A Project Which (or is it that) Gobbled Me Up....

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It took more than two months and ate me alive, partly because of my technical inadequacies, partly because it involved a huge amount of work to get it to the point where someone else could take over the final editing -- another story that was also time consuming and complicated.

Shirley drove, the GPS gave us directions, I took photographs and video. We started in mid-July. We couldn't' go often, of course, since she has to train the horses -- exercise and hot walk, bath and wrap and groom, etc. So, on the days when she could carve out time, we'd leave around noon. She'd drive, we'd drink coffee and she'd tell stories.

One was about donkeys - or maybe it was about mules -- and why she likes them -- because they watch you all the time, figuring out how they can get you to do what they want you to do. They are not like horses, she said, who also watch you all the time, but will do what you want them to, usually.

The stubborness of mules saved her father's life when he was in the army, assigned to delivering wagons of munitions at night. No one knew that he was night blind. And it's probable that he would have died if the wagons had been pulled by horses, rather than mules... since when they got to a bridge that had been tampered with, armed to blow up under any pressure, the mules refused to move forward. Nothing could make them cross. A horse, Shirley told me, would halt, but if told to keep on going, would.

She likes mules and I photographed some on Kenny Posco's farm...but she likes horse, too, Thoroughbreds and Standard breeds. I've seen her sit on a bag of shavings for an hour, just watching what those four horses in her stalls are doing, how they're reacting to a delivery from Dodge Grain or another horse ridden outside of the barn by an exercise rider.

The creature, beautiful as it is, staring out of that very predictable photograph, isn't friendly. He's a cross between a zebra and a horse, a left-over from a petting zoo on this former apple farm that's now a Thoroughbred breeding farm. He roams the huge hunk of land that you'll see below...

Anyway, since July, I learned about some of the ways that Thoroughbred breeding adds to the economy of Massachusetts and took endless photos and video that illustrate this idea, including about land that isn't developed because it is used for breeding farms, of folks who work on the farms, machines bought for farm use and on and on...grains, hay, horse shoeing, equine dental work, washing and grooming and wrapping legs and on and on....
    
The point of the video is that Thoroughbreds spend 80% of their lives on farms, before and after a relatively short time (2-6 years) at the racetrack. And that there is what is termed an economic multiplier because of their care.

I can't say that I like all that many photographs that I took...but this one was taken at a riding school, another fine place where retired Thoroughbreds have a second career...this horse, which may or not be a Thoroughbred, is covered by a fly mask and coat...and is being led from a paddock back into a barn...

And I can't say that I like horses all that much more, though I'm not as scared of babies, even if one took a nip at my back and I squeaked. I'd be happy to have chickens, and maybe goats. I wouldn't mind a small, stubborn mule, but that's not going to happen...

This is not, I have to say, what I intended to spend the summer doing...my preference is standing around in the shedrow listening to Panama, also called Fast Eddie and Eduardo, talk while he rubs down a horse or mucks out the stall. He has three more weeks before this meet ends. And he probably won't come back next year since his wife found him another job. They have a rig and this summer she drove across country with her grandson, making a delivery, and stopping at the Grand Canyon on the way. Since they haul stable goods, they don't have to rush all that much....he has five children, I think, and numerous grandchildren, is a meditative soul, a musician, from a Jamaican heritage preserved when his grandfather was hired to build the Panama Canal...

I'm sure I've written about the impracticality of the horse design -- 50% death rate of mother or foal in the wild. George and Arlene Brown spend weeks spelling each other, sleeping on a couch outside of the birthing stall, waiting to help out, turn the baby over and pull it out, if necessary, and catch.

Anyway, I've learned a lot. Now I have to carve out the time to write.