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By Malcolm C. MacPherson
Rappahannock News Staff Writer
Out West, maybe even cowgirls get the blues. But not in Virginia, and certainly not if you are a rootin’ tootin’ cowgirl from Rappahannock like Maeghan Boucher
As a rising 11th grader at Rappahannock County High School and Rappahannock’s only competitor in the Virginia High School Rodeo Association (VHSRA), Boucher, from Sperryville, can ride with the best of the women’s rodeo crowd and never get down, much less blue.
Last weekend, she was awarded enough individual points to rank her 11th in the state in barrel racing and 12th in pole bending at the VHSRA’s Invitational Rodeo at the Virginia Horse Center in Lexington, attended by 150 contestants including those from West Virginia and North Carolina.
Boucher, 16, with a fair complexion, sandy hair, a ballerina’s slight frame, and blue eyes the shade of a Dakotas’ winter sky, is the mistress of controlled violence when she spurs her horse Doc to race against time.
In those beats of chaos, usually around 15-18 seconds to complete the triangular barrel course, with mere hundredths of -a second determining first from fourth places, Boucher and Doc seem almost in the continual act of falling head over hooves, with mass straining to move forward, beyond a velocity that seems possible.
Her black cowgirl hat flies off her head. The wind is in her face. She leans forward as the horse suspends itself in mid air. She grasps the pummel to stay in a balance that threatens to unseat her. She becomes frozen in a tableau of headstrong vigor and joy heedless of the world outside her vision of the barrel ahead, the horse beneath, and the sky above. Indeed, in that moment caught on a frame, she is as modem as today’s teenager on a tear and as ancient as a Greek warrior, galloping over the dusty plains of Attica.
She has never not been a horsewoman. “I had no choice but to like horses,” she says on a recent rainy afternoon, resigned to being inside. Her mother and father owned a farm in Massachusetts where Boucher was born. “I was more or less bom in the saddle.”
Her mother, Sally Petty, claims that she put her daughter in a saddle when she was only five days old.
Boucher moved to Rappahannock with her mother three years ago from
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