Rough Magic. Lara Prior-Palmer
the pony’s wrinkled mane, I remind myself it is just a horse—a solid, four-legged, hairy, plant-eating, sometimes-domesticated mammal with a mane and tail. Yet my breath is scared.
I think I felt more fear in that cold-blooded moment than I would at any point in the race. I didn’t show it. I was attached to my exterior of fearlessness. Even inside my head, I never went near phrases such as “I am scared,” “I am sad,” or “I am angry.” Perhaps this failure to emotionally engage linked me to the long tradition of British adventurers who refused to let anything flummox them, even if their partner’s leg fell off in the Arctic. I imagine this sort of disconnection from emotion was also required by their contemporaries and forebears when running an often brutal empire. Somehow, I cannot separate myself from that history.
The pony was tiny, yet standing at his side I felt the cumulative danger of all the risky times I’d ever experienced with horses. I had been led to believe Mongolian ponies were especially life-threatening. Despite standing half asleep on the horse lines, they were rarely handled and therefore hypersensitive to human motion. If you were lucky to get on board, you would, I’d been told, certainly have no control thenceforth.
The Right to Buck Off a Human Being is one of what I think of as the universal horse rights. Competitors had broken bones from such treatment at past training camps. Years earlier, I myself had broken my collarbone off a horse named Tweenie, whose sensational buck had her known locally as The Witch, a label I loved her for.
The pony did not move when I mounted. It turned out the start-camp horses had been tamed to prevent a repeat of the previous year’s injuries. “Choo choo,” said the herder, using the equivalent of a cowboy’s “giddy-up.” My pony fell into a donkey trot.
Riding is a dance that demands each muscle in your body answer to an ever-shifting floor. If you speak the language of trot, you will know it as the least graceful of pony paces. I rose up and down to the jarring rhythm, my vision underlined by a pair of triangular ears. If there is a grandeur associated with horseback riding, there was none here. Crawling around the basin aboard our short-legged ponies, we thrust our chests outwards, and with every rising stride, the giant, noncommittal landscape erased us.
As the sun dropped behind the ridge, I stooped through the door of the ger at the end of the row. Soft-spoken Paddy and four others were already roosting on low beds, indulging in yet another Lycra discussion. Matthias, a forty-year-old who lay with his headlamp glowing, muttered in his German accent, “I don’t wear Dri-FIT clothes. After three days, I start to feel like a sausage.”
I fell asleep to the noises of a party in full tilt. Someone stumbled in after midnight and collapsed next to me, snoring menacingly. From the outline of a beard I decided it had to be Todd, who herded cattle in Australia for a living and smoked a lot of cigarettes.
The next morning, Natacha chirpily repeated the pleas of an Australian voice she had overheard behind her tent in the night: “Look, listen. I love your bum, I love your boobs, and I fucking love your personality. . . . Now just hurry up and sleep with me.”
He was talking, Natacha suspected, to one of the vets, who did not sound keen on his advances.
At dawn on the second training day, I got entangled in my backpack, which required the rescue of three crew members, including a thickset, heavily eyebrowed man in his early thirties called Charles. The test pony then sprang me over the plain with weathered resolve, but the saddlebag soon fell off, causing him to have a bucking fit. I jumped off before he threw me.
Beneath the pony’s tummy, I sat untying the bag from his upper back leg, as though this were my beach spot, and he my parasol. My tent-mates abandoned me in their hurry to reach the training checkpoint, and Richard, the official race photographer, drove across the plain to magnify his view of my situation. He muttered from his jeep window as he pulled up, an easy smile behind his words.
I mumbled back. “No, I do not know where to go. I can’t read my GPS. Is it the pink line or the blue line or the red dot? What’s that arrow? Me? Really?”
I had been expecting, and am still expecting, someone to teach me how to use a global positioning system. Although there are many maps of Mongolia, there were no suitable GPS maps at the time of the race. I liked the idea of traversing a space free of the net of lines I associated with maps. The organizers had entered the coordinates of the horse-changing stations into our GPS system, but no one had mentioned what the numbers and colors meant.
I often feel strange in groups, overwhelmed by the puzzle of humans, so I was moping at the back when the next lot of riders decided to take a deliciously straight line over the rocky ridge. Like a good sheep I went after them, ignoring the alternative track skirting the mountain. At the top, my horse refused to descend. Like the last lot, the others went on without me.
Marooned on the peak, I dismounted and slung my body down on the stone crumble. I wasn’t aware of any rules for the training day so, relieved from the group-hurry, I began dozing. In this state I occasionally returned to the problem at hand, erupting in a spate of giggles. I hadn’t noticed until now that part of me preferred to travel slowly and catastrophically. Nor had I realized this preference would be at odds with participating in a race. Later I would learn that Devan, the well-prepared American competitor, was by now already back at camp, bulging her eyes out of her skull at the news of our group so stupidly going over the ridge.
When I was sixteen my favorite history teacher told me to start taking myself seriously. I loved her, so I tried to listen, but I didn’t understand people who took things seriously. I especially loathed the Head Girl team, who flapped their wings like mother hens and mowed the school corridors with gravity. I couldn’t see why you would invest in life in this fashion. How did serious people fare when the world turned around to surprise them?
Hours later, I returned to find Devan holding court on the grass. When she announced she was taking bids from people to ride with her, Tom, a tall, blond twenty-four-year-old American, casually said he might like to join Team Devan.
She looked him up and down from her sacred patch of land. “Sure. If you can keep up.”
By the next morning, Tom would have torn ligaments in his shoulder, not at the hands of Devan, but because he’d had the pluck to take on a Mongolian in a nighttime wrestling match. The fact that wrestling was the national sport in Mongolia had not been noted by Tom, a risk analyst by trade. What foresight Devan seemed to have.
My own race plans were vested in a six-meter bungee rope I had nabbed on eBay. During nights spent in the open, I would tie it from my tummy to the pony’s bridle to stop the pony straying. None of the other riders believed I was serious about sleeping attached to a wild horse. They thought I’d just end up being dragged down a flinted valley and deposited in bog. It was during such conversations that I felt myself falling into their stereotypes of an English eccentric—Class B: ditzy, female. None of them were aware that I effected similar surprise back home. At the end of the first training day, a rider from California had asked if I was high, while another had simply inquired, after watching me clown about with a little boy, “Who is your mother?”
I sank back into my heart.
Once again I ate lunch beside Paddy, who narrowed his eyes and leaned into me to reveal his bet on Matthias, the German with no tolerance for Dri-FIT, as the likely winner of the race.
“That Matthias, oof, he’s a real interesting guy. You know what?”
“What?”
He lowered his voice, “My money’s on him to win.”
Matthias and Paddy had decided to ride together. For hours that morning they flustered about the gloomy ger, packing and repacking their luggage. Matthias epitomized the winning expert, but without Devan’s swagger. He did tai chi before breakfast both training mornings, had apparently lost 60 pounds before the race (riders weren’t allowed to weigh more than 85 kilograms, or 187 pounds, in their gear), and had clocked up over 6,400 kilometers on lone training rides in the Australian outback with his GPS. I had never ridden more than 20 kilometers at once, let alone with a GPS, and, as established, I didn’t know how to use one anyway.