BY SUSAN SCHAFFLER
With nearly surreal clarity, I remember the half-second before all my plans changed. A crow gently landed on a fence post. Nothing dramatic; there was barely a sound. But something in her shifted underneath me; I saw her ears go up, her head raise. One small thing becomes the next small thing, the way it does, until I felt the moment of explosion arrive. She shifted right and took off. That was ok, I’ve held to her gallops before. But then she started to buck, really wanting me off her back. I’ll grab her mane and hold on until she’s done, I thought. Her front end went high off the ground into a full-stand rear. I felt her teeter backwards. I remember thinking, with strange clarity, this is happening, and then making the decision: I let go.
I have ridden for thirty years. I have come off horses before. I have never come off one like this.
What surprised me afterward wasn’t the pain, although the pain was extraordinary. It was the replay. For days, my mind ran the fall over and over, slowed down to something like film footage, slide by slide – the crow, the shift, the half-second of weightlessness, the ground. I’d find myself doing the math on what I could have done differently, as if enough analysis might retroactively change something. I’ve talked to enough riders over the years to know this isn’t unique to me. The fall doesn’t end when you hit the ground. It keeps happening in your head, on a loop, for as long as it takes your nervous system to believe it’s actually over.
I landed with my face in the dirt, and the first thing I did, before I even tried to move, was twist my head to find her. She was fine. Standing twenty feet off, ears up, watching me. That was the only good news for a while.
Then I tried to get up, and couldn’t. Pain shot through the right side of my back in a way that told me, immediately, this wasn’t a minor thing. My right arm felt heavy. I pulled it towards me; I saw the deformity before I fully felt it. My hand sat on top of my wrist. The pain that followed took my breath in a way I didn’t know pain could.
And in that strange, suspended moment, face in the dirt, arm clearly broken, not yet knowing about my spine, my mind didn’t go to the fall at all. It went forward. A birthday trip I’d promised my daughter. A trip to Europe I’d been planning for months. A project I’d spent the last year building that was finally, this summer, supposed to go from idea to something real. All of it lined up, all at once: what happens now?
I was taken by ambulance to the LA County General Trauma Center. My wrist was fractured in two places, displaced, and there was a compression fracture on my L1 vertebra. All plans would be canceled.
The part I’ve had the most trouble sitting with, and the part I think other riders will recognize even if they’ve never said it out loud: I don’t think this was only an accident. I think I arrived that morning already off. I’d been pushing myself for weeks, past tired, past reasonable, telling myself I could hold on a little longer, ask a little more of myself, just until the next thing was done. I was dysregulated before I ever put a foot in the stirrup, and I knew it, even if I didn’t let myself fully feel it.
She’s the kind of mare who has never let me get away with pretending otherwise. She didn’t this time either. I also recognized something about her that wasn’t quite right that morning. I made light of it, pushing her through in the same way I was pushing myself. Whatever was happening for her met whatever I brought, and the two of us came apart together.
I went to see her four days after surgery, wrist still wrapped, arm still smelling faintly of the hospital. Usually, she has her head out of her stall’s window before I’ve arrived. She can hear and smell me from afar. But she didn’t welcome me this time. I walked into the stall. She came to the front of her stall and put her nose to my wrist, not a quick sniff, but a long, deliberate one. And then she backed away. To the far side of her stall, head in the corner. She didn’t want to come close again.
She’d watched me being carried out. Whatever she understood about what happened, she was holding something, and it kept her at a distance I hadn’t experienced from her before. I felt the trust between us, a trust I’d taken years to build, feel suddenly thin. Not gone. But thin, and uncertain, in a way it hadn’t been the week before.
We have repair work ahead of us, and I don’t think it’s only my body that needs to heal before I get back in the saddle with her. I think we both do. For now, I think the right thing isn’t to push toward riding again at all, not yet, but just to sit with her. To be present without asking anything of her. To groom and scratch her. To let her feel that I’m not going anywhere, the same way I’m learning, slowly, to sit with my own discomfort instead of fleeing it.
Because that’s what I recognize now, looking back at that morning honestly: I was running from discomfort in nearly every part of my life, the way I have at other hard points in my life, the old pattern of moving fast and far rather than staying still with something uncomfortable. And when she came undone that morning, I think she did something similar. We both reached for the same exit.
I’m not angry with her. If anything, I have more compassion for her now than I’ve had for any horse I’ve worked with and a surprising compassion for that part of myself, too, the part that’s always tried to outrun what’s hard. She was protecting herself the only way she knew how in that moment. So was I. We just happened to be tangled together when it happened.
Recovery, it turns out, isn’t only about a wrist healing straight or a vertebra knitting back together, though I’m grateful both are on their way. It’s about two nervous systems – hers and mine – slowly remembering how to trust each other again, one quiet, unhurried visit at a time.
Susan Schaffler is a lifelong equestrian and equine-assisted learning practitioner based in Los Angeles. She works with horses and youth out of Lincourt Stables in Atwater Village and writes about the science of horse-human connection at Honest Ground on Substack.
