I’d Know If It Was Broken

Winter 2016

In the emergency room, I was praised for hauling my body across the paddock, through the gate — closing the gate — up the stairs, across the porch and onto my mud room where paramedics rescued me.

My husband, with 22 years in the military and knowledge of survival, had always told me I’d know if something was broken.

It was broken.

The pounding rain that flooded Maine accumulated to four inches and a pond in my paddock. That isn’t supposed to happen in January. Within hours of the last droplets, the temperature dropped suddenly to 20 degrees, and with wind chill, turned the pond into an ice rink.

Chocolate and Akiela, despite shelter, stand in the heavy rain before being locked in the dry barn. This rain on top of snow would turn to ice the following day.

I knew there would be a broken leg, but I thought it would be my horse’s. I feared seeing Akiela’s body leave her spirit like I had seen SarSue’s. In a desperate attempt to encourage the horses to stay in their stalls, I left hot water to freeze in buckets, a grain mash hardened, stalls dirty and an overturned wheelbarrow reflecting the moon and the flashing lights as the ambulance took me away.

The stalls could have stayed dirty. The horses could have been fed extra devil’s claw to combat the stiffening from the arthritis from a second night of being cooped up. I could have worn ice studs on my boots. But as I looked down where the burning was coming from, saw the bend where my tibia and fibula shouldn’t bend, it didn’t really matter what I could have done.

This was what I did. I emptied my wheelbarrow. I travelled across the ice in the dark.

Akiela whinnied a guttural scream from inside her stall, gauging the ice, but daring not step out. It worked. She’s staying in, I thought, momentarily unaware and simply believing I’d protected her — from this.

I screamed, too. First a gentle cry like Paul was just in the barn. Then louder as I realized he was in the house, and louder again knowing he was asleep. And then to anyone because he couldn’t hear me.

Chocolate, my other horse, was my angel dressed in plaid. She paraded by me, trotting up and down the length of the house, whinnying for help. She wasn’t loud enough and returned to me, not gently like Akiela, who’d been a mother, but like she would protect me.

A demon didn’t do this to me. My clumsiness did. But she continued to blow and snort until the wind briefly calmed and I could hear and see no one except the quiet threat of hypothermia.

In that brief quiet, as I began to move like a crab would call, the rubber in my boot dragged on the ice, rumbling and burning my leg until I fell through the doorway a half-hour later and the wind picked up again.

It was days before I was released from the hospital — Dr. B. said, “We need to keep the barnyard out” — and could see the horses in the paddock sun bathing in clean, bright, pristine snow and it was weeks again before I could run my fingers through their thick winter coats and manes tangled from that damned rain and that freezing wind.

Thank you for following 1,000 MILES on my own two feet,

the visual journal of Abigail Austin Photography.

©  Abigail Austin Photography 2011-2016

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