I was riding before I could walk. We didn’t have helmets. Decades later after being away from horses to grow up and raise my family, I began riding again with lessons from certified instructor Kellye Pollard. Kellye insisted on helmets and I bought the blue Troxel with the gold horse emblem.

A couple of years later as an equine photographer I was shooting an appendix out of West Palm Beach. He was beautiful under his rider’s hands, went along as smooth as a metronome (sp?). The rider reined in next to me and asked “Do you want to ride him?”. Silly question!

“Yes, please!” I agreed. “Just let me get my helmet out of the truck.” Thank you Kellye for ingraining helmets into my brain!

As I was being legged up, the horse started spinning around his owner. She had the reins and I couldn’t get my feet in the irons. As I held his mane, he began bucking and the owner let go of his reins. Can we say ‘bolt action’ means something new to me now?

As the gelding flew around the pasture with me in the saddle but no reins nor irons, I started getting cocky. “I can ride as fast as you can run, boy” I said. Wrong thing to say. I felt him collecting under himself and looked ahead to see the pasture fence 30 feet in our path. I thought “He’s going to jump and the fence is too high!”

I had no recollection of ever having to make the decision to bail off a horse while galloping before, but I felt I had no choice. With no stirrups I had nothing to launch myself, so I pressed as hard as I could into his side with my leg and jumped as far to his right as I could. I hit the ground on my side, slid, caught a root with my hip that flipped me into the air and the back of my Troxel helmet collided with a solid 4×4 post in the fence, stopping me most abruptly. I was unaware as I lay there that the post had cracked from the force of the impact of my helmet with my head inside!

I was out of the saddle for 4 months. While I was laid up, I was told the horse did the same thing to another rider who also bailed. That time he did attempt the jump, caught the fence and flipped. Turns out he had some sort of seizures and flipped over on his back just standing in his stall also. Poor horse.
I got back in the saddle with my instructor and friend Kellye, wearing a Troxel helmet I borrowed from her. Kiowa, her now deceased Appy, gently carried me back to confidence on many long, slow trail rides.

I photograph thousands of images of people on horses every year. It saddens me to think how many of them do not wear helmets. Hopefully I will never have the memorial shot of the one that “should have been wearing a helmet”. I know that I am still here, riding (a little) with borrowed helmets and shooting (a lot) of equine activities, because of the Troxel helmet I broke and my instructor Kellye, who cared enough about her students to insist “No helmet, no ride”.

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