The Mad River Valley has always felt like home. At first, it was a weekend home, as my family shared a small house on the Common Road with two other families from the Boston area. Then, in 1963, weeks before my 7th birthday, we bought out the other two families and moved. No one explained to me at the time that my father, George Hall, was under a lot of stress in the Boston business world and sought a simpler life in The Valley, where he would reinvent himself as a high school physics teacher.
I had completed kindergarten and first grade in a progressive school system, where I was already an avid reader and loved learning in general. After my first week in second grade at Waitsfield Elementary School, it was determined my skill level was better suited to the third grade, so I skipped second grade and joined the third graders in Mrs. Howard’s classroom. I was small for my age, and shy, among a group of older children that had known each other pretty much since birth. My first friends were naturally the ones on my bus route along the Common Road -- including Eddy Barnard, Linda Folsom, Bobby Rose, Barbara Rivers, Angela Marble, Beth Eurich, and others.
As much as my father reinvented himself, my mother, Sally Hall, did so even more. From a golf champion and president of the garden club, she started working at the Peter Glenn ski shop at Mad River and driving the Waitsfield school bus. Our house was situated on 6 acres, surrounded by farm land and covered with lots of lush grass. After a year or so in The Valley, my mother decided we needed a horse, and before I knew what was happening, a 14.2 hand ‘large pony’ that belonged to a family in Massachusetts where I had my first riding lessons, showed up at our doorstep. Oliver was a converted cowpony, who spent the first 10 years of his life in the wild west. He was a beautiful bay, with a perky nose, and cute, curious, upturned ears, who looked like a blend of quarter horse and Welsh pony.
As I entered fifth grade, my friend Cindy Parker, daughter of the local minister Charlie Parker, was exercising horses at the Valley Farm. Mostly they were the ponies used for lessons given by Charles and Kay Wade. Cindy asked if I would be interested in going with her and riding in the indoor riding ring for a couple hours every day after school. So, I found myself, at the age of 9, walking from school to Valley Farm and grooming, tacking, and riding whichever pony was assigned to me that day. I essentially became a barn rat. In addition to exercising ponies, I did whatever was asked of me -- cleaning stalls, cleaning tack, walking polo ponies between chukkas; in exchange for lessons. On the days of my lessons, I would take the school bus home, tack up Oliver, and ride down Brook Road to the farm. After my lesson, I would ride back up Brook Road. Those solo rides home hold some of my favorite memories. The world was quiet and peaceful, and it was just me and Oliver, feeling as one as his hooves sounded out a slow steady rhythm on the dirt, and the sun slid toward the Green Mountains in the western sky.
It wasn’t long before my mother decided Oliver needed company. Vince Sardi offered her a retired NYC police horse, Paladin. Paladin was a true horse, bigger than my large pony Oliver, with tall withers and a sway back. On my days off, when I wasn’t riding or doing chores at Valley Farm, I would find a friend to join me, and off we would go, on Paladin and Oliver to explore The Valley.
Around this time, Charles and Kay Wade bought their own barn, in Moretown, and named it Mad River Stables. I was now in junior high school and would make the trip after school to the stables, where I had started taking riding much more seriously. I would school the fine horses that boarded there, muck stalls, and clean tack; pretty much anything I was asked, including shoveling a loft full of chicken excrement to clear it for hay storage. In exchange, Charles developed my skills and my pony to the point where I was showing all over New England in hunter/jumper and equitation classes. During this time, we made a broader group of friends; some of whom rode for other barns, such as Gail and Kady Ward and Lani Williams; and some who joined Cindy and me at Mad River Stables for summer programs -- such as Dana and Leslie Whittle, and Mary Ellen Wright.
Oliver and I were a team. We spent the show season at the stables, and the rest of the year where it all started -- riding the dirt roads around The Valley. I was still too young to drive, so Oliver and Paladin served as the main means of transportation. I would recruit a friend, usually Galen Brown, and we would saddle up and while away the days exploring old logging roads until the heat and/or hunger and thirst made us turn our horses toward town for a creemee at Phyl/Dens, named for Hap Gaylord’s children, Phyllis and Dennis. Often, we would plan our route so we would pass by a pond. Our favorite was on the Airport Road. We would remove our saddles and ride bareback into the cool, fresh water, where the horses would go all the way in until their hooves were no longer grounded, and we felt weightless and free on their backs.
During the shoulder seasons, we would help the farmers in the area (Folsoms, Barnards, Euriches) -- bucking hay in the fall and collecting and emptying sap buckets in the spring. In exchange, our barn was full of beautiful Valley hay, and our shelves held several grades of maple syrup from the sugar groves along the Common Road.
As the years went by, life grew more complicated. My family’s roots in skiing influenced our winter activities, and I got to a point where I had to choose between riding and ski racing, both of which I had been able to do into the early years of high school. On the horse show circuit, I had essentially outgrown Oliver, and was ready for a bigger horse and the higher fences that came with jumping a larger animal. The choice was difficult, and the amount of resources to pursue competitive riding at the time were far more than to participate in ski racing in The Valley. As my sights turned to college, and a potential place on a collegiate ski team, I rode my last days on Oliver. He and Paladin spent their final years lazily grazing the deep nourishing grass in the field behind our house. Though I no longer live there, I can still hear Oliver’s soft nickers and feel his warm breath on my face when I return to The Valley and lie in the long grass on the knoll behind the house on the Common Road.
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