I'm at least sometimes a person whose face conveys messages that don't correspond with what's going on in my mind, and this may have been one of those times. I was surprised, certainly, because this hadn't been part of the plan. But I was likewise thrilled, because I knew how exciting this would be for Ada. My expression, though, must have read as nervous. The woman who first greeted us had joined us in the corner of the ring for the second lesson, and now she offered reassurance. "This horse is barely awake," she told me. "She'll be fine." I wasn't worried, and Ada was more than fine. She rode around the ring proud as could be. She delivered her verdict the moment the car door closed for the trip home. "I want to ride here." And so it began. ### This is a book with several topics. One of them is parenthood, and its challenges, and how it involves a constant journey into the unknown, with each decision about what to do next made under conditions of considerable uncertainty. What's the goal? Is it the right goal? Is this the right path to reaching it? Should I push? Should I hold back? Just how committed to this dream are we going to be? What shape should the dream take? When will we know that we've achieved it? "Success" can be measured in many ways. Familiar benchmarks focus on winning--ribbons, trophies, and other awards. But that sort of success can be a moving target. The satisfaction of succeeding at one level turns into a desire to do it again at the next level. Even the thrill of standing atop the Olympic podium no doubt wears off at some point, and then the gold medalist starts to seek ways to add to her legacy. Only one person can be the best there ever was, so anyone who measures success solely by awards and recognition is likely to come up short. Other approaches to the question focus more on intrinsic rewards. It's satisfying to do something for its own sake. This book could end up being read by hardly anyone at all and I'll still have enjoyed the process of writing it. But of course I won't mind at all if people take notice. My motivations, like anyone's, include a combination of both. Which just reframes the question: What's the right balance? Even with the benefit of hindsight it's hard to know if you've "succeeded." It's even more difficult to predict what goals will seem like they were the right ones when you've reached them. Assuming, of course, that you do. It's a struggle that each of us faces in our own lives, of course, whether the goals relate to being successful in a career or in a hobby or more fundamentally to having a happy and fulfilling life. As I reflect on my own path it's clear I could easily have made worse life choices than I have. (And one way I keep myself feeling young is to remind myself there's still time to make bad choices.) It's also clear I could have made choices that were better in terms of professional achievement and wealth, though they would have come at the cost of being able to be involved as a parent in the ways that led to this book. Did I make the right call? I think so, but none of the process of navigating our own lives is easy. At least the consequences of the decisions we make about our own paths fall mostly on us. It's different as a parent. The consequences of the decisions I make in that capacity fall primarily on my kids. That raises the stakes. I make a choice that ends up with me living under a bridge? I'll figure out how to deal with it. If it ends up with my kids living under a bridge? Whole different story. I often recall a comment to a social media post from a then-moderately famous musician who'd just had a daughter: "Congratulations. It is the solemn duty of all parents to [mess] up their children as little as possible. Give it your all!" In spirit, at least, that gets it exactly right. But how do you do it? How do you mess up your children as little as possible? If you find yourself the parent of a child with a passion, and with dreams that grow out of that passion, where do you take it? Should you resist out of some undoubtedly realistic sense that those dreams won't lead to Olympic glory, or should you provide your support? What's the right amount of support, and what becomes overbearing? You won't find answers in these pages, at least not in any pat form. But you will find what I hope comes across as a good-faith effort to struggle with the questions. This is also, of course, a book about horses, and the people who like horses. That may seem like something with only niche appeal. But there are all sorts of ways in which the subculture I write about here parallels lots of other subcultures in our society, whether the kind that grow up around a sport or hobby or the kind that exist among members of a profession. The world is filled with little communities that mostly escape our notice, each with its own vocabularies, complexities, and controversies. They are all different, yet they are all the same. One of the striking and truly unexpected benefits of my daughters' activities--which included figure skating in addition to equestrian sports--was the extent to which what I learned from them shaped my own professional life. As a professor, I've come to understand the activity we might call "doing law" is something that at a fundamental level is like riding. True mastery of either requires the development of a nuanced understanding, a feel, that can be developed only through repetition over time. It's a simple enough sounding insight, but one that's often overlooked in a world that tends to value only that which can be measured. And it's an insight that has influenced my teaching. You might not think that what works in the ring would also work in the law school classroom, but some of it does. You might not imagine that long days at horse shows would influence how a legal scholar thinks about judging, but they have. The lessons run in both directions. Many of the things we think about in law could be put to work in the horse world. Some of that has to do with how we teach. Some of it has to do with how judges judge, and what sorts of processes and systems could help them judge better. I work on those problems a lot in my day job, and I've been asked to speak about that work to audiences of judges across the country. Judges are responsible for much of the scoring at equestrian competitions, and there are important ways in which their jobs parallel the jobs of judges in law. Could the work I do in law be applied to equestrian competition? I think so. So there will be some of that in this book as well. And then there are the people. It's easy for many of us to spend our days around people who are fundamentally like us--similar incomes, similar habits, similar world views. A passion for horses cuts across those lines. No doubt the equestrian world has its lines of division and exclusion, by wealth and otherwise. Its diversity is, at best, incomplete. Those issues deserve, and are starting to receive, attention. Even so, my daughters' participation in the sport helped take me out of the bubble I might otherwise have remained in. It led me to routinely cross paths with people whose lives and perspectives are different from my own. There's value in that. Those people and those interactions have enriched my life in ways large and small. I can't say I'm a fan of every person I've met in the horse world, but I'm a fan of most of them. They have made all the lessons I've learned--and thus this book--possible. Excerpted from A Man Walks into a Barn by Chad Oldfather All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
