Riding the World’s Loneliest Horse Race, by Lara Prior-Palmer, 2019
This was the first book for the 2020-2021 Old Town Library Book Club. It was a fast read, like the 1000-kilometer horse race over the Mongolian Steppe it describes, in which 19 year-old Lara incredibly wins. She competed in it on a whim in the year 2013. She is ill-prepared and unconcerned. She is very deep and philosophical at times. She is an odd ducky from England. She has had an almost constant tummy ache since she was a teenager and this followed her and plagued her throughout the race. She doesn’t start out competitive but ends up being very competitive and wanting to beat Devan, the prideful blonde from Texas. And the reader wants her to beat Devan, too. Lara is asked if this is a UK vs. USA thing, and Lara answers, No, it’s a UK vs. Texas thing-the rest of the US is okay. She was born in 1994 and this book was published in 2019, so she wrote it in her mid-twenties or younger. She journals throughout the race in a Winnie the Pooh notebook which becomes soggy and the ink runs because of all the rain she has to ride through. She comes across as really thoughtful, lonely, and aching – physically and mentally, and I’m left with wanting her to find peace and comfort and solace. May you find that, Lara Prior-Palmer. You write a good book!
The race involves riding a different Mongolian horse (pony) from one ‘ger’ to another across 1000 kilometers of Mongolian grassland. You pick the horse you ride at each ger from among 40 or so available. I love how she comes to know each of her 25 horses; she gives them names, like Barbie and Stripes and Steppe Orchid. She seems to constantly be lost, has a GPS but doesn’t know how to use it. Not sure how she actually found her way to the finish. Sometimes she rides with a fellow racer or two, sometimes she rides alone. She ends the race alone on a plodding horse that would not run. She thinks she has come in 2nd to Devan’s first place, but Devan is penalized and Lara ends up winning. Time penalties occur if your horse’s heartbeat doesn’t lower to an acceptable level within 45 minutes of each leg.
Here are some interesting lines:
What was it about turning into an adult? The color drained from the days and life became a calendar. (from page 4)
Before the communist takeover, the last ruler of Mongolia sipped tea in a ger as humble as everyone else’s….The respect for nature, or baigal–“what exists”–is such that many Mongolians on the steppe wear shoes with soft, curved soles to spare the stalks of the tiniest plants and to avoid hurting the earth. (from page 37)
Glee is my favorite train to catch; it really carries me. Soon I am letting out shrill hollers and woo-hoos. (from page 49)
As we curve each valley corner, we set the plains behind us free. Grasslands pull the summerscape in every direction. Green, green, gulping us up. Where the grass ceases, blue sky begins, translucent and bold. “Blue and green should not be seen, without a color in between,” begins my mother, babbling in my head wherever I go. “Blue and green should be seen,” she carries on, reminding me of the philosophy behind her jewelry making, which marries emeralds to sapphires at every opportunity. (from page 52) (Her mum’s jewelry business is called Julia Lloyd George.)
I sing as we circle the rocks and scarves while Kirsten records on her camera. She shouts after us as we stride off into the evening. “Your singing voice could injure a small child.” (from pages 66 and 67)
My mother worries a lot too. But she loves it. She lives in a worry. It colors her dreams. Her whole existence is worrisome, partly I think because when her worries come true she feels a sense of victory, and when they don’t, she feels her worrying has paid off because it has ordered the future into compliance. (from page 110)
There’s no land ownership on the steppe, since the earth isn’t for sale; by contrast, every patch of England seems to be buyable, even some waterways. Ibn Khaldun, historian of the fourteenth century, felt nomads were “removed from all the evil habits that infected the hearts of settlers.” He might’ve deemed the right to buy property one such evil. (from page 119)
Richard’s jeep roves the cliff above. I feel the silent clicks of his camera slicing us up into rectangles. (from page 144)
On the soum’s northern edge, Chloe stops for an emergency toilet break. I get off to hold her horse, who breathes peacefully into my hip.
“Is anyone watching?” she whispers up at me while crouching. It seems unlikely in such a ghost town.
“There’s a crowd the size of a football stadium eyeing you through the slats in the fence here,” I tease. “Hurry.” (from page 146)
We worm on through valleys of delicate wildflowers, their fragrance rising at our sides, the young sun and the old sky. (from page 150)
Twice she sighed on the brink of collapsing and my meager response was “No, no, come on let’s keep cantering.”
I asked myself if sympathy was an art I had yet to learn or whether it was always an awkward, possibly ugly, thing, even when performed by experts. (from page 151)
Cars were what I had come from and what I would return to, but at school I already yearned, perhaps unlike my urban peers, for the time before tarmac began: when mud was truth and cities trampled by hooves and carts went dusty in summer, when you had to exert your body merely to get around–forced aboard a horse, or else onto your own two feet, to bare your face to the breaking sun and stream your cheeks through the air. (from page 155)
Being on a horse pulls you out of yourself and grounds you in the larger land. “Plug in,” Aunt Lucinda says, to get riders feeling the animal and earth beneath their seat bones. (from page 156)
When I wake, there’s bad weather inside my head. Fog rising, lost feeling. I think my head crashed through mountain tunnels in the night. For the first seconds of day I’m a train tricked into going the other way–rewinding, drawing back into darkness, tucking into the underside of time, delving out of the onwards motion to see what lies beneath, behind, around, and between. Deep inside I must be tired of the straight-knit line. Some force arrives to kick me upwards and leftwards. My dreams slip from my body as I bend out of the tent, bubbling short thoughts–the types you’d find in a washed-up goldfish. I raise my face to the cold and start surfing the day. (An example of her philosophical writing from page 180.)
Unzip my skin and you might find luminescent blue rubber ready for a swim. I am not really human. And nor, am I sure, is anyone else. (from page 209)
Inside the ger the boy with long legs is dreaming on the floor. I tap him and gesture for help. Relaxed as ever, he moves slowly to dress while I wait outside, where the wind swings the canvas at the brim of the ger. When he emerges he moves his gaze to the distant pony and goes up the shrubby incline loosely, as if the earth is walking him.
I follow behind. He nears the pony and whistles three long notes. The dun does not move. He’s so close I’m sure the pony will flee in fright. All is held still by a rope between their minds, one I can barely touch. He links his gangly arms around the pony’s neck. I witness their standing embrace from afar. This is beautiful. Time for me to leave, I think. (From page 211 in which she describes a young Mongolian boy capturing her horse who escaped from her.)
Why couldn’t I just be triumphant, like an elephant squirting water? In other words, where was Devan when you needed her? Heaped on the ground apart from her pony, weeping with her head in her hands, unavailable for the outsourcing of my victory celebrations….
Devan was quaking like a washing machine. So long had she lived as a parasite in my mind that her real body had me shuddering too…
Maggie caught me looking at Devan and nudged me in her direction. I slunk over and curled my arms around her. She unfurled to embrace me back. (from page 263)