Easy Rider

You remember the last time you were on a horse. It was the summer before the fifth grade, at 4-H camp. The counselors gave you the oldest, slowest, tamest horse in the barn. You still wound up with a painful, half-dollar-size blister on your tailbone.

So it is with mixed emotion that you pull up to the horse-riding establishment where they are offering lessons on learning to ride “the cowboy way.”

The term “cowboy way” conjures up images from “City Slickers,” but you park your reliable steed--the four-wheeled variety--and saunter into the log cabin that serves as an office.

More intimidating than the thousand-pound creatures outside is the liability release form you must read and sign. You scan a paragraph of information provided by the National Electronic Injury Surveillance Systems. It tells you that horse-riding ranked 64th among activities that led to hospital stays. How long was the list? Is that higher or lower than, say, skiing near trees? (They do, after all, offer horseback-riding helmets.)

But you are most alarmed by this statement: “Horseback riding is the only sport where one much smaller, weaker predator animal (human) tries to impose its will on another much larger, stronger prey animal with a mind of its own (horse) and each has a limited understanding of the other.”

You thought you were just going for a little ride.

A horse has been saddled for you, and she’s soft and gleaming. If only she didn’t seem to have--as you were warned--a mind of her own. When you just want to stand still and wait for your guide, she wants to stroll around the corral.

Fortunately your guide quickly catches up, and then passes you. You will spend the next hour or so trying to make your horse walk at a pace faster than what can only be described as moseying. Horses are smart, the guide tells you. They know that every step they take on that trail puts them one step farther away from their feeding trough--and horses don’t like to be far from their food. Left to their own devices, your guide adds, a horse could pig out until it keels over.

The other very smart thing your horse does (you try positive reinforcement on the horse) is expand her rib cage like a puffer fish when someone saddles her up. Once you are out on the trail, Holt has to cinch up the saddle girth when she’s unsuspecting, lest you roll off the side of the animal like some Yosemite Sam cartoon. (Positive reinforcement gets you nowhere.)

You ride over a narrow bridge that crosses a concrete trough that is actually a river. Then you go through a few tunnels, under a freeway. As you ride away from the freeway, you cast a glance back toward your regular form of transportation before heading into a vast park.

Now it’s time for some instruction. Clearly, your guide has given you a horse of the same variety you had at 4-H camp. She could walk every trail in the park and bring you neatly back to her feeding trough and you’d have to do no more than stay in the saddle. But your guide assures you there is more to riding than that.

First, put the reins in your nondominant hand, each strap going between two fingers. Then, flip the remaining length of the reins over your hand. You hold your reins in the air, above the saddle horn. This, says the guide, is your steering wheel.

You can tell that your left arm is going to tire of this position. Why can’t you use your right, you ask?

Oh. That would be the ropin’ hand. This is the cowboy way.

Next, turn your feet outward, like second position in ballet. (It was uncomfortable in ballet class, too, you remember.) Your legs, though, become natural shock absorbers. A simple squeeze of the legs should make the horse pick up her pace.

As uncomfortable as this all seems initially, you know it must work. After all, your guide used to do long cattle drives, and was, in fact, a genuine cowboy.

Toes out, hand up, horse slow--you ride into Griffith Park.

The steering wheel actually seems to work. You continue to have trouble with the acceleration.

The park--while under attack from impending construction, covered landfills and massive composting projects in some areas--remains an urban oasis.

The farther up you climb--OK, your horse climbs--into the hills, the more distant the freeway sound becomes, until, over a ridge, it’s gone.

The rude rules of freeway life don’t apply here. There are no little metal cages around them, so people treat one another like something other than inanimate objects. A strange, unspoken bonding goes on between those in the park, the dog-walkers, the hikers, the horse-riders.

Your horse, however, is not impressed by these surroundings, which she traverses nearly every day. Despite the guide’s recommendations for leg-squeezing, you can’t get her to move beyond a plod. That is, until you shift the reins in your hand and she thinks she’s about to get swatted with the strap.

All of a sudden you’re at a canter on a hillside path that suddenly seems narrow and precarious. You hold on, try to maintain control, try to think what a cowboy would do.

The horse thinks quicker than you do, however, and realizing you’re not going to swat her, she returns to her previous slow gait, the pace she maintains all the way back to the stable. Apparently getting closer to her food is no incentive, either.

You dismount. The cowboy way has made your knees ache. Your legs seem to extend from your hips at an unnatural angle. But when no one is looking, you reach around to check your tailbone.

The cowboy way has given you no blister.

BE THERE

Rancho Royale, 10480 Creek Road, Oak View. Beginner to advanced riding lessons. About $25 an hour. Call for appointment. (805) 649-2755.

Conejo Valley Equestrian Center, 4801 Potrero Road, Newbury Park. Beginner to advanced riding lessons. 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. $20-$32 an hour. (805) 498-2880.