One of my childhood friends who loved horses grew up to start a riding academy. It was a successful venture for her until tragedy did what tragedy sometimes does: one of the students died after falling off her horse during a lesson. I was already in Alaska by then, and my mother wrote me about it.

“I see the class out, clopping along, even slower than before,” she wrote. “Oh, my dear, I think it’s better to run, as fast as possible.” It was an irony coming from her, the woman who had weighed me and my pony down with so much safety equipment that I was a bit like a small knight in armor. But I knew what she meant.

When my friends and I had gone riding, half a generation earlier, we had run like the wind. The first pony I rode was Candy, a Shetland who mastered the art of kicking and biting me while I was sitting on her back. The second was a slightly larger Welsh named Blizzard, who would at least wait until I got off. Whichever pony I was riding would usually choose our rate of speed and direction, and sometimes that direction included a beeline for a tree with low branches or a steep bank overlooking the nearest road. When the kids in my neighborhood went riding, we played Capture the Flag in the lowgrounds and raced across open fields. On hot days we took the saddles off and coaxed the ponies to swim in Cousin Max’s pond. We didn’t really ride then, because we kept floating off, but we usually managed to keep hold of a handful of mane.

Falling off was inevitable. I knew that when I fell off, if I didn’t keep hold of the reins, I would be walking home. At that time there was a popular cartoonist named Thelwell who drew pictures of kids riding fat sassy ponies. My favorite was one of a woman standing on her porch, looking at a riderless pony, reins dragging, trotting up to the house. “Ok,” she said, “what did you do with her this time?”

Is it better to run? I can’t say. I can only try to imagine the burden in my friend’s heart after that accident, or the burden on my mother’s as she watched me ride out, hoping I would hold on tight.