I Wanna Be a Gaucha

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting Manchita. This sweet horse is hanging out in Gloria’s pasture, providing her with free fertilizer. In addition to making the veggies grow, she is incredibly patient, gentle and excellent for children or beginning riders, like me. Sergio, her owner, is also very patient, and indulged my curiosity by bringing over a saddle and other horse accoutrements and allowing me to go for a ride. His English non-existent, my Spanish very basic, he managed to show me the basics of what in the U.S. we call Western riding.

I didn’t realize it until after I had dismounted with shaky legs, but I was a little nervous at first. I am not what I would call a “horsey” person. Never begged for riding lessons as a kid and have only been riding on horses in groups where my horse simply followed the others with little direction from me. Being on my own on a horse was new to me. It is also something I want to experience again.

Telling a Uruguayan you don’t know how to ride a horse is like telling a Hawaiian you don’t know how to swim. They seem mildly shocked and sorry for you. Horses are an important part of Uruguayan culture. The true gauchos may have ridden into the sunset, but most modern Uruguayans have some longing for gaucho ways. Foremost in gaucho culture is the horse. There is a saying that a gaucho without a horse is a man without legs.

Where we live, horses are everywhere. People ride as a pleasant pastime or simply as a way to get from place to place. Some people own horses, but not land. One sees these horses of landless owners hitched in fields by the roadside. Several times on our way home from town we have seen men on horseback leading a herd of other horses. Where they were going, I’ll never know.

I hope to get to know horses better. I am certainly in the right place to do it. I think with help from Manchita, I will.