Horse Crazy

With Sarah Maslin Nir, produced by Out There Podcast

Released on July 29, 2021

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(Out There theme music begins) 

Hi, I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.

On today’s episode, we talk with the author of a book called Horse Crazy. Horse Crazy is part memoir and part cultural exploration. It’s a love letter to an animal. It’s a story about the struggle to belong. And it’s a deep dive into the fascinating things that horses — and the humans connected to them — can teach us about ourselves and our society. 

I’m joined now by Horse Crazy author Sarah Maslin Nir.

(Out There theme music ends)

WILLOW: So how did the idea for this book come about?

SARAH MASLIN NIR:I have always been a secret, obsessive horse person — emphasis on secret. Because as a reporter for the New York Times, I cover really hard corners of the earth — really difficult subjects, some of the grittiest. And I was really concerned that if I ever outed myself as a horse person, that if people knew that so much of my heart and mind was filled with ponies, I wouldn't be taken seriously doing my job. 

And I was chatting with a friend about wanting to write a book, and I told him that the only subject I wanted to write about was horses, but I couldn't for the reasons I explained. And he said really something important — he said, “Sara, passion translates. Whatever the subject is, readers just want to understand passion. And if you're passionate about it, that's the important part.” 

(upbeat music begins to play)

Everywhere I've gone around the world as a reporter for The New York Times, I realized that when I was finished reporting the story I was sent there to do, I'd whip out another notebook and go find the horses. So when I was in Rajasthan, I found a woman who's managed to smuggle rare Indian horses to America. Hint: she smuggled their semen in her pockets on Air India flights.

(Sarah and Willow laugh)

When I was traveling around doing stories in New York, I found fox hunters who ape the rules of aristocracy in Westchester, galloping around on horseback. And a woman who galloped away from a failed marriage. When I was in Chincoteague, following the steps of Marguerite Henry, the wonderful children's horse book author, I found two little girls who bought a wild horse from an auction, only to set her back free. And I realized that they're horse people just as much as I am, even though they've never even stroked her auburn nose. They own what it means to be a horse, which is freedom. And that became the threads I pulled together to write this book because I had been doing it all along.

(music fades away)

WILLOW: You know, you delve into a lot of these kind of cultural phenomena related to horses. Phenomena that I think reveal a lot more about us as humans, than about horses really. And one of the ones that I found particularly interesting was this chapter that you have on Breyer horse shows.

And maybe for listeners who are not horse lovers themselves, Breyer horses are these, these toy horses, these little plastic horses that I mean — I remember playing with them endlessly as a kid, and I would, you know, make little saddles out of bits of fabric and have my dollhouse dolls ride them and things like that. And to me they were a toy but, um, but that you know that eventually I grew out of when I got older. But you write about this, this just fascinating thing of Breyer horse shows. Tell us about that.

SARAH: Willow, why do you find it strange that adults cart hundreds of 12-inch playthings around the country to compete them in 4-H clubs as if they're living creatures? What, what's so strange? 

(Willow laughs)

WILLOW: I know, right? We all, we all do that, right? We all..

(Willow laughs again and cheerful music begins)

SARAH: It is a fascinating phenomena. So Breyer model horses are acetate horses at a one-to-eight scale of the real thing, and they're quite realistic...but they are plastic. And here I found a world in which adults predominantly, though there are children, drive them around the country to compete them against each other. And lest you think they're competing models they painted — right, some artistic endeavor — they are competing store-bought horses against store-bought, plastic horses. 

And this isn't a small phenomenon, I should add: 30,000 people come to the annual Breyer horse convention at the Kentucky Horse Park where the derby is run. So it's a real deal thing. 

I came into that center in Leesport full of skepticism. I almost felt judgy — you know, what is this thing? How? How could people participate in this? And there, in that room, I saw adults doing something that I don't let myself do as a grownup anymore, which is play. It was pure play. And here were these people finding the same things that I find in living, breathing fur-covered horses, in these plastic animals.

(music ends)

And they really appeal to people who can't access horses for financial reasons. They still seem to have that draw. And I left that hall, I write in the book, feeling ashamed that I had come in with preconceptions, and realizing at the end that those people — those adults playing with plastic horses — were horse crazy, in the same way that I was. That what they loved was what a horse can do for your soul, which is expand it. 

WILLOW: Well, and I was gonna ask about that. The title of the book, of course, is Horse Crazy. What does, what does that term mean to you? 

SARAH: It's a fascinating term, because I don't think there's an equivalent dog crazy or cat crazy, right? If you look at a kitten or a dog, I like to say, you think like, ‘Aw, how cute.’

But when you look at a horse, you feel something. It's more akin to looking at a mountain vista, or waves rolling in across the ocean. It tugs at something. 

(music begins)

And that, to me, speaks that horses are, have come to embody something larger than just being these 1,200-pound creatures on hooves. You know, you don't feel that way about a cow. 

Horse crazy is a global phenomenon. In America, it's actually predominantly female, a lot of the sport. And I look into that. My father, a Freudian therapist, would say this is an example of young women wanting to dominate something large between their legs. And it goes into these atomistic, id-based feelings and impulses. 

But I think it's about power. On my own two legs, I'm just me. And given four more, I suddenly become formidable. And a little girl is probably the least formidable thing in our whole society. And here she is able to control this wondrous beast and make them one with her. And that, to me, just sparks horse crazy.

(music swells and then fades away)

WILLOW: Well, and that actually leads into one of my other questions. Because I think it's really fascinating that — and you go into this a bit in the book — I think it's really fascinating that in the US, riding is seen as a predominantly women's sport. I mean, leaving aside let's say rodeo and, and ranches where horses are actually working, but just riding for the sake of riding is, is very much seen as a women's thing to do here. 

But that's not the case in other places around the world. And you have a trip to India in your book where you talk about the fact that, that it's really, like women really don't ride there. It's, it's much more of a men's thing. So how do these, how do these cultural norms about who gets to ride — and what is the appropriate gender to ride — like how does that come about?

SARAH: It's more than gender. One of the subjects I really unpack deeply — and the threads I pull at in Horse Crazy — are who do horses belong to? For me, in examining my own passion for these animals, I realized a tremendous part of it was about passing. Passing as an all-American girl, when I was the daughter of a Holocaust survivor — of an immigrant, a Jew — who felt out of place in this sport that's of kings and of Jackie Kennedy. Who was I? And I think I inserted myself, maybe shoehorned myself, into this sport so deeply in an effort to pass. And that gave me a lens to examine the horse world in general. 

(quiet music begins)

One of the stories I dig into deeply is the erased legacy of the Black cowboy. One in four cowboys, Willow, were Black in the American pioneer era. And they've been totally erased from the narrative by racism. As the great historian William Loren Katz said to me — another Jew from Brooklyn, actually who is a black cowboy historian — he said, “If Black people came into the American origin story, the cowboy story, they came under a whip and in chains. And that's not the America we wanted to remember.”

And they've been removed from that narrative. So in my book, I ride with the Black cowboys of Texas and in Harlem and try to examine that. But the question you pose is fascinating. In different countries, it's a men's sport. In this country, certain aspects are seen as hopelessly female and derided because of it. But horses are incognizant of all of that. They have no concept of who they belong to. And in that way, they're deeply democratic. They belong to all of us.

(music fades out)

WILLOW: This concept of the Black cowboys I found really interesting, and not least so because the way you, the way you sort of find out about all of this is you stumble upon a Black cowboy in New York City. Can you talk about that? 

SARAH: Sure. So when I was in my early twenties, I was biking around the city and I saw, in the middle of the Harlem River, what I really thought was a mirage. That can't be a little red barn, underneath, like, a wastewater treatment plant and beside a mental institution. And so I biked across and threw my bicycle into a shrub and ran to the barn. And lo and behold, a little brown horse popped her head out. And that was my introduction to the New York City Riding Academy, which I just thought was a little riding school run by two ornery and lovable old folk. 

Turns out they were the founders of the New York City Black Rodeo, which had taken place for 20 years in Harlem. And they were evangelists for reinserting the Black cowboy into the American story. Dr. Blair — don't call him George, he's Dr. Blair to you Sarah, and Mrs. Blair too — he said to me one day, I asked him, “What are we teaching at this riding academy?” 

Because we just had three horses, and 40 inner-city children would come at a time — and they would never ride, because we couldn't mount them all up. And I said to Dr. Blair, “What do we, what do we teach here at the New York City Riding Academy?”

And he said to me, “Sarah, do you know what a cowboy is?”

And I thought that was a rhetorical question. Right, who doesn't know what a cowboy is? The Marlboro Man. And he said to me, “Sarah, a cowboy is a Black man.”

And actually etymologists, some believe that the very word “cowboy” speaks to the blackness of the people who had that profession first. Because in the era of its coinage — I think it's the late 1800s, early 1800s — you wouldn't call a white man a “boy.” It would be incredibly derogatory, but you had a house boy, and a yard boy, and those were your slaves. And he said to me, “Sarah, a cowboy is a Black man.”

And the next thing he said I will remember for the rest of my life. He said, “I'm not teaching children to ride here. I'm teaching them that there are different futures for them in this world. That they belong to much larger a part of the American story.”

He said, “I'm not teaching them to ride, Sarah. I'm teaching them to dream.”

(soft music begins)

And that was incredibly powerful for me. And as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, whose people were literally erased from the planet, the figurative erasure of Black people from the American equestrian story really felt a parallel, and something that I wanted to help repair.

WILLOW: Where are we heading with that? I mean, I think you hear now and again about, about people like this, who are trying to bring stories of Black cowboys back into the narrative. But I think for a lot of us, I mean, it's like you said: you picture a cowboy, and you picture the Marlboro Man — you picture a white guy.

So how, like, where are we in this process? Is there, is there hope for, for you know, getting Black people back into this narrative where they belong? 

SARAH: There have been strides taken towards equity in the horse world, especially sparked by the Black Lives Matter conversations of the past summer. They have been painful conversations. Show jumping is an incredibly white sport. And there have been long discussions, “Oh, it's because it's wealthy.”

But there are rich Black people, and they obviously don't feel welcome to participate in the sport of show jumping. And so there have been a lot of conversations about inclusion that are happening now, across the disciplines. 

A really interesting thing to me, that I wish I had explored in my book, and I didn't, is Black jockeys. So the first-ever winner of the first-ever Kentucky Derby was a Black man, and the trainer of that horse was a freed slave.

WILLOW: Wow.

SARAH: And in the early days of, yeah, in the early days of American horse racing, people ran the horses they owned, with the humans they owned on their backs. And Willow, when you walk into a plantation, you feel the blood that built those places, right? 

We are so deeply aware of the pain that the cotton industry was predicated on. But thoroughbred racing owes that same debt to Black lives, and it has never had its moment of reckoning. 

When you go to Churchill Downs where the derby is run, there's a statue of Secretariat, right? Everybody knows the Triple Crown winner stretched out in a gallop in bronze with a jockey on his back. And actually not far away is a statue very similar with Aristedes, the first horse that won that first-ever Derby. But there's no rider on Artistedes’ back, and that's because that rider was a Black man.

(music continues and then fades out)

WILLOW: Coming up on this episode, we’ll talk about the connection between being a horse lover, and being a journalist. But first…

I often hear about people getting tattoos as a reminder of something important to them. Maybe it’s a reminder that you are strong and capable and resilient. Maybe it’s a reminder to stay present and stop worrying about the future. 

I’ve always liked the idea of a physical thing that can serve as your own secret pep talk. Something to give you hope and courage. But I personally don’t want a tattoo. So I’ve started wearing a ring.

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And now, back to our conversation with Sarah Maslin Nir.

You’re horse person, and you are also a reporter for the New York Times. And I'm curious about the connection between those two identities. I mean, do you think it's an accident that you have these dual passions of horses and journalism? Or do you think there are certain personality traits that you have, that lend themselves to both?

SARAH: I've never been asked that question in all of my interviews, so I love it. Good job. Let me think about it.

(soothing music begins)

Being with a horse requires speaking in horse, which is silence. Horses are nonverbal communicators. They communicate in a language of very specifically delineated gestures, and communicating with them, steeped in silence, is very different than what I do as a reporter, which is verbally engaging with people. 

But I often say that interviewing is not a conversation; you're extracting something. It's very different than talking. And it requires a sort of quiet listening that allows the other person to fill a space. And that is similar to being with a horse in their deep silence. 

(music fades out)

I will tell you something really interesting. Horses really healed me through that silence. I was the victim of a knife attack that I write about in my book, where a burglar climbed in through my window in my apartment in New York City, and stabbed me while I was sleeping on Thanksgiving Day. 

And after that attack, I had what's called hypervigilance, a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, where you hear everything. I couldn't quiet the city down. I heard every air conditioner, every screeching car. It was incredibly loud. And that's the way that prey creatures hear the world. They're listening in case something attacks. And that's the way that horses relate to the world. 

And what healed me, and what silenced the city again, was being around those creatures who navigate the world in silence, and yet somehow survive. So it's a very circuitous way of answering your question that both engaging with these animals and engaging and winning the trust of humans requires a depth of listening that you don't do in the outside world. 

(piano music begins)

WILLOW: What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

SARAH: My fervent hope is that readers understand that passion and the things that define us are our choice. I really dig deeply into the barriers that society puts up against participating in this world. These sports with the black cowboys — and we didn't get into this yet, but the Indian horse riders who are stoned when lower-caste people have the audacity to attempt to ride a horse to their wedding, sometimes killed. The jockeys, the wild horse owners, the plastic horse people, that all of them are part of this story and that how we define ourselves isn't up to other people. And I hope there's some solace in that. Horses have given me tremendous solace ,in my life and I hope this book does the same.

WILLOW: Well, thank you so much, Sarah. It was a delight talking with you, and a delight to read your book.

SARAH: Thank you. It's really meaningful to me, and thank you for thinking of it for this.

WILLOW: Sarah Maslin Nir’s book is called Horse Crazy. It comes out in paperback August 3rd. Special thanks to Cecily Mauran for editing this episode, and to Tiffany Duong for connecting us with Sarah.

(music fades out)

Coming up next time on Out There, we have a story about the tension between following our dreams and paying the bills. 

KHALEEQ ALFRED: I'm a person who's very fixed on doing what you love, and being happy about doing what you love, or being happy about doing what you do. Period.

(folksy music begins)

WILLOW: Tune in on August 12 to hear that story. 

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