Not only is it the year of Big Brown, the racehorse poised to win the triple crown, but the horse is also celebrated in the current exhibit at New York’s Museum of Natural History, appropriately enough called “The Horse”. The exhibition is an exploration of the evolution of the horse and the many ways humans and horses have interacted over the ages.

 

 

Deborah Butterfield

 

While pondering these events, I fortuitously came across a marvelous rendering of that empathy between horse and human in this deceptively simple photograph of a horse by Esko Männikö which is not in the show but should be.

 

 

Esko Männikö

 

Simplicity is the easiest thing to see and the hardest thing to do well and Männikö has done it supremely well in my judgement. Männikö, a recent winner of Europe’s Deutsche Börse photography competition, is a Finnish photographer who ordinarily documents Finnish culture with an emphasis on old structures.

 

Esko Männikö, Organized Freedom

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But lately he has been photographing animals …

Esko Männikö

 

I began to think back on my own experiences with the noble horse. I spent part of my childhood on a farm in Virginia where I shared a pony with my sisters. Scout was an elderly somewhat obese pony who was blind in one eye which might explain why he cost all of $60. Scout who preferred immobility to a walk, and a walk to a trot and a trot to a gallop, could be persuaded to the latter only after realizing that if he galloped the ride would soon be over.

So one day, after an hour of going through the gears, he finally broke into what he called a gallop. The non-equine world would have termed it a slow canter. Spying my parents watching me trying to get Scout ambulatory, I decided to show off my riding skills so cantering along, I headed for the fence where they were standing. It suddenly dawned on me that Scout was intending to jump the fence, a scenario I wanted no part of, so I turned his head to the right, a procedure that would normally cause a horse to change direction.

Yes, you guessed it. While his good eye was staring at me in injured surprise, his blind eye failed to see the fence, and into it we crashed. I went sailing through the air and landed at my parent’s feet. As they related later. they didn’t know whether to applaud or flee in panic. As I remember they did neither, but stared at me as if I was a UFO which had dropped from the skies.

Scout shook himself once or twice and began grazing on the grass, unharmed. Not so me; the UFO had a broken arm. That was my last ride as a few months later, having reached the age of 15, I obtained official permission to ride mechanical horses and the automobile and I have been inseparable since.

 

Fast forward many years, and while on the same farm, my wife, Virginia, who has been around horses all her life, decided to take in some retirees from Rock Creek Park’s stables. These were ancient hacks who had spent many of their working years plodding about ovals with shrieking children on their backs. [Rock Creek Park is Washington DC’s great natural park in the heart of the city.]

Notable among the elderly steeds she adopted was Clown, so named because of erratic spots on his hide, a result of his Appaloosa blood. Clown was of a great age and had a winsome personality. For example, he was fond of biting children, a trait which W.C. Fields would have admired. I must confess I thought it indicated a superior intelligence myself. Clown also shared Scout’s desire never to move unless it was to search for food, doubtless one reason why he had reached such a great age. Soon Clown and Virginia were inseparable, although she rarely rode, perhaps because she could walk faster than Clown could gallop.           

 

 

 

 

Clown, 1996

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Soon after Clown reached his 40th birthday, he began to visibly decline. Virginia heroically nursed him through several crises and he seemed to be improving. But one morning this is what we found.

 

 

1997

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Clown’s funeral was quite an event and I’m sorry I don’t have a photograph to commemorate it. Virginia was determined to give Clown a burial instead of having him hauled to the knacker’s yard, the usual fate of a dead horse. She was ready to dig Clown’s grave with her own hands, something that probably would have taken her a month, but I prevailed upon Gene Stephenson, a farmer who occasionally rented out a field or two from us, and he came over with his trusty backhoe and had an enormous pit ready in no time.

The funeral procession was quite grand with Clown’s carcass raised up in the air on the claws of the backhoe as Gene made his way to the grave, followed on foot by the mourners, me and Virginia. Finally Clown was rolled into the hole and Virginia asked Gene if he might say a prayer for Clown. This caught the old farmer by surprise; I think it had been many years since he had deigned to address his Creator. He removed his Southern States Best Feed cap, and without getting down from the machine, bellowed a mighty LORD! There followed an uncomfortable silence as Gene searched through his memory bank for a horse prayer. Finally, he uttered a strangled THIS HERE WAS A GOOD HORSE…followed by another long silence. And then inspiration struck, and the one word which would set him free came out, a mighty ground-trembling AMEN.


And the year of that good horse came to an end.