Some of you may have read my disjointed, incomplete, and poorly written blog about my experience in Colorado. I wrote it in a fit of recollection, and with
a need to get some things off my chest and out into the Interwebs. Its conception was spurred by two things: the
anniversary of the day a giant mechanical bird had carried me back to the
safety of home after that unbearable summer was over, and a proliferation of nightmares
wherein I had somehow chosen to return and thus found myself face-to-face with
16 weeks of fresh torture.
There was, however, one very vital thing
that I left out of that blog, for whatever reason, when I wrote it more than
three years ago. This incident happened
on June 30, 2011, on a Thursday, at about 5pm, in the middle of a
thunderstorm. I came closer to dying
that evening than I ever have before or since.
Had things gone differently – by as little as an inch – I would likely
either not be here typing right now, or at least the last four years of my life
would have gone very differently.
I had a page and a half of a paper left to
write for Dr. Swartz, and the deadline for her to turn in the grades for my
Independent Study on Sherlock Holmes was fast approaching. In fact, it was the very next day (although
she informed me later, mercifully, that she had recalled the paperwork
incorrectly and that I actually had an additional two weeks to complete my
paper.) Bad storms had started in the early afternoon – I almost
had to dismount my 1 o'clock ride and tie up the horses so we could wait out a
lightning storm – with hail and sleet and rain.
As a second storm front was approaching, Hannah was next on the
roster to take out the last ride of the day, but somehow she had managed to
talk the managers into making me take it instead. Knowing that I was in desperate need of
finishing my psychological profile on Sherlock Holmes, I was forced to approach
her in the barn and plead with her to take her own ride out, which she
grudgingly agreed to (though she didn’t actually tell me this – I discovered it
when I walked out into the corral and saw her preparing her guide horse.)
Three of her five riders were mounted, one
was preparing to mount, and one did not yet have a horse. Whiskey, the gelding that had been assigned
to the last rider, was standing by the barn, his lead rope tied to the hitching
rail that ran along the barn’s long side, about three feet from the wall. I rushed into the beginnings of a hail storm
to tighten his cinch and bridle him (rides go out rain or shine as long as the
clients consent.) As I got the bit into
his mouth, an extraordinary lightning strike lit up the entire corral with two
rapid-fire flares of light. I had only
enough time to imagine what the accompanying thunderclap would be like when it
exploded overhead in the kind of deafening roar I had only read about in
novels.
To this day I have no idea how any of the
other horses in the corral reacted to this sudden assault on the senses,
because my entire world was suddenly consumed by the creature I was touching in
that moment. Whiskey spooked, rather
predictably under the circumstances, as I was stretched upward with both of my
hands between his ears, attempting to fix his headstall in place. He reared up in primal terror and jerked
back from the hitching rail, naturally dragging me with him, my hand still
gripping his unsecured browband. He then of course discovered that he couldn't
run away because his head was tied, which terrified him even more. His jerky,
prancing steps churning up the corral sludge under him, he pivoted his back end
toward me and I heard one of the other wranglers shout, "Get away
now!" I started to scramble
backward, but I either slipped and fell or Whiskey knocked me over, because
suddenly I was landing hard on my back in the cold mud. My first
thought was, "Roll under the hitching rail so he can't step on you. He won’t be able to get you if you roll under
the hitching rail." A moment later,
however, I realized the fall had disoriented me; I had no clue where the
hitching rail was or which way to roll to get myself to safety.
Then I felt the impact
of his hooves landing heavily in the mud on either side of me. He had backed up over top of me after I fell,
and all I could think then was, "He is going to crush you." I
expected to feel blinding pain at any moment, but it didn't happen, and to this
day I don’t know how he could have missed me. I flipped myself over, crawled
away and was on my feet in what must have been just a few seconds. I had aimed for the hitching rail but when I
opened my eyes I discovered that I was actually crawling away from Whiskey, and
away from the hitching rail by about 50 degrees. Another wrangler shouted to me to get into
the barn, then handed me two still-saddled horses while the rest of the crew
hustled to get the tacked horses either untacked or into the barn so their
leather saddles wouldn’t be ruined in the downpour. I stood there holding Happy and Sawyer,
trembling and taking stock of the mud I was carrying on my shirt and jeans. Looking past the tie stalls, I noticed in a
fleeting moment that Whiskey was not where I had left him, and imagined him
running across the corral while his lead rope dangled from the hitching rail
with a broken snap. What actually
happened, I don’t really know.
I remember sitting on the
bench in the barn after someone took the horses from me, and I remember Jen
asking if I was okay and me replying with something about being more freaked
out than anything. The adrenaline was
still proliferating; the pain in my arms and hip was dull and numb, but my
palms had started to burn where the mud had scoured them. The thought "I am
going to die" had not entered my mind until I was on my feet and walking
away, and did not enter it again until later than evening.
I was denied leave to clean
myself up, nor was I excused from barn duty that night. I put away saddles and filled grain cans and
raked stalls and picked manure with everyone else, unaware of the broken skin
under the mud on my palms and forearms. I
was also not excused from kitchen-cleaning duty, or entitled to any special
treatment the next day at work. This
affected me not only because of the visible limp caused by my severely right
bruised hip and ankle, but because of the emotional toll that a near-death
experience can have on a person. I do
not recall any of the managers asked me how I was, but I do remember, quite
vividly, being yelled at for not moving fast enough.
When I had finally climbed
into the shower that evening, the pressure of the homesickness, the pain, the
stress, the shock, and the dread of going to the barn’s sister stable that
Saturday pressed in on my chest and I had an emotional breakdown, sobbing alone
in the bathroom. After my customary
Thursday night of
Ryan-thinks-he’s-a-good-cook-and-I-should-just-clean-up-after-him-on-the-night-we-share-kitchen-responsibilities,
I pulled out my laptop with the hope of finding Jennie on
AIM or Skype. I broke down again while
telling her what had happened, and making her promise not to say anything about
it to Mom or Cindy. I knew that Mom
would freak out in a world-bending way, and that Cindy could probably not be
trusted to keep it to herself, under the circumstances. (My original plan was to not tell any of my
family members what had happened until I was home safe, yet on my first day off
after it happened, I called my dad – as I always did – and the first words out
of my mouth were, “I almost died on Thursday.”)
I have never thought about it before
writing this blog, but I wonder if the person who was supposed to ride Whiskey
that evening remembers this. I wonder
what he or she was thinking, and if he or she ever relates the story to friends
and family or wonders whatever happened to the girl who almost got trampled by
the young chestnut in a thunderstorm.
I learned later, from my
bunkmate Caroline, that Whiskey had bad knees despite his young age and wasn’t
expected to return to Colorado the next summer. In
fact, her determination as a horseman was that he was not fit to be ridden
every day over rough terrain as it was, and that from the looks of things, the
company (which shall remain nameless throughout this blog for obvious reasons)
was likely going to continue pushing him through the trails until his knees
gave out entirely. I cannot attest to
this as fact, given the crumbling nature of my memory and the second-hand
nature of the information, but to be honest it doesn’t seem unlikely given my
own experience with these same managers.
While I was never quite comfortable bridling Whiskey after he almost
killed me, I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for his circumstances. I had myself been thoroughly used and often
treated less like a person and more like an instrument of profit, much like a
shovel or a wheelbarrow – necessary for the functioning of the business, but
not deserving of much regard.
But this facet of my
experience is for another time. My
managers had organized sight-seeing trips for us throughout the summer and
taken us out to dinner two or three times, and if you have read my Colorado
Nightmare blog, you’ll know that two of my managers especially deserve
recognition for seeing their employees as humans and not strictly assets for
profit. I should probably keep these few
bright spots in mind while writing about how terrible the business was to work
for, but gestures of kindness mean significantly less when one’s everyday
behavior is so callous and inhuman.
