A question from my interviews also came up a lot in Colorado: What does masculinity, “being a man,” actually mean anymore? Is it trading crypto for testosterone supplements? Swapping spouses on Feeld? More importantly, what might a healthy, confident version of masculinity look like today?

Anna, our German guide, tall, strong, magnificently beautiful in her muck boots and men’s overalls, her thick blond hair tied in a mane-ish knot atop her head, is the horse girl we all wish we’d had the courage to be. She gathers us, says yes, that in spite of the gale and the worsening prediction (50 mph, gusting to 75), we need to saddle up and get ready to go.

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I don’t talk about my Horse Girl era much.

Maybe it’s because of the assumptions I fear people will make about me based on the cultural stereotype. Maybe it’s because I feel other childhood obsessions — sled dogs, Greek mythology, the Redwall series, various Nintendo franchises — had a more formative impact on the adult I became. Maybe it’s because my time as a Horse Girl felt so brief and casual compared to the denim-jacketed diehards that define said stereotype; as if I was merely a pony poseur, not a true Horse Girl. 

But I cannot deny that from the ages of roughly 7 to 10, I was fully, unapologetically, a Horse Girl. 

Here’s what I remember: Listening to the audiobook (back when they truly were “books on tape”) of Misty of Chincoteague on a family road trip. The trail ride in Estes Park, Colorado when I was 7 — probably the happiest day of my life. The sirenic allure of the bright pink and blue Grand Champions collectible boxes. The thick Dorling Kindersley breed guide I read over and over again, cover to cover, memorizing every detail; I could tell you the difference between a Russian Don and a Budyonny, although I definitely couldn’t today. The one summer I attempted a riding camp, with the mustiness, the satisfaction of cleaning the muck from a hoof, and Coley, the small, curmudgeonly black mare who kicked if you didn’t approach her right and who I loved with every fiber of my head-in-the-clouds being. 

Over the past several years, there’s been plenty of writing exploring our cultural obsession with the idea of the Horse Girl. This identity holds so much — in examinations of Horse Girls, we find odes to untamed femininity, searing indictments of insularity and privilege, and a swinging pendulum between romantic nostalgia and reality. She is both the awkward and O-M-G-relatable Tina Belcher from Bob’s Burgers and a stirring voice in the poetry of Ada Limón. In 2021, Electric Literature executive editor Halimah Marcus edited a collection of essays reclaiming and recasting the stereotype; two pieces from that collection are included on this list, along with some other favorites that explore the idea of the Horse Girl and the bond at its center. So saddle up and enjoy.

An Autistic Girl’s Guide to Horses (Katie Rose Pryal, Catapult, December 2022)

Katie Rose Pryal was diagnosed with autism in 2020, at the age of 44. Upon receiving her diagnosis, she writes, much of her childhood “came into focus,” particularly her special interest in horses. Around the same time as she recognized her autism, she was learning how to ride again, with her horse, Leroy. Her bond with Leroy intertwines with her further understanding of her own self and experiences. The resulting reflection is introspective and healing. 

For an autistic person, to be able to communicate, to touch, to care, all without fear, is a gift. Too often, our words, our very actualities, are rejected. With Leroy, I could share all of my secrets, spoken or unspoken, and he would listen with one fuzzy ear cocked in my direction. I could drape my body across his back and rest my head on his side, listening to the slow beat of his heart, steady as the dirt beneath our feet. Even when his coat was glossy, I could brush him, aligning each tiny red hair across his flank.

Black Californians Have Long Celebrated Cowboy Culture. We’re Just Catching Up. (Tyrone Beason, Los Angeles Times, December 2022) 

Beason profiles riders of all genders for this gorgeous feature for the Times’ “My Country” series, so I’m choosing to count it for this list. This piece takes readers on a journey from the bucking thrill of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo, an event celebrating Black cowboys and cowgirls, to a peaceful morning at the end of a trail ride on a Northern California farm —  a painful past being reclaimed to the celebratory current zeitgeist of Lil Nas X and Beyonce. Come for the stories of Black joy and community; stay for Jason Armond’s stunning photos. 

It originated as an epithet used to demean Black cattle drivers and ranch hands, who made up as much as a quarter of all such workers in the Southwest in the late 1800s, says Boyd-Pates. When Black men call themselves ‘cowboys’ and Black women refer to themselves as ‘cowgirls,’ Boyd-Pates says, they take pride in being able to transform a painful history into something they can glorify.

Finland’s Hobbyhorse Girls, Once a Secret Society, Now Prance in Public (Ellen Barry, New York Times, April 2019) 

Barry’s dispatch from Helsinki is not the first exploration of the community around hobbyhorsing, a sport in which adolescent girls trot, hurdle, and race astride wooden toy horses. The hobbyhorse girls of Finland have been the subject of viral videos, documentaries, and trend pieces — both praised as unique confidence-builders, and derided for being too childish, or worse, cringe. 

What happens when the hobbyhorse girl grows up, though? One of the key voices in Barry’s exploration is Alisa Aarniomaki, a spokeswoman for the sport who is now in her early twenties. Through profiling those who have stuck with the hobby, even as they grow into teenagers and young adults, Barry highlights the importance of the community to its members and how we may all need a space to safely rekindle our sense of childlike joy. Cringe is dead, the earth above it tamped by thousands of imagined hoofbeats. Long live the earnest pursuit of wonder. 

Once, she was invited to a party in France where adult guests were given hobbyhorses, provided as a way, she said, ‘to run away from your boring and maybe exhausting normal life.’ The one thing that drives her crazy, she added, is when people describe her hobbyhorse pursuit as playing. ‘If someone says we are playing, it strips away everything we made, it strips away the reality.’

Horse Girl (Heather Radtke, The Believer, February 2019)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if one is a Horse Girl, one must have a favored Horse Girl book or series. These are often pillars of the genre, standalones like Black Beauty or series like The Saddle Club, Pony Pals, or Thoroughbred. 

As a former Marguerite Henry girlie (if you were also a big King of the Wind fan as a child, know that I see you and I love you), I was thrilled to see a dispatch from the famed Chincoteague Island Pony Swim, an event that has captured the imaginations of Horse Girls ever since its appearance in the iconic Horse Girl novel Misty of Chincoteague. 

In its encapsulation of the wild, murky, and sometimes uncomfortable space between two ideas, Radtke’s reflection on her visit to Chincoteague feels like the pony swim itself. As the horses make their perilous journey between islands, we find ourselves in the messy middle space between hazy nostalgia and harsh reality, wonder and horror, the desire for something to exist in our imaginations as both unclaimable and wild, and as an accepting friend. 

Watching the scene asked me to hold two truths at once. The ponies are wild creatures that, like deer or raccoons, need to be managed. But in the mythology of the swim, the ponies are also presented as transcendent companions, animals who might offer up their manes for braiding and their backs for riding. Here, the ponies were both docile pets and feral beasts, animals that need to be convinced to swim so they might be ridden by little girls.

Horse Girl: An Inquiry (Carmen Maria Machado, excerpted for Them from Horse Girls, edited by Halimah Marcus, August 2021)

The Horse Girl stereotype is associated with privilege — whiteness, wealth, thinness, hyper-femininity — despite, as Carmen Maria Machado points out, a multitude of non-white riding cultures and traditions. Typically, when thinking of Horse Girls, we project our collective assumptions about what a Horse Girl is or isn’t, and mix in our own desires or insecurities. 

Machado’s contribution to Marcus’s anthology explores identities and desire — those we cultivate, like the author’s wish to be around horses and burgeoning queerness, and those projected onto us as an assumption, fetishization, or other intrusion. (In one section, she notes she is “exasperated” that this essay includes, among other things, inappropriate comments from older men and sexual innuendo.) In a stunning personal inquiry, Machado tracks that desire, from a covert moment with a coveted toy horse to briefly revisiting riding as an out queer adult. 

There are so many moments that will stick with me from reading this that it’s hard to pick just one, but a particularly intriguing parallel she makes is between horses having barn names and show names and the magic people find in names for drag or roller derby.

Are Unicorns Horses? Unicorns are horses that can only be ridden by virgins. 

Are Horses Unicorns? Horses don’t care what you’ve done, or what’s been done to you.

What Are Horses? A species of odd-toed, ungulate mammal, primarily domesticated, belonging to the taxonomic family Equidae. Useful, expensive, dangerous. Beautiful.

How Horses Helped My Ancestors Evade Colonizers, & Helped Me Find Myself (Braudie Blais-Billie, excerpted for Bustle from Horse Girls, edited by Halimah Marcus, July 2021)

Braudie Blais-Billie’s connection to horses derives from both sides of her family: She describes the thrill of watching barrel racing at the Seminole rodeo with her paternal grandmother and feeding apples to her maternal grandparents’ horses at their home in rural Québec. Her great-grandfather, she learns, was a prominent Seminole cattleman. 

In addition to reflecting on her family’s deep connection to horses and how it shaped her identity, Blais-Billie digs deeper into the history of Seminole resistance to colonization, and the role that the shared knowledge of horses and cattle husbandry played in their survival. It’s a reminder that the bond between humans and horses has been about more than childhood fantasy as displayed on Trapper-Keeper stickers — it’s been a means of resistance and resilience, of deep connection to one’s history, culture, and community. (Also, at a time of attempts to repress teaching histories of non-white and other marginalized peoples in the U.S., it’s a reminder of the power that comes in keeping those histories and stories accessible.) 

Tia and I have settled on the loose term ‘Seminole horse girl.’ It seems simple, but the specificity allows just enough space for the intricacies of our biracial identity. Like the Seminole peoples, ‘Seminole horse girls’ originates from a conglomeration of cultures adapting to their environment; sometimes not belonging to one group exclusively can be empowering. I’ve found that, in our family, horseback riding is more than show titles and prestigious stables — horses are how we survive.

I Entered the World’s Longest, Loneliest Horse Race on a Whim, and I Won (Lara Prior-Palmer, Longreads, May 2019)

The Mongol Derby is a test of will for even the most experienced rider, a grueling 1000-kilometer (621-mile) run recreating the messenger route of Genghis Khan through a variety of terrain on semi-wild horses. Riders change horses every 40 km, which means less exhaustion for the horses but an even greater challenge for the riders, who switch horses just as they’ve grown accustomed to the quarter-ton beast under them. In 2013, British equestrian Lara Prior-Palmer became the first woman to win this equine gauntlet, which she writes about in her memoir, Rough Magic, excerpted here for Longreads.

Those looking for the visceral awe of the race itself will have to read Prior-Palmer’s memoir in its entirety, but what makes this section so engrossing is the strong sense of place. We’re with her as she finds herself lost in the “concrete nowheres” of London, then in the green expanse outside Ulaanbaatar, and inside her mind as she longs for the adventure and freedom so often romanticized within the Horse Girl canon. As she trains by riding bareback through a field of ragwort — at full gallop, gripping the horse with all her strength — it’s hard not to feel that dangerous thrill, that reminder of why these animals have such a chokehold on our imaginations. 

I was expecting quite the holiday — a green steppe stuffed full of feisty ponies, with hunky riders from all over the world. One to trump the sightseeing and sunbathing holidays I was used to… By the time I applied for the Derby, I was no longer keen on touring the world’s buildings with awestruck stares. My thighs were strong and my heart was raw, yearning for my own motion.

My Little Pony Broke All of the ‘Girl Toy’ Rules (Seanan McGuire, Polygon, November 2020)

As there is for all the semi-universal phenomena of millennial and Gen-Z childhoods, there’s a TikTok about this. In a clip that has been seen more than 1.5 million times, user @funkyfrogbait compares how people think girls play with toys (bubbly, idle chat about shopping) with how they actually play with toys, wherein wide-eyed plastic critters become players in a harrowing trial before a shadowy council. The comments are full of affirmations, memories of Barbies in divorce court, Polly Pocket murder mysteries, and even re-enacting the sinking of the Titanic with Littlest Pet Shop toys. 

It’s difficult for a child of the ’80s or later to imagine this kind of narrative-heavy pretend play, full of high fantasy and even higher stakes, as being out of reach. My own childhood memories are spotted with dramatic courtroom scenes with stuffed animals and battlefield epics with Beanie Babies. But in this essay for Polygon’s “Horse Girl Canon” package, Seanan McGuire explores how My Little Pony, a fantasy-focused toy line “for girls,” shaped the way we still play today. It’s a fascinating look at the cultural significance of the toys, and their evolution from a realistic companion for horse girls with aspirations of stables to juggernaut — a rainbow-tinted powerhouse that sparked imaginations at a time when only “boy toys” were centered on this kind of fantastical play. (Of course, as McGuire correctly notes, the American toy industry still enforces a rigid gender binary, but kids of all genders have always enjoyed “girl toys” like My Little Pony.)

The 1980s were a time of fantasy adventures for children, with little attention paid by the censors to anything that had been preemptively dismissed as an attempt to sell toys… Death was generally off-screen, but it was present, and dangers were both real and manifest in the worlds we were told our toys and imaginary friends inhabited. But at the time of My Little Pony’s launch, all the grand, sweeping adventure was reserved for the blue side of the toy aisle, intended for the male** audience. Toys aimed at girls were much more likely to be domestic in nature, filled with baby dolls and pretend kitchens — in other words, training them for adulthood.

People Ask Me to Write About Horses (Adrienne Celt, Tin House, June 2018)

Author Adrienne Celt achieved what most Horse Girls only manifest in fantastical notebook scribblings: owning a real live horse. But like most things romanticized from afar, reality can be bumpy — horse ownership is messy, expensive, and can be heartbreaking. Celt tenderly reflects on what draws “rational adults” to horses, and on her emboldening bond and uncertain future with her own horse, Lady. 

Celt admits that reflecting on the pain points of horse ownership sounds like #ChampagneProblems, but it’s, as always, about more than that. It’s an essay on horses and their romanticization, but also an essay about seeking and pursuing joy, digging your heels in and spurring it on, chasing it cantering into the wind. 

Of course, when I say that horses are romantic, I mean for people who don’t spend much time with them. To most actual horse people, the animals lose their mystique rather quickly. On farms and ranches they’re beasts of burden, livestock of the same order as cows or pigs or dogs or goats. To a pleasure rider like me, they’re funny and corporeal: they fart in your face when you try to pick their back feet, and get scared when they see things out of the corners of their eyes, thinking that any abandoned truck tire or garden hose is about to kill them.

Who Gets To Be an Equestrian? (Rita Omokha, Elle, October 2020) 

As millions of people took to the streets following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, so began a reckoning over anti-Black racism in many sectors and communities, including equestrians. In June 2020, teen equestrian Sophie Gochman wrote an essay for The Chronicle of the Horse, calling out the race and class privilege of the community; a white trainer responded in the same publication with defensiveness and condescension while quoting MLK. Rita Omokha continues this necessary conversation, speaking with Black women equestrians about the discrimination they face — both overt and systemic — and how they are working to make the sport more welcoming. 

Omokha’s thoughtful profile of Black equestrians serves as a reminder that should undergird conversations about representation in any community or sport. Behind this discourse, you’ll find real people with real passion and expertise, paying a real human cost (be it financial, emotional, or otherwise) that they should never have had to pay. Omokha takes care to discuss the struggle of being “one of the few,” and the conflict between excelling in the world you love, and, as equestrian Shaquilla Blake puts it, “whitewashing [yourself]” to do so. 

Under the shade, the air thick with the scent of manure, they take a moment to catch their breath before the day’s trail rides begin. As Blake cools off, she feels a tug at her dreadlocks. “Can you feel that?” a giddy voice says from behind her. It belongs to a 13-year-old girl whose profile matches what Blake calls “your typical equestrian”—namely, wealthy and white. Can I feel that?? Of course I can! You just yanked the hell out of my dreads!

Lindsay Eanet is a Chicago-based writer, editor & performer. Her writing has been featured at Polygon, Longreads, Serious Eats, Block Club Chicago & others. But enough about her, let’s talk about you. 

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copy-editor: Peter Rubin

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In today’s edition, our editors recommend:

• A glimpse into a mutual aid auto repair shop in Alabama, where volunteers with different ideologies come together.
• A takedown of a phony celebrity criminal profiler and co-founder of an elite crime-solving club.
• A story about a Croatian gambler who exploits the flaws in roulette wheels and whose methods have changed the game.
• A read on the feral horses roaming around decommissioned mines in Appalachia, and the people who are caring for them.
• A profile of the man behind the @dril Twitter account — “the undisputed poet laureate of shitposting” — on emerging from anonymity, Twitter, art and comedy, and creating things on the internet.

1. Where the Sidewalk Ends

Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein | Lux | March 3, 2023 | 3,498 words

I hate the South, and I love it. This internal conflict is my inheritance. My roots in the region run deep and strong, but I have no illusions about who and what fed them. “We bury the people we do not care about in the South,” Tressie McMillan Cottom recently wrote for The New York Times. “It is where we have put migrants and poor people and sick people.” As Cottom rightly notes, however, “Americans are never as far from the graves we dig for other people as we hope.” Needless to say, I’m forever grappling with the South and its sins, which lately include two high-profile mass shootings, threats to reproductive rights, two Black men’s ejection from the Tennessee legislature, and Florida circling the policy drain even more than usual. What a joy, then, to read a story with a different vision of the South. Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein introduces readers to Zac Henson and his band of leftist rednecks who run a mutual aid auto repair shop in Alabama. “The organizers,” Kaiser-Schatzlein writes, “believe that people in the South, conservatives especially, just need to be given the chance to operate in institutions that harness their most altruistic, communal, and caring tendencies — or, as Henson describes it, ‘positive reinforcement to not be fascist.’” I too want to believe this. Here’s to hope. —SD

2. The Case of the Fake Sherlock

David Gauvey Herbert | New York Magazine | April 11, 2023 | 7,018 words

David Garvey Herbert tells the wild story of Richard Walter, a low-paid staff psychologist at a Michigan prison who, in the ’80s, invented a more glamorous persona: genius criminal profiler. Walter faked his qualifications and positioned himself for decades as an eccentric, sought-after expert on the criminal mind, testifying in murder trials and enjoying the true-crime TV spotlight. “He so fully inhabited the role of celebrated criminal profiler he appeared to forget he was pulling a con at all,” writes Herbert. But how did this Sherlock Holmes wannabe fool people for so long? How can such a narcissistic impostor embed themself in America’s criminal justice system? I read this from start to finish, then went back to the beginning to dive in again. The first read was engrossing. The second? Infuriating. —CLR

3. The Gambler Who Beat Roulette

Kit Chellel | Bloomberg Businessweek | April 6, 2023 | 6,516 words

You can beat roulette: A game designed to be pure random chaos has a flaw. That is fascinating, but throw in London’s Ritz Club, Scotland Yard, and a skilled Croatian, and you’ve got a plot worthy of any heist film. But did Tosa — the Croatian who won tens of thousands from the Ritz and other casinos — even commit a crime? That is what Kit Chellel sets out to answer in this brilliant piece. He spends six months investigating the world of professional roulette players, and this careful research is evident. We learn about the tiny computers that can beat roulette tables, though no devices were ever found on Tosa. We learn that, over time, wheels develop flaws that can turn into predictable patterns: Was that how he did it? Casinos changed their wheels just in case. Miraculously, Chellel tracks down the elusive Tosa to ask him in person, and Tosa is adamant he trained his mind to beat roulette. Nothing dodgy to see here! But would he say if he had cheated? Sometimes not reaching a clear conclusion can leave a bad taste, but not in this instance. I was delighted that Tosa remains an enigma — and is still planning secret international gambling trips. I bet he wins. —CW

4. Saving the Horses of Our Imagination

Ashley Stimpson | The Sunday Long Read | April 9, 2023 | 5,236 words

It’s Ashley Stimpson’s keen eye that pulls you into her stories, original detail by original detail. In this feature that examines feral horse management in the U.S., you’ll meet Tinia Creamer, who runs Heart of Phoenix equine rescue: “At 40 years old, Creamer has a mane of dark hair, glassy blue eyes, and a full-throated Appalachian accent that stretches her vowels like taffy,” writes Stimpson. “She knows it sounds made up but swears it’s true: her first word was horsey.” You need not have an affinity for feral horses to go wild for this piece. Stimpson’s writing has that magical ability to pique your interest and make you care about a subject you may know nothing about: “Renegade was the first horse I met,” she writes. “The color of black coffee, his mane was so choked with burrs that it was twisted into green dreadlocks. I arrived unarmed with snacks, but he frisked me anyway – my fingers, my phone, my notebook, my hair – with a nose soft like flower petals.” If you’d like to read more by Stimpson, check out “Shades of Grey,” her Longreads feature about Florida greyhound racing. —KS

5. Dril Is Everyone. More Specifically, He’s a Guy Named Paul.

Nate Rogers | The Ringer | April 12, 2023 | 5,170 words

Despite being on Twitter for almost 15 years — a number that’s shameful for multiple reasons — I’ve never actually followed the shitposter extraordinaire known as Dril. I didn’t need to. His absurdism was retweeted into my feed nearly every day. Sometimes I’d laugh, sometimes I’d shake my head, but over time two things became clear. The first was that whoever was behind the blurry Jack Nicholson photo had created a wholly unique persona. The second was that this persona somehow distilled Twitter’s worst impulses into a single parodic voice: bombastic, utterly un-self-aware, and so in thrall to the Dunning-Kruger effect that you couldn’t help but marvel. Dril, in one anonymous form or another, has been written about before, but he’s never been truly profiled; that first falls to Nate Rogers, who managed both to score some face time with him and to use that as the foundation for a long, well-reported piece about the man and his legacy. Even if you’ve never heard of Dril (in which case I commend you, again for multiple reasons), Rogers’ piece functions as an incisive assessment of how we think about art and creativity, and perhaps even why so many of us have yet to fully divorce that godforsaken bird site. When a character as good as Dril exists, you don’t need the other 279. —PR

HOP was still a fledgling nonprofit in 2012 when Creamer learned about horses roaming old strip mines. Someone sent her an email with a picture of a horse “that looked like it had been set on fire.” The horse was located in Mingo County, the email said, could she help? When she wrote back asking for the owner’s name and the address, the person explained that the horse lived on the strip mine. Lots of them did, actually.

Even 12 years later, her eyes still get wide recalling this moment. She decided to go see for herself.

They were out there all right. Herds teeming with emaciated horses, some with hides marred by open wounds and lacerations, nosing for something to eat amid rocks and brush, breeding and in-breeding indiscriminately. Swarming local roadways to lick salt off the pavement. She knew even the healthy-looking horses were likely vitamin-deficient and full of worms. “They’re domestic animals. They are in no way designed to live out there,” she says.

Jana Meisenholder|  The Atavist Magazine | August 2022 | 7 minutes (2,197 words)

This is an excerpt from The Atavist’s issue no. 129, “King of the Hill.” 

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The Atavist Magazine, our sister site, publishes one deeply reported, elegantly designed story each month. Support The Atavist by becoming a member.

Before the arrival of European colonizers, the Columbia Plateau, which forms swaths of present-day Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, was home to several Native tribes, including the Nez Perce, Wenatchi, Palus, and Colville. Foreigners brought with them disease and destruction. They also brought horses. “It was probably the best gift the white man ever gave us,” the late Stampede organizer and horse trainer Eddie Timentwa told author Carol Austin, who wrote a book about the Suicide Race in 1993,

By the 1700s, horsemanship had become an integral part of Native culture. The animals assisted in transportation and territorial expansion. “Mounted war parties could strike enemies at greater distances and with greater force than ever before,” writes anthropologist Deward Walker. Horses also led to larger traditional gatherings, allowing more people from a wider geographical range to come together. During salmon-spawning season, plateau tribes would meet at the confluence of the Sanpoil and Columbia Rivers to harvest and dry the coming winter’s supply of fish. Horses served as entertainment and objects of sporting competition. Riders paraded horses adorned with tribal regalia and beaded stirrups and bridles before running perilous mountain races.

After the plateau tribes were forced onto the Colville Reservation, the tradition of horse racing continued, and people wagered on riders. Stories of these events were most often passed down through oral tradition, but in 1879, Erskine Wood, a U.S. military officer, wrote of one horse race, “It did not take long for the excitement to grow and soon the bets were showering down and the pile swelling visibly with such great rapidity that it was marvelous how account could be kept. Blankets, furs, saddles, knives, traps, tobacco, beads, whips, and a hundred other things were staked.” (Wood wrote positively of many of his encounters with Native tribes, but also participated in the violent removal of the Nez Perce from their ancestral land.)

In the 1920s, Hugh McShane, a white man married to a Colville woman, introduced a mountain race at the rodeo in Keller, Washington. The race, described by Austin as “a half mile, pell-mell down a nearly vertical, boulder-strewn chasm in the face of a mountain,” quickly became a crowd favorite. But it wouldn’t last: The construction of the Grand Coulee Dam in the 1930s flooded Keller, forcing residents to relocate. In Omak, about 60 miles northwest, Claire Pentz, a furniture salesman in charge of publicity for the town’s rodeo, heard about McShane’s event and decided to stage one of his own. Locals brainstormed what to call the starting location, a precipitous incline on the Okanogan’s southern bank. Murder Hill was floated, but organizers settled on Suicide Hill. “The suicide race draws only the most nervy riders,” The Omak Chronicle declared.

In 1942, a jockey named Bev Conners drowned in the river during the race. Since then, according to various sources, no other jockeys have died. But injuries are common, including grievous ones. Larry Peasley, who taught Andres how to ride a mechanical bull, has two adult children who were nearly killed in the race. In 2002, his daughter Naomie—one of only a few women to ever run the race—suffered a skull fracture and flatlined on the way to the hospital. Doctors were able to revive her. A few years later, Peasley’s son Tyler went somersaulting off his horse and was trampled by oncoming riders. He fractured his ribs and suffered a broken pelvis and hip.

It’s not hard to see what makes the race so dangerous. There’s the hill itself, more than 200 feet of earth pitched at a harrowing angle—according to one race organizer’s measurement, it’s steeper than the Great Pyramid of Giza. Riders charge down the slope at full gallop, reaching speeds up to 30 miles per hour by the time they hit the river. Then there’s the lack of any hard-and-fast rules about how the race should be run. Horses aren’t lined up in an orderly fashion at the starting line. What happens on Suicide Hill is a free-for-all, with mounted jockeys jostling each other, fighting for a competitive spot. The aggression only escalates during the race. Riders violently whipping other jockeys in the face with their crops, attempting to throw them off balance or slow them down, is a common tactic, and often a successful one.

The best Suicide Race jockeys are adrenaline junkies, as athletic as they are knowledgeable of the event’s 1,260-foot-long course. They’ve meticulously mapped out the quarter-mile and know what to do when: Lean back before this point, lock your knees here, sit forward just after that section, pull back the reins there. Riders have incredible core and leg strength to help them stay in the saddle, and they know how far their bodies can tilt sideways if need be, to avoid injury or inflict it on a competitor.

In 2002, the race’s all-time reigning champ, Alex Dick, passed away at the age of 83. He had 16 King of the Hill titles to his name; his obituary in a local newspaper noted that Dick, who was Native, “set a record that will probably never be broken.” So far it hasn’t been. Yet if there’s a first family of the Suicide Race today, it’s the Marchands. Three brothers—Loren, Francis, and Edward—have followed in the footsteps of their grandfather, Jim, an endurance racer who died after a horse fell on him in 1990, and an uncle, George, who holds three Suicide Race titles. Loren, now 34, has been crowned King of the Hill seven times, most recently in 2015. Francis and Edward have never won the overall title, but they’ve come close.

As the dominant force in the Suicide Race, the Marchand brothers have a wealth of tips and tricks, and they know all the best places around Omak to practice. But the race is a tradition most often shared among kin, and the Marchands are notoriously wary of letting people who aren’t blood, or at least Native, into their inner circle. They also reject weekend warriors and wannabe jockeys who are in it purely for the exhilaration. “The Marchands don’t fuck with anybody,” said Conner Picking, a Suicide Race jockey and a great-grandson of one of the founders of the Omak Stampede.

That didn’t stop Andres from trying to get their attention.

***

By the summer of 2018, Andres, now 26, had cleaned up his life and was working construction and picking up jobs as a handyman. He was also holding fast to his desire to learn from Suicide Race royalty, looking for a way in to their good graces. One day he accompanied a welder to a small ranch in Eastside owned by Preston Boyd, a Colville elder renowned for breeding and training thoroughbreds for flat-track racing. Boyd needed the men to fix his broken horse walker, a motorized machine that leads horses in a circle. While Andres worked, Boyd took a good look at him. He noticed Andres’s height—just five feet six inches. He probed the young man about his weight.

Boyd was searching for a new rider to exercise his racehorses, because his usual guys were getting too busy. Among them was his great-nephew, Francis Marchand. Francis was helping Boyd break some new horses that summer, but his schedule was increasingly packed with rodeos—a formidable horseman, Francis regularly competed in saddle bronc and bareback riding. Andres’s specs were promising for the kind of rider Boyd needed. Sure, he couldn’t gallop a horse yet, but he could learn. Boyd told Andres he might fit the bill.

Andres knew he was being given a rare opportunity—a chance to get to know Boyd and one of the Marchands, and to show that he had what it took to run the Suicide Race. But months went by and nothing happened. Boyd never followed up with Andres about exercising his horses.

Omak is the kind of place where everybody knows everybody, and sometimes Andres bumped into Francis at social gatherings. He would bring up Boyd’s suggestion that he was rider material as casually as he could, to see if Francis knew anything about his great-uncle’s plans. Andres also asked about going off the hill—what it felt like, what it took to win. Francis recognized Andres’s ambition, and in early 2019 he told him to stop dithering and get to the point: If he wanted to become a rider, he should go to Boyd and say so. “You want to do this? Look him in the eyes,” Francis said. “In any culture, you grab a guy, shake his hand, and tell him you want this.”

Andres took the advice to heart, but he didn’t want to seem desperate. He waited until he ran into Boyd at a gas station one day, then asked if he could help exercise his horses. Boyd said sure, and Andres showed up at 7:30 the next morning to start learning.

Unlike bull riding, which Andres took to easily as a boy, riding racehorses was challenging. Though short, he was stocky and muscular; working construction had made him strong, but he wasn’t nimble or quick to respond to a horse’s stride. Montana Pakootas, a seasoned jockey who helped out on the ranch, had to constantly remind Andres not to yank the reins, but to pull them gently, if he wanted to slow a horse down. “Use your wrist, not your whole arm,” Pakootas said. Otherwise, when a horse was going full speed, Andres risked throwing it off balance.

Andres’s riding improved, and by the summer of 2019 he was exercising Boyd’s newest racehorses for several hours most days of the week. Boyd expected his riders to stick to a routine, for the horses’ sake. “I take Wednesdays and Sundays off to let their muscles, if they get sore, to give them a little rest,” he said. On training days, it was Andres’s job to guide horses to a trot around a local track for a quarter of a mile, getting their blood pumping and helping them build stamina. Eventually he would get them up to a gallop. As a horse became more aerobic, Andres learned to increase its speed against its pulse, maintaining a low heart rate even while the horse worked hard over varying distances. After weeks or months of training, when a horse was comfortable running at top speed around the track in Omak, Andres took the horse to Emerald Downs, a race facility in Seattle, not to compete but to get acquainted with crowds and the whirring sound the starting gates make when they open.

Andres exercised Boyd’s horses for free, and he and Renteria, who was selling Amway products at the time, sometimes struggled to cover the bills. Andres picked up odd jobs where he could, but not anything that took away from his time with Boyd’s horses. The Suicide Race was never far from his mind. He watched videos of past races over and over, studying them. “He’d always say, ‘I hope I go down the hill one day,’ but I never thought he would actually be in it,” Renteria said. Sometimes Andres was surprised he still had a girlfriend at all. “He told me that he thought I’d break up with him since all he did was ride,” Renteria said, smiling.

One day, when Andres had been working with Montana Pakootas for a while, he decided to tell him about his ultimate goal. Pakootas, who had run many Suicide Races and was crowned King of the Hill in 2004, was hosing down a horse at the time. In response to what Andres said, he turned and sprayed him in the face. That’s how the hazing began. Another time Pakootas dumped a boot full of water on Andres’s head. “You scared of getting wet? Because that water fucking feels like it just whips you in the face,” he said, referring to the dive into the Okanogan River. Andres was humiliated, but he kept showing up, kept taking shit.

When Boyd asked him to come along to Emerald Downs for an official racing event, Andres jumped at the chance. At the Downs, Andres awoke every morning at 4:45 to feed the racehorses, then got them ready for the day’s competitions. Francis Marchand and his brother Edward were there, helping care for Boyd’s horses, and they picked up Andres’s hazing where Pakootas had left off. “Edward wasn’t easy on me, that’s for sure,” Andres said. The eldest Marchand brother, known for his success in the extreme sport of Indian relay racing, in which a rider changes his mount mid-competition, seemed to notice every mistake Andres made while warming up the horses. “It’s almost like he waited for me to fuck up,” Andres said, “just so he could go off on me and drive me away.”

Andres persevered, and over margaritas at an Applebee’s one day, he felt bold enough to say it to Edward straight—what he wanted, what he was sure he was capable of. What did he need to do to go off the hill? Edward, who had placed second overall in the 2018 Suicide Race, shook his head in response.

“You don’t have what it takes,” he said.

“What’s it take?” Andres asked.

“It doesn’t matter. You don’t got it.”

Read the full story at The Atavist.

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Dear Reader,

This month’s books newsletter has one foot out the door. It exists somewhere in the uneasy space between deciding to get as far away from home as you possibly can, or barricading yourself inside. “Refuge is always a temporary construction,” Ryan Chapman writes in a review of two recent novels centered around surreal home invasion scenarios, in which outsiders come crashing into tranquil domestic spheres bearing strange tidings from the outside world. As an urbanite-turned-smalltown-homeowner, Chapman is on edge about his new isolation, aware of how easy it would be for an outsider to break the perimeter, and the two novels, Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World and Willem Frederik Hermans’ An Untouched House, are so unsettling that they have him “convinced barbarians would arrive at any moment and burn it to the ground.” But in the end “the house is just a house,” and Chapman identifies his newfound “ease with naked uncertainty” as more of a wisdom gained with age than a symptom of home ownership.

“Domestic spaces are often perceived as spaces of familiarity and intimacy,” Chia-Chia Lin says in an interview with Alex Madison about her debut novel The Unpassing, “but in my experience, the domestic space also contains unknown depths. The home is a place as wild as any in the world.” Lin talks about how home and wilderness tend to bleed into each other — the boundary between the two is not so clear cut. Moreover, it’s not easy for Lin’s immigrant characters to feel grounded by the easy dichotomy of home vs. everywhere else, or to take for granted their home’s permanence:

Throughout the entire novel, the mother keeps saying she wants to go back to Taiwan. I don’t think of her as a very self-aware character, and at some point I realized that she wouldn’t actually go back. She would leave Anchorage, but maybe not know where else to go. So she ends up in Seattle, a place that is ironically not so far from the place she wanted to leave. The mother has retreated, but she hasn’t returned home. It’s possible she realizes she doesn’t really have a home.

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The distinction between here and there, between outside and inside, collapses utterly in the worldview of the conspiracy theorists whom Anna Merlan writes about in Republic of Lies. In an interview with Rebecca McCarthy, Merlan says,

One thing that happened a lot within conspiracy communities that I was talking to was this belief that people were out there by themselves trying to investigate this great wrongdoing or that only a small group of people really cared. I saw a lot of conspiracy communities that got kind of torn apart by internal controversies and rivalries and accusations of being a plant and a shill and a government agent.

They feel isolated, but also infiltrated; alone yet attacked by something undetectable from far away. Altogether, a fairly accurate take on the modern condition. In a review of two recent books and an HBO show about the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, Linda Kinstler writes, “How does one recognize catastrophe, when it comes? … If it is an invisible catastrophe, how can you know when you are near it, and when you are far away?” Historian Kate Brown, author of Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, says we can only prepare for future calamity by cutting through the propaganda that is still hiding the calamities of the past. As Kinstler puts it, “we must understand that we are already living with our mistakes” if we are to avoid making new ones.

I started off talking about how this month’s books newsletter has one foot out the door, and I’ve ended up talking about Chernobyl? You can arrive just about anywhere, after you take that first step. For example, Lara Prior-Palmer’s casual google search for outdoor adventure led to her becoming the first female and youngest ever winner of the world’s longest, most dangerous horse race. Prior-Palmer tries to understand how it happened, what drove her to search out something so far away from home:

Why do humans put so much thought into some decisions yet plunge into others like penguins into freezing ocean? Are we met with a sudden urge to avoid the direct path to middle age and subsequent visions of growing old in a lonely world of cats? I certainly have a fear of falling into the routines of my elders — their eggshell worlds of dangers and do-nots. But maybe I had a simpler desire to settle something unsaid, away from home. Or a longing to be wild and snort about like a horse.

No single reason seems satisfactory. I want to hand myself over to something, but I can’t tell what creates that need to leap nor what decides its timing.

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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In December 2017, we knew it would soon be time to make a decision to euthanize our 8-year-old lhasa mutt. The best vet and all the medications in the world could no longer forestall a growing belly, heavy with the water his failing heart couldn’t purge from his system. We thought we’d get to choose when. Author Pam Houston thought the same thing about her 39-year-old horse, Roany.

As Houston recounts in this poignant essay at Outside, she and Roany had been together for 25 years. After a lengthy period of lameness, despite exceptional care, she knew it would soon be time for her friend, a horse known for his gentle disposition and a keen emotional intelligence. On the night before his scheduled departure, Roany made his own decision, but not without Pam by his side.

Roany was stoicism defined. As his condition worsened, he learned to pivot on his good front leg—and would, for an apple or a carrot or to sneak into the barn to get at the winter’s stash of alfalfa. He blew bubbles in his water bucket because it made me laugh, and he would sometimes even give himself a bird bath by splashing his still mighty head. I also knew that just because he could handle the discomfort didn’t mean he should. He had been so strong so recently, such a force of nature thundering back and forth across the pasture. There was no chance I was going to ask him to make another winter, but as long as he was hobbling to his golf course and chortling to me each morning, it seemed too early to end his life.

He was still standing when I got there. But the minute he saw me he went to the ground with relief. He curled up like a fawn, and I could hear that his breathing wasn’t right. Mike and I sat beside him and petted his handsome neck. Above us, stragglers from the Perseid meteor shower, which had peaked over the weekend, streaked the blackness.

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Lara Prior-Palmer | an excerpt adapted from Rough Magic: Riding the World’s Loneliest Horse Race | Catapult | May 2019 | 19 minutes (5,344 words)

It was May 2013 when I was cooped up in an attic in Austria, au pairing for a family with six Ferraris. They lived in a converted hotel in the jaws of an Alpine valley.

“Lara? Larah!”

Every morning the mother shrieked my name up the endless floors. “Time to feed the baby!”

I had taken the role to practice my German, but she only spoke in English. My jobs varied from sitting with the toddler to vacuuming up the dead skin that snowed from his father’s bottom.

The family never left their house except to get in their cars, which they kept tucked up in the garage. They viewed their valley through window frames as you would a photograph. So sedentary a lifestyle in such physical surroundings made me itch. At night I hatched plans to creep up the mountain and slide down the other side into Switzerland, yet the mother looked appalled when I so much as suggested running to the church and back.

By the time she sacked me a month later, my body was rusty and yearning for usage. I returned to the silent butterflies of an England on the brink of summer, seeking an experience unlike any I’d had before. In theory, this ought not to have been difficult. The most exciting moment in my eighteen years had been collecting chickens from Dorset on the train and wrapping them up in wine crates for Christmas presents.

The next month, June, marked a year since my release from high school. Fleeing the red bricks had been my dream for years — at fourteen, I had thought of myself as the finished article, ready to either have babies or break free (to where I couldn’t say, though for many years I had been fixated on becoming a burglar). Despite my conviction that more education would poison me like pesticide on a lush forest, I had remained in London until I passed my final exams. Strangely, the dissolution of structure thereafter unnerved me.

What was it about turning into an adult? The color drained from the days and life became a calendar. I floated in a debris of possible dates and implausible plans, with neither the funding nor the fervor to propel me onwards. Friends were busy with jobs or university, inclined to holiday on beaches rather than accompany me to Kyrgyzstan — a place I fantasized about. Meanwhile, I hadn’t heard back from my application to go organic farming in Wales, nor from the orphanage placement in Ethiopia. Dead-end jobs and equestrian competitions came and went. I moved through the month of my birthday without any fixed direction.

It was a warm city day when, for the umpteenth time, I cast my rod into the depths of Google as if the internet might contain my future. After opening and abandoning endless tabs, I brought up the page of a horse race.

The passing London Underground train shook the building as I leaned into the photograph — long-maned ponies streaming over green steppes, space poured wide and free — in Mongolia. The open-voweled sounds of the word matched the freedom the country conjured in my mind. I couldn’t place Mongolia in history, nor could I place it on the map. The magnolia tree outside the window had passed full bloom; its pink petals were turning brown on the pavement. For a while my head merged these two words — Mongolia, magnolia; Mongolia, magnolia.

*

I had spotted the Mongol Derby online many years before, but the entry fee was exorbitant (around $6,000 at the time) and I knew I’d never afford it, at least not until I was towing some dull job along in my thirties. Sadly, the price was now even higher, thirty riders were already signed on, and the entry deadline for the August race had passed. I moved the mouse to quit the page, blinking back to the ponies for a pause.

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Here was a truly peculiar invention: a 1,000-kilometer race on twenty-five wild ponies, a new steed for every 40-kilometer stage to ensure the endurance fell on the humans, not the horses. A Pony Express–style format that mimicked Chinggis Khan’s postal system but seemed from afar more like a perfect hodgepodge of Snakes and Ladders and the Tour de France on unknown bicycles. A competition they deemed “the world’s longest and toughest horse race.”

I moved the mouse back into the page and worked out there were seven weeks until the start gun. The entry portal seemed to still be open, despite the deadline having passed.

Mustn’t squish the mole that lives in my heart.

“Apply” — click.

*

Why do humans put so much thought into some decisions yet plunge into others like penguins into freezing ocean? Are we met with a sudden urge to avoid the direct path to middle age and subsequent visions of growing old in a lonely world of cats? I certainly have a fear of falling into the routines of my elders — their eggshell worlds of dangers and do-nots. But maybe I had a simpler desire to settle something unsaid, away from home. Or a longing to be wild and snort about like a horse.

No single reason seems satisfactory. I want to hand myself over to something, but I can’t tell what creates that need to leap nor what decides its timing.

In fact, maybe this was me at age eighteen: a bundle of urges, a series of plunges. I was loud and quick. I thrived on being the loser in the anecdotes I recounted — caught without a ticket on the Underground, shouted at unjustly by an anxious teacher. I bent the world this way and that — schlepping barefoot through London, to school in my pajamas, where I threw pens in class and blurted my frankest thoughts. What, besides a diagnosis of attention seeking, did any of this point to? I couldn’t yet tell.

If the fashion in which I applied to and signed on for the Mongol Derby was characteristically thoughtless, the event itself would, perversely, leave me deep in thought. Grasses and a blue-domed sky. Bodies and wind and rain and pain. Wide, open prairies, and twenty-five ponies saying, Who are you? and Who are we?

By the time I took the return planes to London, words were tumbling out of me. In the writing I could mull the matter over, as a cow ruminates her grass. We had been given ten days to ride twenty-five semiwild ponies a long way around Mongolia. Why the need to go all that way and do such a thing?

*

I am telling a story about myself. There’s a British disease called modesty, which nearly stops me from sharing what I’ve written. After all, this is about an event that seemed to go well. Somehow, implausibly, against all the odds, I won a race labeled the longest and toughest in the world — a race I’d entered on a whim — and became the youngest person and first female ever to have done so. We read of sporting victories in the newspapers, but what about all we cannot see? It’s easy to forget the thudded moments of hopelessness involved in a journey, one’s deepest difficulties slowly made clear.

*

“She is not going to Mongolia, Julia! Julia, do you hear me?”

My father had discovered my plan to ride in the world’s longest horse race and was insistent I wouldn’t go. I listened from the next room as he bellowed at Mum in the kitchen.

“It’s too” — his foot stomped the floor — “opportunistic!”

Dad had encouraged opportunism in the past, but when it came to horses, he was keen for me to steer clear. He often told people how he’d made it a condition of marriage that my mother give up horse riding. Years after the summer of the Derby, I would overhear him shouting at her once more. “Lara’s been to Stanford University, Julia. I am not having her riding horses.”

My father, Simon, is a large-foreheaded man with Victorian characteristics, who grew up alongside his horse-mad sister, Lucinda. He is anti-riding, anti-horses: waste of time, waste of money (and please don’t talk about them at mealtimes). Aunt Lucinda’s Olympic riding career had coincided with their father going into overdraft, while Dad worked long hours in the City. The story of him tying his sister to the oak tree when they were little circulates frequently in the family.

“Julia, are you listening?” I heard him move closer to Mum at the sink.

Lodged in the thicket of my father’s anger, we would often find ourselves flapping with no clear way out. Mum quietly carried on with the washing up. If my father is a man who speaks clearly and interrupts often, my mother can be the catatonic opposite.

“Oh, I like prattling in the background,” she says whenever I tell her she’s mumbling, though she once followed up by saying, “I think I need to go on an assertiveness course.”

Mum is generally taken with the idea of horses (my older brothers used to jest that she married Dad just to get closer to his sister) and had been all wide-eyed when I first mentioned the Mongol Derby to her. Although my father’s fury had me bracing myself, it also summoned a sense of victory, since his anger seemed to speak from a powerlessness. Simon had no way of preventing me from going to Mongolia.

*

It seemed you needed to know how to ride to do this race, but the type of riding you did — the particular discipline — didn’t matter. I couldn’t say I myself had grown up riding — my parents did not ride, nor did my three brothers. Although Aunt Lucinda set me up with lessons when I pleaded for them aged seven, I lived and went to school in the city so horses were confined to Saturdays. More recently I’d been able to try Lucinda’s sport, eventing, but that only required riding for a mere hour or two at a time. A month after my nineteenth birthday, I would arrive in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, to discover that half the Derby competitors were experienced in endurance, which involved riding up to 160 kilometers from dawn until dusk. I had never even heard of such a sport.

*

One of my father’s fears had always been that I might turn out to be a horsewoman like his sister. Unfortunately for him, by my teenage years I sneezed and itched when around the creatures — symptoms of uncontainable excitement rather than an allergy — and could possibly be classified as a pony girl: I dreamed of saucy centaurs. I’d once hallucinated, while sober, an azure blue horse cantering towards me. I was truly taken with the romance of those rolling English parklands where my aunt laid down her horse histories.

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Yet my equestrian imagination was tethered to my urban home, a hearty part of me city-slick, London-sly. My schoolfriends and I grew up fast in the capital, leaping across it alone on the Tube and pacing its streets with elastic courage. But I felt empty in the concrete nowheres. Truly, I only loved the city for letting me leave — on Fridays, we eased our way out through darkened traffic jams, arriving centuries later in the village of Appleshaw.

Appleshaw floats in a shallow valley where the tameness of Hampshire stops and the wilds of Wiltshire begin. Weekends there sent me out to make mud-balls with my brothers, walk miles without purpose, and swim away from time. The city basin, tasked with curating our futures, drew us back every Sunday night. My brothers and I slotted into the week as dirty plates do into a dishwasher. The routine days crawled by until the eventual swing back to Appleshaw on Friday, holy Friday.

In this way, privilege had us always on the move, and it shaped me — an in-betweener ungrounded, too spacey for London, too colorful for the country, probably suspended in particles above some motorway between the two. Certainly the M3 has more of me than most places do.

*

Within a week of my application, Katy, the Mongol Derby organizer, returned from plotting the course on the steppe and sent me an acceptance email. I might’ve been gleeful were it not for the phenomenal entry fee. She said most riders had entered the previous year with sponsorship secured. For several nights, I prepared to let the dream decay with the remaining magnolia leaves.

There’s no knowing why Katy gave me 50 percent off when I asked for a discount, nor why she granted another $650 off when I couldn’t afford the halved amount. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I had name-dropped my aunt, Lucinda Green, on my application — Katy turned out to be a “bit of a fan.” Or perhaps it was my opening sentence: I am extremely competitive and want to become the youngest (am 18) person to finish.

I trotted down to the bank with my head held delusionally high and poured out a lifelong collection of pennies from my checkered plastic pig, hoping they would top up my balance to near enough the asked-for price. Prior to that, I had refused to spend any of my savings, and it’s endearing to me now that I was willing to hand all of it over for a horse race I might not last very long in.

I was expecting quite the holiday — a green steppe stuffed full of feisty ponies, with hunky riders from all over the world. One to trump the sightseeing and sunbathing holidays I was used to. Earlier that year I had wound my way through India, stopping at temples highlighted by a Lonely Planet guidebook, viewing the world through a manicured prism as any good tourist does — but my eyes had run out of space. By the time I applied for the Derby, I was no longer keen on touring the world’s buildings with awestruck stares. My thighs were strong and my heart was raw, yearning for my own motion.

*

“You won’t enjoy it.”

I held my tongue.

“Sure,” the voice on the telephone continued, “it’s phenomenal, but the accidents last year were horrific. Google them.”

It was high July when I rang Lucy, a past competitor. Down the line came factual splatter: broken ribs, amputated finger, cracked pelvises, punctured lung, torn ligaments, broken collarbones. On she went as I watched a ladybird crawl up the lamp at my side: bucking ponies, fraying girths, sicknesses, extreme dehydration, getting lost, not fun, don’t expect fun.

I couldn’t just slump there in that dusty Appleshaw chair and roll my eyes. Mongolia was coming for me in a month.

How many riders finished the race during her year?

“I think thirty-five of us started. . . . Seventeen finished.”

I thanked her and said goodbye, feeling my wrist wilt as I dropped the phone back onto the receiver. I wanted to pull out of the race. Summer had swallowed its charm.

In the kitchen I told my older brother Arthur the news as he traipsed on by.

“Oh my.” He shivered and dashed upstairs, relieved not to be me.

*

I could not pull out of the race — I had paid for it and written letters asking for charitable donations in the name of it — so I let the terror energize me instead. Asked afterwards if I would dare attempt the race again, I’d reply that I could never again be scared enough to do so. The supernatural power of fearing the unknown stunned me into a state of readiness. With four weeks to go, I launched my attack.

Although my application claimed I’d been riding five horses a day, this was fiction. I had been au pairing the toddler in Austria.

“Never too late,” declared Mum as she poured herself another cup of tea.

I volunteered at the local stud, where I began riding three or four horses a day. I also started playing tennis again and running farther than usual. It is a horse’s habit to pace about when she feels a storm approaching. Winding herself up seems to ready her for the coming saga. Now that I’ve forgotten the accompanying terror, I long for the manic flurry of those July days, hopping from horse to horse as I edged towards the race. The whole affair indulged my existence.

Bartramia, a small and racy gray, was the closest creature to a Mongolian pony I could find at the stud. I rode her through all the valleys — even rode her bareback once. Her canter quickened as my calves clung to her full-moon tummy, my boots ripping through the knee-high ragwort. Onwards she flew, a wood ahead, no sign of slowing.

“Woah!” I shouted into the wind at her ears — could I bear this for 1,000 kilometers? “Woah now!”

At the last second she jinked left, braking on the turn as my chest jolted over her shoulders, leaving me hanging on with my thighs as she picked up her gallop again, on up the hill along the rim of the woods.

This was the terrible thrill. Come August I would encounter it atop twenty-five wilder ponies, free of the tightly bound English fields. Our Mongolian ponies would be the descendants of Genghis Khan’s famed Takhi horses, who shouldered his empire’s postal system from the thirteenth century onwards. Their speed allowed letters from Siberia to arrive in Poland within twelve days, though our ride wouldn’t go beyond the border of Mongolia’s green oasis — a wide island surrounded by the Gobi Desert to the south, the barren Altai Mountains to the west, and the freezing wastelands of Siberia on the northern border with Russia.

I had begun to notice how the idea of Mongolia made many a Brit go quiet. I don’t think the reason is Genghis Khan as much as the void in our history. Where British culture has not forced its influence, we tread carefully, sensing a different lay of the land. England was crafted by roads and fields, flooded with a web of happenings with which I was familiar. The steppe would strip all this away.

*

The race was set to begin on August 4. In the first week of July, the organizers sent me a month-by-month “Your Year of the Derby” calendar. They had sent this to everyone else at the beginning of the year, since they had applied on time. We were advised to assemble our gear in February, get vaccinated in April, commence language-learning in May, use July to visit relatives and update our wills, and devote the entire year to training.

Maggie, an endurance-riding specialist, had apparently been sending handouts on fitness, navigation, horse pacing, and hydration. “You’ve missed those now and it’s too late for you to be training anyway. You can’t get fitter in the final two weeks,” she stated on the telephone. I gulped and clung closer to the daft resistance within me.

The month-by-month calendar from the organizers read: You could do all your preparation in July if you have unusually low blood pressure — no? Thought not.

I do happen to have low blood pressure, and a low heart rate. Perhaps that would help. When I was small and we measured our vital signs in class, Mrs. Bleakley said my results meant either I was an athlete, or I was nearly dead, or I couldn’t count. Likely the latter — despite being a decade older when I entered the race, I still struggled with numbers and time.

July rolled by. I researched all the race’s sore statistics and found that Lucy was right. Every year just over half the field made it to the finish. No woman had ever won the Derby, nor had a Briton. South Africans tended to triumph. The youngest person ever to cross the finish line had been twenty-three.

*

Beneath the plane window the steppe folded in green waves. As we descended, white tents appeared at valley mouths, met by colorful tin-roofed houses flowing down the gullies towards gray high-rises. The plane let me out in Ulaanbaatar, 8,000 kilometers away from home.

Through the taxi glass I saw fragments of a city. Men in big coats curled around fires, denim-clad figures spilled into the traffic. Small-windowed blocks stood alongside nomads’ tents at the outskirts; farther in, Soviet architecture leaned into slicker glass structures. By now there was no sign of the steppe. The only hint of horses rested on the tögrög — the Mongolian currency — that I handed to the taxi driver: wild-maned ponies cantered off the banknote edges.

*

At four the next morning I sat sleepless in a hotel room among bloated white pillows. Delving into my suitcase, I pulled out a collection of tangled ropes and confused penknives that had spent their lives dormant in my brothers’ drawers. There was also a copy of The Tempest, which I had taken no interest in at school, but after leaving found myself diving into for comfort. Shakespeare speaks another language, yet I never needed to know the whole meaning to be moved by the sounds — Caliban’s “I cried to dream again” moves me to real tears.

My eleven-year-old self, on the other hand, did not spare the play a thought — I was pursuing real commotion. There was nothing like the sound of Mr. Thompson’s angry voice soaring. “Get out,” he’d shout, when he caught me whisper-giggling. “I said, ‘Get. Out.’” In the wasteland of the corridor I would lean against the wall while the pink in my cheeks faded, unaware that in the play I’d left on my desk were a series of rebellions I might have admired.

Now I lay on the floor of that sublimely square hotel room ripping out soliloquies and gluing them into my flimsy Winnie-the-Pooh notebook. I imagined they’d live out the race in my backpack and might lift me out of any lows. U just have to get through the pain with . . . poetry, Mum had written in an email that midnight, British Time.

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.

*

The following morning, competitors met for the first time. Stuffed into a corporate room in the city, ours was a silence of not quite wanting to begin. Horses seem to do these things better. On meeting, they amble and sniff bottoms. Sometimes they squeal.

In the 1930s, John Steinbeck embarked on a scientific research trip to the Sea of Cortez. Reflecting on his fellow crew members, he wrote, “None of us was possessed of the curious boredom within ourselves which makes adventurers or bridge players.” Were we a handful of those people who cannot sit still? Or were we all seeking the great death? I believe we sought some kind of oblivion. The characters in The Tempest leap from their sinking ship in a “fever of the mad.”

Maybe we desired a heroic proving. I was aware there were people in the world who classified themselves as adventurers, inhabiting the realm of the extreme, dog-panting for epics and gagging for photos in Gore-Tex. I didn’t know how many were here, or whether I was about to become one. The “longest, toughest” superlative had surely appealed to many, though I’ve conveniently erased from memory whether or not it had been a draw for me personally. What would my eleven-year-old self think of me buying into such a constructed adventure?

*

As the hello-how-are-yous of the crew piled onto one another, I spotted Maggie, the race steward, at the head of the room under mattresses of curly red hair. In a phone conversation two weeks prior, she’d told me that I “frankly” didn’t sound prepared. She was not to take me seriously until the finish line, and even then her eyes would search me with the same unconvinced look, a shock that I’d ever made it beyond the borders of my mother’s vegetable patch.

The day was made up of a series of briefings on the race. The veterinarians explained horses’ hydration levels, gut sounds, lameness protocol, and heart rates. Pushing horses too hard would lead to elevated rates. The rules imposed a two-hour penalty or race expulsion if a horse’s heart rate remained above 64 beats per minute for a period longer than forty-five minutes after the end of each leg.

“Look — after — your — horse,” concluded the Scottish vet.

It seemed simple enough, though it hadn’t crossed my mind you could take a horse’s heart rate, let alone how four hours’ exercise might change that rate.

During a break, the paramedic handed out medical forms. I didn’t meet his gaze as I handed the paper back to him, uneasy about its incompleteness. Aunt Lucinda is a stickler for eye contact. If I manage to look her in the eye when she’s telling me off, she congratulates me later (such is her stick-and-carrot formula), but I find focusing difficult.

“I haven’t had a rabies vaccine. I’m sorry. I’m not sure what these other ones are.”

His mouth opened. Apparently the steppe was teeming with rabid dogs. I’d not had time for the recommended vaccinations before departure.

“Not even hepatitis A?”

Was that a sexually transmitted disease? I slunk away.

Bureaucracy flapped on like a beached fish — riders weighed, papers signed, headshots taken. By the lunchtime talk, “Rules of the Race,” the room understood itself a little better. The Derby (they went on) was an unsupported one-stage race, but riding would be limited to the hours between 7 a.m. and 8:30 p.m., outside of which we’d be penalized. Positions were policed by rider satellite trackers, which would also allow people to follow the race on the internet. There was no set route, only twenty-five obligatory horse-changing stations, where we would choose our next steeds. Those stations changed every year, and the course had been kept secret until today, when we were handed map books with wiggly red lines on each page.

By the time Maggie and Katy, the organizer who discounted my entry fee, leaned back in their armchairs and opened the floor for questions, I had grown comfortable enough in my seat to share some qualms. I raised an arm and waited.

“Will anyone be waking us up in the mornings?”

My voice was meek, as if I’d emerged from a breathless swim in a chlorine pool. These voices — the chlorine edition is just one — bring themselves up from my internal cellar and pour forth, unfiltered.

The room cackled more with amazement than amusement. They didn’t know my alarm clock was an untrustable brand of wristwatch from a French supermarket. The panel, including Maggie, barely answered. “One fool can ask more questions than ten wise men can answer” — so says a Mongolian proverb.

My tongue asked the next question without me. “If you’re with a partner and one of you falls, can you both ride one horse?” Heads swung around. I vacated my face as though my words weren’t intentional. I wanted to feel out the limits of this strange race. The panel admitted to having no rule against my proposition. As usual, I could sense everyone else in the room but had no grasp of myself — not of how I appeared, nor of what I might do next. Pixie mode is automatic, a relic from school, released to tickle any uptight armpits in a room. She was born, this pixie inside me, in response to an atmosphere of seriousness.

On she went, wondering aloud, “So you could do the whole thing in a truck? With each of the twenty-five ponies successively loaded into the boot?”

Frowns met frowns, a few stragglers laughing. In this way, the beginning quickly slipped from my control. That the great race was a bit ridiculous — that we were in danger of forgetting this — was the idea hiding behind my questions, but those questions probably just prompted other riders to decide I was delusional. Never mind. The following day would cast us into the grasslands.

*

We move to the start line, tensed upon our horses, talking at their ears. There are stories of carnage at past race starts — ponies celebrating the gathering by flinging their backs and disposing of their riders. The pony I’m on doesn’t seem the type for such theatrics. He walks in a trance, his tail swishing against space, sights of grass. So much to eat, so little time. Is that what they all think? He sighs.

Ahead on the plain a blue banner hangs from leaning stumps: WELCOME BRAVE RIDERS. It’s a brittle sight. I am not brave, am actually very jittery — scared of the dark in the yard at home, always creeping through it in the gait of a chicken. Then again, I’m tired of the hype. Even here on the start line, I only half believe the stories about the race being so awful. A part of me is looking back up at the world from its underbelly, saying Come along, don’t be scared, there’s nothing down here, like Dad used to say from the cellar, even if it was full of deadly winter frogs.

*

We congregate around a red-robed lama, or “high priest,” who sits cross-legged on the grass. When he begins chanting a blessing for our journey, we try to hold the ponies still but they’re fidgeting in reaction to our nerves. Todd is slurping water at my side. Bubbles slip up the plastic tube from his backpack to his mouth. He radiates the smell of last night’s beer. Around us are the other twenty-nine riders. I feel the steppe inspect us: a curious bunch, a motley crowd, a sea of legs dropping from horse tummies. In one of her text messages, Aunt Lucinda worried that my long legs would drag on the ground from a Mongolian pony. She suggested I purchase roller skates to protect my feet.

My aunt and I did not part on the best of terms. The day before she went to Austria, I decided to rub some sweat off her horse’s tummy while she was near his head, which upset him enough to bite her boob. She got cross. I think she was in large amounts of boob-specific pain. I felt bad. In Ulaanbaatar, I received a wordless email from her, with a photo of a pink-and-purple breast in the attachment. The subject line instructed me not to share it with anyone else.

Some minutes into the chant, my gray pony begins dancing his hooves. A giggle ricochets down my body. I turn him away and see Matthias splatted out on the ground. Above him stands his confused pony — What little effort, for such results. The lama in red chants on, unaware. To the rescue strides the British doctor assigned to monitor competitors. He picks his way through the ponies, moving to the glory of his bristling beard, and leans down to inspect the wilted Matthias, while the Scottish head vet marches in to catch the loose pony. It kicks him. He rebounds with a pained vowel, muffling his whelp so as not to interrupt the lama.

Twelve minutes of chanting quietens us, though most riders don’t know quite what has been said — as far as I’m aware, none of us understands Tibetan. I have a verdant urge to explode into the plains. There’s an umbrella planted at an angle ahead, absurd in the midmorning heat. If ultra-trained Matthias is already on the ground, I’ve no hope of making it beyond the horizon line. So I’ll be the first past that umbrella and at least begin the race with a win.

“Shall we give o’er and drown?” says the Boatswain in The Tempest. “Have you a mind to sink?”

10 a.m.

Bang.

* * *

Lara Prior-Palmer was born in London in 1994. She studied conceptual history and Persian at Stanford University. In 2013, she competed in the 1,000-kilometer Mongol Derby in Mongolia, sometimes described as the world’s toughest and longest horse race, and became the first woman to win the race, and the youngest person ever to finish. Rough Magic is her first book.

Longreads Editor: Dana Snitzky

The world still can’t stand seeing women’s ambition, women’s independence, women’s sexuality, or women’s pain. For Deadspin, journalist Jessica Camille Aguirre writes about an emerging contingent of professional female bronco-riders who are changing the structure of rodeo. Women aren’t new to the sport. They’ve been riding angry horses for over a century. What’s new is the way Daryl and Michelle McElroy, of the Texas Bronc Riders Association, have been creating tours and sanctioned events for women to compete in. “Ever since 1929, when a 32-year-old bronc rider named Bonnie McCarroll was thrown from her horse during a rodeo in Oregon and died in the hospital eight days later,” Aguirre writes, “women’s saddle bronc riding has been more or less wiped from the rodeo event roster.”

But McCarroll’s death prompted the rodeo where she rode, the Pendleton Round-Up, to cancel women’s bronc riding, and other rodeos followed. The Rodeo Association of America formed the same year, and since there were no women rodeo producers, there were also no women in the organization. The RAA did not include women in its published standings, or print photos of women in the finalist shots in its magazine. In 1931, rodeos started hosting sponsor girls, who led parades and were judged on their attractiveness instead of their athleticism. A decade later, Gene Autry started a rodeo company and from then on, none of his rodeos hosted any competitions for cowgirls at all. Deciding that they had better do something or watch themselves be relegated to beauty pageants, women started their own organization, which put together some all-girl rodeos and managed to get barrel racing back on the roster at the larger rodeos.

Since then, women have competed publicly in nearly every sport, including ones that openly involve physical peril. The first woman climbed Mount Everest in 1975; the first woman bullfighter to become a full Matador de Toros in Spain did so in 1996; women’s boxing was included in the 2012 Olympics. It has become passé to fête the achievements of women athletes as though they were interesting only by virtue of their having been accomplished by women, but there is still something liberating about watching women conspicuously demonstrate that they are free to make use of their own bodies however they please, danger or no. In a sense, though, reviving women’s rodeo bronc riding is less of a trailblazing move than it is a throwback to a model of gender roles that prevailed during a certain American moment and that has been dimmed by the passage of time. Eight years before McCarroll was fatally thrown from her horse at the Pendleton Round-Up, an author named Charles Wellington Furlong wrote about the cowboys and cowgirls who rode there, noting that, “few queens have vouchsafed to occupy thrones less secure than that supreme one offered by the parliament of the Round-Up each year—the world championship saddle of the cowgirls’ bucking contest.” By less secure he didn’t mean at risk of being cancelled. He meant that bucking horses buck.

After the video of Wimberly’s bad ride starting circulating and the same old tropes that shut down women’s saddle bronc riding the first time starting appearing again, Wimberly thought, what the hell, flaunt the hurt. Being up front about the injuries and danger, and nevertheless still pursuing glory, would show everyone what women were capable of and what the sport was about. “The way I see it, it doesn’t show the weakness of women, it shows our strength,” Wimberly told the RIDE TV camera crew. There was no reason to hide the hurdles women faced—if anything, they were tougher for it. “When you can get dragged across the arena on your head, get a bad concussion, get your feet nearly jerked from your leg, and get up from that, and stand up, wave to the crowd, walk off—okay, I might have limped a little—to me, that’s impressive.”

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