I’ve been riding for three years, and so I was due. I was cantering in a rutted field dotted with spindly apple trees and a few boulders the size of Volkswagens, and one second the horse and I were paralleling a fence by a road, and the next I was on the ground looking up at him as he snitched leaves off a tree beside us. I was—and this seems all too appropriate—directly beside a fresh pile of poop left by one of his pals from the stable where I ride. Falling was a humbling experience, though not because I have ever deluded myself for even a nanosecond that I have the slightest idea what I’m doing when I’m on a horse. I only started riding because I was researching the experience for a book, and because it struck me as one more hobby I could share with my daughter as she grew up. We ride together once a week. Over time, however, I discovered how much pleasure I, too, was deriving from riding: the sense of power and speed, the feeling of accomplishment, the reality that here was another way to indulge the mid-life demons that besiege a man once he is forty.
