Ridin' Steel Horses

Did you know that 100 years ago the automobile was touted as being the pollution-free transportation of the future? In big, crowded cities like New York, horse pollution was a problem that made smog seem like a joke. Horse manure was a terrific problem and nearly everywhere it lay where it fell. Even when it was picked up, it was just dumped in someone else's back yard. Even dead horses tended to lay where they fell, liquefying in the streets. Aside from the stench and unsightly appearance of it all, flies and disease were rampant. In addition, city horses could only work about 5 years before they had to retire. They required a lot of feed and water, couldn't move a whole lot of people per animal and had a hard time trudging up hills - especially when pulling carts. In 1872, an outbreak of horse flu ripped through New York wiping out much of the transportation and causing a serious carcass problem.

There were about 3.5 million people in New York City in 1900, and about 75 million in the entire United States. Today the population of New York City is well over 8 million, and in the US there are about 300 million of us.

Can you just imagine if we were all still riding horses? I think we'd already be extinct.

But we aren't. We're here, riding the horse of the future. Rather, the "horseless carriage" as it was called back in the day. The car was the solution to pollution. It was clean by anyone's standard in 1900. It didn't drop dead and rot, spread diseases (or catch diseases) or leave steaming piles of fly magnets every half hour. It could last well over 5 years with proper maintenance. Of course, paved roads weren't common at the time and the Interstate system hadn't even been conceived of. Outside the city the horse was the only alternative to walking, but inside the city the car had everything going for it, except that it was too expensive for most people. But Henry Ford changed all that with his brilliant idea of the assembly line, and in 1908 the Model-T started rolling off the lines and into the hands of the masses. In a generation the horse went from being transportation to being recreation - from daily necessity to play thing.

I thought of this last week as I was grooming a horse named Sunny. Horses fart a lot. They poop a lot. They pee a lot. They sneeze big slimy dirt-filled boogers a lot. It's astounding how many offenses a single horse can produce in a short period of time. And they aren't nearly as cooperative when I've got a brush in my hand as my pickup is when I've got a garden hose and a towel.

Recent studies have suggested that all of the world's livestock - horses, cows, etc. - produce nearly 20% of all the greenhouse gases being released into the environment. That's more than all of the world's planes, trains and automobiles combined. The combined global farts alone produce a whopping 1/3 of all the methane being released into the environment, and methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Right now there are over 600 million automobiles on the planet. No one knows how much livestock there is, but there is at least 1.5 BILLION cattle.

At my conference last summer in Austin, one of the presenters mentioned a study wherein psychologists determined that people, on a subconscious level, identify their car as a horse. Apparently Chrysler used this information to give "eyes" to the Jeep by making the headlights round, and sales shot through the roof. Indeed years later when they shifted back to square headlights, customers revolted and the design was swiftly changed back to round where it has remained since. I don't know how much truth is in that, but I've always thought of my vehicle as my horse in some sense. It has always given me freedom - freedom to run and to roam. I even bond with my vehicles, silly as it seems, and in years past was known to spend hours detailing my pickup. I've heard it explained that the American frontier and our vast dependence on the horse for so many generations, along with the lingering fantasy of the American West is what gave rise to the American love affair with the car - particularly among American men. Psychologists tell us this ultimately goes back to thousands of years of horsemanship and roaming.

There's this Boulder hippie who works down at Whole Foods - young guy - long ponytail, scruffy beard, skinny, vegetarian. He's about as green as a Boulderite can get. And he drives a jacked-up, beat-up old white Jeep Wrangler with black flames down the side, and the thing's nearly as old as I am. It totally doesn't fit his image. "It's the only thing I do that's not 'green,'" he'll tell you. "But it's my horse. I love it. I gotta have it." His comment strikes a chord.

I suppose all of this is on the forefront of my mind because of all the time I've been spending around horses lately. Just about everyone I know who rides or has ridden frequently has numerous stories of being bucked off and sustaining injury. I decided to do a little investigation. Turns out that horseback riding is many, many times more dangerous even than motorcycle riding, which itself is far more dangerous than driving a car or truck. We're talking orders of magnitude here. This of course led to looking at injury and death statistics for lots of activities, learning about fears generally held in modern society, and facing up to some of my own fears as well. For example, I'm not in the least afraid of spiders or snakes, though I do have a healthy respect for them. However I've always been irrationally terrified of a shark attack. I've never lived within 100 miles of the ocean (and maybe that, in part, explains my fear.) I don't think twice about jumping in my pickup and going anywhere at all, but put me out on a mountain above tree line and I can't stop obsessing over a lighting strike.

Yet the chances of me having a life-altering accident in an automobile are far, far, higher than being eaten by a shark or struck by lightning. In nearly every scrap of literature on riding horses, we're urged to wear not just helmets but protective vests due to the high rate of injury. In our society you're considered odd, to say the least, if you refuse to drive for fear of an accident, but it's nothing at all to be afraid of bugs or sharks or lightning. Why is this? I think it's familiarity. I suspect that over 100 years ago, few people feared riding a horse because riding is just what one did. It's how one got around, got work done, moved things. Likewise, despite the risk of car accident, few people today think twice about riding in one despite the risk.

And then of course there are those who believe that when you're time's up, it's up. Nothing else matters so why worry about anything.

So these have been my thoughts the last few days: horses and pickups, technology and tradition, cowboys and urbanites, life and death. Sometimes it seems like everything is so jumbled up. I'm not saying they were necessarily better, but the "old days" have a certain appeal to me if for no other reason than that life was pretty clearly defined. You're born, you get married and have kids, you work, then you die. Depending on your perspective, that may or may not sound appealing. The appealing part is you didn't have to worry about the millions of choices we have today. You don't worry about getting hurt on a horse, you just ride. You don't worry about finding the perfect career or the perfect life-partner or living in the perfect place; you do what you can, you love who you're with, and you live where you are. More than likely that meant you did what your father did for work, you married the girl next door for better or worse, and you lived your whole life within a few miles of where you were born. Again it's not the formula that's necessarily appealing, but the simplicity behind it that's appealing. I honestly wonder if kids today aren't so screwed up because they're plagued by choices. They have so many options they don't know what to do, and end up not doing much of anything constructive. In my own experience, graduating from high school was like stepping in the center of a giant labyrinth with a thousand doors all going to places unknown. At first it seems like a wonderful thing: endless possibility. But you soon realize it's got a dark side. You can't go through all the doors and you can't see how any of them end. Does having more options really bring more happiness? Numerous studies have shown that pre-arranged marriages produce couples that are far happier than our system produces. That's evident from the divorce rate and the proliferation of online dating and social networking. As for me, I became obsessive about which road to take after high school. What might I miss or suffer by choosing one instead of another? How far do I go down one road before I turn back and try another if this one isn't doing it for me? Had I been born over 100 years ago there might have been only two or three doors, tops. At least I'd have (or I think I'd have) the satisfaction - the peace of mind - of knowing this was my life's path, that I didn't make any mistakes because there were no other options.

Or maybe I'm just perpetually wondering "what if" and romanticizing things I don't really understand. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.