BACK IN THE SADDLE

There is a sequence of six glossy photographs in Donna Johnson’s scrapbook that remind her just how lucky she is to be alive.

They were taken Nov. 4, 1982, as she and her horse, Maggie, attempted to jump an obstacle called the Helsinki staircase during the American Horse Show Assn. West Regional in Napa, Calif.

They didn’t make it. The first five photos show why. Maggie trips over the first element of the jump, does a somersault over the fence and throws Johnson over the barrier and to the ground.

The most captivating photo, however, is No. 6. It shows Johnson pinned helplessly beneath her 1,000-pound mount.

She left the arena that day suffering from multiple skull fractures, a broken jaw, a broken collarbone and a punctured lung.

Johnson, 29, can’t remember what caused her horse to trip at the start of its jump. In fact, she remembers very little about the day before the accident, or the two months that followed. And maybe that’s a blessing.

If Johnson could vividly recall the pain of her injuries, Maggie, the horse she calls her “best friend,” might be remembered only as the horse that almost killed her.

And maybe there would have been no rise after the fall.

But Donna Johnson is coming back. Watch her guide her horse around a makeshift equestrian arena in Hidden Hills, effortlessly gliding over jumps as if she were riding Pegasus. And hear her urge a helper to raise those fences a few more inches.

“Just one day of jumping gets me going all over again,” Johnson said after a workout. “You want to see how far, how high and how fast you can go.”

At the time of the accident, she was aiming high and moving up fast.

Johnson and Maggie were a unique pair on the combined training circuit. Born in New York City, Johnson didn’t take her first riding lesson until she was 18 and had moved to the Valley.

She bought Maggie, a small, ordinary-looking lesson horse, shortly thereafter. Maggie, however, had a split tendon for the first six months Johnson owned her. She was also in foal, which no one knew until she went into labor a day after she was sold.

“She’s a grade mare--which is like the mutt of dogs,” said Johnson, who lives in Encino. “We’d go to a show and no one would even take a second look at us. Here was this little black mare going up against these gorgeous thoroughbreds. What kind of chance did we have? Well, we showed ‘em. We beat ‘em all.”

Or at least most of them.

Before the accident, Maggie was tied for the lead in the race for AHSA combined training Horse of the Year. With a win at the West Regional, Maggie would have won the championship. They were in second place, eight-tenths of a point out of first, after the dressage competition at the regional. The first-place horse was expected to fall out of first during the cross-country phase of the three-event competition.

And then the fall.

“Being a championship, the course was being run at a very fast pace,” Johnson said. “We were going as fast as we ever had and the faster you go, the flatter your jump is. Maggie was always a pretty flat jumper anyway. She would just barely make it over each fence. She was not a natural jumper. She won because she was such a great competitor.”

If Johnson expresses any regret over the accident, it is not about her injuries. “The only thing that bothers me,” she says, “is that Maggie was so close to winning it all. She taught me how to ride and we came all that way together. It would have been nice to see her name on that cup.”

Johnson was in intensive care for 10 days and in the hospital for a month after the accident. Much of that time, the left side of her face was paralyzed and her equilibrium was gone.

“I couldn’t walk and could barely talk,” she said. “I had double vision so bad that it was almost entertaining. I’d turn my head a certain way and things would come together or come apart.”

But less than eight months after being carried out of the Napa arena on a stretcher, Johnson was back in competition with Maggie. She proved that the doctors who said she might never walk again were wrong. More important, she was proving to herself that she could still ride competitively.

“From what people have told me, I guess that wasn’t too smart, going back so soon,” Johnson said. “It was just one of those things, something I felt I had to do. It was like getting up to hit again after being hit by a pitch. You just get up, dust yourself off, and get back in there.”

Johnson’s friends did not even try to talk her out of competing.

“It wouldn’t have done any good,” said one friend, Suzie Cover. “Doctors told her after the accident that it would be six months before she would walk again, if at all. Well, three months later she was not only walking, but she wanted to ride again. I said, ‘OK, you can ride, but I’m using a lead rope, and you’re using a hard hat and a western saddle.’ That was fine with her, as long as she could do it.

“Stubborn isn’t the right word for Donna. She just has a tremendous will to live and do the things she loves to do. There’s no stopping her.”

Tom Waters, another friend who competes on the equestrian circuit, said that Johnson was still dealing with the effects of her injuries when she returned to competition.

“She was still slow with her speech and her riding wasn’t real slick, but that didn’t stop her. She didn’t win, but she didn’t fall, either.”

Johnson and Maggie finished fourth in their first show after the accident, and Johnson retired her 19-year-old accomplice afterward.

“She showed she could still do it, but she had lost a little spunk,” Johnson said. “It was time to give her a rest. I owed it to her.”

Johnson has a new horse now, a 10-year-old Appaloosa named Chuck.

Like Maggie, he is a a stable horse all but abandoned by its previous owner.

“Chuck is good,” Johnson said. “I learned a lot from Maggie and I’m learning more from him. Each horse I’ve ridden has taught me something. Chuck is more of an athlete than Maggie was, but I’d still like to get one hell of a horse and find out what I could really do.”

Until she has that chance, however, she’ll work with what she can afford. Chuck already has first-, second- and fifth-place finishes in three shows.

“I’m somewhat of a poor girl in a rich man’s game,” Johnson said. “I enjoy the challenge of trying to beat people who come out here and ride their $10,000 horses, but it’s not easy keeping my head above water financially.”

Johnson’s bills for the doctors and the hospital ran close to $30,000; her insurance covered only 80%.

As a result, she hasn’t been able to enter Chuck in a show since March. Each show costs as much as $500 to enter--including the travel and boarding costs--but she hopes to have saved enough to compete in a show as soon as September.

“People ask me why I’m not training hard,” said Johnson, who works for Security Pacific Bank. “It’s not that I’ve lost my enthusiasm, it’s just that it’s frustrating to train and then not be able to afford to show him. He’s deserves better than that.”