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amarantine-amirite · 17 days

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Riding Assessment, a Clique Fanfiction

Summary: Somebody’s riding assessment for the lesson program at Galwaugh Farms

Today is my assessment at Galwaugh Farms. The place I used to ride, Tansley Woods Equestrian, kicked me out for weighing well over 135 pounds.

Truthfully, it has nothing to do with my body. Last year, a private equity firm based in Mexico bought out Tansley Woods. On paper, Tansley Woods continues to be a hunter/jumper barn, but in practice, it's a jockey training program.

Think about it. They insist on riding in skull caps and vests, just like jockeys wear. They insist on riding with short stirrups, just like jockeys do. They have a lot of retired racehorses in their school program, and some of the over-16s work with new racehorses. They have a very low weight limit of 121 pounds for the show team and 135 for the lesson programs in general. I don’t know how people haven’t put the pieces together yet.

I walk into the barn. The main office looked like the inside of a log cabin.

“Hi, are you Judy?” the receptionist asked.

“Hello,” I nodded, “ I am here to do my assessment lesson.”

The receptionist checked her smartphone. “OK, I see that you’ve sent in the payment and signed the waiver, you’re good to go,” she said. She looked at me. “You’ll be riding Pebbles, she’s in the last stall on the right and her tack is in locker number 11 in the tack room,” she pointed to the corridor leading to the stalls.

“OK, thanks”

I headed over to the stalls. The place looks nice. It’s a bigger piece of property than I expected. The exterior of the building looks like something out of a movie. Inside, however, leaves much to be desired. The tack room was way smaller than it looked in the pictures. Contrary to what the pictures of their social media feed would have you believe, they don’t have grooming stations, just hallway cross-ties. More disturbingly, the bathroom doesn’t have a door. It appears the last person who used the bathroom had to use a horse blanket as a privacy curtain.

I now understand why the few photos of the interior they had on their website or their socials were so staged. It looks way more impressive in the pictures than in real life.

I found the last stall on the right-hand side and saw a chunky Appaloosa-quarter horse cross mare snacking on her hay. “Hello, Pebbles,” I said as I set my tool bag full of brushes down. Pebbles looked at me and then resumed eating.

I got Pebbles groomed, tacked up, and ready to go. Before we got into the arena, she thought it would be funny to hang her tongue out. I looked at her and smiled. “Oh, goofy horse with your tongue stuck out,” I chuckled.

I got to the arena and discovered my assessment would take place in a group, not privately. I shared the arena with three other people: a fourth grader on a little dun pony, another kid about my age on a big, tall chestnut thoroughbred, and a college student on a fluffy, gray cob. The horses looked like they were in good shape.

I brought the horse to the arena. The coach walked up to me. She had wavy blonde hair, an apple-shaped torso, and half-open eyes. “Hi there,” she said softly.

“Hi,” I said right back, “I’m Judy”

“I’m Jacqui Dyer, nice to meet you,” she said. We shook hands and she led me to the middle of the arena to check my girth.

I passed the tack check. I went over to the mounting block and got on Pebbles. Nothing about Jacqui struck me as being hard to get along with.

After warming up at the walk, Jacqui said, “All right, everybody bring your ponies to a trot.”

The other kids pony-kicked their horses into a trot, and I squeezed Pebbles and clicked my tongue.

Jacqui disapproved. “Judy, stop what you’re doing immediately,” she said

I had no idea where the hell that came from. “what did I do wrong?” I asked.

Jacqui waved me to come into the center of the ring. She then said, “Judy, horses spook easily, so we need to keep our voices down when we’re around them, and that includes clucking or kissing when we’re riding”. I couldn't tell whether she was trying to help or talk down.

Initially, I shrugged it off. She wasn't wrong, and it appeared to make sense, nothing about it screamed “bullshit” to me. A few minutes later, I realized that I had a problem. I tend to yelp when startled. I've been told this is a safety issue numerous times, but I don't know how to fix it.

We finished trotting and brought our horses down to a walk. Jacqui then announced it was time to start cantering. “Judy, would you like to start us off at the canter?” she asked.

I nodded. I pulled out of the center, rode Pebbles to the rail, and moved her up to a fast walk. As we entered the corner, I moved my outside leg back, my reins up, and kissed.

Jacqui told me off again. “What did I just say about the vocal cues?”

“Fine,” I rolled my eyes, “I’ll bring her back down to walk and then pick up the canter quietly.”

Jacqui shook her head. “No, bring her into the canter from a trot,” she insisted, “We don’t canter horses from the walk, it teaches them they can bolt.” I had to fight not to laugh at how stupid this was.

I asked Pebbles to trot, and I thought I clucked quietly enough that Jacqui couldn’t hear me.

“I heard that,” Jacqui said, “Consider this your last chance. If I hear one more peep out of you, you’re out of here, understood?”

I nodded. I quietly kissed at Pebbles to get her to canter. We made it halfway around the arena before somebody’s dumb dog entered the ring and gave her a startle. Pebbles sped up, dropped low, and spun around. Something about the dog must’ve triggered an embedded memory of cutting cows.

I sank my weight into my heels, grabbed her mane, and chuckled at the situation. Together, we ran the dog out of the ring.

Jacqui shook her head, scoffed, and pointed at the ground. “That's it Judy, get off!” she barked.

As far as I was concerned, her reaction came out of nowhere. “Why are you mad at me?” I asked, “Staying on a cutter in an English saddle is a feat in its own right.” I’m not kidding, even Western riders have to hold onto the horn when the horse goes into cutting mode. If anything, Jacqui should be impressed.

“Judy, Pebbles bolted because you made too much noise” she reprimanded, “You need to get off, now.”

“She didn’t bolt, I told her to get those dogs out of the arena,” I said. It’ll probably be the last time the dog makes that mistake.

"This was your last chance, you blew it"

"Wait, you weren’t kidding?” I asked, utterly surprised, “How was I supposed to know you meant it?"

Jacqui grabbed Pebbles and led me away from everyone so I could get off.

Pebbles didn’t care about the noise. Nobody else did, either. The only one who made such a big fuss was Jacqui. That was enough to make me suspect it may not be as big a problem as I think.

People can get weird about certain unpleasant but ultimately harmless stimuli, like second-hand fish funk, and have an outsized reaction. The horse doesn't know the difference between the rider making a mountain out of an ant hill and the rider sensing a genuine threat, so he spooks. The horse spooks at the rider having an outsized reaction to the noise, not the noise itself.

I brought Pebbles back to her stall to untack. Her neighbour is a dark Palomino gelding named Tricky. The guy with the ponytail and scraggly beard in Tricky’s stall looked at me and said, “You’re back early”

“Yeah,” I nodded, “I don’t think they’re letting me in.”

Tricky’s rider raised an eyebrow and tipped his head to one side. “Oh, you had an assessment today?”

“I don’t understand why we can’t use vocal cues?”

Tricky’s rider damn near dropped the brush in his hand. “I've been at Galwaugh since 2004, and we were allowed to use vocal cues back then.”

“So, it's new?” I asked.

Tricky’s rider shook his head. “It’s not,” he replied, “it’s a holdover from 2008”

I figured this would be related to the financial crisis. “2008? So it's due to the financial crisis, then,” I said inquisitively.

Tricky’s rider nodded. “They didn't take into account that the financial crisis artificially lowered their no-show rate, so they sold way more seats for the lesson program than were available,” he said matter-of-factly.

I knew immediately he was talking about overbooking. “Like the airplane?”

“Exactly, but worse. They have to give you your money back if they turn you away because they don’t have enough space, but they didn’t want to do that. Instead, they came up with stupid rules that they only enforced on people who were overweight. That way, they can continue to post revenues from selling seats that didn’t exist.”

Hearing him say that vindicated me. “I knew that rule didn’t make any sense!” I trumpeted triumphantly.

If you make noise because you got startled by the horse spooking at something, whatever noise you made didn't spook it, it's too late at that point. If any other horses spooked after yours, it spooked because the first one spooked, not because of you.

A few weeks after my assessment, I found out that Galwaugh Farms would no longer take new students. Roughly a year later, they shut down the lesson program altogether to focus on breeding.

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