Team #767 Joy Cooke and Wesmor Beaudacious

Team #767: Joy Cooke and Wesmor Beaudacious
From: Bolton, Massachusetts
Ages: 75 & 25
Combined Age: 100
Test: Training Level Test 1

Though I was “horse crazy as a kid,’ I always assumed that riding was out of reach. I didn’t start riding until my 20s. My husband and I were living on Cape Cod. We moved in across the street from a British woman who had horses. She would joke about the people who would knock on her door offering to ‘exercise’ her horses for her, so I was very careful to keep a low profile on my longing. Then one day she offered to let me try riding. I had a short session in her ring on John, a 15-year-old tried and true Quarter Horse, and from then on, I rode with her often, but mostly in the ‘hang on tight’ school of riding. John was what she called a push-button horse, and we had wonderful long trail rides through the woods and around cranberry bogs. After a few years, I bought my own horse, a five-year-old Appaloosa named Jack, and had some proper lessons, including an introduction to something called dressage.

Life got complicated. I had to sell Jack, had a child, and moved to central Massachusetts. I did not ride for several years, and then I met a woman in the community who had horses and we became riding buddies. Many blissful long trail rides through woods and fields – my mount this time another Appaloosa called Britches, who was blind in one eye, put his head down and went like a locomotive.

I met Claudia Lauze, a trainer and teacher, and we became friends. I began taking lessons again with Claudia, and for the first time realized how much I didn’t know. Hanging on tight was not enough.

My work and family life became very demanding, and again I stopped riding. By this time, in my early 60s, I just assumed I was done with horses, but then someone offered me one.

Wesmor Beaudacious (aka Allie) is a Morgan mare. When I got her, she was 12 and hadn’t done much in her life except eat. She had belonged to my sister, who could no longer keep her. I had ridden Allie several times and liked her despite her lack of training. I took her on the condition that she would live with my friend and trainer, Claudia. I knew I didn’t know enough to take her on by myself. I knew by then what you get from the combination of green horse-green rider.

Allie was a challenge from the start. Probably because she had been asked to do so little, she was not happy to be expected to work for a living. At a groundwork clinic, the trainer commented that she had “started kindergarten and gotten her AARP card at the same time.” She tried every evasion she could muster. “Bend? No, thank you.” “Give to the rein? You’re kidding.” “Canter? How about a buck and a gallop?” Our education proceeded together, with Claudia’s experience and guidance, and along with some great times with trail riding and hunting and saying yes to every possible adventure, we have learned together, grown older and wiser, and become a pretty good team. (Her independent streak is mellowed but intact, evident when she left the ring briefly during our Century Club ride.)

Completing this ride - both the preparation for it and the actual accomplishment of it – has rejuvenated my belief in myself in so many ways. I’m reminded of the rewards of sustained effort, and that age need not be a limitation. Especially with such a great horse!