Horseback and Duty

I rode upon horseback for the first time in my life on this Sunday afternoon. The local equestrian club was hosting their annual weekend derby, where eager folks from around the region of Northwestern Ontario come and explore the rather sophisticated and beautifully rugged trail system here in Atikokan.

{A ride on Sully. Truly a dream come true}

Around me were a mix of families and old timers, all camped out in their trailers and circled around a fire, going back and forth from the trails at their own leisure. A few were off in this grassland's lone building, cooking and cleaning for the potluck to come. It's amazing, isn't it? Volunteers built these trails, two women in particular, who are still out riding and working to this day, 25 years and counting. Nothing happens without them. Nothing is founded, and nothing maintains. It may be clichéd at this point, to simply thank volunteers, and wish them your dearest blessing. But I am not necessarily singing an ode to what we would in the modern day call 'volunteerism'. I am looking for the deeper, root quality in an individual that leads them to serve and commit the way that these ladies and so many more do. Perhaps it is the combined attitudes of duty and passion. Both are essential here. Passion without duty leads to abandonment, while duty without passion leads to mindlessness. These qualities within our brave volunteers today have echoes in the spirit of the medieval knights errant that I tried so hard to imitate on horseback; the knights that would run after any call to adventure, so long as it sparked their sense of chivalry, and perhaps libido. Or, perhaps, this image of brave knights is a farce, a fantasy, as Miguel de Cervantes would so articulately have us believe. Don Quixote is delusional - that is the common moral that people derive. But who surrounds our great knight in that legendary Spanish novel? It is merchants, and robbers, pimps and deceivers, each with their own individualistic ends. Not a soul with a shred of honour, or sense of duty. And perhaps that is the genius of Cervantes tale - a tragic story, of a man caught in the binds of a changing world, a world everyone is adjusting to, fighting not to be left behind, with no time for higher aims beyond mere survival. The dastardly merchants that Don Quixote despises so intensely adjust to the world as it is, while he chooses to live out ideals that blind him of any sense of early 17th century reality. Gunpowder, adopted in full force by the late 15th century, had transformed warfare to the analogous degree that cars transformed transportation. And just like the knight lost out in the competition of combat, so too did the horse in the method of travel. After getting the opportunity to ride one (an experience I will likely build on in the future), I am just happy people still feel enough passion to nurture and train these creatures, and the sense of duty to pass this skill on to the next generation.

Finally I got off of Sully, the horse I had just ridden for what felt like an enclosed period trapped in infinity. I tried thanking him, but he just turned away and snorted. I took the hint and walked away, noticing in front of me a big pile what we might call, the more undesirable type of duty. Somebody else'll get that...