Taking the Reins

Every summer at a Kentucky horse camp, it's a battle of wills -- between wild mustangs and the kids who try to tame them.

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Free Spirited

"C'mere, Dakota." Fifteen-year-old Brandon Ridley held out his hand to a scruffy bay gelding. The horse eyed him, then dropped his head to graze. "All he wants to do is eat," muttered Brandon, tramping after him in jeans and unlaced sneakers. Across the bluegrass pasture on a sunlit summer morning in Kentucky, a half-dozen other kids carried halters and tried to catch their horses, softly calling: "Hey, Eagle," "Here, Brook ... Come on, boy."

The horses didn't want to be caught. They were mustangs, rounded up on the open ranges of Wyoming. The kids were "wild" too, from the rough streets of Lexington's inner city, where the air rings with occasional gunshots, not with whinnies.

Wild kids. Wild horses. Put them together, and all hell can break loose, right? But the street-smart kids and the free-spirited horses share something else -- a desire to care and be cared for. That's where the Mustang Troop comes in. It teaches at-risk youngsters, ages 9 to 18, to ride and tend to horses.

Every year, on summer weekdays, the Lexington Police Activities League buses kids about 15 minutes outside the city to the Kentucky Horse Park, a sprawling, state-owned equine theme park. The youngest kids, the rookies, have never touched, much less ridden, a horse. Here, they learn to check the swagger and swearing of the streets.

"Anyone who thinks they're tough," longtime staffer Todd Waronicki tells the kids every year, "will find out that a 1,000-pound animal is much tougher." The barn manager assigns each child a horse for the summer, then teaches them ground rules: Don't raise your voice. Move slowly and methodically. Pat the horses on the shoulder when they do something right. The kids usually start out scared. For the mustangs, the tendency to spook is even stronger. The most volatile horses have to be "gentled" by staff before kids can come near them.

"Eagle, it's okay. It's not gonna do nothing to you!" said Deshaun Tucker, 15, spraying hair polish on her horse's coat as he jerked away from the spray can. "He doesn't like it to be touched by his ears," she explained.

Deshaun has attention problems, struggles at school and was so shy she rarely spoke when she came here three years ago. For her, the "Big Barn" has become an oasis of calm, quiet and order. "When I got here, I was really scared. Now I love it. I get to take care of horses that have never been helped before, and I get to love 'em."

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Birdwatching is a passion of mine, and my wife has always been impressed by my ability to identify each species solely by its song. To help her learn a little bit about birds, I bought a novelty kitchen clock that sounds a different bird call for each hour. We were relaxing in our yard when a cardinal started singing. "What's that?" I challenged.

She listened closely. "It's three o'clock."

-- Rich L. Pershey

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