So when I start to get homesick, which I inevitably do when I travel, I dream about the horses. I dream I am riding them. These are vivid scenes. I can feel the horse. I can feel the rhythm of the trot and the three beats of the canter. The dreams are often very long. In the most recent dream, I rode all three of my horses, even unbroke Belle. That's the sign to me that it's time to get the bags packed and get back on the airplane.

Usually when I travel I try to do at least one horse-oriented thing. Last year, when we went to the Czech Republic and to Prague, I took a day trip out to see the national stud, in a village called Kladruby (which also happens to be the name of the national Czech horse--a cross between the Iberian breeds and European warmbloods). The search for the horse (where ever I may be) often turns into an adventure. In the Czech Republic, it took me two tries to find the Kladruby. Little did I know that there are multiple villages in the Czech Republic with the same name. So the first time I ended up in a small village with nary a horse in sight. The second time, I got off the train and walked about a kilometer and saw the horses---hundreds of them in the fields and a grand "national stud" looking place. I had arrived.

It was a satisfying day--a beautiful building, lovely horses, and a real insider's tour. In Vietnam, however, finding horses has been next to impossible.First, there is very little English spoken outside of the tourist centers. Horses are still used for work here--we saw some pulling carts and carrying loads of rice as we passed by on the train. From what I can tell, from a distance, the horses are more ponies--small, stout, usually well-fed, with bushy forelocks. We saw some light colored horses, dun-colored but without the dorsal stripe, a few greys, some chestnuts and a couple of almost-whites. Obviously being a dark bay in a place where it is routinely hot and humid would be an evolutionary mistake. I also imagine that the horses are close to Mongolian ponies since there was a long period of Mongolian colonization of Vietnam in the 15th-18th centuries (all this information gleaned from the Hanoi history museum). So this trip, that was about as close as I came to visiting horses. We never made to the Hmong country, since the journey was fairly difficult and there was plenty to keep us busy. In Hanoi 20, or even 15 years ago, I imagine you'd still see the occasional horse. But nowadays, it's all about the Honda motorbike.

Maybe on the next trip to this fascinating, crazy, dirty, wild, place. There will definitely be a second trip here. And maybe next time I'll study Vietnamese before I come. Or at least learn the word for horse.

Rather than long rides in pleasant temperatures, we’re forced inside and the horses stand tail-to-wind in the paddock. Just as soon as the first buds appear on the mulberry, the wind starts to howl. And wind here has texture—because we live in the desert, the sky turns a weird redish tan color and sometimes visibility is severely diminished. It is not a good time to be out on a horse. Or to be a horse, especially a horse with bad allergies.

For as long as I’ve owned him (15 years), Volare has suffered a pretty severe form of allergic asthma in the spring. When I moved back east for a few years, he was a lot happier—the moisture or humidity or something, made his allergies pretty much go away. But here in New Mexico they’re worse than they’ve ever been. He has a hard time breathing, coughs terribly, and is generally miserable from March to August.

But a year or so ago, my vet took a little sample of his lung. It was an expensive and somewhat invasive procedure, but his cough had gotten worse and worse. He sent the tissue off to Tufts University, where the veterinary school has a procedure for determining lung tissue damage. Thankfully, it was what we’d always suspected—allergic asthma—and nothing more. So Volare got what everyone with asthma gets: an inhaler. Yes, a horse inhaler. It’s a pretty cool thing. It looks like a plastic bottle with a flexible rubber cup on the end. The cup goes over the nostril and the people-sized inhaler gets inserted into a rubber nozzle on the wide end of the bottle. Then you just “squirt” 12 times.

Although he’ll still cough a couple of times each ride, he’s much more energetic and happy since we’ve started his inhaler therapy. We had to bribe him the first few times, holding the cup over his nose while simultaneously feeding him peppermints, his favorite treat. But now, he relaxes and seems to actually enjoy the process. He breathes deeply and lets his head drop, breathing in the Flovent. And the rides, even with the terrible wind and all the allergens flying around, have been truly wonderful. I only wish they’d invented the inhaler 10 years ago.

Well, the saga continues.

You know, when you get that elusive moment of “harmony” that you read about in all the training books, it is, really, an incredible rush. But more often than not, I’m mired in some middle ground between harmony and hell. Mostly, Baleno and I have good rides, where he’s listening to me and I’m listening to him; our shoulder-ins are good and our canter transitions clear and smooth. Our walk is relaxed and forward and our trot work is, if not harmonious, than at least in some kind of tune.

For both of us, the problems crop up when there’s pressure. When I’m training with the “important German trainer” or when I step foot on the show grounds for our umpteenth attempt to qualify for championships, suddenly Baleno is rearing and bucking, and I’m powerless to figure out how to change his behavior. Sometimes I ignore my instincts, too, which is not a good thing. There’s a reason they call it horse sense. Yesterday at the dressage show, my gut was telling me to get into my half seat and gallop around the arena (a very un-dressage-warmup thing to do). B felt like a lot of horse yesterday. A whole lot of horse. A good gallop might have taken the edge off and gotten a little more concentration from him. Instead, I fussed with him and did lateral work until we were frustrated. And it showed in the ring. Low scores, no submission, lots of misbehavior, but great canter work. B wanted to go.

So what next for us? I have some serious thinking to do about our current course of training. My scores at shows go down instead of up, and my horse seems unhappy more days than he’s happy. I’m going to take six months off from the intensity of dressage training and just play with him. Jump a bit, take casual trail rides, dial back the dressage to just a couple of lessons a month to work on my seat. It seems like the best course now. I know my horse is physically talented enough to move up the levels, but whether he and I are emotionally able to, that’s still a very big question that looms over our training. Maybe he just doesn’t want to do it.

It’s funny, when I think back to the very first horse show we went to, it was a two-phase event—dressage and jumping. We did really well—my dressage score was so good I was in first place in a large class. Then I went into the jumping phase, and although I had no coach, and I’d only jumped him a half a dozen times, we got around just fine. I ended up in third (we had one refusal which was purely pilot error).

So why did I have such a great, mellow horse willing to kick ass in the ring back than and not today? What has changed? What has made Baleno so hate the show environment that he nearly panics? Is it physical pain? I wish I knew. Anybody know a good horse communicator? Because at this point I wish I could he could talk and tell me what he’s feeling. Then I’d know what course of action to take.

Okay, I admit I woke up dreading my lesson yesterday with the trainer from Germany. For the past two days Baleno and I had been yelled at, lectured, ranted at, and although I know I’m not supposed to take it personally, I couldn’t help feeling I was the worst rider on the planet. And worse yet I was probably ruining my horse.

Years ago when I was a groom at a large competition barn, there was a woman who boarded her horse there. She took countless lessons and bounced and pulled and jerked and never seemed to get any better. We were all bothered by her riding and lack of improvement and frequently noted that there was a special place in horse heaven for her beautiful, unbelievably tolerant horse. “Poor guy,” we’d lament, as she bounced and pulled and whammed against his sides with her ungraceful aids.

I remember at the time mentioning to my boss that if I was ever that woman—in other words stuck forever with horrible habits I can’t seem to break to the point that I was torturing my horse—that I hoped someone would tell me. It’s like the time I had to tell an employee he had body odor. We were both embarrassed but he appreciated that I mentioned it. He promptly changed deodorant.

So after my lesson yesterday, when my horse spent 45 minutes looking like a giraffe instead of the 3rd level dressage horse he’s supposed to be, after he was so annoyed by the whole exercise he reared, and after the German trainer said five million times, RIGHT REIN!!!!!!!!!!! I was not looking forward to my lesson. I felt like that woman. The one who never improves.

So dreaded was this lesson that I had all kinds of scenarios running through my head. I imagined a sudden stomach virus.  (“You know, I spent the night at the porcelain alter; I’m going to cancel”). I imagined a minor bout of totally curable, unserious lameness. “Baleno’s just a little bit off. I think we should cancel.” Last night during dinner I had a totally explainable muscle spasm in my left arm, which immediately escalated into an imaginary heart attack. Who could blame me for wimping out on an equestrian tongue lashing if I was in the midst of a myocardial infarction? ?

But the weather took care of the problem for me. After two days of glorious sun, we had a stinker of day on our hands. Cold, windy, snow falling in the high country, flurries in town, and did I mention wind? But I’m also known as a non-weather wimp. “That Emily will ride in any kind of weather,” I’ve heard them say. The German, however, was not quite so hardy. Turns out he was miserable out there teaching, and about a half an hour before I was due to load up Baleno and start driving, he cancelled.

Even if the weather hadn’t been miserable, why wouldn’t I just bail out? I don’t quite know the answer to that. Perfectionism? A sense that I hadn’t quite conquered my ability to “take the best and leave the rest” as I’d been counseled? That I had paid good money? That my pride forced me to persevere? Where does pride end and misery begin? Who knows. But sometimes we get just a little too serious about our hobbies.