The Horse and the Sea

When I bring my horse to the sea, we both must face our fears of the rising tide. Our struggles stretch across ancestors and oceans, and our survival depends on how we relate to each other. 

In the winter, I bring my horse to the sea. When I back Maui out of the trailer, he blows hard through his nostrils and turns his head towards the sound of the surf, the waves hidden by the dunes. His ears quiver as he stares. Once he is saddled, we ride through the soft sand and a steep bank out onto the firm beach still wet from the last tide. The air is thick with cold, and we are the only creatures who have ventured to the shore today. We are both scared–Maui of the sea, and me of what Maui might do at the sea. 

As we emerge from the dunes, I catch my breath, startling Maui, who jumps and lands four hooves wide. So much of the beach is gone since the last storm. It feels like looking in the mirror and noticing a new wrinkle, the kind that doesn’t match the curve of my face, a momentary reckoning with my mortality. 

The sloping sand before us stretches miles towards the wide and roiling Kennebec River to the north and the snaking Morse River to the south. There has always been a decadal dance between the two rivers here, but that music is dulled by the ocean roar. The smaller Morse does most of the carving. Last winter, swollen with stormwater, it tore the tip off of the sand spit that connected the beach to the Fox Islands, two prows of lichened granite stoically facing the Atlantic. Before that, I tried to ride Maui to the end of the sand and up the rocks, but he refused, tossing his head and whirling on his heels as people stared. Horses notice everything that we are designed to filter away–an extra coil of the hose, a shirt in the grass, a fence board out of place. Perhaps Maui could sense the intent of the river. We humans might not notice the slow rise of the tide. But a horse does.

The ocean is new to Maui. He is a cow horse bred in the West, but his ancestors came from across this sea. Mine did too, a few centuries later, fleeing famine in Ireland and politics in Russia. His came on ships powered by the wind, mine by steam, both accomplices in the subjugation and remaking of worlds, both subject to global forces beyond our control. Those events roll into our relationship now: this is my idea, being at the beach in the slicing cold, not Maui’s. He humors me, but it’s tenuous–if he gets scared, he could dump me on this packed sand and leave me to the tide. 

I consider this as I watch the waves reflect the high gray clouds and feel my nose hair crackle. I wear layers of wool and down and insulated riding boots, but the chill creeps into my toes until they begin to ache. I turn Maui towards the Kennebec, tracing the new canyon created by the storm: the sand wall to our left, the ocean to our right. My mind balks at the new shape of the beach, even as the Atlantic makes me feel an exquisite smallness. As a social scientist who studies how people deal with the impacts of climate change, I spend a lot of time with people trying to imagine higher water, trying to respond before the water is ever present. Then there are days like these, where the future leaves thumb prints all over the sand. 

Maui hops into a trot as I press him forward, trying to find some heat in our bodies. He shies from the foam lip of each wave and leaps over the braided rivulets of freshwater running from where the dunes and rip rap give way to a grove of rare pitch pines, stunted by the salt air. Maui’s white mane rises with the beat as the wind fiddles with his black forelock. After five centuries, he is back on the shores of the ocean where his ancestors first walked onto a continent that had not seen horses since the last ice age. Maui’s blood likely came from somewhere in southern Europe on a sailing ship heavy with men, ambition and disease. Those first horses, with thick chests and strong hinds, walked up wooden planks and into the holds of galleons. They would have been trained in classical dressage, an equestrian art that I practice now, born from teaching horses how to collect the power of their bodies and balance in battle. Maui’s forebearers were instruments of colonialism. They were also individual animals, each with their own character, their own relationships with each other and the people who trained and rode them. Maui’s coat, splashes of brown and black across a sea of white, is also tied to Native nation breeding, a prized gene of color, a horse small and muscular built for surviving sparse lands, thriving in the harshest conditions because they know their strength is in the herd. 

We are an unlikely herd of two, the prey permitting the weight of the predator, and me asking him to take comfort in that. Absurd–yet horses make this leap all the time. I feel stiffness in my legs, and Maui hollows his back, holding his neck high, jerking like a wide-eyed chicken. I wrap my calves around his barrel and slow my exhale, alternating the wiggle of my ring fingers on the reins, my line to his mouth and clenched mind. He recognizes this cue and drops his head, softening a little, as if he were the sand finding its lighter form. 

Riding a horse–this horse–at the edge of land is not easy or relaxing. This is supposed to be fun, some dream dusted off from the back shelves of my mind–a girl, a horse, an ocean. I am not a girl anymore, but a middle-aged mother taking time away from her family to drag this nervous half-ton creature to a body of water so cold I would be dead in minutes if I got wet. Even so, that dream survives. It feels older than me, stretching back to ways of knowing that my mind can’t grasp but still remembers, lingering in my body like the glow after sunset.

The rising sea holds no real threat at this moment, but Maui thinks it does. He skitters under me between the water and the dunes, trapped by the shifting surfaces, prancing in a sluice where the sound of the sea never subsides. Brown roots shoot straight out of the storm-scoured dunes and tap the cold breeze, like long fingers reaching for Maui’s fetlocks. He doesn’t appreciate their wind-driven scolding and doesn’t know which to eye harder: the tide or the terrain. I focus on staying upright through Maui’s jigging, trying to ignore the cut banks and bare roots that once held the line between land and sea. 

Another one and a half feet of water by 2050. The amount of sea level rise that the state has committed to manage. In twenty-five years, the sea here will be up to our knees. By the end of the century, when my daughter is old and Maui and I are ghosts, the water here will be over our heads. 

Maui picks up his hooves as if he can already feel the rise. He juts his jaw and slaps his tongue over the bit, his anxiety drawing me back to our bodies. When he spooks, he darts sideways and drops his shoulder, a movement bred into him for cutting cattle out of a herd. More than once his sideways leaps have left me gasping on the ground and limping for months. It has taken me years to connect my mind to his without falling into both of our fears. He pushes into the world with all the false confidence of the trickster demi-god for whom my daughter named him. Maui, abandoned by his parents and found by ocean spirits, who pulled the North Island from the sea and brought fire to humans. I struggle with his name, as I am not sure it is ours to use, yet it came from my daughter at two years old–she saw something in the horse that she saw in the Disney character. Maui the horse embodies the cleverness and humor of this ancient story, a power tethered to vulnerability, strong enough to carry me yet never fully known. 

More than anything, Maui senses me, thousands of years of predation guiding companionship. The language of the horse is of the body. Horses can smell intent. I have to move with the assuredness he often lacks. If I don’t give Maui my full attention, he snatches the moment from me: a few months ago, walking beside me, he swung his head to nod at some whisper in the grass and swerved into me, breaking my pinky toe. But just as Maui and I share a genetic code for the fear that keeps us alive, the ghosts of thousands of years of horse and human relating tuck into the corners of our heredity. Even through our hardships, our two species keep turning towards each other.

Right now, Maui is most concerned with turning towards home. There is an almost rhythmic consistency to his balking: ten steps forward, half rear and spin. He holds his neck so his dark brown eye is on me: can we go back now? How about now? He can feel any hint of uncertainty through our aligned spines, but he still watches my face. I have learned to relax my body and tell him this walk is good for him, he needs the exercise. But he is very smart in the ways of humans, and knows to look for a crack in my resolve. I love this about him. I know, too, that this is his way of giving his attention to me and not his fear of the sea. I cast that same eye to the waves. 

Drawing the cold in through my nose, it leaks out in a thin river to my lips. Even when it is this frigid and raw, I find the smell of sunlit hay in Maui’s coat. I splay my gloved fingers into the fluffy fur of his neck. When I nudge him to the edge of the water, he lowers his head, curious for a moment, then snorts and backs away from the moving edge, dragging his toes. Even with the winter swell, the sea reaches out to him gently, like a mouse reaching up to sniff his soft muzzle. The swell laps lines that disappear, and I can feel Maui’s confusion rising. Maybe he will come to know the sea in a different way, but for now, he doesn’t trust it. What this really means is he doesn’t trust me. Somewhere in his past, either encoded in his spotted genes or in his training by men who see horses as instruments, he learned not to trust. It will take me more years, more walks along the shore, more circles in the ring, more pats on the neck. But I will trust him first, and I will love him, and I will recognize that our two species have changed each other before and we will do it again.

The horse and the sea have carried our burdens, our children, our ideas about belonging even thrown into the waves. We remake them for our uses and desires, but they hold their wild. Sometimes their ambivalence startles me–the sudden hoof that almost killed my sister, the storm that dragged homes in my town out to sea. How we know them in the past is now how they will be in the future. But it is mostly their mercy that amazes me. I’m like the horse spooking at the shadows in the corner of the ring at every pass, surprised again and again: I just can’t believe that anything so beautiful and so powerful shows us such generosity of spirit. The horse and the sea, absorbing our darkness and insecurities. Maui flicks his ears back to me as the ocean folds our carbon into her deep belly.   

When I turn Maui around at the wide and dark Kennebec, he finally relaxes. On a loose rein, he lowers his head below his withers, showing me that he trusts me to survey the environment for both of us. He leaves cupped prints that fade into the water they drew to the surface. Pale purples of the setting sun wash the sand, the wind humming to itself over the quieting slip of the swell. When I look out over the whitecaps, I imagine the ghosts of galleons and steamers. The tide has risen, narrowing our path. The wind pulls at the exposed grains of the sand canyon. A gull dives and laughs. Maui and I turn our eyes up, then he strides on. The cold reminds me–this is not a dream. Maui traces the beach between the waves and the dunes, hips swinging. The land that seemed to trap us is the path that leads us home.