Ours is a culture so urban in mindset
that a rural way of living has become anachronistic; a romantic concept that is
the trope of jokes, and of Hollywood plots of
dystopia. Equally, our culture’s recent spate of nostalgia is an impossible
fantasy of women’s roles that practice a convenient amnesia to the
restrictions, abuses and denial of the
many gifts of the women who lived in those times. In addition, our culture’s
tacit acceptance of transience gives rise to
a lack of commitment, a sense of disposability to our relationships, to
our very environment, that has created the climate change that may end human
civilization, if not all planetary life. It is not a march in lock-step,
however, and there are those who are choosing their life path in a way that
rejects the glut of cities and all that dense population centers represent. One
such person is Katie Walker, who says she is “not a city person. I visit them,
but I don’t like them”. Reflecting on
the urban influence upon our current culture, Katie says, “I think there’s a
shift in how people live. When you make yourself far removed from the land and
what the land can offer you, you’re at a deficit when something happens.” Mentioning the
recent patterns of increasingly severe storms due to climate change, Katie
stated : “It goes back to the primitive idea that even if you don’t live as
organically as people living off the land, you still have the know-how [ to not
be helpless]”. Katie is a fourth generation Floridian—a rarity in a state that
is overbuilt beyond its water resources, where the state Farm Bureau posts “No
Farms, No Food” advertisements, and where large commercial concerns destroy
entire communities for tourist attractions and gated neighborhoods.
Nonetheless, Katie intends to not only live her life as a rural person, but to
spend her life with horses.
Formerly Katie Wimberly, Katie Walker is
a talented equestrian who rides with classical grace, and who has begun also to
accept clients as a trainer. She
says she has been “riding since before I
was born; my mom rode with me until she was four months pregnant, and she made
a point to have me on a horse before I was a year old”. She attended University of Florida,
Gainesville,
for agricultural marketing and commuted a hundred miles “to keep the horses
while I went to school”. Equating horses
to actors and dancers, Katie says, “Horses have an emotional level that offers
more depth, each one has its own way of being in the way they carry themselves
and the way that they perform […] To me, riding is an art; being a good steward
of the land is an art. Art is an appreciation of one’s surroundings. If you
look back at agriculture, it took an understanding of your surroundings.” Katie
continues with a comment about ‘the different grasses’ their individual
structures and their appearance in large
tracts “ so I think it’s interesting from a visual perspective.” Such
considerations—the aesthetic of different grass types—are not the prosaic realm
of an urban aesthetic; nor would their protein and sugar content after rain,
after mowing, in drought, in dormancy, be the usual considerations of someone
not used to thinking about the nutritional health of a four-hoofed vegetarian
dancer, whose heights of movement can encompass both the competitive (sport)
and the sublime.
Yet this is a woman with talent,
intelligence, education and dedication, a woman who says of herself, “I have a
great appreciation for the arts” without mentioning a classical mindset that
once saw such appreciation as being equally necessary as agricultural knowledge
and equestrian skills. In this young woman, Katie is in her twenties, our
culture, as whole, has both another equestrian woman following the precedent of
those equestrian women who preserved both our land heritage and our horses—the
American Mustang, or wild horse, would have been exterminated two generations
ago if not for the fearless, tireless work of a woman (and they are hunted and
slaughtered by helicopter to this day—babies, pregnant mommies, half grown or
ancient). While it may be true that too many young women concern themselves
with only the produce and consume slavery our urban centers offer, here is one
whose interests are far from the Manolo crowd.
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