North Bay kids equestrian camps offer thrills for pony passionate

‘I think he likes you,” Holly says.

A 10-year-old pony named Nemo nuzzles up to my daughter Zoe again as she brushes his sleek, brown coat.

She smiles and pets him back. Amid a chorus of chirping birds and waking horses at daybreak at Kilham Farm in Nicasio, co-owner Holly Charlebois is helping Zoe prep for her first horse riding lesson.

An hour earlier, while winding through the fog on Lucas Valley Road, my 7-year-old daughter had let me know, “Dad, I’m kind of half-excited and half-scared, but more excited than scared.”

I turned down the “Beauty and the Beast” soundtrack to talk about it.

“What are you most scared about?”

“Well, just if the horse gets out of control or something,” she said.

We discussed how, a few days before, we’d been reading about Harry Potter’s first Quidditch lesson: “Perhaps brooms, like horses, could tell when you were afraid, thought Harry.”

“How do you they know?” she asked.

I didn’t have a good answer. I’d ridden a few horses while growing up in Florida, but hadn’t been on one in decades.

The first horse I ever rode was Old Sovereign, who was grey with white spots, and lived up to his stately name. Mostly what I remember is how he stepped on my foot while I was brushing him and I was able to wriggle my toes from the front of my boot as my boot remained firmly under his hoof. I didn’t think Zoe would have that problem, but I warned her any way.

Ever since she was old enough to walk, Zoe’s been infatuated with horses, whether miniature toys or sticker books or shows from “My Little Pony” to the Netflix series “Free Reign.”

But until now she’d only ridden the occasional pony at fairs and birthday parties. The only animal that held more allure was the unicorn.

After learning to attach the halter and lead Nemo from his stall to the barn, Zoe discovers that horses are measured in “hands” (four inches per hand) and that Nemo is a medium pony at 14.1 hands.

To show her how it’s calibrated, Charlebois brings out a measuring stick and sizes up Zoe at 13.1 hands: “See, you’re a medium pony, too. But not for long I bet.”

With Charlebois walking her through each step, Zoe learns to groom Nemo, brushing his coat with the grain, picking his hooves, dressing him in polo wraps and buckling the saddle.

“Whoa!” is the first thing she says after sitting in the saddle and Nemo takes a few steps forward before she gets her boots settled in her stirrup.

“That’s a very important word,” Charlebois tells her. “You can use that to slow down and stop.”

As she leads Nemo and Zoe around the wide, covered Kilham arena, Charlebois adds pointers like “When you’re pulling back on the reins, you can feel his mouth” or “Hold on to those reins, sister!” or “Do you want to add a little steering into this equation?”

Zoe quickly learns the trademark clicking sound to give with a soft kick in the stirrups to get Nemo to move. And how to pull back on the reins with a “Whoa!”

It’s the same thing, Charlebois teaches to first-time riders at horse camp every summer. “You just go slow – one step at a time. Everybody goes at their own speed. It’s a scary thing; it doesn’t matter if you’re little or an adult.”

Midway through the lesson, Zoe’s eyes go big as she trots for the first time and tries to adjust to the rhythm of Nemo bouncing up and down.

“How did that feel?” Charlebois asks, slowing down a little.

“Rough!” Zoe says, but with the same enthusiasm as “Awesome!”

Five minutes later, Zoe’s holding her arms out wide (“put your hands out like an airplane,” says Charlebois), learning to balance without holding on to the reins as Nemo lightly trots around and Charlesbois leads. Zoe looks over at me, only for a second, to smile, as if to say, “Don’t worry, Dad, I’m not scared any more.”

It’s the magical grin of the first-time rider, and you can tell Charlebois has seen this many times.

Raised in a storied horse-riding family – her mother, Elizabeth “Lumpy” Kilham, was an Olympic rider and her father, John Charlebois, once ran the Chalk Hill Winery Equestrian Center – Holly can’t actually remember her first time riding a horse.

“I was probably riding in the womb,” she says.

If you query owners and instructors at horse farms across the North Bay, their first-time rides vary as much as the horses.

At age 5, growing up in Woodacre, Crystal Clear Farm owner Renee Ronshausen got her chance when she hopped atop her friend’s new pony, Blitz, in the middle of a baseball diamond.

“They plopped me on the pony with bareback pads, handed me the reins and slapped him on the butt,” she remembers. “We went trotting across the baseball field and the pads swung underneath the pony and I fell off. I hopped right back on and said, ‘I wanna go again!’ I was hooked, totally hooked.”

Strides Riding Academy owner Maggie Clancy’s first horse ride was at age 6 on a ski lodge trail in upstate New York.

“I remember my horse was slipping around in the snow and my sister was behind me freaking out, but I thought it was awesome,” Clancy said.

Mark West Stables owner Virginie Richard grew up in San Anselmo, where “all the houses were zoned to have horses” and many had barns and paddocks behind them.

Her first horse was named Rebel.

“And we used to ride our horses down Sir Francis Drake Boulevard to Fairfax where we would go to the 7-Eleven and get Slurpies by horse,” Richard said.

Now, as instructors, they try to tap into that first-time feeling, teaching kids how to approach a horse slowly without scaring it, to take care of it, to respect it, to balance on it and most importantly to have fun.

“Above all else, you’re supposed to have fun,” says Charlebois. “If you’re not having fun, this might not be the sport for you.”

When the ride is over, after leading Nemo back to his stall, Zoe helps me interview Charlebois, who also trains riders and competes in horse shows.

“It’s a very humbling sport,” she explains. “You can literally be on top of the world at one moment and on the ground the next.”

Zoe gets excited when Charlebois describes how “Riding is one of the only sports where men and women of all ages compete on a level playing ground.”

When it’s time to go, I ask, “Do we have any more questions for Holly?”

Zoe lights up. “Yeah, when can we come back?”

I have a feeling the answer is, this summer, for horse camp.