Legend Flies her Flag

El Monte, California, early 1960s.

We had a friend, let's call her Edna because that's not her name, who had a horse, harness and training cart. She went for a drive one day and somehow got kicked in the jaw, which shattered. She spent quite a lot of time in the hospital on a liquid diet because her jaws were wired shut.

She had no idea of how the accident happened. She didn't even remember getting out of the cart. One moment she was happily driving, and the next moment she was in the hospital.

Although she didn't remember any of the circumstances, she decided to avoid a repetition of the incident by giving away the cart and harness. She offered them to Joanne. Free. She accepted gladly. She was not discouraged by the fact that she knew nothing about driving a horse or training a horse to drive.

Joanne chose Legend for her driving experiment. Poor Legend. She was our guinea pig horse. She'd been trained for endurance riding, had been used for trail riding, jumping, fox hunting (off Mulholland Drive – runaway there, but that's another story). Joanne had the mare lined up for tap dancing lessons when the cart and harness opportunity came along.

We lived near a riverbed that led from the San Gabriel Mountains to the Pacific and there was a trail beside it. Lest you get a wrong idea about elegance here, the river bed had been converted into a concrete ditch by the flood control people and we could have bowled from our house to Long Beach. But the trail did exist, and that's where Joanne taught Legend to drive.

Since neither horse nor driver knew what they were doing, it took a while before the lessons were learned. But once she had this driving thing down, Legend absolutely love it! She could move out. She didn't have some big lummox floundering around on her back. The cart was light. It was almost like being free, and she showed it. She'd go into an extended trot and her tail would come up and blow in the breeze.

The other horses on the trail did not share Legend's enthusiasm. They wondered what that awful thing chasing that poor horse was. The fled, leaped, crowhopped, climbed telephone poles. Legend and Joanne left a trail of panicked horses behind them, but who cared? It felt wonderful to move freely, let her tail blow in the wind, fly her flag.