“The last ride.” That was the front page headline of the Daily Hampshire Gazette on Friday, November 1. The story began, “Since 1972, the Raucher family has taught generations . . . how to ride at Heritage Farm [in Easthampton]. On Tuesday the last of those lessons took place as the farm is about to be sold . . . . On Saturday at noon at the farm, everything . . . will be sold at an auction . . . Diane Raucher Miller, the only woman among the five [Raucher siblings] said what she will miss most . . . are the children they taught there. ‘All the kids,’ said Miller, choking up. ‘Watching them grow up.’” The story made me choke up, too. I think my Gazette column about Heritage Farm, published over 21 years ago in March 1998 and lightly edited here, explains why.
— Bill Newman
Puffy, my almost 15-year-old daughter Jo’s chestnut Quarter Horse, has an alias. Puffy boards at the Raucher family’s Heritage Farm, where Jo, who jettisoned the name Joanna when she was 3 or 4, has been riding since she was 5.
When Puffy arrived at Heritage, Maureen Raucher, who’s married to David, the eldest Raucher son, asked her then 4-year-old niece Annie if she wanted to name the new horse. Annie, who was standing on the bench of the picnic table near the stable, pushed the white snip on the mare’s nose, felt her exhale warm air, and said, “She’s Puffy.”
“That’s probably not her name,” Maureen responded. But the little girl knew a Puffy when she saw one, and the name stuck.
Some years later when Maureen was married and expecting her first child, she was considering selling Puffy in order to raise some additional money for the home she and her husband David were building near the barn. She would need to have faith in Puffy’s new owner.
At the same time, Jo was quite literally outgrowing Willie, the Rauchers’ forgiving and talented Welsh Pony, whom Jo had been riding for years. Puffy became Jo’s. The mare’s home remained at Heritage, of course.
Among other things that Jo and Puffy would learn together was the show event called Gambler’s Choice — a competition where each rider sets her own course and sprints over as many jumps as possible within the allotted time. A typical Gambler’s Choice works like this:
At the start signal Puffy, with Jo glued to the saddle, breaks toward the brick wall; 1,100 pounds of horse and rider fly over it. Although Puffy is only 15 hands, she clears that jump by a foot or more.
Puffy then gallops toward a three-foot-high picket fence. Jo’s hands rest an inch or two above Puffy’s withers and barely move. As they take off, Jo squeezes her right calf and almost imperceptibly pulls back her right shoulder.
Puffy responds by performing a flying lead change while over the jump. On the landing she buttonhooks, then races over the oxer, and next spins through a hairpin turn to face the natural gate where Puffy does another flying lead change, and then they take the hedge, the brush, and the roll-top in quick order and then, from the opposite side, soar over the brick wall again.
They stop reluctantly when the buzzer sounds. Puffy has gone flat out, jumped big, and shown why, among horse people, Quarter Horses are known for having a deep heart.
Jo dismounts, removes her helmet, and hugs her horse. From a distance, it’s hard to tell what’s Jo’s hair and what’s Puffy’s mane because they’re the same copper color.
Jo is still flying, chatting nonstop with her friends and fellow riders. It’s hard to believe that this is the same grumpy teenager whose monosyllables pass for conversation on school-day mornings.
And let’s not overstate Puffy’s professionalism. Non-jumping events sometimes bore her, and she does not go well. And this mare enjoys — I use “enjoys” advisedly — a bad reputation for nipping and kicking geldings who graze too close to her. Of course, when she is in a field and sees Jo, carrot in hand, coming to get her, she whinnies.
Jo and her barn buddies, Val and Katie, all ride hard at Heritage. They also work hard there. They clean tack, muck stalls, assist the farrier and vet, and feed, water, and groom the barn’s Appaloosas and pintos, bays and sorrels, thoroughbreds and Shetlands, as well as the occasional donkey and llama. They also show the transient horses and ponies offered at auctions.
But let’s not overstate the case for teenage responsibility.
One spring Sunday afternoon, while driving Jo back from her friend Gillie’s, she told me they had been riding Gillie’s horse, Buzzie, in the fields behind the house. That sounded reasonable enough. Months later it slipped out that, unbeknownst to any adult, they had been cantering Buzzie bareback — while riding backwards together, hanging on to him and each other, facing his tail.
After every ride, whether on trails or in the show ring, Jo walks and cools off Puffy. Puffy then follows Jo — the halter and lead rope are unnecessary — back into the barn with its familiar smells of hay and mash, sawdust and manure, saddles and saddle soap. Jo pauses to pet Grover, the gray cattle dog, and also the calico kitten curled on a barrel top and then puts Puffy in her stall, picks her hooves, brushes her, and makes sure she has plenty of water, bedding and hay.
For my wife, Dale, and me, it’s amazing how neat Puffy’s stall is. For many years we’ve given Jo a birthday card that says on the cover, “We wish you as much happiness as there are stars in the sky and sand on the beach.” On the inside it says, “And clothes on your floor.”
On the brass plate tacked to her stall, Puffy’s name appears over Jo’s. In bigger letters above “Puffy” is her registered name, the name by which she is introduced when she and Jo enter the show ring, the name by which this horse is known to the rest of the world. Puffy’s other name is “YouBetchaBabe.”
March 1998
After high school, Jo moved to New York City to attend an acting conservatory, and we sold Puffy back to Maureen so that Puffy could become her daughter Mackenzie’s.
For five or six years Mackenzie rode and jumped Puffy and mucked her stall and fed her hay and oats. She, too, loved that horse. But a Quarter Horse generally lives about 20, maybe 25 years, and Puffy was growing old and her arthritis became increasingly severe.
Over time, no amount of supplements or vet visits, painkillers, massage, physical therapy, or ointments made her feel better. Towards the end, she would bear most of her weight on only three legs, which would ease the arthritic pain in her fourth only for a while.
The Rauchers are horse people. They know deep in their bones that a horse shouldn’t suffer.
Puffy was almost 30 when they put her down. Maureen and Mackenzie cried for a long time. When I told Jo the news, she did too. But I also passed along to Jo something else Maureen had told me — that they had buried Puffy in one of her favorite places, in the field behind the barn near the wood rail fence and an oak tree where the summer sun seems to set, the place where Puffy knew the geldings would leave her alone, where Jo, walking with carrots in hand, often would find her.
September, 2013
There were no horses. Every stall in the large front barn was empty. Every stall in the back barn was empty, too. It was a spectacularly clear and beautiful autumn day. Dale and I sat quietly by ourselves in the bowed wooden bleachers, overlooking the outside ring and the fields beyond. There were no horses in the fields, either.
The inside ring, in contrast, was overflowing with people and stuff — piles of riding equipment, horse jumps, bridles, saddles, stirrups, even some old metal milk containers with the Heritage Farm logo on them. Through loud speakers the patter of Donnie and Dennis Raucher, the auctioneers, filled the room.
Dougie Raucher, David, Donnie, Dennis and Diane’s brother, told us that while going through papers that morning, they had found Puffy’s, which he gave to us.
Diane Raucher later asked us if we wanted to see Jo’s initials. Remember the earlier part of this story when I suggested that arguably our daughter Jo as a teenager was not totally perfect? At the auction I learned from Diane that years ago Jo had scratched her initials into the wet cement that was a repair to the floor in the front barn. The cement and an unmistakable “JN” are still there. We took a picture of her initials and Puffy’s papers and texted them to Jo.
There was one thing I wanted to do before leaving the farm. I asked Maureen if she would show me where Puffy was buried — I wanted to say goodbye. As Maureen and I walked past the stalls out to the pastures, I recalled some words from Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill: “As I was green and carefree, famous among the barns/About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,/In the sun that is young once only. . . .”
November, 2019
Bill Newman lives in Northampton.