Dear Universe,
Thank you for the gift of time. Time to spend in deep contemplation. Time to spend learning, reading, listening, watching, exchanging ideas, recording ideas, fixing up the farm, working with horses. Amazing!
I know that not everyone gets this tremendous opportunity – to be housed and loved by my parents so I can spend my time this way, seems surreal. Is it too much to ask?
And then I think, “What if she was MY daughter?”
Wait – I said that wrong, but do you get my drift? I mean, I wonder what it would be like to be my mother. From her perspective, looking at my daughter’s life, what would I wish for her after all she’s been through?
If I had watched her over-commit, over-extend, and miss (as I often have) … I would wonder how she could ever stand again … and I would perhaps mistrust her judgement and worry about her. Fair enough. I’ll just have to be strong enough to wear that, let it go, and forge ahead, swearing to make NEW mistakes only, going forward.
My poor Mom. She has long suffered for my follies, for my poor boundaries, and for my overflowing life spilling all over hers. Her daily sweat has fueled a few of my dreams. Her grooming for me, managing our finances, and figuring out how to access what we needed, got me as close as I got to the Olympics. I didn’t make it, but I was lucky not to be put in the position to have asked that little Irish crossbred to extend himself in Spain. I was spared the shame of asking more from him than I already had, and my Mom deserves a medal.
You know, everyone around here always calls me, ‘the Olympic rider’ and it never sits well with me. I just can’t help but stop to correct them.
“Well … I ALMOST made it”, I’ll say.
That’s usually countered by something like: “Close enough! You were THERE, right?”
And I sigh, unable to NOT correct them; “No. I wasn’t THE reserve rider. I didn’t travel to Spain.”
THAT honour went to the youngest member of our team, Caro Angus; the gentlest, softest soul you’ve ever met, who had the most extraordinary kinship with her father’s horse, Flag. Caro got there with a broken arm.
While Caro and Flag travelled to Spain in case they were needed, I stayed at our training base in England. When I heard that the Brits had named their tall up-and-coming-phenom William Fox-Pitt a ‘Non-travelling Reserve for the Barcelona Olympics’ I thought, ‘That’s close!’
No one awarded me that title, but I will sometimes refer to myself as a ‘non-travelling reserve’.
I grew up planning to ride in the 1992 Olympics since BEFORE I can remember. It seemed just a matter of getting creative to make it happen, and being willing to work – REALLY HARD - to invest sweat equity in someone else’s dream, while I learned from their experience. So I did.
And Keitha got creative.
I know most would take a peak and say, “Well, she WAS married to a vet – she didn’t have to get THAT creative, Paige!” And that’s where you’d be wrong!
As you unroll your eyes from the back of your head, I’d like to take a moment to disavow of that delusion.
My father became a vet because he grew up in charge of all of the animals on his small Prairie farm, when at the tender age of 10, he found his father’s body floating in a nearby creek. My dad grew up unable to afford a vet. The animals always paid the highest price for his family’s poverty, and it broke his heart, every time he couldn’t help ease their suffering. It was intolerable.
His memoir, ‘Back to Willow Creek’, which he wrote longhand and published on his own, tells one of the stories of heartache that fueled his desire to be able to help animals, and other farm families struggling like his. He tells the story of a botched castration, and the loss of his very first colt. At a time when he was supposed to be planning his very first ride, with the honor of being the very first human to climb upon this young pony’s back lighting him from within, he was instead curled in his bed listening to the sound of a shot in the dark, the swinging of the barnyard gate, and the wracking sobs of a desperately frail man. His father, Toughie, didn't last much longer. Other than the day my dad found him floating in the Creek when his horse came home without him, he'd been bedridden since that horrible night. The loss of that pony finished off a broken man.
And so, my Dad had to be creative, too. He found school relatively easy, so eventually figured out that he could use his brains to get the education he needed to become a vet - his way out of poverty and anguish, and the end of powerlessness in the face of disease and trauma. An amazing dream he made a reality!
Then, upon graduation, he proceeded to work his heart out - more than any other person I know - to answer the needs of local horse owners and farmers. There was a constant, unquenchable demand for his time and expertise. Clients showed up on Sundays, with horse trailers in our driveway, or would stop in on their way home from church and drag him off his tractor to sell them some dewormer and Furazone ointment.
Unfortunately, neither my dad nor I have much of a ‘NO’ in us. So, if the phone rang and someone asked for him, I went to get him - no matter what he was up to! And if someone showed up and they asked him to help, he couldn't or wouldn’t say no.
He needed a gatekeeper, and that was Keitha. Somebody had to do it!
Chuck worked as hard as he could go and was bringing money in ... but never equivalent to the rate that it went out. He was giving his services away at a rate that couldn't sustain the farm and family he had grown, so he took a civil servant job for stability with Agriculture Canada. He still practiced veterinary medicine from 4:30 PM to 10:00 PM most nights, AND, he went to the standardbred breeding operation he ran in Powassan before his office job in the morning.
And the phone? It. Rang. Off. The. Hook. It was insane!
Every night, my mom had dinner ready exactly at 6 o’clock and started buzzing the barn through the intercom to give him a heads up ten minutes ahead of time. She usually had to buzz back; “Chuck! Dinner is getting COLD!!” But, he'd take a break where he could get one, in between taking and developing X-rays, freezing joints, doing flexion tests, and taking blood Samples. Oh, and talking with the clients! There was plenty of THAT, too! And laughter – SO much laughter! I heard the same stories over and over, but I never tired of them. They got better every time he told them – and as a born performer, he told them A LOT!
And so, everyone loved him. He made sure YOU got what you needed, whether you could afford it or not … and somehow that trickled down … and the Universe made sure that my dreams came true, whether we could afford it or not.
And the truth is, we couldn’t. We couldn't have done it without having access to the kinds of special trades and deals only a vet can get for his kid’s ponies.
Everyone in the North was invested in my success, so it's no wonder you all call me an Olympian. You were all along for the ride. We couldn't have even made it to England to be CONTENDERS without a community fundraiser and tons of local support.
It was such a crazy long shot! After a promising start as an Advanced level rider in my teens and early 20s, a series of cross country mishaps in 1992 kept us from qualifying for the Olympics. That is to say, we qualified by the I.O.C.’s (International Olympic Committee) criteria, laid out by the FEI (Federation Equestre International) but NOT by Canadian criteria.
One of the cross-country penalties was incurred when, against my better instincts and what I had rehearsed incessantly for days, I took what was supposed to be the easier option, turning O'Reilly away from what he was focused on right in front of him, and we fell.
My final instructions before leaving the mandatory 10-minute rest stop in the vet box at the Rolex Kentucky Three-Day Event, were to play it safe. The consensus was, that after an uncharacteristic stop at the previous competition when a jump took O'Reilly by surprise, we couldn’t afford to take our usual risks and ride in our usual way - which was generally fairly ‘Irish’, if I may say so myself, on top of my traditional Northern Ontario approach to most things;
“Give ‘er, buddy!” or “Hold my beer!”
Basically, I felt like I couldn't miss on this horse. It was nearly impossible, if you stayed out of his way and gave it some welly (some energy and enthusiasm). A bit of, “Yee Haw!” went a long way back then.
Anywho ...
At the last minute, I changed my plans to ' play it safe’. And the thing that was etched into O’Reilly’s mind after countless repetitions of me envisioning it, was now directly in front of him. His ears were pricked! He had come off the bank, locked and loaded, while I grabbed the reins and hauled hard left in the two strides between the bank and this skinny jump in front of us. He argued with me, threw his head in the air, and I had to double down as he took another stride towards the skinny we were so worried he might try to run past.
In the end, at nearly 6’1”, I succeeded in pulling that little horse right off his feet, as I fought to turn him away from a mission he had already sworn to complete for me.
In that instant, as he went down - his body still fighting to go in the direction of his right shoulder and his thoughts – with his head cranked left in desperation, mouth open, eyes bulging … it was over.
I knew it then, as I stood stunned, right there beside him, where he had crumpled after slipping on the sloping, dewy grass. For a moment, he was so confused, hauled out of the dream, out of the flow, stunned. Winded. Gutted.
When he jumped to his feet, I sprang aboard. In my day and age, it was still very much a cavalry test and our marching orders were not to waste a nanosecond after a fall; to get back on and proceed forthwith! It was a team sport, in the sense that Nation’s had to finish a team of 3 out of 4 riders to count in the medals, so in our overall combined scores, EVERY second counted.
With that instinct drilled into me, I leapt aboard and carried on, but from that moment on everything was different. From that moment on, the dream was over. Until that moment, every single ride, every jump, every stride, had been to make it to the Games.
We finished the course without further penalty. But you should see the photos from the rest of the course! Me, scowling; O'Reilly, also scowling. They are the only photos you will see of that horse without his ears pricked on the horizon, looking forward to (and unusually prescient of) what was coming next –M.A.S.H.’s ‘Radar O'Reilly’ of the horse world
.
The disillusionment of something you have held to be real is a strange, lost feeling. Surreal, you know?
But then … there was hope, apparently. Depending on who you spoke with …
There was ONE more event - Checkmate - at which I could show up, show my worth, and petition my case to the IOC if necessary. Our chef d’equipe advised me to try for a good result at Checkmate, then like a Canadian diver and swimmer who had missed mandatory selection trials for injuries, but we're clearly healed and the best Canada could send, I was supposed to petition the IOC and argue why I should go above someone else.
Oh boy. Super-duper.
We consulted the head of the Canadian selection committee, Liz Ashton. She told me, “Paige, it doesn't matter if you WIN Checkmate, our hands are tied by our criteria. We can't send you.”
The last person on our list of phone calls for advice was our team coach, the famous Jack LeGoff. He said; “Young lady, get yourself to England! We can't send you if you aren't over there, and if we need you, we'll figure it out. You never know - ANYTHING can happen!”
His last words to me were; “Where there is life there is hope. Get yourself there.”
And so, the odds were stacked against me, but there was a possibility - a glimmer of a chance for a small town girl from northern Ontario on a game little horse who looked like he belonged in front of a wagon, to make it to the Olympic Games. IF, we could afford to travel there ...
Malcolm Nickerson dared to raise the idea of a fundraiser, and my relative Mike Corbeil and a large group of friends and family ran with it. The community put on the two-day Family Fun on the Farm Day of a lifetime and raised just enough to cover the cost of flying a horse across an ocean and the costs of keeping said equine athlete fed, happy and sound, while training with the core team in England for 3 months preceding the Games.
In the end, of course, I didn't go to Spain, and I often have to remind myself that that was not a failure, but rather a f****** MIRACLE that I was on the world stage at all! Seriously, I was 22 years old, and I was among the top eight in our country. And that is only because my friends, family, and community, cared enough to show up, cough up, and take a gamble alongside me. It took a while to get to this perspective and to realize how lucky I was, but now I am cognizant of that every damn day.
So now, when I say; “No, I wasn't a reserve for the Olympics. I was sort of a non-traveling reserve” and I explain myself away from identifying as an Olympian, know it is in deference to those who WERE. And, with thankfulness for how close I came.
Though you will not find my name on an Olympic roster, you WILL find my friends’ names, including the lovely and endlessly humble, Caro Angus. The word Olympian is an honor reserved for those who made it and it is in deference to those whose names are etched in history, that I clarify that.
I'm also, at the same time, happy I didn't make it there. As I alluded to earlier, it would have finished that little horse.
Thirty years later and I am back home again, and Keitha continues to fuel my dreams. I'm cognizant of my enormous privilege to be able to afford the time it takes to write, learn, think test theories and create things. Most people don't have the option of living on their parents’ farm and creating a life with enough time to take care of my body, feed and stimulate my intellect, spend time with horses, explore music, the healing arts, Horsecraft, drumming, singing … and write about it all to fulfill my purpose. But most people, if asked (particularly after some life changing catastrophic event) “What would you do if you could do anything?” … would come up with something pretty spectacular, right? I mean, if there were no financial limits, if there was No Fear, if there was no chance of failing, but only of thriving … then what?
What would YOU do?
I would spend my days writing in a little cabin, making videos to help horses be better understood by their humans. I would write about the amazing horses who gave me wings, and the tremendous opportunities I have now, because of them. I would write about ending generational trauma and about better ways I am finding with horses. I would gather a small team of like-minded people together in my backyard, and with as much respect for my mother's peace and quiet, I would find a way to come together to the greatest good of the farm, and the greatest good of horses. And while I was learning and growing, I would find a way to capture it on film, and become part of a team that gets this all out to the world.
I would stay right here, on the farm, creating a life with enough time and space in it to tend to the land and infrastructure, tend to my dad as he ages, tend to horses; excited, once again to be alive. As I shed the bonds of fear and am encouraged to dream with the ‘lid off' and as I spend time in nature and meditation, the words flow, my purpose becomes clearer, and I just have to remind myself to stay out of my own way and not get too attached to the outcome or to any idea of ‘control’.
Sigh …
There's the rub! Easier said than done, after 50 years plus of circuitry working a certain way, but I am working on it, alongside friends like Nicky Poulin, and Nona Bell-Morrow, who has awarded me a scholarship in her upcoming course called ‘The Shift’ coming out this fall/winter. I am already seeing and experiencing a difference. You guys might want to check out Nicky’s Ohana Wellness and Nona’s Substack at ‘The Field’. I even have a free subscription or two to give away. Nona has a gift with words and storytelling and is passionately following her path. It is a joy to reconnect and learn from her - she is a game changer!
Time to sign off, with big hopes and plans on the horizon. Join me, to see how it all comes together and thank you for being here with me on this journey so far. Who knows what will happen next?
In a world where ANYTHING is possible, I encourage you, as always, to take a chance.
With love and gratitude,
Paige
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit themagicofhorsecraft.substack.com/subscribe
