Oh, Devon. You tease me with your glitz and glamour, your promises and prestige. You string me along just until I’m in, heart, soul and pocketbook.
That’s usually about when the rain starts.
This year’s Devon was no exception. Tropical Storm Nicole whomped the East Coast, planting 10 inches on Philadelphia over its 24-hour run. After puttering around all day, which included watching some very naughty horses drag their owners around the Dixon Oval, and going for a nice long run on the hotel treadmill while the clouds grew darker and darker, show management cancelled the classes scheduled for Thursday evening—the tests for 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds—and rescheduled them for Saturday.
I am glad, because it would have been really messy to ride that night, though I wish I could have ridden Fender earlier in the day so he had gotten more exercise. As it was, I took him for two nice long walks (hoorah for my rain sheet!), and then got all dressed up to go to dinner with Michael Barisone, his wonderful wife Vera, and several of his students.
Dinner was lovely, but the rains got heavier and heavier. We had to ford two pretty hefty rivers across Route 30 to make it back to the barns (where’s a team of oxen when you need ’em?), only to discover there was a third raging river… going through the barns. Fender and his stablemates were standing in water past their fetlocks, and naturally, of course, the power was out.
I managed to get hold of the assistant TD, who told me to find someone from stable management and get the horses the heck outta there. Couldn’t find anyone. Finally found some guy who seemed like an authority figure, and he said “just get them to higher ground.” Great.
The Hasslers had taken all their breed show horses home, and their empty stalls were dry and bedded, so I grabbed Fender and, along with two ladies whose horses were stabled near him, we got them out. Fender was a superstar—how trusting to follow me through the water in pitch-dark. Good man!
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We got the horses settled and started going back for our stuff when the lights came back on. Hooray! But it still took several trips through driving rain, all the while trying to reach the owners of the other horses in our barn. (PSA: WRITE YOUR CELL PHONE NUMBER ON YOUR STALL CARD!! Only about 50 percent of the horses had an emergency contact number on the door. Yikes!)
Stable management finally found us, and then we were really off to the races. Who told us we could move? Who told us where we could move to? It was total pandemonium trying to reach show management (because while we non-CDI competitors aren’t so hard to move, the poor CDI horses have to stay in the CDI area…which was rapidly filling with water). Rain finally slowed enough for us to at least get all our horses moved, and after about an hour of total insanity, I give a perfectly-happy and mostly-dry Fender one last cookie and it’s off to bed for me.
At that point I’d pretty much decided I wasn’t going to stick around for my rescheduled Saturday class, and one look at the arenas on Friday morning made it clear I wasn’t going to be competing at all. The footing in the Dixon Oval has been redone, and it held up pretty well to the deluge (as well as anything can under 10 inches of rain!), but the warm-up and Gold Ring were a mess. Fender is sound and healthy, and nothing is worth risking that, but especially not the likelihood of a non-primary-colored ribbon in a non-prize-money class. So I took him home.
I hit the road by 10, which got me home in plenty of time to ride Midgey and Ella out in my front fields. They are suitably soft enough to ride on for the first time in months. The sun was out; the sky was a brilliant blue. Gusty winds made both of them a little nutty, but while Midge mostly just leaps around when he’s hot, Ella gets better.
Midge eventually settled into nice work on pirouettes and changes; she made stunning piaffe and passage, quick and lithe. They both made me laugh, and grin from ear-to-ear, and take big deep breaths. By the time I finished putting them away, I’d forgotten how mad I was. They reminded me that no matter how bad the show is, no matter how expensive, nothing is worth my horses’ health. Being responsible for their well-being means making difficult decisions, but it also means having the privilege of enjoying their athleticism and their company. Cue the sappy music, but they made the sun come out on an otherwise crummy week.
So it’s back to the grindstone, time to put the bad stuff behind me, move on, and get ready for the BLMs—our last outing. After that, we’ll start putting together a calendar for 2011, which will not, under any circumstances, include a certain big show the last week of September. We’re just not meant to be!
