The second time I ever spoke to Michelle Blumenthal on the phone I was telling her that I had just got my husband’s truck (without him in it) stuck on her steep driveway and I needed help. I apologized for my city-slicker ways. She laughed and sent someone to rescue me. Country girl I am not.

Michelle and I connected via my blog. I had taken a photo of one of her horses at a previous Oregon Draft Horse Breeder’s Association plowing competition and she told me that particular horse always seemed to mug for the camera. She hoped I planned to attend again. That led to the idea of a blog post, a date to meet at her place, and then me calling a mile down her driveway, having unsuccessfully shifted my unfamiliar rig into 4WD and getting it jammed up in gravel and ineptitude. She helped me overcome the first one. Probably the second one will be lifelong.

Once parked outside her barn, horses tacked up, she started me out holding the reins as I walked behind her Percheron-cross team, Johnny and June. Despite not sitting on their backs, these sensitive horses still felt my nervous energy and jigged and jostled in front of me. The instructions weren’t hard to follow, it was the act of relaxing into them that took more effort. “Drop your shoulders, take a breath, lean back to use your body to put tension on the tracings.” Eventually I settled down and started to get to the hang of it.

Driving has similarities to dressage in that you keep a continuous line of communication with the horses via tension in the reins, and the cues are as subtle as a slight tap-tap-tap of the ring finger on the left rein to move left, or on the right rein to move right. How much you move left or right depends on how much of a signal you send down the lines. A full turn can have a voice command as well, “Get around,” for Michelle’s team, but Gee and Haw (right and left respectively) for most.

After I managed to get Johnnie and June around the driveway circle without steering them into a tree, it was time to add some weight. Weight in the form of a downed tree. The tree doesn’t look like much in the photos, about a foot across and 15 feet long, but it’s enough to give them a sense of weight resistance and give me a sense of what working with the team with them hooked up to something feels like. The ground wasn’t ready yet for a plow, so we started with the tree.

This is where things got interesting. You must stand on the uphill side of the log so it doesn’t roll over your ankles, sending you tripping and loosing the tension in your lines. That small detail had me wondering about loggers back in the day using horses to haul trees wider across than the length of their bodies. The complexity and risk of it all in equal measure.

When we got to the end of our straight stretch, I had the task of completing a turn. Out there in that practice field I had as much room as I possibly could want to get Johnny and June turned around and headed in the opposite direction. But when there’s a real plow in the ground behind the team, you want the turn at the end of a furrowed row to be tight, but a tight turn can mean a loss of tension on the chains connected to your doubletree, and thus your equipment. Or a tight turn can cause one of the horses to step over the chains, as June did, and then fidget in irritation at the chain moving against her leg.
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June’s irritation with the chain led to little kicks, trying to get the chain off her leg. The kicks were small, harmless jabs at the air, but they’d be devastating to the anatomy of a hand if they made contact, so we left it for her to get used to or figure out how to step back over the chain, which she eventually did.  

I don’t know how long we practiced, I was lost in the feel of my body leaning away from the reins, the use of my voice from my diaphragm telling them to get around, the sun on my face and the dirt squishing up the sides of my boots. Sometimes I think about the frailty of the body and if there ever might come a day when I can’t ride. Now I know I always have a way to be with horses, to literally harness their power and feel it in the leather running between my fingers. Driving, and plowing, would be a way to keep working with horses, enjoying the outside and feeling of timelessness.

As much as I can describe all of this to you and show you photos, you must go and see it for yourself. You must experience it firsthand. You need to hear the metallic clinking of snaps on the harnesses, the sound of muscle moving under leather, and the smell of wet mud. A machine might do all this work now, for our food and for our hay, but not so long-ago man and horse did the work together. If you see the horses working in person, you get a sense for that history, a massive appreciation of it, and maybe, bitten by the bug to be a part of it.

The Oregon Draft Horse Breeders Association Plow Competition is this Saturday, April 6^th from 10am to 4pm at the Yamhill Valley Heritage Center in McMinnville, Oregon. They will have a harvest fest the third weekend in August where the plows will be swapped for harvesting equipment, but the technique and appreciation will remain. You can follow their activities via their Facebook page here.