Book Review//The Ride of Her Life: The True Story of a Woman, Her Horse, and Their Last-Chance Journey Across America by Elizabeth Letts

Have you ever wanted to run away? Have you wanted to just walk away from your life and your home and everything familiar and go on an adventure? Back in 1953, a sixty-three-year-old Maine farmer named Annie Wilkins did just that. She had been holding on to the family farm for years but the struggle was finally too much. She had no family to help her, poor health, and a lot of upcoming bills. She decided to sell the farm and ride a horse across the country to California. California had always sounded a bit like the Promised Land to her so she thought it was about time she finally went there.

But that was the thing about Maine. Seemed like every year, about this time people started to talk about leaving. The frost crept in, the jagged V’s of Canada geese honked past, the light blue endless summer sky put on its winter coat of gray, the mercury dropped, and the days got shorter, making the familiar slow, silent march toward the deep frozen heart of January. No chance you could think about going then. By then, there’d be drifts of snow up around the eaves and black ice on the roads, fires roaring in fireplaces, crossword puzzles and knitting in the chairs, and you just knew you’d have to stay put and wait for the thaw.

But before that happened–there was always a moment. A moment when people got the urge to leave, when they looked up at the Canada geese and thought maybe they could just go with them.

Her mother never made it to California. Never traveled farther than New Hampshire. Right now, on this cold October afternoon, Sarah Libby Stuart lay in the graveyard at Mechanic Falls, just a couple of miles as the crow flies from the doorway of the helter-skelter farmhouse where Annie now stood. Her mother had been gone for twenty years. Annie was well past the age her mother had been back when Annie was a girl–and yet here Annie still was.

But she had some money, and she had her furry companion, and the more she thought about it, the only thing she truly lacked was courage. The courage to follow the plan that was starting to form in her mind.

Annie sold her farm, bought herself a horse, and loaded up all her possessions. She, her dog, and her horse took off for California. Annie traveled without a map, depending on the suggestions of the people she encountered to determine her route. It did not take long for word of her travels to spread. Soon, she was being greeted by townspeople, offered a bed in the local jail, given meals, her horse was shod, and her story was written up. First, the local newspapers took it up and then it spread nationally. Television stations wanted to interview Annie.

In the morning, Russ accompanied Annie on the five-minute walk to the WMUR-TV studio. Annie had not only never seen the inside of a television studio, she’d only seen TV a few times, mostly in the homes she’d visited on this trip. She hadn’t seen a movie in years–the last one had been a silent film. So when she was ushered into a small room and seated in a chair for an interview with a newscaster, she felt perfectly at ease–she loved to talk, and this was just one more conversation. But about halfway through, Annie looked up and realized that her own moving face was being projected onto a small screen. Shocked, she stared straight at the camera and couldn’t think of anything else to say for a while. Still, she had no concept of just how far her image would travel anytime that camera was rolling.

Annie meandered through the country instead of taking a straight line to California. I enjoyed reading about the beginning of her journey because she went straight through the area I grew up near–Springfield, Massachusetts and Windsor Locks, Connecticut, and South Windsor, Connecticut. Soon, she was out of the New England area and dealing with winter. Eventually, she got a second horse to carry her belongings. She got sick, her horses got sick, they were caught in a flood, they got lost. But still, they kept going hoping they would encounter kind people and finally, reach their destination.

And isn’t that what hope is? Not a wish, not a specific thing that you pray will be delivered to you, but merely an expectation that whatever dark, sleety side of the road you might find yourself on will not last forever.

Annie Wilkins was an interesting individual and I enjoyed reading about her but I also enjoyed reading about what the United States was like in 1953. It wasn’t really that long ago in the grand scheme of things, it was the time of my parents and grandparents, but it was such a different world. It was a world where television was just starting to take over, where the police took you in for the night when you were alone and cold, where maps were on paper. Where, Annie believed, people where kind and good-hearted. It was a world where a woman could set off with her horse and her dog to ride across the country and the country would take her to its heart.