School portraits / Ninth grade in Ojai, before breakfast
A Thacher Mother Thought Mucking Was a Sport
Every ninth grader at Thacher gets a horse and a stall to clean before class. In 2013 a parent told the school what that word had meant to her family.
At the Thacher School in Ojai, California, ninth graders are paired with a horse in the first week of school and ride it for the whole year. Most have never ridden before. They muck the stall before class in the morning, ride in the afternoon and feed the horse every evening, rain or shine. In the spring they compete in the Big Gymkhana, a day of races around barrels and poles, ring spearing and an event called the Silver Dollar Pick-up, which the school describes as notoriously difficult.
In 2013 Muriel Walker-Waugh, a chemistry professor whose son was then a Thacher senior, gave the remarks at a Sunday chapel service. Her talk was titled To Muck or Not to Muck. Four years earlier, she said, neither she nor her husband had any experience with horses, and they had debated the word on the list of freshman duties. "I thought that 'mucking' was a new and adventurous sport devised by the rich and famous." She declined to share her husband's theory.
It means shoveling out a stable. She had asked her husband whether their son really had to get up at 6:30 in the morning to do that.
He did. That is the part of boarding school that does not appear in the viewbook photographs, which tend to show the horse at sunset, not at 6:30.
She admitted her son was afraid of his horse, Archie, at first, and so was she, because Archie was huge. By the end of freshman year they were friends. He wrote the horse a poem, "Ode to Archie." And, for balance, she noted that he was still a slob who forgot where he left his clothes and shoes.
I read the speech to my wife. She said that is the most honest thing a parent has ever said in a chapel.
We have no horse. We have an old dog who has also not read anyone's application. Every morning at 6:40 he stands by his bowl and stares at the middle one, whose job it is, until the middle one gets up. The middle one has not written him a poem. He did, once, in a school assignment on "someone who depends on you," write about the dog, and he got the feeding times exactly right.
He also spelled the dog's name wrong. He is twelve. The clothes are on the floor. The dog is fed.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Thacher Horse Program thacher.org
- Team Orange For The Win! — May 20, 2021 thacher.org
- Thacher public parent and student reviews niche.com
- Muriel Walker-Waugh: To Muck or Not to Muck (2013) thacher.org