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Wonder Woman

by Rhonda Brittan | November 23, 2020
6 min read
portrait of Bernice Ende
Bernice Ende Photograph by Lydia Hopper

Lady Long Rider: Alone Across America on Horseback by Bernice Ende, 2018 (ISBN no. 978-1-56037-722-1)

Imagine packing up your favorite horse, with a map and a dog, and riding from Montana across 2,000 miles of unfamiliar territory to visit your sister in Albuquerque. This was exactly what Bernice Ende decided to do for her first long ride in 2005 at age 50. As she writes poetically in “Lady Long Rider,” her gripping memoir of her midlife travels on horseback, she was so nervous that she cried “with trepidation dripping down my cheeks.” Yet this amazing woman seems thrived on the effort it takes to pack up camp each morning, ride 20 miles, and stop to set up camp every night.

Of course, she didn’t start out cold. She grew up on a dairy farm in Minnesota, so was always around animals as a little girl, riding her Welsh pony by age 5.

Bernice is now a member of the International Long Riders Guild, the world’s first international association of equestrian explorers and long-distance travelers. An equestrian long ride, by definition, must cover 1,000 continuous miles. There are only a handful of long riders scattered around the world, and Bernice is a standout even in this elite company.

No other female equestrian has completed as many journeys, ridden as many miles, or spent more years in the saddle. She is the only long rider in history who has ever ridden round-trip from coast to coast in a single ride, taking two years and covering 8,000 miles! This length of journey is incredibly difficult logistically, physically, and emotionally. Yet Bernice cuts quite a confident and comfortable figure on her ponies of Mongolian heritage.

Map of second long ride made by Bernice
Bernice’s second long ride of 5,000, undertaken in April 2006 and completed in September 2007, again brought her to New Mexico, but not for the last time.
Bernice Ende riding through Truth or Consequences in 2018
Passing through Truth or Consequences in January 2018 Photograph by Diana Tittle

I first met her in 2018 while I was running my bookstore, Black Cat Books, in Truth or Consequences. I looked up and saw her riding one horse and leading a pack horse along Broadway. I burst out the front door to invite her to come in for a cup of coffee and to let her rest her horses in the store’s large backyard. Her animals obviously always come first with her.

Bernice’s open-heartedness is inspiring, and you find yourself doing anything you can to support her remarkable efforts. I was almost ready to go with her, myself! Fortunately, reading her memoir allowed me to experience her adventures vicariously while learning more about her unusual life story.

From 1973 to 1993, Bernice taught classical ballet and related dance exercise programs in Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle and San Francisco. Her interest in ballet was sparked as a young girl by having seen the Lipizzaner stallions perform and admiring how they and their trainers worked together with such graceful elegance. Interestingly, her experiences and talents in ballet helped prepare her mentally and physically for dressage.

Bernice met her husband in Washington state, but after they bought a vacation cabin in Trego, Montana, they drifted apart and divorced. Bernice stayed on, establishing a dance studio in Trego. On very cold days, she would have to haul red coals from the log cabin’s wood stove in a garbage can lid and slide them under the car so it would start to make the trip to a second dance studio she had started in Whitefish 40 miles south.

Horses re-entered her life in Montana, and many of her ballet students also participated in her riding program at her cabin.

But somehow, all this wasn’t enough. One day, the idea of a long ride came to her while training two horses, riding one and leading another with her dog, Claire. A vision flooded her being—of herself packed up on an unfamiliar horse, traveling across a desert, all dusty and worn. When she couldn’t shake the desire this created in her, she set out, as prepared as she could get herself.

The long riding life Bernice chose is very isolating, and we are all beginning to know how lonely that feels. But it also allows time for major introspection, which Bernice seems to need. She says, “I’ve come to know myself in the absence of others.” I think Thoreau would agree with her.

She took inspiration from the stories of the very few previous lady long riders. Women like Alberta Claire, who in 1912, rode 8,000 miles in a circuitous route from Wyoming, along the west coast, ending up in New York City in support of the women’s suffrage movement and for the right to ride astride.

By the time she wrote her memoir, she had logged seven long rides, covering 29,000 miles in 13 years. Her memories of her many encounters are quite vivid, assisted by her journaling, while she remains an impartial witness to the diversity of American life.

The sympathetic characters who befriend her come to authentic life. Arriving in Pie Town, NM, at the beginning of a windy blizzard, Bernice was running a fever, but had to keep dismounting periodically to scrape the packed snow from her horse’s hooves. She finds Peggy Rawls, the owner of the Daily Pie Town Café, at work. What a relief for Bernice, as well as the reader, to open the door and be greeted by the aroma of baking bread and pies. “I was smelling HOME!” she says. But the most harrowing of her stories by far is the chapter, “The Night of the Black Stallion,” relating an attack late on a moonlit night by a wild horse, squealing with bared teeth.

Each colorful chapter begins with a relevant quote from a variety of sources, then is segmented into digestible subheadings and peppered with her personal treasury of black and white photos. The stories of her richly experienced life are told with warmth, economy and readability. Having met her, I know that that is how she moves through the world, with a smooth efficiency, making it look easy.

These irresistible, heartfelt tales will lift your spirit. Come along on these wonderful rides with Bernice.

Editor’s Note: In late October 2020, Bernice was inducted into the Montana Hall of Fame, which honors those who have made an impact in their part of the state and represent Montana’s authentic heritage for future generations. “She embodies the pioneer, can-do spirit characteristic of those who have created our great state,” her induction stated. “Bernice has put Montana on the map from astride her horses.”

 

author
Rhonda Brittan owned and operated Black Cat Books & Coffee, a used book store and community gathering place, in Truth or Consequences from 2001 to 2019.  In retirement, she has been able to spend more time with her husband at their Hillsboro cabin and taught herself to play an inherited ukulele. But she still enjoys turning people on to literary and non-fiction classics.
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Understanding New Mexico's proposed new social studies standards for K-12 students

“The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”
—National Council for the Social Studies 

Reader Michael L. Hayes of Las Cruces commented: What impresses me is that both the proposed standards and some of the criticisms of them are equally grotesque. I make this bold statement on the basis of my experience as a peripatetic high school and college English teacher for 45 years in many states with many students differing in race, religion, gender and socioeconomic background, and as a civic activist (PTA) in public education (My career, however, was as an independent consultant mainly in defense, energy and the environment.)

The proposed social studies standards are conceptually and instructionally flawed. For starters, a “performance standard” is not a standard at all; it is a task. Asking someone to explain something is not unlike asking someone to water the lawn. Nothing measures the performance, but without a measure, there is no standard. The teacher’s subjective judgment will be all that matters, and almost anything will count as satisfying a “performance standard,” even just trying. Students will be left to wonder “what is on the teacher’s mind?” or “have I sucked up enough.”

Four other quick criticisms of the performance standards. One, they are nearly unintelligible because they are written in jargon. PED’s use of jargon in a document intended for the public is worrisome. Bureaucrats often use jargon to confuse or conceal something uninformed, wrong or unworthy. As a result, most parents, some school board members and more than a few teachers do not understand them.

Two, the performance standards are so vague that they fail to define the education which teachers are supposed to teach, students are supposed to learn, and parents are supposed to understand. PED does not define words like “explain” or “describe” so that teachers can apply “standards” consistently and fairly. The standards do not indicate what teachers are supposed to know in order to teach or specify what students are supposed to learn. Supervisors cannot know whether teachers are teaching social studies well or poorly. The standards are so vague that the public, especially parents or guardians, cannot know the content of public education.

Three, many performance standards are simply unrealistic, especially at grade level. Under “Ethnic, Cultural and Identity Performance Standards”; then under “Diversity and Identity”; then under “Kindergarten,” one such standard is: “Identify how their family does things both the same as and different from how other people do things.” Do six-year-olds know how other people do things? Do they know whether these things are relevant to diversity and identity? Or another standard: “Describe their family history, culture, and past to current contributions of people in their main identity groups.” (A proficient writer would have hyphenated the compound adjective to avoid confusing the reader.) Do six-year-olds know so much about these things in relation to their “identity group”? Since teachers obviously do not teach them about these other people and have not taught them about these groups, why are these and similar items in the curriculum; or do teachers assign them to go home and collect this information?

Point four follows from “three”; some information relevant to some performance measures requires a disclosure of personal or family matters. The younger the students, the easier it is for teachers to invade their privacy and not only their privacy, but also the privacy of their parents or guardians, or neighbors, who may never be aware of these disclosures or not become aware of them until afterward. PED has no right to design a curriculum which requires teachers to ask students for information about themselves, parents or guardians, or neighbors, or puts teachers on the spot if the disclosures reveal criminal conduct. (Bill says Jeff’s father plays games in bed with his daughter. Lila says Angelo’s mother gives herself shots in the arm.) Since teacher-student communications have no legal protection to ensure privacy, those disclosures may become public accidentally or deliberately. The effect of these proposal standards is to turn New Mexico schools and teachers into investigative agents of the state and students into little informants or spies.

This PED proposal for social studies standards is a travesty of education despite its appeals to purportedly enlightened principles. It constitutes a clear and present danger to individual liberty and civil liberties. It should be repudiated; its development, investigated; its PED perpetrators, dismissed. No state curriculum should encourage or require the disclosure of private personal information.

I am equally outraged by the comments of some of T or C’s school board members: Christine LaFont and Julianne Stroup, two white Christian women, who belong to one of the larger minorities in America and assume white and Christian privileges. In different terms but for essentially the same reason, both oppose an education which includes lessons about historical events and trends, and social movements and developments, of other minorities. They object to the proposal for the new social studies standards because of its emphasis on individual and group identities not white or Christian. I am not going to reply with specific objections; they are too numerous and too pointed.

Ms. LaFont urges: “It’s better to address what’s similar with all Americans. It’s not good to differentiate.” Ms. Stroup adds: “Our country is not a racist country. We have to teach to respect each other. We have civil rights laws that protect everyone from discrimination. We need to teach civics, love and respect. We need to teach how to be color blind.”

Their desires for unity and homogeneity, and for mutual respect, are a contradiction and an impossibility. Aside from a shared citizenship, which implies acceptance of the Constitution, the rule of law and equality under the law, little else defines Americans. We are additionally defined by our race, religion, national origin, etc. So mutual respect requires individuals to respect others different from themselves. Disrespect desires blacks, Jews or Palestinians to assimilate or to suppress or conceal racial, religious or national origin aspects of their identity. The only people who want erasure of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-American origin aspects of identity are bigots. Ms. LaFont and Ms. Stroud want standards which, by stressing similarities and eliding differences, desire the erasure of such aspects. What they want will result in a social studies curriculum that enables white, Christian, native-born children to grow up to be bigots and all others to be their victims. This would be the academic equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

H.E.L.P.

This postmortem of a case involving a 75-year-old women who went missing from her home in Hillsboro last September sheds light on the bounds of law enforcement’s capacity to respond, especially in large rural jurisdictions such as Sierra County, and underscores the critical role the public, as well as concerned family and friends, can play in assisting a missing person’s search.

Reader Jane Debrott of Hillsboro commented: Thank you for your article on the tragic loss of Betsey. I am a resident of Hillsboro, a friend of Rick and Betsey, and a member of H.E.L.P. The thing that most distresses me now, is the emphasis on Rick’s mis-naming of the color of their car. I fear that this fact will cause Rick to feel that if he had only gotten the facts right, Betsey may have been rescued before it was too late. The incident was a series of unavoidable events, out of everyone’s control, and we will never know what place the correct color of her car may have had in the outcome. It breaks my heart to think that Rick has had one more thing added to his “what ifs” concerning this incident.

Diana Tittle responded: Dear Jane, the Sun undertook this investigation at the request of a Hillsboro resident concerned about the town’s inability to mount a prompt, coordinated response to the disappearance of a neighbor. From the beginning, I shared your concern about how our findings might affect Betsy’s family and friends. After I completed my research and began writing, I weighed each detail I eventually chose to include against my desire to cause no pain and the public’s right to know about the strengths and limitations of law enforcement’s response and the public’s need to know about how to be of meaningful assistance.

There was information I withheld about the state police investigation and the recovery. But I decided to include the issue of the car’s color because the individuals who spotted Betsy’s car emphasized how its color had been key to their identification of it as the vehicle described in Betsy’s Silver Alert. Because the misinformation was corrected within a couple of hours, I also included in this story the following editorial comment meant to put the error in perspective: “The fact that law enforcement throughout the state was on the lookout in the crucial early hours after Betsy’s disappearance for an elderly woman driving a “light blue” instead of a “silver” Accord would, in retrospect, likely not have changed the outcome of the search” [emphasis added].

I would also point to the story’s overarching conclusion about the inadvisability of assigning blame for what happened: “In this case, a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances, many of them beyond human control, hindered the search that it would fall to Hamilton’s department to lead.”

It is my hope that any pain caused by my reporting will eventually be outweighed by its contribution to a better community understanding of what it will take in the future to mount a successful missing person’s search in rural Sierra County.

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