The Funny Farm

Saturday was another day on the farm. I had spent Friday night in Apartment B because we had a hunt club trail ride departing from the farm at 9 a.m. on Saturday. I woke at daybreak to the sound of some sort of family of laughing birds in the sycamore tree outside. Magpies? Laughing Starlings? Whatever they were, they were in hysterics over something. Which was an omen.

My first job was to go and get Mallow and Burton from their field which is now very far away and which means I took the Gator to get them (little motorized John Deere thing). Catching two horses is harder than catching one. You catch the first one and then have to drag it around after you while you try to catch the second one. Neither Mallow nor Burton are particularly easy to catch sometimes so they make sport out of the efforts of the human. I was not very coordinated and kept stepping on my own lead lines and getting tangled up and dropping the carrots and falling down and the horses looked at me with pity and thus, allowed themselves to be caught.

Once I caught them I had to drive them both back to the barn in the Gator. This means one horse on either side of the Gator (if all goes as planned) with me driving trying to hold on to two lead lines without running over them, or running into the horses, or running off the road, or getting pulled off the Gator when the horses decide to stop moving. Mallow was happy to trot along beside the Gator but Burton wouldn't move faster than a walk. Which make for jerky and inconsistent progress down the driveway and a lot of yelling. I dropped Burton at one point and had to stop the Gator and park it and go get Burton without dropping Mallow too etc. Very tiring.

Then Mary Anne and Don and Rebecca and everyone else showed up and the trail ride went off and we went across the road into the park and ran around in Goshen's territory jumping all the log jumps they have in their woods and got back to the lodge exactly 1.5 hours later (trail rides are strictly timed due to the heat).

Then I had to put Mallow and Burton back out in their field with the Gator. See points above. I did not drop Burton this time but I did drive over his lead line which was alarming to him and to me and then I leapt out of the Gator to rescue him but forgot to put the parking brake on so it rolled slowly forward and almost hit Mallow so I had to run back to the Gator to stop it from hitting Mallow which fortunately had the benefit of getting the Gator off Burton's lead line. Tiring.

Once I got to their field I had to park the Gator, of course, but I stupidly parked on a slight incline and the parking brake is not strong enough to actually hold the Gator on a hill. But Burton was immediately behind the Gator gazing at me adoringly and Mallow was immediately in front of the Gator gazing at me adoringly so I couldn't drive the Gator up the hill to a flat place or I'd hit Mallow nor could I get out of the Gator to move Mallow because then it would roll backwards into Burton. A dilemma. I ended up encouraging Burton in steps the size of a centipede's to come around the front of the Gator to Mallow without letting the Gator roll into him, without dropping him, without dropping Mallow, and without falling out of the Gator. This took a while. And because horses can't talk, the entire process took place in the bright sunshine in total silence.

Then I ate too much spicy soup at the breakfast and almost blew my head off.

Around 11 a.m. I got a case of the giggles that would end up lasting all day. I began to tell stories and couldn't finish them for giggles. I sat on my stool at the bar in the lodge and laughed so hard my face started to hurt. Everyone else started to laugh too. Mary Anne Ridgely, the Katharine Hepburn of Howard County, looked down her patrician nose at me and announced matter of factly, "Miss Kim, there's something wrong with your head." Yep.

Then Dale says to go ride Arizona. I do not care for Arizona and I do not believe that Arizona cares for me. Arizona did not know how to jump when he came to the farm and Dale forgot to tell me that one day last year and told me to take Arizona around the woods, which I assumed meant jumping jumps. That did not go particularly well. Then Arizona learned how to jump somehow and said to himself, "ah, this is excellent!" and tried to jump out of his paddock and instead lacerated his entire belly so badly things were falling out of it. We thought he was a goner but Roger came and wrapped him up in a big body bandage that went all the way around his entire body and he stood in a stall for six months oozing hideously bad smelling stuff out of his belly onto the straw and then it finally healed and now I have to ride him again.

Arizona is such an unfortunate creature that one day Don (the owner) walked by him and said, "who owns that one?" Jonathan said, "uh, you do." Don rolled his eyes and walked away.
Arizona and I get along so poorly that it makes me laugh. The horse does absolutely nothing that I ask him to and plenty of things I don't ask him to so I just sit up there and wonder what will happen next. I was behind my friend Jonathan and I laughed so hard the whole way around that I was doubled over on the back of Arizona and couldn't really ride and Jonathan started to laugh too and so did Rebecca who was with us and we just laughed and laughed and laughed. My face hurt some more.

Then, Jonathan and I sat around in the sun under an oak tree and laughed for a while and then decided to ride two more horses. He would ride his Belle and I would ride Annie, a plump little mare that needed exercise.

We fish Annie out of her field and she turns out to have a most disgusting suppurating puncture wound on her hind leg so all I can do is walk.

Annie and I walk down to the river and Belle runs circles around us warming up so that Jonathan can school her cross country while I watch aboard the plump, lame Annie. We conclude that perhaps Belle is lame, too. So Jonathan trots her back and forth and back and forth and back and forth in front of me in the woods as we try to decide if she's lame, lazy, or if the ground is just bumpy. The geniuses that we are, we decide to jump her to see if she falls down, which would suggest she might be lame. She jumps like a star. Not lame.

Nevertheless, I suggest to Jonathan that when we get back to the barn he should see if she has a stone in her foot. He decides to leap off Belle and do that right there in that very muddy spot right out there in the woods. He picks up a stick and picks up her hoof. He jabs at her hoof and his stick, which was rotten, disintegrates. He picks up another stick and tries the other hoof.
Belle decides this is boring. And in an instant -- poof! She runs away!. Jonathan and I stare after her as she disappears over the hill, stirrups and reins flapping. "Belle!" Nothing. Sunny silence once again. We start to laugh.

So Jonathan has to trudge all the way back to the barn on his people feet looking for Belle as I waddle behind him on lame Annie. He finds Belle grazing near her field on the other side of the fence from her friend Plum. Belle sees Jonathan and picks up and trots madly back to him. "Hi!" Strange.

The final installment of this doomed ride was Jonathan decides to jump Belle through the in-and-out that traverses the pasture that Plum lives in. Plum runs at a full gallop after him as he and Belle approach the first fence. Jonathan sees her running beside him and tries to stop Belle but Belle was locked on the jump and going so in they go into the pasture and then Plum T-bones them and I thought for sure there'd be a collision or that Belle would object to the interference but no, Belle jumps calmly over the second fence and out of the paddock and Plum looks like she's going to follow but slams on the breaks instead and decides to run the entire fence line to express her outrage -- easily a mile in length. She runs the whole thing, not slowing down for a single moment. Madly. Stupidly. Foolishly running. Belle looks at her in amazement. I sit on Annie laughing. Laughing laughing laughing.

The Belle-Annie ride was such a disaster that really all we could is laugh. We laughed and laughed until our stomachs hurt as well as our faces.

Then we did evening chores and went out to dinner and watched something hysterical called Most Outrageous Home Videos or something on the bar TV at the Olney Bar and Grille and that was the end of us and we just died laughing right there. Dead.

Stuck in the River

We went to the New Market - Middletown Valley hunter paces this weekend and almost got swept away by the Catoctin River or a very large branch thereof. I swear.

The place was beautiful -- Station Road off Route 17 almost on the Washington County border, west of Frederick, Maryland. The parking field is surrounded by an historic stone wall. There are wrought iron benches along the river so that you can look across the river at the horses coming to the finish line and the last 5 jumps or so. It was the prettiest site we've had all season.

Burton and Kona were once again team-mates for the flat course, this being Kona's third hunter pace now so he's an old hand. We mount and ask where the start is. We are told it is down by the river. Indeed -- the starter tells us "your time starts when you hit the water!" We look at the water. It's the Catoctin River itself (or a very large branch thereof) -- full from the recent rainstorms, rushing very fast and very deep across river pebbles. It is very clear water. And as soon as our horses step in it we realize it is also very cold water.

Burton dips his toes in and says, "No -- this is very cold and it's moving too fast and is tickling me. I will do bogs and muddy streams and snow and ice but not rushing mountain rivers that tickle me. No." Kona, who was otherwise quite willing to move into the refreshing current, says "Oh, well maybe I'm not supposed to go over there....?" He takes his cues from Burton and Burton will not move. We are about 10 feet from the starter with lots of teams behind us waiting to go. I kick and kick and kick and kick and kick and Burton goes three feet out into the river, at which point it is already up to his belly. Then he won't move anymore. He has become a Thelwell pony. Kona stands there mildly. Burton drifts downstream a little and smacks broadside into Kona, who has also waded three feet out into the river. Kona bobbles around but still rather mildly. He is taller than Burton so maybe he wasn't so cold or something. I am still kicking Burton but now we are so close to Kona that every time I kick Burton I also kick Kona. Jonathan meanwhile is also kicking Kona which means he is kicking Burton too. The horses drift further downstream packed tightly against each other -- downstream it is even deeper and colder. We are up on top of them flailing and kicking. Huge amounts of water sprays everywhere -- froth and foam and we are up on top screeching and wailing at our beasts. COME ON! COME ON! BURTON! etc. We are now wet through. The opposite bank is getting farther away because we are going downstream instead of across. We look like tiny children just learning to ride. We scream and kick and wail some more, all the while no more than ten feet from the starter. It was like that movie where the guy is lying on his back flailing around in three feet of water thinking he is drowning. SAVE US! OUR HORSES WON'T MOVE! WE'RE STUCK! HELP! HELP! AAAAGHHHHH!

Finally I take Jonathan's whip from him and crack a good one on Burton and he finally went across the river. SUCCESS! We could begin the course!

We were proud of ourselves until we turned around and saw Dale sitting on a horse on the river bank glaring at us.

La la la!

Turns out this mighty river was also the finish line. So when we came back through we ran flat out for the river so that the horses wouldn't have a chance to even thinking about stopping in it. A much better performance.