With Sandy the barn manager out sick today, Barbara steps valiantly into the breach. In the morning, she and Pam (who owns a sweet Appaloosa mare named Jewel) fetch 10 equids, one by one, from five different paddocks and lead them into their individual stalls. They feed them breakfast — scoops of grain or other feed, plus whatever supplements and medications each owner likes to dose each horse with. They use mallets and sieves to remove the ice from each stall’s water bucket; then they fill other buckets half-full from the spigot and pour those into each stall’s bucket.
They let everybody munch and doze while they drag around a big cart to throw piles of hay into each paddock. Then they return everybody to the paddocks again — checking to make sure the troughs have enough unfrozen water. Thankfully, the horses possess accurate internal clocks, so they almost always come to the gate rather than making their humans hike over hill and dale to fetch them. And they more or less wait their turns to enter and exit according to their dominance rankings. Plus, Sandy gets big points for another blessing: she’s trained them all to lower their heads so that short humans can slip their halters on and off easily.
Still, those 10 trips in and 10 trips out are no cakewalk. In one direction, with all the horses in a paddock milling around the gate, the handler needs to shoo some away while haltering the departing horse and leading it out with one hand while using the other hand to hold the gate semi-shut to prevent escapes. Then she and the horse need to turn back toward the gate so she can latch it (a two-handed operation), before heading for the barn. In the other direction, the handler has to fend off the previously turned-out horses while leading the new horse into the paddock with one hand while using the other hand to hold the gate semi-shut. Then she needs to unhalter the arriving horse and latch the gate. Rinse and repeat..
In the evening, for dinner feeding and nighttime turnout, Barbara and I do all these chores again in reverse. In the growing dark. Over icy, rutted, snow-caked paths.
With everybody turned out, the real work begins. It’s time to clean stalls. This is less arduous than at stables where horses are kept inside all night, but it’s still a Herculean labor. Some horses are tidy and some are slobs. But they all move their bowels prodigiously and frequently, they all gush small inland seas of urine, and they nearly all trample and soil some of their hay. Clods of soaked wood-shavings have to be dug out and tossed in the wheelbarrow. Wet or nasty hay has to be teased away from still-edible strands that can be raked clear of shavings and repiled. And the poops — oh, Lord have mercy, the poops . . . They need to be scooped up and then the pitchfork shimmied like a pan of popcorn so that dry, clean shavings can sift back to the floor for reuse. But the individual turds in each deposit are only loosely bonded, and they’re maddeningly spherical: they roll off the fork (the more so when frozen). Some get impaled on the end of a tine; others get wedged between tines. Gus the donkey is small enough that many turds slip between the tines and can’t be picked up no matter how many times you rescoop them. Sandy is super-skilled and efficient, but for a weekend warrior like me, mucking out stalls is time-consuming and awkward. And spine-twisting. And arm-tiring.
Nevertheless I’m happy — literally joyful — to be able to help Sandy out a bit. Moreover, I truly love doing each and every barn chore, and I wish my musculoskeletal decrepitude didn’t prevent me from doing more. I adore the aroma of shavings and manure and hay and grain. I groove on the Zen of focusing solely on one action at a time: haltering, leading, mucking, bucket filling . . . They each nourish my soul with deep, serene satisfaction. I suspect Sandy feels that too. What’s utterly beyond my ken, though, is how she physically manages it, by herself, twice a day, seven days a week. She can do it solo in half the time it takes Barbara and me working together. She's a force of nature.
To some people, women of a certain age — which is everybody at this barn — may look and sound like lightweights. But step aside, Hercules. We can mop the barn floor with you.
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