The New York Cowboy

Chapter 3

As I spent more time in Idaho at The Black Ranch I began to feel a desire to move out of New York City, where I had lived my whole life. Feeling equal parts of excitement and anxiety I decided to move to an old farming area at the end of New York’s Long Island. The first few days after I arrived I went around looking for any sign of horses. I called Okie and asked him what he thought I might do to keep horses in my life. I told him it seemed like from what I saw most of them were barns for English saddle riders like Dressage, Jumping and Polo. But, I said, there was an old western ranch called Deep Hollow Ranch located in a little town called Montauk, named after the Montaukett Tribe of American Indians. I said: “They told me they give trail rides.” Okie said: “Good, go out there and be a Trail Guide.”

Including some public land owned by New York State, Deep Hollow Ranch was close to 4,000 acres. Trail rides consisted of going deep into these wooded acres on narrow dirt paths about four feet wide and arriving on a magnificent sandy white beach overlooking the Atlantic Ocean across to the coastline of Rhode Island and Connecticut. The Ranch kept about 100 quarter horses, was opened all year and employed about 15 trail guides during the busy summer season. Most were collage age men and women coming from everywhere in the country, a few even came from Ireland. Although I was old enough to be their father, I needed to constantly ask many of them for horse help.

I must have taken out hundreds of rides in the ten years I worked as a part time weekend volunteer trail guide. I was kicked, bitten, reared up on, bucked off, stepped on and dragged. However, when I think back to all the saddling, grooming and interacting on the ground I did with so many different horses I realize how invaluable every unmounted experience was in my horseman’s education. Being good or “getting handy” with horses usually has very little to do with horseback riding. It never occurred to me then that unless I learned to establish a positive mental and emotional connection with a horse on the ground, I would be left, like most people, with no alternative but to try and control them with physical force when I got on their back to show them who’s boss. And just as with a human adult or child, it would eventually become ineffectual in creating a harmonious or safe relationship. Being a trail guide not only taught me more about horses it taught me about myself.

Although I loved the unexpected turn my life had taken with horses I couldn’t fathom how it might fit into my future. I knew the magnitude, complexity and time it would take to become good with horses. I knew that to be good at anything physical: tennis, skiing, body building etc. one needed to practice a minimum of 5 times a week. The truth was it would take a lot more than trips to Idaho and guiding weekend trail rides at Deep Hollow Ranch to become proficient, accomplished and professional with horses at age 52. I remember thinking; “I guess this is the end of my horse journey.”

It was the weekend. I decided to stop trying to figure out my future and instead relax with one of my favorite pastimes: reading all the different sections in The Sunday New York Times. When I got to the Real Estate section, this is the headline I saw on the front page:

 GRAND OPENING AT NYC’S PIER 63 - A PLACE FOR THE HORSY SET

Chelsea Equestrian Center (soon to be known as CEC) an exclusive members-only 40,000-square-foot Indoor- Outdoor arena is to open in May at Pier 63 next to Chelsea Piers sports complex at West 23rd Street and the West Side Highway on the Hudson River. The center will offer a 180- by 75-foot Indoor arena, a 150-by 65-foot outdoor arena, 50 box stalls, two wash stalls, a tack Room, a glassed-in lounge and 50 school horses. Seeking full and part-Time Instructors.

For the next 4 years I worked at CEC 3 nights a week It was an invaluable experience. In addition to teaching Western riding to others, I obtained my own wonderful education in a number of other different equine disciplines, including Dressage, Jumping, Polo and Equitation. However, what I found most fascinating were the relationships I saw occur between my students and their horses.

In the late fall of 2001, almost 4 years to the day of its opening, CEC sadly closed its doors. Nevertheless, I remained vehement in continuing to learn everything I could about horses and becoming the best rider and horseman I could be. It was the first and only time in my life I had ever loved and surrendered to something or someone without any thought or expectation of receiving anything in return. The closing of Chelsea Equestrian Center was the end of a remarkable New York City anomaly. The fact that it appeared at all, and at the time that it did, always seemed to me to contain a sense of Providence.