I’m in the saddle with my two year old son Rowan sitting in front of me. Betsy, the reliable old bay quarter horse mare, is carrying the two of us for the first time. She steps carefully, knowing she has precious cargo. We are riding down towards the pond at the bottom of the driveway where the oak trees grow. A typical Texas scene. As we approach, a big gray heron gets up and flaps away.
“Heron!” says my son, delightedly.
I rein in, astonished… You see, my son Rowan is autistic. This same week his speech therapists have given up on him, telling me I’ll probably never have a conversation with him.
I try a small trot. He giggles, laughs. I put Betsy into a slow lope. More laughter. “Fast!” he says, delighted. “Fast!”
My son, my autistic, non verbal son, is speaking!
Fast forward ten years on, Rowan now has his own web based television show, a job with a local road construction company as a site safety inspector which he does partly in Spanish! How did we get here? Through trail riding.
From that first ride, Rowan and I began to spend literally three to five hours a day in the saddle together, exploring the ranchland around our Texas home. I noticed immediately that I got more speech at the trot than at the walk, and more at the lope than the trot. I didn’t yet know why, only that it was working. He learned to read; he loved the Lion King, so I’d paint letters of Lion King character names on trees, putting them together as we rode. It worked!
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