My Wild Love Went Riding

Some stories don’t require a translation. Some tales can satisfy your curiosity in the imagery itself. The story I am about to tell however, is one that asks that you be patient, and allow yourself to hang on every word:

The year was 1994 when Guenter Wamser, a German Equestrian Explorer embarked on an incredible journey crossing the Americas, from South Patagonia to Alaska, entirely on horseback. 

As the story goes, the trip began with a motorcycle trip between North Africa and the North Cape. (Note: forgive the translation, all of these quotes were translated loosely from German, which is not my native tongue). Guenter Wamser explains that his horseback trek across the Americas was inspired by what he felt on his “Motorradodyssee”: “Disappointed about the impossibility of being able to capture a country in four weeks, grew in me the desire to someday take a journey of at least one year in duration. In 1986, I took leave of family and friends, from the regular salary of a secure existence. This was the beginning of a four-year Motorradodyssee in North and Central America.”

With that odyssey, Wamser discovered what it felt like to travel from a different perspective. He became fascinated by slow travel as he said, “It enabled me not only an eye for the spectacular scenery, but it opened me a different view of the magnificent details. I could now feel the country feel, grasp and comprehend.”

Guenter’s route through South America lasted five years, from 1994 to 1999. He trekked through Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. A companion, Barbara Kohmanns joined Guenter on the journey from Ecuador to Mexico. Throughout the South American route, the team was Guenter and Barbara, the dog Liesl and the horses: Rebelde, Gaucho, Maxie, Samurai and Pumuckl.

The route through Central America took the team of Guenter, Barbara, dog Liesl and horses through Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico. This part of the journey stretched from 2001 to 2005.

Guenter wrote in his travel logs, “After 11 years and 20,000 km we finally reached Mexico. Each country smells different. But nowhere this impression was so strong as in Mexico. Mexico smelled like chili and fire, spirited life, like music. Mexico showed his picture book page: men with bright, wide-brimmed cowboy hats and trousers with oversized belt buckles. Mexico was the objective of the common journey of Barbara and me.”

Crossing the border, the route across the United States was taken following the Continental Divide Trail, the CDC, which runs from the Mexican to the Canadian border. This trail is the dividing line of the tributaries of the Pacific Ocean in the west and the Atlantic Ocean in the east.

“In June 2007, the journey on the 5000 km long hiking trail along the Rocky Mountains began. In summer 2009, we reached the Canadian border. Why it took so long? Because intervening unique, beautiful landscapes are waiting to be discovered. The journey is the destination, the slowness is the beauty of traveling.

The CDT led us through the high plains of New Mexico, and the Land of Enchantment (Tierra de Encanto), passing the Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, through the lonely plains of Wyoming to the natural wonders of Yellowstone National Park and up into the rugged mountains of Montana.

Our four Mustangs we adopted from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) . These wild horses were trained as part of a social project, the Colorado Wild Horse Inmate Program . In the course of this project the inmates get vocational training in the taming of horses and can be easily integrated back into society after their release.

Since 1971, wild mustangs in the United States are legally protected (Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971) and its stock is controlled by the BLM… Each year a portion of the wild horses captured by the BLM and given up for adoption.”

During this part of the trip, a new team member joined and another departed. Barbara Kohmanns discontinued and Sonja Endlweber embarked on the route with Guenter. The team that crossed the Rocky Mountain route was made up of Guenter, Sonja and animals: the dog Leni and four Mustangs Rusty, Dino, Lightfoot and Azabache.

This part of the trip lasted from June 2007 to September 2009.

The last leg of the transcontinental horseback ride for Guenter and Sonja was started in the Spring of 2013 from the United States- Canada border to Alaska. Even after their epic trip on horseback is finished, Sonja, Guenter and Barbara continue to travel around Europe giving lectures and doing showings on their amazing adventure.

Getting a glimpse at their journey and the route they followed in crossing over continents with their horses, I feel a deep stirring in my soul. Something in me is waking up, stretching, and saying more loudly each day, your dreams are possible. You may be told you’re crazy, and that your dreams are unrealistic, but if crossing two continents on horseback in the span of twenty years is a reality for those who dared follow their dreams and do the work necessary to make it happen, then why on earth do we dare not live ours?

Click here to read more of the story of the transcontinental ride from South Patagonia to Alaska 

See the Resemblance

I first heard the term Nomadic Pastoralist in a book about horse behavior and their herd dynamics. The book was called, Power of the Herd by Linda Kohanov. In so few words, Kohanov gave me the most serious case of Deja Vu I’ve ever had. And every time I would open the book to continue reading, coincidentally, (or not!) the book fell open to the exact same page in which she introduces the nomadic pastoralists. Reading about their culture is like reliving a dream I once had. Ever since learning of their existence, I’ve devoured every shred of research I can find which relates to them as if I’m reminiscing my very distant family. In an interview in The Sun Magazine by Leath Tonino, Jack Turner said of his past,

In the mid-1970s I was an assistant philosophy professor at the University of Illinois. I was about thirty years old. I was very unhappy. One day I went to the Lincoln Park Zoo to sneak some meat to the snow leopards, as I did on occasion. It was a crappy day, cloudy and dim and snowing, and I thought to myself: I’m as trapped as these wild cats. I decided that I didn’t want to live my life working indoors. Since then, I’ve worked inside — a forty-hour-a-week, punch-the-time-clock type of job — for only two and a half years total. The rest of the time I’ve been working outside or writing in my cabin.

Turner began living the dream once he changed course and lived in a way that would fulfill his compass’ direction, that was always guiding him outside towards mountains and wilderness, and always guiding him inside to his cabin and his spirit.

We are all connected to the same hub of very ancient culture like the individual spokes on a wheel. Philip Shepherd said, “If you go back to the Indo-European roots of the English language, which date from the Neolithic, you find that the word for the hub of a wheel came from the word for navel.” The most tapped in roots of our inherited physical body are still joined with a very ancient culture of humans who we can strongly relate to in our guts even if we don’t see any resemblance.   To learn about ancient cultures is to brush off the dust on the mirror that reflects the deepest part of our ourselves. As the Buddhists say: “What happens upstream floats downstream.” In The Power of the Herd, Linda Kohanov explains in amazing detail, the history of a culture we have long forgotten about; a culture that embodied the sacred connection between humans and animals:

Nomadic Pastoralism, contrary to popular belief, was not a primitive condition. It was a specialization that developed out of settled farming communities requiring horses and skillful riding techniques. It required the wheel to allow populations to migrate with their herds by cart and wagon, leaders able to make quick decisions in an emergency, and a variety of craftsmen and specialists, far more than family subsistence farming did. The early horse tribes even managed to raise crops without becoming enslaved by them. They simply planted wheat in patches of fertile soil and returned to reap the benefits during seasonal migrations.

Recent archeological findings also suggest that women were equal to men in many of these tribes. Skeletons of warriors at first thought to be young boys later proved to be female. Over time, it was estimated that nearly 25 percent of warrior graves contained women dressed for battle, some of them obviously bowlegged from years spent on the back of a horse. Yet these wild-riding ladies mythologized as Amazons by the Greeks, were no less aware of their femininity. Their graves are filled with mirrors, scent bottles, and cosmetics of various colors. And like many women today, they loved to groom their horses. In burial mounds across Ukraine and Russia, up toward Tuva and the Altai Mountains, human and equine corpses lay side by side among a dazzling array of colorful saddle cloths depicting scenes from daily life. These in turn reveals a culture of decorative mane dressing and fantastic crested horse masks. Four-legged members of the tribe were dressed with as much enthusiasm as their two-legged counterparts…

Most impressive, however, are reports of the nomads’ behavior in battle, descriptions that have little in common with standardized legends of fierce barbarians out to vanquish the sacred innovations of the civilized world. Around 450 BCE, Herodotus, the Greek “father of history,” wrote about a curious, highly frustrating encounter that King Darius I of Persia had with these tribes before deciding to take on a much easier project and invade Greece. Darius was chasing a group of Scythians who’d either attacked or offended him in some way, and he was apparently planning to punish them, for good. Gathering his troops together, he entered Eurasia for the first time in 512 BCE, but when he arrived at the edge of the steppes, none of his officers could figure out how to engage these so-called primitives in combat. Whenever the troops got too close, the Scythians simply dispersed, riding into the grasslands, leading the king’s rigidly disciplined military force farther and farther into the wilderness. The scythians were sleeping on horseback, drinking mare’s milk and playing games along the way, while Darius’s men were growing weak from starvation and exposure. Finally, the Persians were forced to turn around and march home as the Scythians cheered and chuckled in the distance. The horse tribes maintained their culture and their territory by acting like the horses they rode. Choosing flight over fight was not a cowardly act but an obvious, thoroughly natural way to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. The enemy was ultimately irrelevant because there were no cities to defend. Warrior riders of both sexes led the challengers away from women with young children and mares with foals (who were mobile, but undoubtedly slower). It was only when increasingly materialistic members of these tribes began trading profusely with city dwellers that they sacrificed centuries of freedom. The more possessions they craved and acquired, the more their belongings weighed them down, and the more sedentary they became. Greek gold and wine and decorative vases eventually lured the nomads into a gilded cage of cultural amnesia. The ones who refused to forget fled farther into the grasslands until civilizations developing to the east and west expanded and overlapped right over their graves.

The assumption that nomads were more violent than their “civilized” counterparts has begun to evaporate in light of new research. The Danish archaeologist Klavs Randsborg insists it wasn’t marauding hordes of barbarians that led to the fall of the Greco-Roman world. Rather, these societies destroyed their environment and, in desparation, moved out to incorporate the lands and cultures nearby – Celtic, Germanic, Thracian, Scythian – “which until then had led an effective and long-standing existence in harmony with nature.” Citizens of early cities were suffering from anxieties derived from the instability resulting from conspicuous consumption and unchecked population growth. Their only choice was to expand outward, taking over the territories of other peoples and transforming them into the slave labor needed to build new buildings and reap greater harvests. Randsborg and his colleagues insist that, after nearly a millennium of expansion to compensate for repeated economic failure, this process had borught city dwellers to the point at which they had devastated the whole natural and political world around them.

The greatest way to let go of ancient history is to embrace it, in the present. 

 

Ain’t Gonna Lose You

Just a few days ago, three new mustangs arrived from the BLM at Windhorse Ranch. Two of them were born in the wild, a ten year old Carter mare and a two year old gelding. The youngest of the horses, a stunning and curious grey one year-old filly, was born at the short-term holding set up by the BLM for horses who are en route to be adopted out. The yearling was especially curious about humans; that is, at least she wasn’t shaking and terrified anytime they come around like the ten year old mare who was born wild.

Horses who are born wild have very good reason to shake and quiver whenever humans come around. After being chased for miles by helicopters and then torn from their families in the chaos of transitioning into captivity under rough human hands, they are completely justified to fear the sound of our footsteps. This yearling, in a way, is a lucky one. She has no idea what she is missing having been born in captivity. She doesn’t have to be held captive by the maddening yearning to get back home or return to freedom, right? She should have no reason to wonder, why am I here?  En yet, I’d still understand if she did, because I find myself madly wondering, why are we rounding them up?

With some earnest research into the motives for the BLM roundups of wild horses and burros, I have come to better understand the pain and loss I see in the eyes of newly rounded up horses who arrive at our ranch. The motivation to tear native horses from their homeland and put them into captivity stems from a purely corrupted mentality and approach to tending the public lands, which of course, is money and industry driven. The consequences of this are farther reaching than can be directly seen. However, we can imagine the implications if we only look no farther than history. The settling of the West and the forced displacement of indigenous peoples onto reservations that happened in a larger sense, not so long ago, have caused so many rich and important cultural traditions and knowledge to be lost. Even as activism for indigenous peoples is raising attention to remembering and honoring these rich practices and their way of life, what was torn from them may be irretrievable.

There is no going back. We can learn from the past, but it no longer exists. We can strive for a better day tomorrow, but surely tomorrow never comes. All that we have is this moment to right injustice as we see it. But what justice can be brought when the system that oppresses that which you hold so dear, oppresses you in affect? There is surely a larger root to this problem, but understand that if we do not deal with what debris that is on the surface first, we will have no clear pathway to get to the more deeply seated imbalances.

Sometimes it seems our power has been taken from us. We may feel our freedom has been captivated for long-term holding in a place with our name reserved on it. But who has the power to take that which only we are in control of? No one. We may be subject to fate, destiny, reincarnation, karma and whatever else this crazy world has in store for us, but I believe only we have the power to free ourselves, or lock ourselves away. It makes me weary to see so many wild animals held captive from their freedom, as if they no longer have the choice to pick the road they want to walk. But the perception that we can take away this freedom is an illusion we’d better wake up from. We are fools to think we can take another being’s power. Why should we test this in the first place when it only creates trauma that might not heal in this lifetime, for humans and animals. However fortunately despite all of the trauma that has been inflicted, if wild animals have learned anything from wildlands, they have learned how to persevere.

Photo by Alexandra Valenti

It is a fight, it is vulnerable issue, and wild horses and burros are dependent on us now to reserve their freedom. But they are patient with us, and they can hold unconditional love for you if you learn to work with them with respect and patience. Humans have always been interdependent on animals and wildlife, so what has changed today when we jeopardize the livelihood of wild animals in their native lands, is we are forcing ourselves to look at a very grim reflection of ourselves. Through the history of civilization, we have worked very hard and broken our backs to tame what remains wild in us. We may think we have lost our freedom and wildness, or that we are somehow wholly civilized, but I bet any one of us can testify to knowing of some influential people held in high esteem who are not always so civilized.

I have a proposition for the people of our culture. I invite you to look in your heart to find something you care deeply about. Something you worship or hold in awe. Something you would kill for. Something that makes you passionate about your life. When you find this in your heart, I want you to imagine that somebody walks up to you says, “Tomorrow you will lose all memory of this thing that you love so deeply. However, you can remedy this. If you want to keep your memory of your heart’s dearly beloved, you must take away its freedom of will, so that it can stay in your heart. If you let it’s will remain free, then it will forever be gone from you.” What would you do?

I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying, if you love something, give it away. I can admit, I’ve been dumbfounded by this saying until I have come to understand it in this way: if you love something, you will work to preserve its freedom as if it is your own. It becomes unimportant whether the subject of your love will stay with you or not, because you would rather have it be free to live the life it intends than be tied down by your relationship together. Of course in affect, when the thing you love so much comes to find that you hold the importance of preserving their freedom over the importance of maintaining a relationship with them, they choose to stay in relationship with you. Why?

This kind of love, my friend, creates a relationship that is interdependent rather than codependent. If you study the science of life, you’ll discover the interdependence of humans on animals and animals on plants and plants on the elements and on and on. But I hold that interdependence is the action of freeing, and empowering and holding in reverence both individuals. When you have an interdependent relationship with those individuals you hold close in your heart, you don’t need to lose them to love them. All you need to do is empower them, revere them and remind them that they are wild and free to be who they choose.

Resources for more information on the plight of wild horses:

American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign – http://wildhorsepreservation.org/

Return to Freedom Wild Horse Sanctuary – http://www.returntofreedom.org/

Bureau of Land Management Release on Wild Horse Roundups – http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en/prog/whbprogram/history_and_facts/myths_and_facts.html

American Mustang the Movie – http://www.americanmustangthemovie.com/