A Natural History of Love (36 page)

   Throughout time, there have been stories about conquering a minotaur or dragon or some other fearsome force of nature. We have soft, penetrable skin, we are so fragile in this world. Earlier cultures were terrified of thunder; through the halls of lightning walked the gods whom humans needed to appease or vanquish. Men have traditionally faced the monster during hunts. A woman on horseback alternately masters and is mastered by that part of her nature which is a wild, snorting, powerful, mane-tossing beast, full of swerve and beauty. No one understood this better than D. H. Lawrence. In
St. Mawr
, a novella about women and horses, the main character is bewitched by a beautiful stallion, whose nerves are like rockets. Intending to buy him, she thinks of the world he represents:

It was another world, an older, heavily potent world. And in this world the horse was swift and fierce and supreme, undominated and unsurpassed…. There was, perhaps, a curious barbaric exultance in bare, dark will devoid of emotion or personal feeling…. He was so powerful, and so dangerous. But in his dark eye, that looked, with its cloudy brown pupil, a cloud within a dark fire, like a world beyond our world, there was a dark vitality glowing, and within the fire, another sort of wisdom. She felt sure of it: even when he put his ears back, and bared his teeth, and his great eyes came bolting out of his naked horse’s head, and she saw demons upon demons in the chaos of his horrid eyes.

What lures me still when I ride is the disciplined panic of a horse flirting with a tantrum at every turn, the delicate, voluptuous play of muscles, the grace-sprung power. This became especially clear to me one cold winter day a few years ago, when I rode an Appaloosa mare bareback, trotting her swiftly through tight hairpin turns, and for the first time I really stuck, without sliding or jiggling. My legs hugged her belly like a cinch, and her heart pounded against my knees as she paced. Deeply I sat, fixed to the
slap, slap, slap, slap
of her trot, and the counterpoint
thud-plod, thud-plod
of her heart, enchanted by a soft percussion I felt part of, floating above the syncopated rhythm like a melody. A sweet, leathery steam rose from her chest and neck. When I fretted her belly lightly with my calf, she rolled into a long rippling, and I felt at home in the pumping of her shoulders, the sweet dank odor of hot fur, the rhythmic gesturing of her head. My legs tingled with half a dozen pulses, some of them my own. Reckless with exhilaration, I jumped her bareback over several low fences, gripping her steamy hide as we sprang over fence after fence, leaving earth for a moment between the blunt stanchions, and leaping through the gristly winter light toward the sun, now setting right at the end of the valley like a hot yellow liquid pouring out. As my legs began to reason gently with her body, we rose over a fence like a fogbank, below which lay the world of humans. For those slender moments, I felt heart-poundingly creatural, and reveled in the thrill of speed and sunlight, part of an earth-ecstasy as old as the runes. Life blew through my veins as the wind charged through the winter trees. Huge, oily-looking ravens sounded as if they were choking on lengths of blanket. And then night began seeping over the hillsides like a long spill of black ink, erasing everything civilized and safe.

   As we are finishing lunch, Linda’s former husband strolls by, with his new wife and his two small children. Linda is remarried, too; and she and her ex live only a few houses away from each other, so that all the children in both families have become part of one extended family. Their arrangement is often lauded by local folk as sensitive and enlightened. His nine-year-old daughter, Hannah, rushes to Linda and gives her a hug, then shows off her brand-new white western boots.

“Those are pretty boots!” she tells her.

The girl squirms shyly and says, “I got them to wear riding horses.” Just saying that excites her, and she adds, “You know what, I go to Four-H, and we brush the horses and then ride them!”

“Look what
I’m
wearing,” I say, pulling my feet from under the table to show her a pair of black western boots. Around the ankle of the right boot is a red leather strap studded with small silver hearts. “Mine are for riding horses, too.”

Her eyes catch fire. She looks at me more intently. Then she smiles with the secret understanding of a fellow Freemason. After lunch, I hurry home to watch show-jumping finals on television, while I pack for a journey that will carry me across time and distance to where horse love began.

   Flying across New York State, I look down on the evergreens, sharp as arrowheads, the forested hills, and the green-and-brown corduroy of farm fields. Last week I rode through the deserts of the Southwest, where at night the sobbing of wolves twists deep into your dreams, and by day eagles show their feathered bloomers to the world as they fly. In only a few hours I have galloped into another climate, another ecosystem, another culture, thanks to that modern-day horse, the airplane, whose energy we even define as “horsepower.” Sailing aloft in a sheath of gleaming steel, while the planet turns gently below, I move forward in time by means of a pocket miracle even children take for granted. We can throw a switch and make sunlight dawn in a dark room; turn a knob and change an icy porch to summer. After such marvels, why should it surprise us that we have taught metal to fly? Or that we can gallop on the wind like the horse gods of old? Or that we can make a pilgrimage at 25,000 feet? Our planes go back and forth, but time goes only one way in nature, and in clocks, with each moment becoming a greater state of disorder than the one before it. Everything decays. Even we, who will become old and may betray our dreams. Even the living, breathing, many-laked Adirondacks below me, ablaze with what we have come to call autumn. Then I finally see JFK in the distance, flickering with haze. In some ways, time is the least plausible of our fictions. Trying to corral time is like trying to hobble a ghost, but horses have helped to make that ghost visible.

At JFK, stepping forward again in time, I climb aboard the fastest metal horse commuters ride, and in minutes leap straight up into the sky, bank briefly, and head east. We pass quickly through “Indian land”—what pilots call the altitudes where Sénecas, Navajos, and other light twin-engined planes fly—and before long leave everything, even the weather, beneath us as we enter a purple sky. At cruising speed—1,000 miles an hour—we are traveling almost as fast as the earth turns. The sea below looks black, and the sun showers glitter onto the waves. Although the water appears flat, still, and silent, I think of all the dramas unfolding in every direction, and how the whole sea is sloshing up and down, like a pen inking across a chart, while the land moves, too. When they move in concert, a reef forms. Through the small porthole, I can see the curvature of the earth. Somewhere below and far away, hidden from view, is everything I’ve ever known, everyone I’ve ever loved.

In time, the purple sky gives way to blue, and we land at Orly Airport, outside Paris. There I change planes and head south, to Périgord in the Dordogne, a region famous for its truffles, goose-liver pâté, and ancient history. From Périgord’s small airport, a taxi drives me for nearly an hour through small towns, past rambling châteaux, and around jagged hillsides, to a simple forest of sycamores and limestone caves. Heading back 30,000 years, I can feel the old bones of my longing to know who and what we were millennia ago. Sometimes the past is more knowable than the present, and it’s easier to glimpse what we were than what we have become. This valley once burgeoned with junipers and hazels, limes, walnuts, and oaks; flowers coated its grassy prairies; strawberries, blackberries, and currants grew on its bushes; salmon filled its rivers, along whose banks wading birds fished. Bison, aurochs (ancestors of the Spanish fighting bulls), wild boars, deer, rabbits, horses, ibex, lions, bears, and rhinoceros roamed the valley. Reindeer herds poured across the grasslands, and the Magdalenian hunters feasted on their flesh, wore their hide for warmth, and used their fat to make smokeless lamps of a kind still used by the Inuit. The so-called cavemen didn’t live in caves, but in hide tents close to running water, and sometimes outside a cave, using its overhang as a protective porte cochere. Journeying far into the caves, on magical expeditions to the Unknown, they began smearing the damp walls with ocher, manganese, and charcoal, organizing the dreamlike chaos of their experience into what we have come to call art.

For the past twenty-four hours, thanks to supersonic horsepower, I have been rushing eastward into the dawn-stalking earth, following a trail backward in time to see the cathedral-like walls of the Lascaux cave. There, depicted more often than any other animal (including humans) is the horse. The horse-worshipers of Lascaux most likely lived about 17,500 years ago, in a world climate similar to ours today. The mild weather filled the living larder of the hills. We picture the people as crude, but they already had perforated sewing needles, were masterful hunters, fishers, and spelunkers. They sang and danced, beat drums made of hide, and played music on bone flutes and whistles. Seminomadic, tribal, few in number, they visited the cave often, presumably for religious and initiation rites. We are the heirs of such folk. In the attic of our genes lie curios and costumes, uniforms that no longer fit, envelopes filled with photographs of relatives we have never met. They bequeathed to us much of our personality as a species—not just the blunt fury of our moods, blood lust, and territoriality, but our curiosity and awe and feeling for family. If there is a crevasse of understanding between us, it’s partly bridged by art—that need to create works of numbing beauty—which speaks to us just as powerfully today. They felt a voluptuous passion for horses, along with a thirst to celebrate and praise nature. We have inherited their sense of worship.

   The original Lascaux cave is sealed and protected, because the irreplaceable artworks, since their discovery, have been disturbed by air, moisture, and human exhalations. Realizing that a fungus had begun to devour some of the drawings, the French government wisely closed Lascaux to the public and built a replica cave nearby (the drawings are laser-perfect). But for many years I’ve longed to stand where the cavemen stood, to touch their brush strokes with my eyes. Five researchers a day may enter the original cave, very briefly, following strict rules; and I have the privilege of being one of them.

In a small office aboveground, five of us gather to be briefed by an official guide; then we set off. Walking down the swollen belly of a hillside, down a flight of steps, and through a thin vent, we enter an anteroom where a shallow basin of disinfectant waits for us to dip our feet. That completes the purification ceremony. Then, passing through a steel door, we climb down another flight of stairs to a womblike opening, through which we creep in darkness. The guide groups us together, by feel and flashlight, in the perfect blackness. The damp tastes gritty and salt-sweet. No one speaks. A quiet fan blurs the sounds of breathing. In this group of five initiates, four of us are women.

Then a whisper breaks my reverie; I return to the present in the black womb of the cave, to hear the faint sound of footsteps. Suddenly an explosion of light hits the ceiling and walls, and brightly colored animals leap out at us. I flinch, blink hard, then find myself in motion. Everywhere I turn the animals are stampeding around and over us in a great galloping helter-skelter array of flashing hooves and horns. There are bison and aurochs and ibex galore. But dwarfing them all are the horses, a floodtide of horses drawn over and around and underneath one another, horses leaping into alcoves, galloping through stone valleys, kicking and rearing and fighting and grazing. They are round-bellied, pear-hooved horses with stiff, bristly manes. Keenly observed horses, with pale bellies and swarthy flanks, sometimes in shaggy winter coats, sometimes snorting breathy clouds. On one wall, a stallion nuzzles the nether petals of a mare. On another, a russet-flanked mare is grazing, her belly round as an apple. But every horse is flowing, full of rhythmic strokes, wild and dynamic. They’re not just pictures, but breathing beasts in motion. Many appear to be pregnant, so their bellies are wild with motion, too.

Drifting slowly through the rooms, we seem too well behaved, watching the pageantry as if it were a static mural in a museum. The horses were not meant to be seen like this, but at speed, fleetingly, at a run, while tribal elders held lamps. In the flickering light, our pupils would be jumping, the horses would be crashing down through our dreams, and our sacred hearts would be wild as tinder.

MEN AND CARS

What horses do for girls, horsepower does for boys. Was there ever a love affair as loyal or obsessive as that between a sixteen-year-old and his first shiny car, even if it’s an old rattletrap? Something about the quivering power of the car excites him. Something about the rounded curves of its flanks, and its headlights, which protrude like bosoms. Something about the grumbling moan of the engine, which responds to his touch when he “turns it on.” He spends hours rubbing, grooming, and polishing it. And even more time cruising around town, slow enough to ogle girls and be ogled back, loud enough to impress other males, or fast enough to slay the more pedestrian of life’s demons. In both senses of the word, cars
express
a young man, by rushing him through time and space at the sexual high speed he feels gushing through his mind and limbs. Cars are fast and furious, dangerous and alive, ready to spin out at a tight curve or a hairpin. It’s how he feels sometimes—all revved up and ready to explode. Many teenage boys find in cars the embodiment of their surging sexuality. Older men are so often seen trading in sensible, affordable family cars for brightly colored sports cars that it’s become a cliché. They leave their wives for sexy young women, and they leave their station wagons for sexy new cars with loud mufflers and only room enough for two. Cars are hot, fast, hard, phallic objects that hurtle through space. Cartoons sometimes show a middle-aged man riding on a steel-plated erection. The caption restates the obvious.