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The Horse Boy: A Father’s Quest to Heal His Son
Rupert Isaacson
By
Published: Apr 21, 2009
Category:
Memoir
Video
The movie trailer
To be the parent of an autistic child like Rowan Isaacson — I can’t imagine it. Life gets reduced to tantrums and the space between them. Toilet training is an impossible goal; once a day, maybe more, you declare “Code Brown”. Even a small thing, like your kid playing well with others, is an impermissible dream.
I could say it’s crueler still that Kristin, Rowan’s mother, is a professor of psychology at the University of Austin in Texas, and that Rupert, his father, is a horse trainer and writer of considerable skill. But really, it’s not crueler. Autism is a leveler — it destroys marriages at every level of the cultural scale. And then, of course, there’s the kid, trapped inside, with a life sentence.
You know, going in, that there’s a happy ending to The Horse Boy: A Father’s Quest to Heal His Son. The cover shouts it: the boy on a horse, arm raised in triumph, and the father, holding him, ecstatic in the moment. That picture is something I turned to often as I read. Because this autism thing, it’s really hard. I’d read about it before, but when you’re reading a father talking about his hopeless kid — that’s hard.
A cure? Good luck. Autism is contained. Dealt with. Adjusted to. No cure exists.
But Rupert Isaacson noticed that when Rowan went into the woods, he got calm. And then came the day that Rowan ran into the neighbor’s horse pasture. He ended up in front of the “alpha mare”, a big horse called Betsy. And Betsy stopped. She dipped her head. Isaacson writes:
I knew I was witnessing something extraordinary. The mare was spontaneously submitting to the child on the ground before her. In all the years that I had been training horses, I had never seen this happen. My son had some kind of direct link to the horse.
And then I cried, the tears coming silent and unbidden on that humid June day, because I thought: “He’s got it. He’s got the horse gene. But he’s autistic. I’ll never be able to share it with him. Never be able to teach him to ride. Never share this joy with my son.”
It’s stunning how wrong a parent can be.
But then Rupert Isaacson gets it right. It sounds crazy, even to him, but he gets an idea: "Northern Mongolia, the place where the horse evolved, the last place on Earth with wild horses, was also the place where the word shaman — literally ‘he who knows’ — came from." So he’ll take his son to Mongolia. And there, perhaps, he will find what eludes him in the West: a healing.
He writes a book proposal, and, to his astonishment, gets a huge advance. A film crew appears. And off Rowan, Rupert and Kristin go.
I have read many travel books about the East; the combination of the exotic and the spiritual is catnip for me. I’ve never read one remotely like this. Easy to figure out why: The stakes seem higher here — not just personal salvation but the future of a child.
You may not have to deal with autism. But the moral of the story is universal. When you’re confronted with a problem that blights your life, don’t just accept it. Do something. If it fails, do something else. And never, never, never give up.
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