I have been putting off writing this particular entry for some time, perhaps because it had bothered me so, or perhaps because it felt almost heresy to mount what seemed like an attack on some of my mentors, the horsemen I have respected the most and from whom I have learned so much. But, the fact that I kept putting this off nagged at me. Now, in the writing, I have learned even more about life, about horsemanship, and about myself.

There is bad, even in the best of us, and good, even in the worst of us. At first glance this seems patently obvious, and because of that I never gave the idea much thought. But, I neglected to consider that I harbored a tendency, a habit even, of demonizing or angelizing people. They were either all good or all bad. To me the world of people was colored entirely in black and white, and so I expected my heroes to be perfect. If I perceived a flaw in their character I would move on to the next hero whom I believed might be free of such human defects. I never realized this consciously and so it astounded me to discover that a person could be good with horses and yet have prejudices towards people or awful attitudes towards life or egos the size of hot air balloons.

So, the episode I experienced with one of my heroes haunted me for months, until I fully realized that he was indeed human and susceptible to all of humanity’s faults and frailties, just like the rest of us. Dawning with this realization was the insight that I expected myself to be more than human as well. In short, perfect. I thought my mentors needed to be larger than life, utterly incapable of error and knowledgeable in every aspect and tiny detail of life. And I expected no less from myself. What a sad state of affairs that was and such a rude but necessary awakening it would require.

I attended a clinic put on by one of my favorite clinicians, a world-class horseman, outside a small town in Oregon, and saw him at what I hope was his absolute worst. He conducted the clinic entirely from the cab of his truck, barking into a wireless microphone, and maintaining an unholy distance between himself and the folks who paid a tidy sum of money to ride in his clinic. The first day of the clinic was short, unfairly so. Several inept and inexperienced riders fumbled through the colt starting class with only minimal help from the clinician. The deafening silence was broken only by the occasional demeaning comment booming from the loudspeakers. I watched as things that should have been addressed went by unnoticed, or more likely, ignored. Everyone in the colt class struggled and two of the less fortunate ended up bucked off in the dirt. From the clinician? – no comment. The afternoon horsemanship class was even shorter. The riding instructions were terse and short, interspersed with additional demeaning comments. Meaningful instruction was withheld and no attempt was made to help people understand what was being conveyed - if anything. After an hour and a half of riding the afternoon ended. It was plain on the faces of the riders that they felt disappointed and shortchanged.

The next day two of the women riders dared to confront the clinician and asked him if they could be allowed to ride longer in the afternoon clinic. They told him the previous day’s ride had seemed quite short. They were assertive, yet polite and hardly deserved the response they got.

The clinician took offense and got extremely angry, something he would never dream of doing with a horse, but with people it seemed to be another story. For a moment someone turned off the microphone, but the clinician’s assistant demanded it be turned back on saying, “Everyone needs to hear this.” Hardly. With the public address system on and his voice booming across the arena he read them the riot act. “Are you teaching this class?”, he bellowed. He got personal, calling them pathetic riders who were tormenting their horses merely by climbing in the saddle. He said he refused to torture those poor animals any further and that was why he cut the class short. For fifteen minutes, using the horses as an excuse, he berated those women. They walked away humiliated, mortified, one of them in tears.

The spectators looked at each other in stunned silence.

The afternoon riding began. A few short passes around the arena and the clinician decided to have the riders walk their horses across a blue plastic tarp lying on the ground. There was no prior preparation, no introduction to the tarp, nothing. Few, if any of the riders were prepared to do such a thing. It seemed that the clinician was doing nothing more than proving a point and he seemed bound and determined to exact his revenge on the group. This day’s riding would turn out to be even shorter than that of the previous day.

As the riders, in over their heads, tried to urge frightened horses across the tarp, the clinician sat in his truck and denigrated folks who dared to call themselves trainers. He even directed a slam at me, merely sitting in the audience, apparently because I handed him a business card from the horse rescue earlier in the day. He said, “Anyone can hang out a shingle and call themselves a trainer these days and the humane society will help you do it.” - Never mind that the horse rescue is in no way connected with any humane society nor did the card mention anything about horse training nor identify me as a trainer. It seemed sheer cowardice to make the comment over a loudspeaker rather than to my face. But, so it was. Unfortunately, that comment was tame compared to what the clinic participants were getting.

The riders cringed and cowered as he verbally whipped them to force their horses across the blue tarp. One young teenager on a green horse was having quite a bit of difficulty even getting his horse near the tarp. The clinician’s assistant rode up behind the boy and smacked his horse on the rump and got her own mount kicked in the process. The clinician barked orders and forced the issue, determined to make something happen, though it appeared that something was to see somebody killed. And that nearly happened. The boy finally got his green horse near the tarp, no small accomplishment in itself, and the horse pawed at the tarp. For a moment his hoof caught, and he panicked. He reared, spun and bolted halfway across the arena and started bucking. The boy fell off, catching a stirrup in the rear cinch. He ended up underneath the animal with the horse stumbling all over him. When he was finally kicked loose all the spectators ran to his aid and an ambulance was called.

And the comment from the loudspeaker? “I told him not to let that horse paw at the tarp.”

Needless to say, the day’s riding was over. As the paramedics determined that the boy was OK, the spectators began packing up their folding chairs and leaving in disgust. I have no idea how many returned for the final day of the clinic, because I could not bear to watch another minute either and did not return.

I drove home saddened by seeing someone I had so admired sink to such depths of disregard for life. I have thought about that day many times since then. It has haunted me. I still admire the man as a horseman, only because I have finally come to understand something about people. There is a taint even in the saint, a seed of saintliness even in the satanic, and sometimes the good can get downright ugly. In the end we all suffer the frailties of the human condition.