I don’t make it a crusade – despite lengthy arguments with my husband about why a medieval battle helm is not appropriate headgear on horseback – but I do my best to always wear a helmet when I’m on horseback. Obviously, situations like “going on a trail ride while on vacation” can and do happen, but… I’d rather protect my head than not.
Part of it is that as a kid, we always had to wear a helmet.
The rest of it is that of the three falls I’ve had, my helmet saved me a nasty blow to the head in one of them and may have saved me.
The first time I fell off a horse, it was off a little pony named Shorty. It was his first day as a lesson horse at our barn, and I think the first night lesson he’d done in the covered arena. He was pretty good, but he kept stopping in this one area of the arena when we cantered. My instructor told me to kick him next time, so I did.
And the stupid pony turned on a dime, leaving me in the dirt. My mom, up the hill by the barn, says she heard my helmet hit the ground pole he’d been refusing to go past. All I remember is being on the pony one minute and staring up at the lights the next, wondering what the heck just happened. (No injuries to anything but my pride, but I had lovely red Texas dirt in places there just shouldn’t have been dirt if normal laws of physics were in effect!)
The second time I came off, I remember every second of it, and I really wish I didn’t. I was starting to lose my confidence by then, and going faster than a trot on the Arabian mare I was riding was starting to freak me out. I was having a lesson with my friend Rachael, and we were in the round pen. We were supposed to trot around the round pen and stop when we got behind the other person. Well, the mare – Punky – kept cutting straight across the pen instead of going around, and I just was not able to keep her from doing it, because it was freaking me out (hello, feedback loop…).
About the third time around, she cantered instead of trotting and spooked to the right. I, of course, went left. I remember seeing the fence, and going, “Oh, crap. I cannot land on that,” and I was able to use my hands to push away from it. Then it was, “Crap, the reins are around my arms, that’s bad,” and I was able to let go of them. And then I was sitting in the dirt, and all I could think was, “Well that was stupid.” I had a bit of rope burn on my arms from the reins, but I was otherwise fine.
The last time, I was riding an off-track Thoroughbred called Bear. He just kind of spooked on me and took off; I had… a moment… and came off. I landed partially on a fence panel. I may or may not have hit my head – I don’t remember doing so, the panel was tilted in such a way that I could have conceivably missed it, and my instructor never mentioned it – but I DO know I landed on my thigh, basically sitting down again. I had bruises on my arm where it hit the fence, my calf where either my shoe hit my leg or the horse nicked me, and – most ingloriously of all – one side of my right thigh was entirely purple by the end of the day. (The punchline here is that I was riding before a full afternoon of classes in college. This happened around 9 or 10. I couldn’t ice anything until 6ish that evening. It was ugly.)