out of enemies, serfs, and common folk.
From antiquity through the conquest of the New World, a meticulously trained war stallion could rear, strike, and kick out his back legs on command to injure foot soldiers. He could leap to the side, slide to a stop, spin, and take off running without hesitation; he would also stand at attention in the midst of a raging battle if his rider dismounted to engage in hand-to-hand combat. Advanced competitors in the Olympic Games continue to demonstrate such feats, and these peacetime pursuits, too, require significant courage, fortitude, and risk to develop. The horse, after all, is an astonishing enigma, a prey animal willing to endure the horrors of war and the uncertainty of the unknown, carrying generations of riders, around the world, for reasons that still boggle the mind, sometimes receiving medals for exceptional bravery along the way.
Reagan, who started his military career in the U.S. Cavalry, no doubt felt history come to life on the back of El Alamein. He would ride for three or four hours at a time, rarely speaking to Barletta on the trail, totally immersed in the experience. Still, the president’s favorite mount was a constant source of anxiety for those charged with the task of protecting their fearless leader. El Alamein was so intense and flighty that at one point Barletta had veterinarian Doug Herthel assess whether the horse was suffering from back pain or some other hidden injury. In a treadmill test, the stallion proved stronger than the average racehorse, reaching optimal respiratory levels in two minutes when it took most Thoroughbreds five minutes to hit the same threshold. Herthel, a seasoned equestrian himself, had some trouble controlling El Alamein in a subsequent ride. “I don’t feel anything wrong with him,” the doctor concluded after a good twenty minutes in the saddle, “but I can’t believe you let the president of the United States ride this dingbat.”
“Still, President Reagan loved that horse,” Barletta observed. “It was almost as if this strong man and this strong horse really understood each other.” Not that there weren’t some close calls during the nearly ten years the president rode El Alamein. But Reagan’s poise and athleticism, combined with his love of a challenge, saved him on more than one occasion. Nonverbally, he could conjure up a calming presence under pressure that was simultaneously firm and reassuring, focused yet agile. It’s a skill that anyone who likes to ride a spirited horse develops through experience — or dies trying.
If Reagan had simply wanted to relax, he wouldn’t have chosen a horse like El Alamein. The president was accessing something in that relationship, something elusive yet essential. Trotting off into the desert on a horse ready to bolt at the drop of a hat or the rattle of a snake, gaining the animal’s trust and cooperation along the way, Reagan wasn’t just clearing his mind; he was literally exercising abilities that would prove useful in the international political arena.
Detractors insisted the former actor and radio announcer was a figurehead, a charlatan launched into office through his extensive film and public-speaking experience, a political amateur controlled by more intelligent, covert, perhaps malevolent forces. As a skeptical college student at the time he was elected, I too was willing to believe this rumor, ready to dissect his every false move — and confounded by his increasing popularity. After all, what Reagan said wasn’t so impressive. It wasn’t even how he said it. Whatever “it” was, there was no logical explanation for it whatsoever in my mind, at least not until I bought my first horse at age thirty-two. Only then did I realize that what Reagan learned in the saddle was crucial to his success.
Night of the Lepus
Contrary to popular belief, riding a horse does not come naturally — for one infuriating reason: the most basic skills are counterintuitive to the flight-or-fight response in both species. Even mildly challenging situations cause the blood pressure to rise. Guts clench and muscles tighten as breathing becomes fast and shallow. Horses and other large prey animals evolved to sense these nonverbal danger signals in herd members at a distance. When you’re sitting on the spine of such a powerful creature, his sudden, overwhelming urge to bolt, in concert with your body’s involuntary alarm system, becomes a serious threat to your immediate survival. Within seconds, a deadly interspecies feedback loop of escalating arousal spirals out of control, creating a tornado of disorganized responses guaranteed to leave dust and destruction in its wake.
Take the classic amateur rider’s initiation: managing a startled horse. If you could watch what happens to the nervous systems of both species in slow motion, ejection from the saddle stands out as the most logical conclusion. However, seasoned equestrians learn to modify their own instinctual responses, causing their mounts to experience the opposite of fear. It’s a nonverbal skill that comes in handy with humans too, as so many of my clients have discovered over the years.
“Stephanie Argento” runs a highly successful East Coast marketing firm. Tall, confident, effusive, the forty-nine-year-old mother of two teenage boys booked a last-minute New Year’s Eve appointment with me through a mutual friend, hoping, as she put it, “to make sense of an unfortunate riding incident” that occurred during her family’s Christmas vacation.
Stephanie’s sister, Marie, had recently moved to Tucson and was inspired to buy a horse, which she kept at a small private facility near the Saguaro National Monument East, a scenic desert preserve with miles of trails. “Marie and I took riding lessons when we were little,” Stephanie told me during our initial conversation. “Actually, we were so horse crazy, it was like we’d taken the postal service oath. You know, ‘neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor hail shall keep us from our appointed rounds.’ And we were fearless, willing to ride any horse, anywhere, anytime. But then I went to college, got married, got practical. So I was really looking forward to visiting my sister over the holidays, doing some mindless touristy things, and maybe getting back into the saddle myself.”
The opportunity presented itself the Saturday after Christmas. A group of Marie’s fellow horse boarders planned to hit the trails, and one of them offered Stephanie the use of his daughter’s horse. The lanky Thoroughbred gelding, an ex-racehorse, seemed a little feisty, but Marie had ridden with the family a number of times and had never seen Charger spook. Considering Stephanie’s background, a fourteen-year-old girl’s favorite horse “seemed like a no-brainer” to her and everyone else involved. The group headed toward the monument around noon, looking forward to a relaxing ride and a subsequent barbecue.
“So here it’s this beautiful, sunny day in December, and I’m not even wearing a coat,” Stephanie continued. “Charger’s owner made me put a helmet on, which I resisted at first. I had these romantic visions of galloping through the desert with my hair blowing free under the big blue sky. I sure am glad he insisted, or I might be a drooling vegetable at this very moment.”
The adventure started calmly enough. “The scenery was like something out of a John Wayne movie, all these gigantic cactuses, massive rock outcroppings, scruffy little trees, and majestic mountains. I was in heaven, seriously considering how to make the move to Tucson myself, when this huge jackrabbit ran out of the brush and sort of spooked the horse in front of me. Charger shied, and my heart skipped a beat. It actually felt like someone had kicked me in the gut for a moment. Then Marie shouted ‘Night of the Lepus!’ and we both burst into laughter.”
Quizzical looks from the other riders prompted the sisters to explain as they headed on down the trail: “We’d been out to Colossal Cave the day before, and they had this little museum with, among other things, a display of some of the old Westerns that had been shot in the area. There was this poster for what looked like a really bad B movie called Night of the Lepus with Janet Leigh. That guy from Star Trek, the doctor [DeForest Kelley] was in it too. My husband had seen it at the drive-in years ago, and we were pretty much in hysterics as he described it, to the point where my sons looked it up on the Internet later that night.”
The 1972 film depicts an ill-fated attempt at rodent birth control. When an Arizona rancher complains of rabbits overrunning his grazing lands, a local university professor injects some test subjects with hormones and genetically altered blood to curb their rampant reproduction. The whole thing backfires, of course. One of the lab rabbits escapes, creating a race of giant bloodthirsty, man-, cow-, and horse-eating bunnies.
As Stephanie and Marie related the details of this ridiculous tale, their mounts relaxed,