Runways and Reins

A horse is a horse, of course, of course. But who’s ever heard of an airport patrol horse? 

Um, Houston has.

At George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH), security is bolstered by the Airport Rangers, the only mounted horse patrol of its kind in the nation. Under the supervision of the airport’s security office, volunteers keep vigil from the saddle, clip-clopping the airport’s perimeter, eyes peeled for anything amiss.

Friends Barbara Levy, 66, Susan Reichenthal, 62, and Eve Lapin, 61, are part of that ranger pack, ready to giddy up and go every chance they get. Though they take off summers when Houston’s air feels like soup and they’re the croutons. 

“Ugh, the humidity! There are certain times of summer we don’t do it. But when we do the patrols, we love it. We see eagles and all sorts of wildlife,” says Barbara of the job that keeps security tight where millions pass through every year. 

There’s been plenty of whinnying in the airport woods since the program’s inception in 2003. At last count, 75 volunteers belong to the patrol that scour a 27-mile perimeter by daylight, mostly along an extensive trail network of hardwoods and creeks. The trails merge with long stretches of open land near the bustle of airliners, landing and taking off. 

WOMEN IN THE WILD Everything’s better off-grid to these women who prefer a rugged experience, camping and riding through a myriad of points on the globe, like here in the Canadian Rockies. Pictured, from left, are Barbara, Susan, and Eve.

“We see people’s faces in planes, on the runways, and they wave to us, and we wave to them,” says Barbara. “That’s how close we are to the action. You sometimes wonder if passengers are thinking, ‘Wow! Really? On horses? You know this is Texas!’”

The three ride like sentries on the edge of a kingdom, looking for holes in fences or wayward wildlife that dig with delusions of escape onto the runway. They cover more ground than a foot patrol could manage, looking for discarded cigarette butts or footprints pressed into dirt that hint at unauthorized visits. 

The women have yet to find anything too alarming. But they’ve called in observations, like a critter’s attempt to dig under the fence line. 

The trio command a presence in their reflective orange vests, helmets, and badges, but they laugh at an encounter with nearby construction workers who asked if they were Texas Rangers. 

Yeah, that’s a whole other variety of ranger, what with the trademark cowboy hat, shiny boots, and holstered firearm. Texas Rangers rode horseback over wide-open frontier long ago. Seeing one on horseback would be a rare sight these days, since their current mode of transportation is primarily Ford F-150s. 

Barbara laughs at the encounter.

Are you packin’?

Absolutely, we’re packin.’

What are you packin’?

Our lunches. We pack our lunches.

Barbara, Eve, and Susan ride even the far reaches of the airport’s perimeters, where law enforcement sometimes trains.

“I mean, that’s the truth. A woman’s gotta eat sometimes!” quips Barbara. “Though one time we did go to Sonic. We made this girl’s day. It was super hot, and we went up and ordered our drinks and stuff. We were on the way back to the ranch.” 

That “ranch” would be Cypress Trails Ranch that provides the women’s horses. “We rent, not own,” says Susan who primarily rides a horse named Van, an “intuitive” type, she says, who is “very chill.” She shares a screenshot of her and Van together, joking that his fuzzy forelocks resemble her own hair. “We go to the same hairdresser.”

Barbara is partial to TikTok, an obedient mount and smooth ride who always follows orders. Eve rides an Arabian, Qatar (like the country), rescued from a kill pen. He’s a fiery sort, of great lineage, who likes to go. Not unseemly fast, but just right, says Eve. He turned out to be a great horse who knows the ropes, says Darolyn Butler, owner of Cypress Trails.

Darolyn, 75, is known as “Mama D” to family and friends. Barbara, Susan, and Eve trust her horse instincts implicitly. They’ve trained and ridden at her trail riding business at the ranch. She’s the one who told them about the Airport Rangers several years ago.

Mama D is intimately familiar with the equestrian patrol because, well, she basically initiated the idea.

The long-distance endurance rider’s 10-acre ranch is just minutes away from the airport periphery. She’s galloped that area since the mid-1980s.

Airport security noticed her one day. 

MOUNTED ON A MISSION urning their love of riding into airport protection anchors these friends in a unique mission. Pictured, from left:  Eve, Susan, Barbara, and Darolyn Butler, owner of Cypress Trails Ranch, who wrangled the idea for the Airport Ranger program, are always happy when riding high in the saddle. (Photo: hartphoto.com)

“I’d been galloping around the airport for years, nobody saying a word,” Darolyn explains. “But after 9/11, people got a little sensitive about that. So, I was accosted one day, questioned about it.”

But Darolyn was looking for a win-win.

“I told them I’d been riding out there 15 years! So, I went to the airport people and said, ‘Can we establish something that gives us permission to do this?’” 

After “a lot of wrangling,” she recalls, the Airport Rangers was established. “You go in, get security clearance, take a test, get a badge, watch a video, the whole safety thing that every employee does there. And then you renew your badge once a year. So, we aren’t just pretty faces out there. We’re doing a job that’s important. It’s a win-win deal because you’re watching for things and you’re getting to do some endurance riding.”

Barbara, Susan, and Eve have taken endurance riding clinics at Darolyn’s ranch. Because, once a year, The Three Amigos – as they call themselves – embark on long-distance rides via pack trips, multi-day excursions where belongings and supplies are transported by guides with pack animals such as mules. They go to quiet corners of the world where they can hear their own breath with the steady beat of horse steps. Where nature isn’t curated, but tangled and unpredictable. 

They like it rugged. It’s not about riding, then returning to spa robes or wine tastings. It’s campfire coffee, sleeping bag hair, and sometimes waking up to frost on your tent zipper. They want the stars as their ceiling, the ground as their bed. No internet. Guides have satellite phones for emergencies. 

Their husbands cheer them on from home. “Robert much prefers a pillow and mattress,” says Barbara of her attorney husband. Ditto, say Susan and Eve of their spouses. 

Two trips to Iceland found them on a different kind of ride with the country’s purebred horse known for the tölt, its smooth gait uncommon to horses here.

In chronological order, this horseback trio has ridden in Vail, in Utah, in Yellowstone, then – twice again – in Utah. Then in Iceland. Again, in Iceland. Up next, the Canadian Rockies, and in the Teton Range in Wyoming. And just this month, in the Canadian Rockies again, to camp and ride the Continental Divide. 

Iceland was a magical experience, they say. The purebred Icelandic horse isn’t big in stature but carries itself like a creature that knows it comes from Viking stock. Compact and strong, it moves with a gait most riders have never experienced: the tölt.

Most horses in the world have the same set of natural gaits – walk, trot, canter, and gallop, the women explain. Their middle gear, the trot, usually has you bouncing in the saddle. With the tölt, you’re moving in a rolling, fluid rhythm.

“What an experience that was,” says Susan. “It took a while to get used to.”

“You could carry a drink without spilling a drop,” adds Barbara.

Icelanders take significant precautions to protect their native horse breed, due to its genetic purity. The women had to sterilize their equipment before the ride, buy new gloves. No horses of other breeds can be imported to Iceland. And once an Icelandic horse leaves the country, it can’t re-enter.

“We’ve learned lots of things on our trips. I’ve loved all our trips,” says Eve, who doesn’t particularly relish cold nights and frosty mornings, though. “But it sometimes comes with the territory. You prepare for it.”

Susan has a keen memory of their first-ever pack ride in 2018, riding Colorado mountain trails, from Vail to Aspen. Ten days before the trip was to start, she found herself hobbled. 

“She broke her ankle, falling off a horse!” shrieks Barbara. “But what a trooper, she rode anyway!”

The Three Amigos, as they call themselves, pause on their horses during the Rockies trip.

“Well, I dismounted,” Susan says, of the accident. “So, we were training for the ride and stupid me had gone to hot yoga at 5:30 in the morning and didn’t change my pants, and my pants were all wet and my horse decided he wanted to go back to the barn, and he yanked the reins out of my hand and took off. And when that happens, they’ll try to get you off. They’ll run into the trees! So, I bailed and landed underneath him. Broke my ankle.”

The equestrian move deserved a perfect-10 dismount, they deadpan. And left Susan with a boot up to her knee.

She called the Vail pack ride group to ask if she could still do the trip. “They said absolutely, as long as I got a release from my primary care physician and if my insurance would cover it.”

As outings go, this was a posh trip, Barbara says. Every day, a chef was waiting for them at the end of the ride with beverages and appetizers. “But it was one of the hardest ones because that first day we rode for eight hours.”

“I’d say we have a really good sense of adventure,” says Susan, recalling last summer’s trip to the Teton Range in Wyoming where the three basked in, what some would call, unfortunate weather. Snow, hail, and rain within their first four hours of riding. “We’re singing, we’re just so happy! The guide is like ‘Are you okay?’ I mean, we’d come from Houston summer where it was over 100 for days!”

The women also recall spotting a silverback bear their last day of riding in the Wyoming wilderness. Barbara started singing the Jungle Book tune The Bare Necessities at the top of her lungs.

Look for the bare necessities! 

The simple bare necessities!

“I’ve always heard you want to make yourself seem loud and big,” says Barbara, barely 5 feet. The bear was a way off and not interested in attending the concert. “I don’t think he was impressed.”

The women are grateful for life’s intersections that brought them together. They met years ago through the Jewish community. Susan and Eve took riding lessons together and sometimes ride on their birthdays, just one day apart. 

Their lives move at a clip that rivals time in the saddle. Barbara works as a nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit at Texas Children’s Hospital, tending to tiny, fragile lives. Susan wrangles credits and collections at the steel company she and husband Max operate, with the same quiet authority she brings to a winding trail. 

And their pal Eve, they agree, is out there quietly changing the world.

A pack trip to Utah was one of many they’ve embarked upon.

Barbara’s son, Avi, and Eve’s son, Oliver, played together when young. Oliver, the eldest of Eve’s three sons, died at 12 of Adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), a deadly genetic disease that affects 1 in 18,000 people. It most severely affects boys and men. The brain disorder destroys myelin, the protective sheath that surrounds the brain's neurons. 

Eve’s life thunders with purpose. She founded and oversees The Stop ALD Foundation that focuses on accelerating knowledge about the disease and finding new therapies to treat it. Husband Bobby directs its fundraising efforts, serving as its development director and general counsel.

Twenty years ago, the couple endowed Oliver Lapin Day as an annual event at the Jewish Book Festival at the Evelyn Rubenstein Jewish Community Center (ERJCC) – coming up Nov. 2 – “to enable community children to enjoy precisely the kind of literary and musical events for children at the ERJCC that Oliver so enjoyed during his lifetime,” Eve explains. 

“She’s incredible,” says Barbara of Eve’s passion. Eve, along with the Stop ALD Foundation and others, was instrumental in getting newborn screening for ALD implemented in Texas after lobbying the state legislature. It’s her resolve, the longest ride of her life.

“And I think she’s also the most adventurous of the three of us,” Barbara states. 

“I do like trying new things,” says Eve, who has hiked Mount Kilimanjaro – the highest mountain in Africa – and trained to be a sighted guide for a blind hiker, helping him on a rim-to-rim journey of the Grand Canyon.

Eve and Susan have ridden in the downtown Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo parade, with the Airport Rangers. “It’s a good way for the public to learn what we’re about,” Eve says. “I mean, all three of us, we just love being on horses. I’ve loved every single trip with them and every single patrol.”

Airport Rangers experience a unique sensory mash-up, the three agree. A strange symphony of nature and machine. The sound of pounding hooves. The metallic shriek of jets, slicing through the air.

But one time, another chorus joined the mix. An unexpected voice, that of a 911 emergency dispatcher. What’s your emergency?

“I was running on my horse and my Apple Watch rings. I answer and it’s 911,” recalls Susan. “I’m like, ‘I didn’t call you.’ And the woman says, ‘Yes, this number called us right now.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m on a horse. Please do not send the police! I’m on airport property. I’m on a horse. On patrol.

“She’s like, ‘What?’

“I mean, we were all cracking up. Running on my horse must have caused it somehow, jostled it. But if I ever do fall off my horse out there, well… I guess I’m in good hands.”