If you are engaged in the same occupation for the better part of five decades and are paying attention, you learn a few things along the way. The more you learn in a business like ours, the broader your horizons are. You soon discover there is much more to know than you have years in which to learn it.
Having attended numerous clinics and conventions and sat through hours (weeks?) of lectures and discussions, I have often been frustrated when I came home and tried to incorporate what I’d learned into my daily practice. It wasn’t until a question from a young man getting started in the business that I figured out what was going on.
“Practice makes perfect” is a phrase we all know and think we understand but what is lacking in that phrase is an explanation of just how it works. There are different kinds of learning and ways our brains and bodies incorporate knowledge. The aforementioned fellow had graduated from the two-year program taught by Jeff Engler at Walla Walla Jr. College and was riding along with me whenever schedules allowed. I would trim the foot, fit and nail the shoe, and he would clench and clean up the foot.
As he clenched a front foot one afternoon, he paused and asked, "Hey David, how do you get your nails to come out in such a straight line? My nail lines are always up and down and seldom so straight.”
Whenever he had questions regarding anatomy or shoe selection, I had a ready answer, but this one threw me.
I apologized and said, “I can’t tell you exactly, just drive thirty or forty thousand of them and you will have figured it out.”
Frustrated with my non-answer, I started to pay close attention when nailing a shoe to figure it out for myself. I soon realized that when shoeing a horse, I was using all of my senses except smell (and even that came into play with a case of thrush or such). When it came to driving nails, I was using sight to assess the angle the wall grew at as well as the density of the wall itself. This told me how to angle the nail before the first blow of the hammer. If the angle of the wall changed from one nail to the next, I didn’t have to think about how to change the pitch of the nail, it just happened. At the same time, I was listening to the sound as the nail passed through the hoof wall. Just as the sound of a nail passing through wood changes as it is driven, the sound of a nail passing through hoof material will change with each blow of the hammer. The sound also changes with the density of the hoof material. Then there is the feel of the nail being driven that comes through the hammer directly into your arm which tells you a lot about what the nail is doing as it passes through the hoof material. I had a lot of fun over the years betting a client, before the nail had emerged, that it would show with the next tap. I seldom lost the bet.
When you are engaging your senses, your body and your mind in the performance of a task, the information being stored is coming from many different sources, and it is learned and stored in different ways. I could not verbally explain everything that was going on when I was driving a nail through a horse’s hoof because the knowledge of how to do that wasn’t retained just in my brain. The knowledge and ability to perform the task of shoeing a horse was stored in and called forth from the tendons and muscles that did the work, as well as the grey matter between my ears.
After that revelation, I started noticing just how much of what I did while shoeing a horse was done seemingly without a conscious thought. “Muscle memory” is another familiar phrase we all know, but I seldom gave it a thought as I went about my daily appointments. I had performed a task so often and paid close attention to doing it well that eventually the task was performed as a kind of dance, without much conscious effort.
It is quite marvelous how we are capable of learning something, not just with our brains, but with our whole being so much so that it feels like performing certain tasks is part of who you are.
As for that young man who asked how I knew how to get a straight nail-line in a foot, he now shoes dressage horses almost exclusively and with handmade shoes. I’m sure his nail lines are a good deal prettier than mine ever were.
Look out for more installments of "The Way it Was" by David Hazlett, stories that explore how farriery has changed — and stayed the same — over the years. You can read previous installments here.
