Herd Bound

Torree McGowan
6 min readApr 16, 2018

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Some of the greatest memories of life start out as really dumb ideas. Over the past five days, I’ve had to try to explain how this all started to a bunch of curious strangers, and every time I detail the origins, it still sounds ridiculous.

“I’m part of a group of 10 women who are all doctors and ride horses. We met on the internet and have never seen each other in real life, but we all decided to fly from our crevices of the country out here to Arizona to come to a dude ranch.” Flat stares, and a few blinks. There was no way to make it sound any more rational. This is the kind of plot that usually starts an episode of “Unsolved Mysteries” and ends up somewhere in Mexico with a ripped shirt and trail of blood.

The realization of the insane idea, however, was so much more amazing than anything I could have imagined. Our group of ladies have been talking about taking a vacation together for years. I finally said, “OK, I’m going to do it. Who’s with me?” Weeks of planning, hundreds of emails, and a million Facebook posts later, the plan came to fruition this weekend.

Instead of craziness, the most remarkable thing happened. For the first time that I can remember, I met a group of 9 women that I was able to be completely me with. Making friends as an adult is hard. I envy my 5 year old at the playground, because he will walk up to another kid and say, “Do you want to be my best friend?” And it happens. Grown ups are so much more complicated, which is one of the reasons that growing up is such a cruel trick.

One of the most disconcerting realizations of the weekend for me was the discovery of a near miss friend. I grew up 40 miles from her. Our fathers were colleagues. Her barn backed up to my grandparent’s property, and I am certain that decades ago I sat on the creek bank, plinked rocks into the water, and watched her ride her beautiful horses. I never went over, climbed on the rail, and said hi. We could have become friends years later, when we served in the military at the same hospital. Our eyes were focused on medicine, never understanding until now how much we needed each other and how horribly close we could have been to a friendship of a lifetime. If we had but looked at each other with the vision we have now, we wouldn’t have wasted so many years waiting for our souls to connect. We had to travel so many miles to find each other, but it was worth the wait.

I’ve never met these females before, but all of the pieces of the woman I am found a home with them. We shared a history of being a doctor, so our stories of residencies, medical school, patients required no explanation. We were horsewomen, so barn drama, saddle selection, and debating the merits of various feed supplements were familiar language. Four of us were veterans, so the core of service at my heart found others with the same myocytes.

We came from various specialties, and we learned so much from each other. I’ve learned from a pain management specialist, a gynecologic surgeon, an oncologist, and a utilization management specialist, all for no cost and no confrontation. Primary care docs, surgeons, and emergency physicians connected without phone lines to cleave between us. Xeamin was administered at a pub table next to a tinkling fountain. I find it hard to look surprised by any of our shenanigans because my eyebrows don’t move like they did 72 hours ago.

The amount of continuing education in an interactive format that happened this weekend puts previous CME conferences to shame, and I can’t claim a bit of it. There is something magical in that: I couldn’t work if I tried this weekend and I was finally able to turn off, slow down, recharge. There was no good reason to take this trip, other than to honor the pieces of me that needed to be fed and cared for. See, at home, those pieces are the last to get any attention, after kids and work and husband and dishes.

We came from disparate riding disciplines, from jumpers, dressage, eventers, barrel racers, and even the horseless but hoping. We all come together and had a vicious water relay race and cut throat team penning. The barrel racing on dude horses thankfully ended with no casualties and a memory that I will always carry. Those memories have a soundtrack of laughter and painted with a golden sunset brush.

Conversations ranged from patients to kids to husbands to skin care. We dissected horse show plans and debated financial management strategies. We plotted how to convince husbands to let us repeat this trip next year, and schemed how to afford more horses. Side conversations would eddy off from the main group, then crest like a wave back into the main stream. Silence was acceptable, cuss words were plentiful, and we are all hopeful we can clean up our language before we teach our kids new vocabulary.

The most remarkable thing about the conversations, though, was summed up by that old cowboy song, “and ne’er was heard, a discouraging word…” This group of women were relentlessly uplifting. There were no petty arguments, no subtle putdowns. There was no catfighting or undercutting. No one’s fashion choices, riding ability, specialty, or lack of language filter were ever called into question. It was the safest place to be me, and all of me, without apology or filter, that I have ever found.

I am flying home with a heart full of new friends, and a deep sadness that I can’t bring them all home with me. These are the friends I want right down the street so I can ride with them all the time. If I can’t have that, I’ll settle for right down the hall in my nursing home, so we can terrorize the residents with our wheelchair races.

Internet searches are already underway for our next year’s adventure, because I can’t imagine my life without these women in it. I’ve found my herd, and a part of me will always be like my idiot herdbound gelding, trotting the fences and whinnying for my friends until they round the bend into sight again. When they do, I’ll make a sound like TopHat when he found his bay after a separation that felt like eternity.

I plan to keep our group text in my phone, and on my bad days, I’ll call out into the darkness and ask for someone to send me a picture from our time together. Those images will remind me that even though I feel alone in my rural area and like there is no one who I can just be me with, there are these amazing women who get me and we’ll drink prickly pear margaritas again soon.

We are all flying back to our separate lives, which will occasionally collide and ricochet back into normal patterns of our days. All the while, a small piece of us will be back in the Arizona desert, in an old unpadded buckaroo saddle, riding a quirky dude horse framed by the setting sun. I imagine that when the next time comes, we will all stampede back to our herd, like the horses turned out at the end of the work day. Bays, blondes, buckskins, and roans will kick up our heels, headed back to familiar pastures, with the happiness of finding our friends in our heart. The only question in our minds will be, “Who is going to make the tacos?”

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