I was 19 years old, the mare was a registered AQHA appendix mare ( half TB race horse) and her name was Launchette. I paid two thousand dollars for this mare and back then that was a LOT of money! Especially for a 19 yr old girl. To put it into perspective my car payment on my used 1968 Pontiac Lemans convertible was $59 a month, I paid $1,600 for the car and the bank gave me 3 years to pay it off. I guess back then I must have been a lot better at hoarding money than I am now.
At any rate ( ok... I'll give you a minute to stop laughing about the goofy hat with the giant feather hatband) this was my first purchase of a seriously competitive barrel and pole horse. I had before then been showing in the judged events. Always one to try something different (as long as it involved a horse) my barrel racing stint was short lived. Like a number of other equestrian pursuits I stayed with it long enough to get good enough to win then decided it wasn't really my cup of tea.
I kept Launchette long enough to show her a couple of seasons and raise a foal out of her. I bred her to a world champion appaloosa stallion and got a barely colored black and white filly. I kept that filly who I called "Hawg" registered as "Sheza Lotta Cash" until she was almost 3. I employed all the cool brand new ( then) foal imprinting techniques that our guest speaker Dr. Robert Miller had shared with us at that time as his "new theory" at the latest ISHA judges seminar that previous February.
By the time she was old enough to ride Hawg had the most impeccable ground manners, but absolutely zero anxiety about anything you did to/with her.Which on the surface sounds like a good thing, but wasn't. With no sense that she was "the prey" and I was "the predator" she was no more afraid to challenge a human as she was another horse in the pasture. If you asked her to do something she did not want to do, she just ignored you. If you pushed the issue, she pushed back. Only harder."bring it on"
One nice late winter day I got the chance to sneak off off to the barn I rented and saddled up Hawg so I could get in a ride. I wanted to get a good start on her under saddle training. Now mind you this was 25 years ago, I was 27 years old, married with two young sons. The youngest Dan was just a months old infant. His brother almost 5. By this time I had been in the horse business for quite some time. I knew what I was doing, and I was a very balanced and talented rider since I spent the first 7 years as a child of horse ownership without a saddle. I was 17 yrs old and had a fast food job before I owned my own saddle. My father was of the opinion that be damned if he was going to pay $50 for a saddle for $25 pony! So..bareback was how I started out.
Anyway....alone on a green as grass two yr old, that had no fear whatsoever of humans ( not even a healthy one) and I got just ever so slightly demanding (squeezing with my legs) asking her to take a few steps forward. I would have been happy with one! All of the sudden she reared so high in fearless defiance that we made the Lone Ranger look like a wimp! She fell all the way over. On top of me. Broke my back. I laid there paralyzed from the waist down, alone, bleeding from the nose and mouth. I figured I was dying from internal injuries.
I laid there worrying about who was going to take care of and love my two young sons. My husband ( at the time, divorced long ago now) Dave had little to no interest in the boys and from what I can tell still doesn't to this day. I was dying ( I thought) and feeling very guilty for checking out under the circumstances. How could I be so thoughtless as to put my babies in such a dilemma? Just to ride my horse! what WAS I thinking!
As luck would have it a neighbor that lived near the barn was out mowing her yard and noticed me laying there and came over. She called an ambulance, caught Hawg, took the tack off, and put her in her stall in the barn. Turned out I had two broken vertebrae, something the doc called a "compression" fracture, and it took almost a year before I felt normal again but it healed on its own. The paralysis subsided in the ambulance after about 45 minutes. The blood my face was pouring was from a ruptured blood vessel in my sinus cavity from impact.The ER doctor entered my exam room and gleefully exclaimed "I got your head x-ray back and there's nothing there!" I gave him a dirty look and said "Thanks!" You know...I had already figured that out on my own.
Moral of the story,
I dont:
ride alone
ride horses that will rear
ride 2yr old's for the 1st 30 days
put my family second to my hobby
They don't call it a "wake up" call for nothing.
No comments:
Post a Comment