Читать книгу Cowboy Dressage - Jessica Black - Страница 9

1945, Rishon LeZion, British Mandate of Palestine

The story of Cowboy Dressage^® began at the side of a grave, as five-year-old Eitan Beth-Halachmy stood solemnly at his mother’s funeral, the youngest mourner, trying hard to look anywhere but at the coffin. Everything was dry, dusty, and bleak, the graveyard a sandy expanse between the orange groves, the people formal and grieving. Out of the corner of his eye, the boy spotted a tall, bearded sheriff, standing under a eucalyptus tree beside his horse, a small chestnut Arabian.

Or perhaps it was that the sheriff was large—to a small five-year old, he seemed huge. Eitan watched the sheriff—and the sheriff watched him—throughout the ceremony. As soon as the funeral ended, the sheriff came straight up to him, lifted him, and put him in the saddle. Even though Eitan had never so much as touched a horse, the sheriff let him ride by himself, guiding the little horse between the rows of trees. That was it; addiction took over his soul.

Eitan Beth-Halachmy spent his childhood dreaming of horses and his adult life connecting with them.

“It felt like flying,” Eitan remembers. For the first time, something else, a live being, was carrying him over the ground, with no effort on his part. Before that moment, he had never known a horse, and had not imagined what riding one would be like. After that first ride, young Eitan did a lot of imagining, if little riding. He spent every spare moment dreaming of horses, wrapped in an imaginary world that was born out of American cinema: the Old West, with its cowboys and cow horses, gunfighters, and Indians. It was a world impossibly far away from his own—it was a fantasy.

Eitan and Santa Fe Renegade perform at the Cowboy Dressage World Finals Show and Gathering on November, 15, 2014. In his journey from a small dusty town in the Middle East to California and then all over the United States and even abroad, Eitan Beth-Halachmy, riding many horses but in particular Santa Fe and Holiday Compadre, has shown an ever-increasing audience that you can have a passion, dream an impossible dream, and make it happen.

WHITTLED FROM WOOD

One of Eitan’s most important jobs as a youth was watching sheep. He would take a herd of 500 into the mountains of Jerusalem for 30 days at a time, carrying a gun, a knife, and not much food—primarily pasta. He would supplement the pasta with figs, almonds, and whatever he could pick from a tree; it was never much. What he lacked in food he had a surfeit of in boredom, and Eitan would fill the long hours whittling figures out of wood, nurturing a talent that would be seen later in his artistic endeavors as a wood carver and sculptor. This ability to see the potential in a nondescript chunk of wood and patiently work at it until its beauty emerged, would carry over to training rough colts and fillies and molding them until they reached their own potential.