S took me on an adventure for my birthday. Which displayed a great deal of kindness and whatever the opposite of typical mind fallacy is.
We Ubered to the desolate reaches of the middle-Bay Area and trekked past some of the least-likely-to-yield-an-ATM coastal hillocks I have ever encountered while on a search for an ATM. And navigated the provocatively different admission procedure at some stables. And rode horses.
My horse was called Malibu, which was nice because I had more or less given up on riding a Malibu back when I turned out to not have any particular surfing skill. I even got to ride a Malibu through the Californian waves! Because she was not a very obedient Malibu, and liked water apparently.
I think I probably also don’t have any particular horse-riding skill, but since horses are self-stabilizing and social protocol does not call for standing on them, a small amount of skill goes a long way.
I spent a lot of the ride wondering exactly how long a way, because the horse-purveyors had not given me a lot of instruction, and what I had gathered from them seemed to be some combination of inaccurate and alarming. They said that the horses were quiet, well behaved, ‘walking horses’. Malibu only ran a bit, and only once took a nibble at the butt-cheeks of another horse—about the only one left that she hadn’t overtaken already—but I feel like running up behind a horse to bite it on the bottom is not low-risk behavior.
They also said that pulling the reins would stop the horse, whereas in fact it caused the horse to shake her head and continue running. In fairness, I’m not sure if they gave this advice to me, or if I just happened to overhear it. In unfairness, neglecting to tell a new rider how to control a horse probably doesn’t entirely make up for the the horse being out of control anyway.
They also said that if I pushed my heels down in the stirrups and my bottom down in the saddle, then I would be fine and wouldn’t fall off. Since the antecedent here seemed to be precluded by Newton’s Third Law, I was left wondering what they meant to imply about my chances of being fine and not falling off in the more physically possible case where I failed to brace myself against the sky to press down on every contact-point with the horse.
I asked if I should maybe be wearing a helmet. An instructor said that they did have helmets, and then wandered off, apparently to not get one.
I asked S about twenty times whether this was safe. He pointed out that large numbers of seven-year-olds appeared to be doing it, and that it is a normal thing for Americans to do. But in the long wait before the staff remembered that they might have visitors…and then remembered what to do with them, and then did it…I observed a lot of both seven-year-olds and Americans. And was not so sure that consensus interest from either group should be that reassuring.
In spite of all this, by the time we got to the beach I had mostly relaxed. And it was a pretty good beach, replete with those tiny birds that glide across the sand together in nature shows, on a blur of needle legs.
Honestly I also liked seeing such an outlier of a business. And what better mitigation for feeling kind of old than to remember that in some ways I am less well equipped for life than most seven year olds!
