Here’s To Tequila, The Horse That Tried To Kill Me

Maintaining courage in the midst of despair

I once literally had a horse named Tequila. What kind of horse was he? He was temperamental son of a bitch, that’s what kind of horse he was. 

One day my dad decided we were ranchers. The way I remember it, I was walking down the road from the bus stop after school, and in the corral that had mysteriously popped up next to the neighbor’s barn that dad had inexplicably bought, there was a horse. It was gigantic even from my vantage point of a few hundred yards away. That horse’s name was Snoopy. Bocephus and Sassy the dominatrix pony came later. (Sassy was half the size of the other horses but left her marks on all of them.)

This is exactly what Satan’s horse looks like

By the time dad brought Tequila home, he’d given me just enough training to saddle a horse and steer it. “I need you to train this one,” he told me. That’s how dad taught lessons.

“Go figure it out.” 

I was 14-years-old, maybe. My hobbies included watching Star Wars, building LEGO spaceships, and drawing wall-sized maps of fantastical realms. But now I was a cowboy or something, I guess. Whatever.

I’ll be honest: horses terrified me. I still don’t trust them. They’re big, fast, and lethal. Snoopy threw my mom once. It was after a terrifying barnward gallop. The fall, or rather, the 60 m.p.h. impact with the earth, shattered her arm. Bocephus seemed like the stupidest creature ever born, but he was clever enough to know he could scrape riders from his back by running under low-hanging branches.

And Tequila? He was a little bucker. If you asked him to do anything, he’d buck. Turn? Buck. Stop? Buck. Go? Buck. 

He could tell he had a rookie on his back, and more than once I sailed over his head or he bounced my head off his butt. Often both. Then there was the time that he went absolutely nuts. That evil sack of future dog food dislodged me, sent me flying off the port side, landing hard on my back, knocking the wind out of me, and then with my foot caught in the stirrup, he dragged me for what felt like 50 yards through sticker bushes and horse crap. He was already back at the barn by the time I could draw a full breath, laying there, as I was, Tango Urilla, contemplating the fluffly clouds above.

In addition to hearing the neighbor girl’s laughter in the distance, I heard my dad’s words in my head: “Always get back in the saddle.” And so I did.

I’ve always been grateful for that time - is there a better way to explicate the “saddle” idiom? No, there literally isn’t. It served me well in the following 35 years, right up to the time I’d become a nearly 50-year-old blogger.

How’s that for a transition?

I’ve been thinking about conflict and courage this week, and today I was going to write about “maintaining courage in the midst of despair.” Tequila (the horse, not the devil water) was nowhere near my mind, but here we are. During that first summer with Tequila, I had the opportunity to saddle up hundreds of times. I was bounced off of barn walls, fence posts, other riders, and more than a couple of times I had to drop the reins and grab low-hanging branches to keep my gourd from getting blasted right out to center field. (That creature must have been comparing notes with Bocephus). 

I got up. Every single time. 

When I think about it, I can see two lessons here. One, obviously, is the immense fundament of the lesson to be persistent. Never quit. Never give up. The other is the power of a father’s words. Dad didn’t impart many lessons, at least not explicitly, but “Always get back in the saddle” was one of them. Dad shared wisdom and his expectation of his son. This drowning boy had no choice but to grab onto that piece of random driftwood. (I’ll have to reflect on that one later…)

I’ve been thinking about these things because, well, I have ample opportunity right now to practice what I’ve been preaching. Persistence, standing your ground, taking action… Some of the ground has been won and lost before. I find myself taking up position in the same defilade as a year ago, and the year before that. Nothing can take the initiative out of you quite as effectively as coming back to the same smoking crater after a year of bloody struggle. It’s easy, maybe even unavoidable, to conclude that nothing really matters.

You know what despair is? It’s the enemy’s greatest weapon. It’s powerful and effective and it’s cheap to deploy because it’s just a feeling. It’s a cheap lie. It becomes lethal when we try to attach certain ideas to it along the lines of “This is just the way it is.”

No. It’s not. I’ve traded enough ordnance with it over the years that I know, even though I don’t feel it, that I can defeat despair by doing the things that I fear. So, I write when I don’t particularly know what to say. I forgive when I know in my soul that I’m right (or when it seems crazy to do so). I stand when I want to run.

I get back in the saddle. 

Which is what I have to do today. 

I don’t have an actual bottle of Tequila with me right now, and besides, it’s too early in the day to light that particular candle, so instead I’ll reach over to the kids’ craft supply table and hoist this bottle of Elmer’s Glue and toast that diabolical steed. Cheers, Tequila. Thanks for all the lessons.

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