Chasing a Dream: A Horseman's Memoir Read online

  Every day we would go through the same scenario, Braveheart panicking and bolting and taking me for another wild ride before he found his way back to a trot and a walk and finally stopping, allowing me to dismount. What had normally worked with other troubled horses didn’t seem to be working with him. He couldn’t let go of his fear.

  I’ve always felt very confident on the backs of even the most difficult horses, but Braveheart was different. His anxiety level exceeded that of any horse I’d ever worked with. Training him required a huge investment of time and the acceptance of a high level of risk. For what? I wondered. Is this worth it? Why am I doing this? What am I trying to prove, and to whom?

  Weighing on me was that if someone like me gives up on a horse, it is out of options. Its fate is decided, and it gets passed on from owner to owner and has a lifetime of bad experiences. I seldom give up on one, and do not do so lightly. Desperate for answers, I called my old friend Tink for advice.

  When Grant began riding Braveheart the huge horse was terrified. He would bolt and run, leaving Grant with little choice but to hang on until the ride was over.

  He said, “Not all horses are worth the trouble,” and then he suggested I try riding Braveheart two or three times a day and settling for the slightest positive change. He knew the time and patience required.

  Jane weighed in, too. An experienced horsewoman, she had watched me work with Braveheart. She tried to reason with me. “I think you are taking a foolish risk with this horse.” She glared at me. “And for what? What if you get hurt? Who is going to do our demonstrations?

  “It’s what I do. I can’t give up on him now.”

  “Well, I don’t think he’s worth it. Do you really think that woman could ever ride this horse anyway? You should just send him home.” She stomped off.

  Jane hardly ever reacted like this. I knew her fears were valid. The small amount of income I was earning from him was not worth the risk. I was just being stubborn but I felt there was more at stake than the life of one horse. Maybe I needed to prove to myself that the philosophy would work in the most extreme cases. I had become emotionally involved with this horse and could not bring myself to give up on him.

  Helga came to some of the demonstrations where audiences fawned over her horse. They connected deeply with his fear and vulnerability and his effort to overcome his past. Again and again they returned to the demos to see how Braveheart was progressing.

  Helga spent a lot of time at the ranch observing Braveheart’s workouts. She enjoyed helping out around the stables, shoveling manure, and cleaning and reorganizing our tack room. We were growing attached to her, too, and she began to open up to Jane by talking about some of her past trials, broken relationships, and disappointments.

  Tink had often told me, “No matter how bad they are, if you’ll allow them to quit on a good note, eventually they will start like they finish. Just hang in there and keep doing the right thing.” Taking his advice, I continued to work with Brave-heart two or three times each day. At first his progression was almost imperceptible. He still continued to bolt around the arena and occasionally would stumble as if he was going to fall. This always caused my heart to skip a beat. If he were to fall and roll on me or I were to fall off and get hung up in the stirrup, I was a dead man. Each day he would run off, but the distance became shorter and he became less serious about it. At the end of each session he was relaxing and responding to my leg cues.

  At one demonstration Braveheart made a particularly dramatic change. Lowering his head, he followed me around like a big puppy dog. Then, with trust, he stood while I crawled on him and rode him around the pen while shaking my slicker above him. The crowd was elated with Braveheart’s progress.

  Afterward Helga approached me with tears in her eyes expressing how emotional the experience had been. I asked her to tell me more, but she physically recoiled and declined to elaborate.

  After a lot more consistent work, Braveheart finally relinquished his fear of a human on his back, and before long I was loping him over small jumps. By the end of the summer, he had exceeded my wildest expectations. I rode him on the ranch moving cattle and out on long trail rides. He was beginning to show strong jumping ability.

  One day an experienced jumping-horse trainer came by the ranch to observe Braveheart’s workout. She said, “He has great potential. I’d like to take him on.”

  This was incredible news, and we called Helga, but to our amazement she did not share our excitement. “I don’t trust him,” she said. “I don’t want to put any more money into him. Maybe I should just put him down.”

  I was stunned. She had seemed so happy about his progress. What has changed her mind? I wondered. The hardest part of Braveheart’s rehabilitation was behind him. There was no doubt he was going to make it. Having known him mostly as she had experienced him before, she was unable to believe he had really changed. I thought, This can’t be about money. Why the change of heart? Jane and I tried to think of ways to help Helga find a better solution.

  I offered to partner with her on Braveheart so she wouldn’t incur further expense. My ownership would cover his continued training, and I would collect any training fees when we sold the horse. But the more suggestions I made, the more Helga closed down. She kept repeating, “Grant, I don’t want anyone to get hurt on him.”

  After all we’d gone through with this horse; her responses were not sitting well with Jane and me. To spare his life we offered to buy him. She declined, but after much discussion she agreed to let me work with him for two more weeks after which we’d reevaluate.

  In those two weeks Braveheart made great progress, and we started searching for a buyer hoping Helga would sell him.

  During the final week of Braveheart’s training we received a letter from Helga. She accused us of trying to profit from her and Braveheart. She said that in her past a man had bought a horse from her and turned around and sold it for a lot of money. She felt resentful of him and wanted to make sure it never happened again. At that moment we understood that nothing we had done or could do would influence the situation. This was not about Braveheart.

  I phoned her, but she had made up her mind and was not willing to talk. She would remove him from our care and board him in Dubois for the winter where another trainer would continue his training. The news came as a relief to us because Braveheart could continue moving forward.

  In the spring we received another letter. In it Helga said Braveheart had not been mentally sound. She hadn’t been able to bear the thought of him hurting someone. So she had had her veterinarian put him down. Jane and I were in shock. Receiving this news was a terrible blow. I couldn’t believe that she had put Braveheart down after all he had been through, after all he had overcome.

  Something in Helga’s past experiences had prevented her from believing Brave-heart had indeed changed. We see what we want to see. While Braveheart had conquered his fear and forgiven humans for the abuse he had suffered, she couldn’t learn the lesson he had come to her to teach: forgiveness and healing. The hurt and anger ate at us so much that we knew we had to do something to let it go. I had struggled most of my life to learn the necessity and power of forgiveness. Holding onto our hurt toward Helga would imprison us in our own kind of cell.

  But letting go of such hurt is seldom easy. It took us months to release the negativity and accept Braveheart’s death.

  The next summer, many of Braveheart’s fans showed up to see him. Each time I recounted the story, my heart broke anew. Though I have forgiven Helga, to this day I often think about that magnificent and brave black horse, and the lessons he taught us, and the terrible certainty that he didn’t have to die for us to learn them.

  38

  MORAN, WYOMING, 2010

  Sometimes while thinking about Braveheart and Helga, my thoughts would turn to Locke and her childhood, about how hard that must have been to overcome. She had made so much headway with her goals. She and Les had been married for fourteen years. After
years of performing and recording albums, they, together with their band Prickly Pair, had become well-known in the western music genre, and had won several prestigious music awards.

  In the fall Locke was diagnosed with tongue cancer. While she battled this disease, her doctors discovered that she had a rare heart disease, a hardening of the heart sack. This combination of ailments made these conditions inoperable.

  Tara and I went to her. Although Locke was very weak, we all shared stories about our adventures, the horses we had owned, the polo years. She and I especially reminisced about our golden days at Buckskin Crossing. We made peace.

  Locke had lived full-bore and had achieved her dreams of being an excellent horsewoman and musician. I loved her and respected her many talents, especially her music. Like Braveheart, she had done her best while suffering from a wounded soul.

  The following April, as the hospice nurse sat by Locke’s bed in her home along the East Fork River outside her beloved Dubois, Les told Locke, who remained engaged in the care of their horses, that he was going out for a few minutes to feed them. While Les was caring for Locke’s horse, the nurse heard a faint phrase form on Locke’s lips. “That’s good,” she said, and then she was gone.

  Not long after Locke died, I had a dream she was in heaven riding Algae, her all-time favorite Thoroughbred mare. She was wearing a billowing red dress, and looked as young, vibrant, and beautiful as she ever had.

  My sadness over Locke’s death combined with lingering sorrow about Braveheart sobered me to a growing realization: My work needed to focus more on people than horses. My purpose in life was becoming even clearer. I burned to pursue it while I still could.

  Regularly I was astonished at how strongly people reacted to what they witnessed at our horse demonstrations. Many of the most profoundly affected were the parents of children with disabilities. We marveled how again and again they recognized their relationships with their children in my relationship with the horses. Dave Makowicz was just such a parent.

  Dave, a Navy veteran, six feet four inches, two hundred thirty pounds, attended a demonstration with his company, Clarion Securities. Dave was the company’s Chief Operations Officer. He wasn’t the crying type, but after the demo he sniffed and wiped his cheek. “This is one of the most important things I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said.

  During his horse demonstrations in the Diamond Cross barn Grant utilizes many techniques from allowing them to find a comfortable place with him to using a flag to ask them to move away.

  He and his colleagues had just observed me using the horse-breaking process to teach parallel lessons to management and leadership. Inside the round pen stood a panting, sweating three-year-old colt, a spoiled, pen-raised horse used to getting his own way.

  Earlier I had released the colt into the round pen. It had raised its head and pointed its inside ear toward me, its eyes wide and gaze locked. Its cooperativeness, however, was shallow in the manner of a manipulative teenager.

  When I lifted the first saddle onto the colt’s back and cinched it down, the horse didn’t seem bothered. CEO T. Ritson Ferguson suspected the colt had been ridden before; the demonstration was a setup. Come on, who could break a horse to ride in one hour?

  Accustomed to skepticism, I pulled the cinch tight and waved the colt away. It felt the cinch and then broke in two, snorting and bucking around the round pen frantically trying to shed the saddle, his eyes glassy with anger like a child throwing a tantrum. Clarion employees leaned back in their seats as if it was possible to dodge an out-of-control horse. Ferguson’s skepticism vanished.

  Months later, Clarion employees would reflect on this scene and discuss how they might apply these lessons. They did not yet know that this demonstration would provide a framework for discussing and solving their specific management problems. At the moment they waited, balled up and gap-jawed, for me to ride. Surely the colt would buck me off.

  “Make the wrong thing difficult and the right thing easy,” I said, and everyone—especially Dave Makowicz—knew I was not talking only about horses. Instead of a horse in the pen, Makowicz saw his son Nate, an autistic young man who often threw tantrums to express fear or frustration. Watching me work with the colt was like watching himself work with Nate, and the lessons came easily: base the relationship on trust. Don’t be drawn into the drama. Allow a person to be himself, but establish clear boundaries. Remain calm, confident, and consistent. This moment of transference, when spectators gaze into the pen and see not a horse, but, for instance, an employee, a boss, a spouse, a child, or even oneself, is when the entertainment gives way to an emotional “aha”.

  The colt faced me, giving me his full attention, and I stroked him on the neck. “There you go. Good boy.” Then I turned to the people and said something I almost always include in my demos: “If they trust you they’ll be loyal and follow you.” Ferguson couldn’t believe how quickly I had won the colt’s faith. “Good leaders develop lasting trust. You have nothing without respect,” I said. “People are attracted to humility, not to a leader who is arrogant and prideful. Loyalty is the goal—people want to be a part of the company family. Respect must be earned; it cannot be demanded. It only comes through strong leadership with transparency.”

  They soaked up the meaning but not for long. I was about to mount up. I lifted foot to stirrup, eased a leg over, and settled onto the colt’s back. It tensed up and stepped around tenuously, assessing the predator on its back and trying to decide how to react. Still uncertain, the colt tucked its hindquarters, and scooted off. The people gasped. The colt looked back at me as if asking “Am I okay? Am I safe?” Old-style cowboys would have grabbed leather, gritted their teeth, and held tight, but I tried to remain calm and loose, reaching out to rub the colt’s neck. “Easy son. You’re okay. You’ll be all right. You can make it through this.” Stroking the colt’s neck until he relaxed, I told him, “There you go, good boy. Those are some good steps.” Though still a little suspicious, the horse lowered his head and carried me around the pen. The preparation time had paid off and the colt was beginning to trust me on his back as well as on the ground. The two were beginning to become one, the start of a lasting relationship. I grinned, and addressed the crowd. As I directed the colt with the lead rope of the halter with just ounces of pressure from two fingers, the colt responded to the slightest touch. “It’s very important,” I said “to be as soft as you can be but as firm as necessary, rewarding the slightest try and the smallest change.”

  The audience, however, did not completely relax. Concerned that the colt would buck, the people sat tense and waiting, afraid to move. The horse relaxed its shoulders and neck and carried me around the pen. I knew that we humans sometimes hang on to beliefs even after seeing evidence to the contrary, so I smiled, stroked the colt, and asked, “If we don’t trust them, how do we expect them to trust us? There is a point where you just have to get on and go for a ride expecting the best. Face your fear, let go of control, and trust that things will work out.”

  After the demo, Makowicz stood at the fence taking in the colt and tried to put words to his thoughts. The horse looked like an employee who had survived the first day on a difficult job. He seemed mostly relieved and maybe a bit surprised that he had survived. In fact, he had done better than that; he had worked through his fear and inexperience and gained a confidence that things were going to be okay.

  Like other corporate business people who have attended my programs, Makowicz might have related the demonstration to increased net profit or improved relationships with employees, suppliers, or clients, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Nate. His emotions surprised and embarrassed him. At first he had a hard time stringing together the right words. “I’m a controlling parent sometimes and maybe I need to let go of the reins and just back off a bit. Let them be what they need to be… and be there to love them when they’re done.” He was talking about parenting, but the application to corporate leadership was clear. Smile lines stretched from the
corners of his eyes. “I see there is a better way,” he said.

  Relaxed and standing quietly, the colt watched me walk away toward the gate—and followed.

  By the time Dave and Clarion Securities visited the ranch, I had worked with hundreds of horses and thousands of people. Life had begun to come full circle. As I look back over the course of my life and remember people like Dave, I’m beginning to develop a clearer perspective about how all this has come about, how all the crazy detours and failures led me in a circuitous line straight to our current position. I am sure we’ll experience many more twists and turns, but enough of life has unfurled behind us for me to recognize the patterns and make sense of it all.

  Our kids now raised and gone, Jane and I are looking toward the next lap. We have much more to learn and more horses to train. I, more than ever, feel an urgency to do more, to share more, to extend our reach and tell others what the horses have taught me. Hence, the reason for our writing this book. We don’t have all the answers, but feel obliged to share what we’ve learned.

  Though I have made many mistakes, I am grateful for them all. Like the horses I’ve worked with, I have been willing to move my feet even when paralyzed with fear. Thank God. I have come to understand that failure is essential to progress. Still, I am amazed at how life tends to work out if we listen to our hearts and have the faith to step out and keep moving our feet.

  These days I am training some great horses and having a lot of fun showing cutting horses and selling ranch horses. More than ever, Jane and I feel the deep satisfaction of knowing we have found our niche in life. Yet I feel the pressure of the ticking clock and a sense that I must do more while I can. This feeling often makes me think I am not doing enough to share the lessons horses have taught me, they hold the power to change lives. I offer Jane’s and my lives as proof. We are but one example of faith and principles seeing people through.