Our family spends a lot of time on the road. Lots of it. We drive to horse farms and skating rinks and sometimes both in the same trip. If we time things poorly and hit traffic it can take an hour to get from our house to Millcreek Farm.
It is, when viewed from a certain mood, a crazy thing to do as often as we do it. There are plenty of days when it’s a burden for all of us. It would seem easy to conclude that it’s just not worth it.
But that’s not where I’ve come out. Oddly enough it was a story about a hockey player that crystallized my thinking. It is, I’ll warn you, a tragic tale. Derek Boogaard was an enforcer, the sort of player whose role in the National Hockey League involves a lot of fighting. That led to injuries, which in turn led to the use of the painkillers that ultimately contributed to his death.
Nearly five years ago the New York Times ran a three-part investigative series on Boogaard. The articles covered his entire life, beginning with his childhood in Saskatchewan. Early in the first piece we learn about the extensive travel involved in youth hockey, which the Times describes as “a perpetual series of long drives across dark and icy landscapes.”
Immediately after that we hear from Boogaard himself. He had been keeping a journal, which was discovered after his death, and the Times story included some excerpts. Here, for me, is the payoff: “I think the best part of playing hockey for ages 3 until 16 was the little road trips with dad.”
That’s a little something that ought to give you pause if you happen to be a parent driving your children all over the place. This was a kid who was chasing a dream, and who later realized that dream. He looked back on it all and what did he conclude? Spending time with his dad was the best part.
What you think is the main event might well not be. In your mind you’re taking your son to play hockey. In his mind he’s spending time with his dad. Or at least that’s how it might look in the rear-view mirror. Talk about life being about the journey rather than the destination.
Taken one by one many of our drives are far from the best part of anything. Sometimes, I confess, I might not be in the greatest mood. Occasionally—and you’ll just have to trust me on this—one of my passengers might not be having the best day. Sometimes none of us feels like saying much of anything. On those days we’ll just drive along listening to the radio, or even occasionally to nothing but the hum of the car.
Other days are good days not so much because of anything extraordinary that happens, but because they’re a part of the routine, part of the glue that holds us together, the sort of thing that we’ll think back to decades from now when we’re playing “remember when.” We’ll talk, but not about much of anything at all, stuff like the mundane happenings at the barn or school. If we’re headed west to Stonewall Farm we’ve probably picked up pony jockey extraordinaire Lexi Miller, who brings her own brand of entertaining cleverness to the mix.
Those trips usually involve several rounds of the “pony guessing game,” an equine version of 20 questions that tends to begin with queries about size and color and tends to culminate with questions about who has ridden the pony under what circumstances. I’m not very good at the pony guessing game.
And then there are those days when the stars align, when we’re all in a good mood and somebody has something bigger on her mind. The right sort of question leads to the right sort of answer and suddenly we’re deeply engrossed in conversation. Before we know it we’re at our destination. Mostly it’s just understood, but sometimes one of us will say it out loud: That was a good conversation.
It might have been about college, it might have been about careers, it might have been about something that came up at school. Whatever it was, we were all engaged. We were thinking, we were listening to one another, and there’s a very good chance that I used some variation of the phrase “I don’t know” an awful lot. (This is partly because I often don’t know. It’s also part of an effort to model the idea that anyone who claims to have all the answers, or speaks as if he does, is not to be trusted.)
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I’m not alone in finding that time in cars will sometimes create this sort of magic. I’ve spoken to lots of parents who have experienced the same thing. There’s something about being together in an enclosed space with nowhere else to go, about facing in the same direction rather than toward one another, about whatever else it might be, that fosters meaningful conversation.
In the tightrope walk that is parenthood—where words don’t always come out the way you’d like, and what you meant to say is not always what gets heard—it’s nice to have a space where talking just happens rather than being forced. Ours may not be a family that spends a lot of time together around the dinner table, but we get the same sort of connection while traveling down the highway.
This past spring was a season of highs and lows for us. Audrey had a tough first show on her new horse Legado (barn name “Alex,” unofficial barn name “The Dark Lord of Show Jumping”). But she didn’t get discouraged and pushed through it to have a terrific second show.
Ada, meanwhile, has been battling a nagging injury that’s progressed to the point where her doctor ordered her out of the saddle for what’s going to end up being at least two months. It’s by far the longest she’s been off a horse since she started riding. That’s some tough medicine to swallow.
It has also meant that, for the first time in over a decade, I’ve been making regular trips to the barn without Ada. Audrey and I have had a perfectly fine time ourselves, and the two of us represent the family combination most likely to conclude that listening to a baseball game is a good idea. We have more than made it work, and there’s a lot to be said for one-on-one time.
But there’s a bittersweet backdrop. Ada just got her learner’s permit, which means a driver’s license is not far off. Soon enough I will no longer be an essential part of the mix. Ada, Audrey, and Laura will start to create a different set of driving memories, on their own. That’s as it should be, of course, and I will welcome the extra time. But I will miss everything else. The conversation, the simple fact of having a daughter in the passenger seat.
I’m going to tell you about a recent drive in a moment. But first I’m going to tell you about a song.
We’re in the habit of listening to music on our trips to and from the barn. Because the girls were too young to have musical tastes of their own when our journey with horses began, I was the one who made the playlist. Of course, I eventually lost my status as the only person in the car with musical preferences. These days music coming from my iPhone is the exception.
But I still hold one key piece of territory: the drive on horse show mornings. It’s a good luck ritual of sorts. We shuffle out to the car, half-awake, at some too-early hour. It’s understood that I will be the one pressing “play.” And while I won’t share the secrets of our entire playlist, I will tell you that it always starts the same way, with Old Crow Medicine Show’s “Wagon Wheel.”
It’s a song built around some discarded Bob Dylan lyrics, which were themselves rooted in 1940s blues. (It’s also, I learned while writing this, a song that Darius Rucker later made popular.) It has nothing to do with horses, but a lot to do with traveling, and it somehow just seems to fit.
You know how certain songs take on a lot of meaning? How they can transport you back to a specific moment, or a time in your life? A first date, say, or maybe a specific summer in your youth How there’s that expression, “They’re playing our song?”
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Wagon Wheel is our song. It’s been a cornerstone of our drives from nearly the beginning. For me it has come to signify our family’s entire experience in the horse world, and thus not a small part of my life. If anybody cares to honor my request they’ll play it at my funeral.
Not so long ago we got in the car to drive to Millcreek Farm for the Wednesday night group lesson. Ada joined us on a weeknight for the first time since she’d been ordered to rest. We were all in a good mood, and there was very much a “we’ve got the band back together!” vibe in the air as we pulled out of the driveway.
Somehow or other the decree came down that I could choose the music. On non-horse show days that means dipping into a playlist that has well over a hundred songs on it. I plugged in my phone and hit “shuffle.”
I’m going to say that part again so you don’t just glide past it. I hit “shuffle.” As in, “play the tracks in this playlist in a random order.” As in, there was a less than 1 percent chance that any one song from the playlist would be first.
And of course you know exactly what’s coming next. The first song? A live version of Wagon Wheel. Our song.
It was perfect. There might even have been some singing along. If you’ve never seen a grown man struggle to fight back tears made of sentimentality and nostalgia and just plain old happiness to be alive and able to experience a moment, well, you missed a chance.
We’re not quite done. Audrey rode in the lesson, and our trainer Serah Vogus, knowing exactly what the occasion called for, summoned Ada to join her in the ring as her assistant trainer. Afterward, as we often do on Wednesday nights, a group went out for dinner. It was a good dinner. Not the momentous sort, but one of those that’s part of the routine, the glue, the kind we’ll think back to when we’re playing “remember when.”
When we got in the car to head home I plugged in my phone and hit play so we could pick up where we had left off. Still shuffling, still a less than 1 percent chance that any one song would be next. There were a few seconds left in the song that had been playing when we arrived at the farm.
We pulled out of the parking lot onto the road. The song ended, and there was a pause. And then: a strumming guitar, followed a few bars later by a fiddle. You might know the song I’m talking about. The album version of Wagon Wheel. The one that kicks off the horse show playlist. Our song. Lightning striking twice.
It was one of those drives that I won’t forget.
Chad Oldfather is the blogging COTH Horse Dad. He’s the non-horsey father of two junior hunter/jumper/equitation riders, and he’s going to take readers along on his horse show-parenting journey. By day, he’s a law professor in Wisconsin, but on weekends and evenings, he can be found, laptop in hand, ringside at a lesson or show. Read his first blog, “My Soul For An Equitation Horse” to get to know him.
