news story / By Japhet Weeks

Bulletproof

Octogenarian farrier Lyal Corliss doesn’t plan to retire anytime soon

(Feb. 21, 2008)  Lyal Corliss’ huge hands tell the story of his life. They have felled Sequoia sempervirens and shod countless horses.

His fingers are burly and broad like tree roots, and they are wrinkled and weather-beaten. A finger on one hand is missing from an accident in the woods. Still, they are immensely strong hands, especially considering that Corliss — who has worked on the North Coast as a horseman, farrier, brand inspector, high school ag teacher, sheep shearer and tree feller — is 80 years old.

Lyal Corliss. Photo by Yulia Weeks.

GALLERY >

It’s a little past 9 o’clock on a recent Friday morning and Corliss — dressed in a clean pair of jeans, a starched button-down shirt with horses running across the breast, suspenders he’s clipped together at his chest with a metal clasp so they won’t slip off and a pair of leather chaps so old and patched they’re turning gray — is getting ready to shoe his first horse of the day. He’s already shod four this week.

Corliss uses a jerry-rigged pole with a nail banged through the end of it to reach into the back of his truck bed and slide out a few buckets filled with horseshoeing tools. He snags two hoof jacks — a stand for balancing the horse’s foot so he doesn’t have to hold it between his clenched knees. For half a century, he shod horses without one. “They’re for amateurs,” he used to say. Now, he admits, he has to eat his own words. But an octogenarian like Corliss deserves to cut a few corners.

The man is a walking toolbox. His chaps are loaded down like a Christmas tree with everything he needs for shoeing. Everything, that is, except the anvil. He has pliers and a double-edged hoof knife in one pocket, a tool he tells me wasn’t even invented when he started shoeing. You needed two knives, he explains, a left- and a right-handed one; a pair of nippers, for cutting off big chunks of hoof; a set of clinchers for tightening down the nails you’ve banged into the horse’s foot (which also weren’t invented when he started shoeing); a rasp, used for smoothing the hoof before the metal shoe can be put on; and a custom-made hammer, notched on the hilt for a better grip and with a cow magnet glued on the back end for picking up stray nails without having to bend down. “When you get old, that’s the way you pick things up,” he says.

At least, that’s the way Lyal Corliss picks things up. Your average 80-year-old doesn’t usually find himself hunched over a horse’s hind leg with eight razor-sharp nails squeezed between his index and forefinger, unless his life is flashing before his eyes at the final moment of reckoning.

“Easy does it,” Corliss reassures the horse as he works its hoof over. First he trims the horn, the hard outer part of the foot. Then he cuts back the frog, the squishy pad at the back of the hoof that acts like a shock absorber. It sounds like he’s shearing through thick fabric. When that’s done, he unhooks his rasp from his chaps and scrapes back and forth to level off the foot. Imagine the sound of a serrated knife cutting through cardboard. “This is where shaved coconut comes from,” Corliss jokes. God forbid. Horse hooves smell like Limburger cheese.

The horse isn’t making things easy for Corliss. He keeps pulling his foot off the jack. “I keep telling her it’s easy but she don’t believe it,” he says. He stands up slowly, red-faced and smiling. “I don’t know how his back does it,” the horse’s owner tells me. I don’t know either. There’s a dull pain in my lower back already, and all I’ve done is stand around with a reporter’s notebook.

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