Thursday, July 21, 2005

Ponies, kids, and soldiers

Stonelifter wrote a story about driving an army truck.
It drought back a flood of memories totally unrelated to the story.
There is army in it though.

Way back when I was a weee little girl, around 12 or 13, the army was still stationed in Chilliwack. They are in Edmonton now and the base is now an RCMP training ground, soon to be expanded into a University.
As I have mentioned before my main hobby and passion is horses. I have been riding them for as long as I can remember, literally.

Well on this day of memory I was riding my brothers pony Mikey. Don’t know why so don’t ask. I was also riding bareback (no saddle), again don’t know why. I even think my brother was there on dearest Chelly. I know the Marland girl was there, and am pretty sure Adam was on his spitfire pony. There were about four of us.
Well we lived a simple hack away from the Marlands and they lived two seconds from the river. We used to meet up with them all the time and go riding down there. This was before dirt bikes and assholes got really popular and it was safe for us to take off on our ponies with no adults present.
We would be gone for hours pretending we were trackers and finding all the deer trails. It amazes me now how our ponies stayed sound, and we were never hurt.
One of the reasons that we weren’t hurt was that Dad had dragged us to judo so that we could learn how to fall safely, used it MANY times, and our parents made sure our teacher taught us how to jump off safely if required, again used a few times. We also went to vaulting.
Ever go to the Rodeo and this crazy trick riding girl comes flying through the ring jumping off and on her horse at full speed? Well that is vaulting. There are two styles: the crazy ass cowboy style and the beautiful girl in white tights at the circus on a white horse style.
I did the circus style.
Loved it.
And when I was younger I was damn good at it.
Couldn’t jump on a horse now to save my life, but back then I could spring on a horse of any size.
This is leading some where.

On this day of memory the four, think it was four, of us headed to the river to go gallivanting in the perfect sand pit area.
Well the river was a prime location for the army sappers to do their training. They were always building bridges.
Now I am terrified of guns. Don’t really need to explain the reasoning for that, just am.
The only gun I have ever held was my brother’s air pistol that he had to use when he was doing the Pony Club Pentathlon. Didn’t even like that.
Well on this day of memory the army dudes were down there building bridges.
I think back now and giggle about it but at the time there was no laughing.
Imagine four kids on the cutest looking ponies and you want to pet them, it is only natural. Well a couple of sappers saw us keeping our distance in the sand pit and walked over to say hi and touch the ponies. They motioned to us to come on over.
They saw four kids with ponies,
We saw two huge sappers carrying machine guns.
We freaked!
We spun and high tailed it outta there.
BUT
As I mentioned for some odd reason I did not have a saddle on.
Well little Mikey is actually a half thoroughbred of VERY high quality racing bloodlines. He spun so fast that I spun off him like a top, grabbed his mane while he is about to bolt away, vaulted on with such grace I would have won an award and we galloped off faster then you can say ‘licitly split’.
The sappers stood there with their mouths open.
We were too scared to go to the river for almost a month.
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Posted by (Top)Andrea::7/21/2005 :: 1 Comments:

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