Sheryl Cody may be more than 3,500 kilometres from her hometown of Milk River, but the southern Alberta farm
girl still starts her days at 5 a.m. and spends the first hour of her schedule shovelling horse manure.
But if that’s what it takes to be a member of the RCMP Musical Ride, the Lethbridge College graduate (Criminal Justice ’00) is more than prepared to muck out stalls.
And when the Ride performs its 135 shows in Canada and the United States this season, Cody will be astride her eight-year-old Hanoverian Teddy, in her first year as one of the 32 RCMP members deemed good enough to display the force’s iconic horsemanship.
“I haven’t worked this hard since the farm,” says Cody, who lives just outside Ottawa. “But here I am, knee-deep in horse poop and loving it.”
It was Cody’s work ethic, sown on her parents’ farm and honed at Lethbridge College and six years as an RCMP constable in Brooks, that caught the attention of those who pick and choose who makes the cut; Floyd and Leslie Cody did not raise a slacker for a daughter.
Cody first saw the Musical Ride perform when she was seven and figured if she ever got the chance she’d love a shot at it.
“I thought ‘hey, that would be neat to do,’” she says. “Now here I am, totally living a dream, making a wonderful salary riding horses and no vet bills.”
The Codys always had horses on their farm and Sheryl was involved in the light-horse section of 4-H as a child. She entered Lethbridge College with the RCMP in mind, but the Musical Ride was still just a dream and several years away.
What she found was a Criminal Justice program that would basically punch her ticket to RCMP training.
“The training I received at Lethbridge College allowed me to go straight to depot [RCMP training depot, Regina] where I found a lot of the work was a review of what I had already learned. “The college program gave me the basics in the criminal code, forensics and identification.
“I run into a lot of people in the RCMP from Lethbridge College through my travels and e-mail. I still remember all their names and all my instructors. It was a wonderful program taught in an intimate setting.”
From Regina, Cody was posted to Brooks in 2001, where she quickly earned her chops as a police officer.
“I was there six years; you get to see everything,” she says of the ethnically diverse community. “It was like inner-city Toronto in the middle of red-neck Alberta. But I had a chance to work on major cases; I’d rather have been in Brooks than a Sleepy Hollow.”
She took a break from Brooks, serving in Waterton in the summer of 2005 where the Musical Ride idea began to germinate. She returned to Brooks in time for the Lakeside Packers strike later that year and, when the labour strife ended, decided to pursue her Musical Ride ambition.
Early last year, she completed a five week, initial training course in Ottawa, passed, and was transferred to the capital in May to begin nine months of intermediate training, graduating last November and forming up with the Musical Ride this January. She then completed another 4½ months of training for the first show of the 2008 season. This year’s schedule will have the team in Manitoba, southern Ontario and a variety of U.S. locales. Half the team is female this season, one of the highest percentages of women riders ever.
Cody’s days, once the stables are mucked, involve some four hours of riding, plus cleaning, feeding and grooming Teddy, also a Musical Ride rookie.
“We’re both learning; it can be a challenge at times.”
Teddy, it was recently discovered, does not appreciate Cody wearing her traditional Stetson. It took patience and a few horse treats to get him used to his rider’s new headgear.
Cody will spend at least the next two years with the Musical Ride, the standard term. A nationwide policing shortage means fewer detachments are releasing members to try out for the team, giving those already in the saddle a chance to extend their terms; Cody hopes to still be aboard Teddy at the Vancouver Olympics in 2010. It’s unlikely, even after three years, the thrill will have lessened.
“You’re up there on that big, black horse in your red serge and everyone who sees you knows you’re part of the Canadian identity,” says Cody. “On Canada Day, we’ll be on Parliament Hill with 20,000 people watching. I love it.”
