Riding Side Saddle

Riding Side Saddle
Copyright Ken Harris 2008

I had very little going for me when I first learned to ride. I had almost no experience with horses, indifferent coordination, and a total lack of common sense. Even so, after I had learned enough by riding Sheba to go where I wanted most of the time, Joanne let me ride her horse, Legend.

I didn’t have much experience as a rider, but Legend didn’t know much about being a horse either. We were green together.

I was very impressed by Joanne’s riding technique. She always cinched her saddle very loosely. You could usually insert a finger between the cinch strap and her horse’s belly. I tried saddling the same way, but when I tried to mount found myself lying on the ground wondering what happened. “Balance,” my soon to be blushing bride told me. “Balance is the key.”

After some practice I managed to learn to mount with a loose saddle and, at the walk, comport myself comfortably. We rode in the Rio Hondo, a Los Angeles County river, the bed of which is now completely encased in concrete. You could roll a bowling ball from the San Gabriel Mountains to Long Beach. But in those days, the mid-1950s, it was sand and brush and rocks. We liked to trot and canter over the sand dunes. I felt like I was Lawrence of Arabia. That is, I felt like I was riding a camel.

One day while cantering over the dunes I noticed the horizon in front of me tipping to my right. I figured out instantly that I was falling off the horse. Among real horsemen grabbing the horn is for sissies. I grabbed the horn.

It didn’t fix the problem; the horizon tilted even faster. Down I went, saddle and all, until the saddle ended up almost underneath Legend and most of me lay on the ground, all but my right foot. My left foot had come out of the stirrup easily enough, but the right foot might as well have been welded in.

If Legend had known anything about being a horse, she would have bolted in hysteria, dragging my lifeless body under her belly, mashing my head into pulp with her iron shod hooves at every frenzied step. But she didn’t do that. Instead, she stopped and looked at me in amazement. You could read amazement in her eyes. “Ken, what the hell are you doing?!”

Joanne rode up and, after first making sure that she wasn’t a widow before she was even a bride, asked, “Ken, what the hell are you doing?!”

Both of them were asking the wrong person. I obviously didn’t know.