No Agenda. By Laura Munson (for Cedar Vance and Bobbi Hall)

There is a girl in Montana who has taught me much about horses and how we get in our own way around them. She is the daughter of my trainer. And she has Down’s Syndrome.

Cedar (Photo by Kylann Sandelin)

I met Cedar in 2001, on my first visit to the horse ranch where I ride—a place that would soon change my life forever. She was sitting under a horse who was attached to the hitching post waiting to be grained. I hadn’t known anyone with Down’s. My mind skipped around sloppily: weren’t they unpredictable? Should she be left alone around horses, especially under one? I figured I had to speak to her differently. With pity, or extra kindness, because surely the world treated her unfairly. Surely she knew her “unfortunate” lot in life. And surely I was, in this little girl’s mind, “lucky” for being “normal.” I felt an immediate guilt. All this before I even said hello.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Laura.”
“What’s your whole name?”
“Laura Munson.”
“Hi Laura Munson!” she exclaimed, smiling, like we were old friends and she was just now recognizing me. “Bobbi’s out feeding the llamas.”

Bobbi (Photo by Kylann Sandelin)

Bobbi Hall was the woman I’d come to see. She’s a skilled horse trainer, and I’ll save this remarkable woman’s teachings for another blog post. For now, it seems just right to introduce her as the mother of Cedar.
There’s something about Bobbi that inspires people to dig in quickly. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that you spend your first lessons at her ranch watching the herd. Examining how 40 head of horses communicate with one another. How they push each other around piles of hay. How, as prey animals, they move away from pressure. And even how they play.

During one of those first lessons with Bobbi, Cedar was standing in a paddock among some new horses that were there for training, touted as being “mean,” though I’ve never heard Bobbi use that term around a horse. “Misunderstood” maybe.
“See how they’re taking care of her?” she said.
“Why is that?” I asked, worrying.
“They know she has no agenda. She’s in the moment, like they are. And they trust her.”
And standing there watching Cedar, seeing what she meant as clear as the Montana sky, knowing deeply that I had much to learn in the way of achieving agenda-lessness, I asked Bobbi about Cedar. What it was like to have a Down’s child. Immediately I regretted it, but my clunky question washed on her graceful shores and I got my answer.

“When she was born, they told me I had a Down’s baby. They said she wouldn’t amount to much in life. They suggested I put her in a home. I was scared out of my mind.” Somehow, she was smiling as she spoke.
Cedar giggled from the pasture, a horse’s nose in her braids, and I found myself smiling too.
Bobbi spent the next hour telling me about Cedar. About how things looked beyond bleak. Her husband was neither emotionally nor financially supportive, her business required her total attention to keep afloat, and after raising two adult sons on her own, and fighting to keep her land for thirty years, it looked like she would be a single mother again. And this time of a child with special needs. She doubted herself. Maybe it was true: Cedar belonged somewhere with skilled professionals.
But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Instead she became intensely protective of her new child, so different from how she’d been with her sons, raising them to be rugged Montanans. She was told that Down’s children can have neck support issues and that Cedar needed to be kept inside where she was safe until she was old enough to have the x-ray which would determine whether her axis was strong enough to support her head. And that x-ray wouldn’t be done until she was two or three years old.

But sooner than later, Bobbi’s instincts told her differently. She was an outside person and hers was an outside lifestyle. No child of hers would be cooped up in doors. Plus her livelihood couldn’t support having a nanny watching Cedar’s every move. So one day she bundled up Cedar and brought her play chair outside while she did her chores. Cedar bounced around and gurgled with glee, and this was in the middle of winter. Soon they started taking long walks in the woods with Cedar in the backpack.

“We’d touch trees or snow, or I’d put her in a little seat while I was trimming horses. I saw her strength. She wasn’t fragile at all. And so she became a part of ranch life. These days, I’ll be talking with a client, and I’ll look around and there Cedar is, out there all on her own, feeding the horses. Would that have happened if I put her away in a home somewhere where she’s locked up? Can you imagine Cedar locked up?”

I looked out at this child, moving a bossy horse away from her with skill, but not anger. Just like the horses. The answer was an emphatic no.
Soon enough, Bobbi decided she would put Cedar in a backpack and take her on horse rides. She was competitive in Endurance riding, which was another major source of her livelihood, so that meant training was rigorous— six to eight miles a day, five days a week at a walk trot and canter over tough terrain. Cedar seemed happy and invigorated, in love with horses and this new sense of rhythm and speed.

Cedar and Bobbi (Photo by Kylann Sandelin)

At about six months, the people from Child Development Services came to check in on Cedar. They couldn’t believe what they saw. A girl who wasn’t supposed to be doing much of anything, barely able to hold herself in a chair, was sitting upright in perfect position, crawling up and down stairs. They’d never seen anything like it, not in their twenty years of working in this field.
“What they came to find is that the horse’s motion at a walk is the same as a child’s at a crawl.” Bobbi paused a moment to refer to the horses. “And somehow that movement from such an early stage, stimulated Cedar like no other Down’s child the case-worker had seen. He was sold on equine therapy for Down’s babies and now has a successful business doing it with all kind of folks.”
Bobbi explained to him that she’d made a decision. She wasn’t going to treat Cedar like a person with a disability. “We all have disabilities,” she said to him, always a teacher. “I’m going to treat her just like I did my two sons.”

So when Cedar entered the local school system, no one was quite sure what to do with her. Special needs children were new to the school to begin with, and here was this high-functioning Down’s child. But with the help of her aid, from elementary to high school, Cedar not only learned more than was ever expected of her, but she became a teacher to many, and the first Down’s student to graduate from the Whitefish High School.

In a recent conversation, Bobbi said, proud, “They said she would plateau in her learning, but she hasn’t. She continues to learn. She’s an avid reader, who will now go back to tutor special needs kids.”

Adding to the list: Cedar cheerleaded in high school, and has won many gold medals at the Special Olympics doing equestrian events (pole bending, and barrel racing, as well as trail class), and competing in the Slolum and Giant Slolum in skiing.

Today, Cedar is instrumental in helping hold and comfort the horses during training sessions. “She understands the way I do things, and she makes it easy.”
And now, on any given day, you can be in a lesson in Bobbi’s outdoor arena, watching Cedar galloping around bareback, her hands out, giggling and whooping and shouting for joy. A girl who wasn’t supposed to “amount to much,” much less ride a horse the way she does—with balance and abandon and a freedom I’ve never seen repeated.

In our interview for this blog piece, Bobbi shared something I didn’t feel entitled to ask, though I’ve wondered about it many times as I’ve grown to love and understand this wonderful girl.
“Cedar, although she is about eight to ten developmentally, has the emotions of a seventeen to twenty year old. She has desires and wishes like any other person her age. And she gets frustrated at times because she doesn’t always understand the whole picture. And when that happens, she goes for a walk in the woods, usually with a horse.”
I pointed out that she learned it from Bobbi– that she’s safe and at home in nature.
But Bobbi begs to differ:
“It’s the horses,” she says. “They’re her teachers. Like I told you years ago, she is in the moment just like they are. Their instinct is to protect themselves. They know she has no agenda. So they trust her. It’s as simple as that. And my job is to trust that relationship. Cedar is my best teacher about unconditional love, fearlessness, and what it is to live in the present.”

Every time I come to the ranch, Cedar runs to me for a hug. She’s usually happy to tell me about her recent achievements, especially her multiple appearances in the local newspapers. “I’m a star,” she likes to say. And she is the very definition of just that.

Laura Munson is the author of the bestselling memoir, THIS IS NOT THE STORY YOU THINK IT IS:  A Season of Unlikely Happiness (Amy Einhorn/Putnam).  You can read more at:
http://www.lauramunsonauthor.com/
http://lauramunson.wordpress.com/
http://twitter.com/Lauramunson

Purchase Laura’s Book at Amazon: click here

Tagged as: Laura Munson, Parelli Media