“Oh, Eeyore, you are wet!” said Piglet, feeling him.
Eeyore shook himself, and asked somebody to explain to Piglet what happened when you had been inside a river for quite a long time.  – A.A. Milne 

Three years ago I dipped my toe in to a churning river that had been rushing past me while I sat on its banks for years. Tempted by the adventures and challenges within, I made a modest boat and pushed it in, with a naïve hope that plain hard work and longing could see me through the rapids ahead.

In the wake of the tragic death of Philippa Humphreys and Skyler Decker’s Inoui Van Bost at the Jersey Fresh International (N.J.), eventers are taking a hard look again at ways to make the sport safer.

In the June 6 & 13 issue of the Chronicle, we asked three riders how they feel about their sport and what can be done to make it safer. In those print pages, Will Faudree, Tamra Smith and Doug Payne weighed in with their thoughts and how the deaths had affected them.

Even before I pulled into the gates of the Kentucky Horse Park two weeks ago, I knew I would eventually need to write this blog for all of you. Whether it would end up being a tale of victory, misery, or something in between, I could not know.

Editor’s note: We had scheduled this blog to run on Monday, May 16, but in light of the tragedies at the Jersey Fresh International, we held it for a few days.

“Riding a horse is not a gentle hobby, to be picked up and laid down like a game of solitaire. It is a grand passion. It seizes a person whole, and once it has done so, he will have to accept that his life will be radically changed."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Like most of you, I find myself seized by this grand passion that is a life with horses. If you challenged me at the dinner table to speak of anything but horses, I might be silent for a long time.