DRESSAGE

OUTSIDE

THE BOX

The gelding’s eyes are on the fenceless expanse of the Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Refuge, his nostrils are flared smelling freedom, and he wants to go. At his back, the Big Horn Mountains curve west and north to meet the Pryors of Montana, snuggling around one corner of the Big Horn Basin. Here, herds of wild horses forage along the occasional creek, competing with bighorn sheep and deer, falling prey to mountain lions and wolves. Blizzards howl down the slopes. Heat bakes the land into powder and wide open spaces beckon.

Not the place where you would expect to find riders learning the dressage basics and doing so in a way that is both innovative and almost as old as the mountains surrounding them. “Dressage Outside the Box,” Barbie Bell calls it. This event rider turned dressage instructor has her students out on a cross-country course, one carved from fifty acres of sagebrush spotted with age-scarred cottonwoods, working on natural footing created by volcanic ash. This sandy soil, when dry, provides an ideal cushion for horses hooves as they leg yield from one clump of sagebrush to another or change leads on a twenty-meter circle around the downed mass of a cottonwood.

“I wish I had brought my horse today,” says a spectator, Marilyn Weaver, president of the local USDF GMO, the Heart Mountain Dressage Club, in the not-so-nearby (nothing is close) town of Cody, Wyoming. “This is wonderful.

“Impulsion is never a problem,” Barbie says, and I believed her. Especially not with a brisk breeze blowing and the temperature in the twenties. As we speak, a herd of mule deer moved past us, not hurrying, habituated to both horses and riders. A rare albino trails this group. Lou Kennedy, owner of the host Crooked Creek Ranch comments, “We had an albino buck, but he disappeared. Someone poached him. Or it might have been a mountain lion. Hard to tell.”

The deer disappear, and we turn back to dressage issues. “Control is the big thing,” Barbie says. Which brings us to the subject of submission. “It’s all well and good to have obedience in the dressage ring with no distractions, but here we teach the horse to really listen to his rider.”

Or, sometimes, not. “I’ll stop a rider and send her back for a stronger bit,” Barbie says. “Safety has to come first, and the horse isn’t learning anything if he’s running away.”

“Amen,” someone says. Probably, me.

As a case in point, on the day of my visit, she stopped the ride to exchange a snaffle for a pelham on a horse who had been charging through the aids, ears pricked straight forward, attention everywhere but on his rider. The effect was salutary, the horse coming back to hand, reminded, if forcibly, that life is not entirely fun, that his rider was the team director. In the new bit he did a fairly decent Training Level dressage test outside the box, still a little too much forward, tense and stiff with resistances, but under control.

Out here, as Barbie says, the barriers are gone. Both horse and rider think and see “forward” as the only way to be. They have space to learn balance without the constant imposition of ten meter turns. If it takes sixty meters or a mile to fall into a rhythmic and balanced trot … that’s fine. Once the horse and rider combination has it, they’re likely to find it again, their next transition will be improved, and they’ll discover it progressively easier to acquire balance and rhythm and maintain it.

There are disadvantages to Dressage Outside the Box. The most obvious and, perhaps, the reason more instructors do not teach dressage on the cross-country field, is the issue of control … keeping the horse’s attention focused on the rider. Then, there’s relaxation, something counterintuitive to a horse in the open. The rider, too, faces challenges on a freely moving horse when the gaits get bigger. Instinctively, the rider moves forward, rising over the knees in a cross-country position, tightening the leg, muddying the aids, and losing whatever front-to-back connection he or she might have enjoyed.

It’s not easy teaching in this situation. Barbie does it from horseback or a four-wheeler, keeping riders and horses grouped except when doing individual “tests,” sending them from point to point, pausing to work with individuals in each of several places on the course where the terrain allows large circles.

“I train both inside the box and outside,” Barbie says, “depending upon the needs of my students and their riding levels.” And their needs are diverse since she teaches a mix of endurance riders, novice-level eventers, western horsemen wanting to see what this English thing is all about, Pony Clubbers, hunters, and women competing at Training and First Level in dressage. With few exceptions, they consider their outings as treats. “I actually enjoy arena work after a day out,” says rider Sara Commons. “Translating what I’ve learned outside the box, seeing how much of the feeling I can keep.”

“For me, the first dressage ride outside the box was a eureka thing,” Lou Kennedy tells me. “I’ve been riding most of my life and have tried just about everything, but here … in my own back yard … I realized for the first time at a gut level just where dressage fits into the training of every horse no matter what the discipline.”

The deer had long since disappeared when we left the cross-country course. The wind was at our backs, sending clouds skittering across the flat tops of the Big Horns, raising snow plumes in the Pryors. Somewhere from the Wild Horse Range to the north, a scream came down the wind. A mare threw up her head and answered, and the horses all lengthened their strides, trotting toward home.