My dear friend is almost ninety-two. She is fond of saying, “The first hundred years are the hardest.” The funny and mysterious thing about life, is that we never know how far along we are on its road and how much farther we have to go.

When I first looked for the barn, I couldn’t find it. It was designated on a 17 Mile Drive map, but I must have driven right past it. By the time I did find it over a year later, no one could have known that it would have lived out more than half its life. Now the barn is one hundred years old and all its stories and spirits and potential are about to shatter and scatter. I did not know when I found the stables that a great era of its history had just passed. Dick Collins had recently retired from forty plus years of directorship. A young couple of up and coming eventing stars would soon be taking over management.

This is the rolling wave of time and place I was swept into back in December of 1982. I arrived knowing nothing much of horses, except that I wanted, and had always wanted, to be around them. I had been given a series of trail rides for Christmas that year. You could get them through the local community college. Ten rides for $100. The trail guide’s last name was Stall. Herb Caen, the late great San Francisco Chronicle columnist would have called that a name freak.

Just after Christmas, I headed over to the Farm Center in Carmel Valley. Pauline Herman was behind the counter. She and her husband, Pat, by then in their late sixties, had owned the Center since 1947, when they began running it as a Texaco station and small grocery. Later, they started selling tack and Pauline and Pat had begun riding with the legendary polo player, Sue Sally Hale. Pauline fitted me with a velvet hunt cap and rubber boots. The store sold made to order Dehner boots, but she convinced me to save my money and start out with the inexpensive ones.

And so, properly attired in my new gear and the cream Harry Hall britches my mother had bought me, I hit the trails in early 1983. Literally. On that first ride, looking every bit the equestrian I imagined myself to be, I managed to fall off, muddying both my pride and my britches.

A few years and lessons later, I would have the first of my own horses, my sweet mahogany bay, Ami. He loved the trails and knew where all the hidden log jumps alongside them were. He made me believe I could ride. At first, I took him out alone and through the sand dunes, figuring that I could just as well kill myself by myself, and if I did go sailing, the landing would at least be soft.

Then I graduated to going out with others. We were a wild little squad, most of us on Arabians, trotting and galloping with an orderly recklessness through the fog and the pines and down to the ocean. The Forest was ours and we knew it in a way that few did. And always, at the end of our adventure, we burst back into the courtyard of the barn like kings and queens, grinning and triumphant, our horses glowing. In our kingdom, time and the tides stood still for decades.

There are nights when I dream that we are out on the trails again, flying like we did, breathless, kicking up clouds of dust, fearless and full of hope. And I am thankful that I found this barn before it leaves us. This barn, where I discovered everything that I was and everything that I wasn’t and everything we could ever be.