As many of you probably know, we went to Brown County with the horses for a Labor Day weekend getaway. We got down there on Friday in the early afternoon and were fortunate enough to have gracious relatives that were willing to help out so we could stay till Monday afternoon. Friday was freaking HOT and freaking HUMID. Setting up camp was similar to setting up in Death Valley with 100% humidity. Nonetheless, the cold beer cooled us down, and we had a really nice early evening trail ride to the fire tower. Unlike last year, the horse flies were HERENDOUS but luckily we were prepared with extra blankets to put on the horses butts behind the saddles. If you’ve never experienced a horse fly bite, I recommend you keep it that way. Some of these things seem about as big as small birds and actually draw blood. They’re smart, too, and know to land on the horse right in the middle of the top of the butt or right in between the ears so the tail (or your hand) can’t kill them. We lived though. Again, the cold beer helped.
It got pretty cool during the night – down to about 60 each night, so that felt good. I think we were the only saps at the whole horseman’s campground with a tent, ya know, camping the “old fashioned” way. All the other people had some rendition of this:
Brian suggested we aquire one of these sometime in the future and I didn’t object. I could live with a mostly solid walled structure, A/C, a kitchenette, table, couch, and possibly even a toilet and shower. They’re like small RV’s with room for horses in the back. Of course that would mean we’d need an actual pick up truck to pull it, too. We’ll see. The used ones are pretty reasonably priced. Just looking, I’ve seen a few (like the one above) priced around $100,000.00 new. Yeah, we probably need to find one QUITE a bit cheaper than that to move forward…
When we got home we were planning on taking the horses to a new barn. The old barn was having management problems and to make a very very long story very very short, I’m pretty sure the horses were missing meals, and I had visited more than once when their water buckets were bone dry and their stalls were full of poo. Definitely NOT what we were paying for. Anyway. We got to the new barn (that will hereinafter be referred to as the old-new barn – read on) and got the horses in. My gelding Harley (Monkey #4) got stalled next to the owner’s stallion. He is an enormous warm-blood, really pretty, but well, really crazy. They had actually custom built this stall for this horse – he was so huge and so crazy that he LITERALLY climbed up the stall wall (really hard to do for an animal with no thumbs…) put his front feet on the top of the stall wall, and stuck his head and neck OVER the top of the stall wall, into Harley’s stall.
If you’ve seen Harley, you’d quickly learn his favorite thing to do is sleep and eat. This giant horse coming over the top of his stall freaked him right out. I’m sure he thought he was going to die. So that’s how things started. Then we got a copy of the boarding contract. Line 3, paragraph one, “All riders shall wear helmets whenever mounted.”
I haven’t worn a helmet since my horse and pony days in 4-H. Not that it’s not a good idea – believe me, I understand the inherent danger in horseback riding. I’ve fallen on my head enough to know first hand in fact. I asked if the helmet law applied to kids or to adults, too. The owner looked at me, appalled, and exclaimed, “You don’t wear helmets?” Uh, yeah, not so much. Remember, my horse’s favorite thing to do is sleep. I’ll take the risk I suppose to avoid feeling like a 10 year old in pony club. But alas, the policy applies (well, applied) to all. It’s something I suppose I could have gotten used to and lived with, but for Brian, not so much. We park the horse trailer there, get into the truck to leave and the first comment is, “Well, let’s get finding another place.” Mind you we’ve been at the old-new place for precisely 17 minutes. After a huge “discussion” we agreed to find a new place. The next morning I hurriedly travelled to a couple barns that we hadn’t explored in our initial barn hunt. I found one that looked promising and asked the owner if we could come in in like, 10 minutes. She said that was fine.
Now I had to go to the old-new barn and tell them that we were refusing to wear helmets, be lectured about helmets, or be treated like we are incapable of weighing risk vs. benefit on our own. We were told the contract said unless we gave 35 days notice of leaving there would be a $200 fee per stall to leave. They were so nice, they agreed to just $200 for both, instead of the otherwise $400 dollars to leave after, oh, about 18 hours of being there. I like my money, and I like it even better when I’m not giving it away for nothing. I plead my case that can’t we just call this a mistake and wipe the slate – no hard feelings. Just let me come get my horses and we’ll call it a day. Angrily, I was told, “Just come get your horses.” Mind you, it’s about 1 in the afternoon at this point and Vincent was getting off the bus in 2.5 hours.
I flew home, picked up the truck and drove to the old-new barn to hitch up the trailer. Remember back in the first part of the post where I said we left the trailer there? Well, we unhitched it with all of our Brown County shit (total about 300 pounds) in the cargo area. The trailer was up as high as it would go, but now, with the truck empty, the back end of the truck was about 3 inches TOO HIGH to hitch up to the trailer. And there is NO WAY I was going to lift it. This has happened before, but Brian just stood on the bumper and bounced to get the truck low enough. The problem was this time, I was by myself and while I can do a lot of things, I can’t drive and bounce on the back of the truck at the same time. It was about 95 degrees that day, and I’m out there in tears at this point. Hot, frustrated, upset, pissed – it was a beautiful sight let me tell you.
So the irate old-new barn owner came out seeing that I was about to have a breakdown and apologized for yelling at me on the phone and offered to help hitch the trailer. His help was graciously accepted, as I was really in a time crunch now. I got my stuff and my horses and left.
Oh yeah, I lost my cell phone somewhere in the process, too, to top it all off.
I called the new-new barn and told them I’d be there in t-10 minutes. Luckily they were ready for us. I pulled in, dropped my horses, and left. They must have been wondering, “Who are these crazy people?” I don’t blame them, though. That would have been my impression too.
Are you liking my post? This is just the beginning.
So I get home and get showered up. Brian was already gone for work. By the time I got the kids in bed and sat down to catch up on some photography stuff, it was about 8:30. I get a call from Brian that he was on the way to the hospital. He had gotten a call of an apparent crazy person swinging a broom around a gas station, knocking stuff off shelves, and screaming that “they” were after him. Of course, my husband the shit magnet (that’s a cop term) was like one nanosecond away. He pulls in and the guy is now coming out of the gas station, sans broom, but soaked in sweat and literally foaming at the mouth. Brian gets him over to his car to try to figure out what the hell was going on at which point the guy gets all agitated. After a minor tussle, Brian cuffed him and (luckily) asked the guy if he was on any meds. The guy rambled off some med that Brian hadn’t heard of so Bri asked him what it was for. “AIDS,” the guy replies. At this point some reinforcements had arrived and Brian started to get his gloves on. The guy is getting more and more agitated and now tries to run. He gets helped to the ground and in the fight, gets a bloody nose and lip. He’s also trying to break out of the handcuffs and is slicing his wrists all up.
Not to go into too much detail, we’re now going through the post-exposure CDC protocol –
Brian doesn’t think he actually got any of this guy’s blood on him. It’s more to be sure than anything else, but it’s HIGHLY unnerving nonetheless. I’m sure he’ll be totally fine, it’s just like, ugh. The next 6 months should be pretty interesting. That’s all I’m going to say about that.
It’s been a crazy week.
