Alistair Bain
Appearances
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Future Looks Bright
When I was 13, I got my first horse. His name was Bo. He was a half an inch over pony class, a chestnut with sort of anonymous breeding history, not very well trained, a little bit mean and shaggy coated. But I didn't mind because he was mine, and I was willing to put the hours I knew it would take to train him in because he was the one part of my life that didn't feel dark and dangerous.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Future Looks Bright
At that point, my dad had dropped me off with my mom in a small town in central Illinois. She had enrolled me in a Catholic school where I was the only Native person at an otherwise white school. I felt different, but that wasn't the only reason. The kids had another name for the reason I was different. Words like fag, queer, it, and freak. I heard that all day.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Future Looks Bright
The teachers told me if I didn't act so weird, maybe I wouldn't get in trouble being bullied. And when I went home, although my mom's words weren't quite that crude, her sentiment was the same. Everything I did, how I walked, how I talked, seemed disappointing. But every afternoon, I would get to go to the stable and saddle up Beau and go for a ride.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Future Looks Bright
I spent so much time grooming him and training him. that within a few months, the first time we went into the dressage ring, he was flawless, and we walked out with a long, shiny, satin blue ribbon in front of everyone who had thought that we were misfits. And for just that moment, everything felt good, like a story of redemption.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Future Looks Bright
But over the course of the next few months, as I entered eighth grade, it seemed like the bullying got worse. And at home, I had decided that it was time that I finally said it out loud to my mother. I came out, and her reaction was everything I feared it would be and more, worse. I could almost feel her disapproval through the walls in the house.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Future Looks Bright
And at that point, it seemed like even when I was at the stable with Bo, those rides, that time I had with him, weren't enough. And there was this darkness that was encroaching on my very spirit, a voice inside me that said, maybe there was no place I would ever belong and no use going on.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Future Looks Bright
One Saturday morning, I found myself in the bathroom looking in the medicine cabinet at my mother's newly refilled prescription of tranquilizers, thinking that it would be so easy that night before bed to take them all. The kids would have no one to bully on Monday. My mother would have no one to say was embarrassing the family.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Future Looks Bright
I left them there, knowing they'd be there, and went out to the stable. And I saddled up Beau. I decided that day I was going to do something good for him, something to make him happy, because even if I felt like I couldn't feel happiness anymore, he could. So I rode him down by the airport, where there was a long dirt road. I take him down there and let him just run to his heart's content.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Future Looks Bright
As we got near, I could feel him getting excited. He knew what was coming next. As we turned the corner onto that road, I step in my stirps like I was a jockey in the Kentucky Derby. I let him have his reins, and he took off.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Future Looks Bright
I had heard someone say once that if you're a true horseman, there comes a day when the communication between you and your horse ceases to be the tug of a rein or the nudge of a knee, and you simply become one with that animal. And as he ran flat out down that road, I began to feel that happen. It was as if he and I could speak without any cues from myself. He ran faster and faster.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Future Looks Bright
And as we approached the end of the road, there's a dead end sign. But I didn't have to rein him in. He knew what to do. He slid to a stop, pivoted on his back legs, and ran back the other direction.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Future Looks Bright
And as he did, it felt almost like that little horse's joy of being alive on a fall day, running full out under a crisp blue sky with the smell of the dried corn in the field next to us came up through those reins and ran through my body like electricity. And so everything was suddenly quiet and clear and beautiful. We reached the end of the road, and standing there was a woman outside our car.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Future Looks Bright
She'd stopped and was watching us. She smiled, waved at me, and said, you and that horse, you're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Thank you, I said. And that was enough. In my culture, we say horses have the ability to heal. And I know that that's true.