And then there was The Time the Horse Fell On Me.

Please notice that the title of this story is very explicit in stating that the horse fell ON me, I did not at any time, fall OFF the horse. I just want to be very clear about that right up front. It's an important distinction. Me falling OFF the horse, would be somewhat embarassing, but a horse falling ON me...well that sucked, but it wasn't embarassing.

Here's what happened: First, I think I was born wanting a horse of my own. I had a little plastic toy horse called "Marvo the Mustang" when I was four or five that was pretty cool, but even at that tender age, I knew I wanted the real thing. Every Christmas, I would offer up passionate prayers to God or Santa for a horse of my own, preferrably white. I regularly begged my father for a horse. I made long lists of chores that I would perform with no complaint if only he'd buy me a horse. I made charts and graphs and slide presentations all about why it would be good for me to have a horse. For example, I'd get up at five in the morning EVERY day and feed and brush the horse, and THEN I would clean the ENTIRE house, and THEN I would be so nice to both my sisters (even Gwen), and THEN I would RIDE the horse and this would be exercise, which would cause me to LOSE WEIGHT! My father was very interested in me losing weight, so I thought this would be a clincher, but alas...it wasn't to be. I settled for drawing thousands of pictures of horses, reading every book in the library that had anything to do with horses (Marguerite Henry was my favorite author), and papering my entire bedroom with pictures of horses cut out of magazines.

So I got to be about 34 without ever having a horse of my own. I rode other people's horses as much as possible and actually became a pretty good rider.

And then Kallie bought me a horse.

Oh...bliss! Heaven! Joy! At last, at last!

He was beautiful. His name was Bullwinkle, which I quickly changed to Beau, thinking that Bullwinkle was a dumb name for such a beautiful animal. He was gloriously handsome...chestnut with a flaxen colored mane and tail, and a white stripe on his nose. He was a Tennessee Walker, probably 16 or 17 hands, and probably weighed around 1000 - 1200 lbs. (I mention this because it becomes important later). He was a fairly well-behaved animal, but could be stubborn. The one big downside to Beau was that he was afraid of cars. Didn't want to go anywhere near one. Maybe he'd been forced to sit in a backseat on a long trip with his siblings when he was a foal. I'm not sure what the source of his fear was, but it was extreme, and he had no interest in overcoming it.

I, on the other hand, was very interested in having Beau overcome his fear. We lived on a dirt road in very rural Georgia. People rode their horses up and down the road all the time, and I wanted to ride Beau out there too. I'd had him for about a month and was tired of riding round and round the pasture. Heck, I wanted to show him off. He was gorgeous, and I'm sure I looked gorgeous riding him.

So, on a beautiful spring Sunday afternoon, I took him for a ride on the dirt road.

First, a bit about the dirt roads: there are these deep ditches along the sides of the roads that serve as a place for rain to run off so as not to entirely wash away the road during the frequent summer rains. Periodically, the county would come out and 'pull the ditches' to keep them nice and deep - deep being approximately 2 to 3 feet. As luck would have it, the ditches had very recently been pulled on this Sunday afternoon.

Things were going really well to start. Beau and I had gone about a quarter mile before someone came by on a 4-wheeler. He started to spook, but there was a driveway nearby, and I trotted up into someone's yard until the 4-wheeler got past. I was feeling pretty good about that solution and pretty confident about our ability to safely avoid trouble. And that's when Kallie came to check on me.

In her car.

I trotted Beau back up another driveway when she went by initially, and when she parked off to the side of the road a bit, I rode out of the driveway and got close enough to yell and ask what she was doing, and to be told that she'd come to check on me. Since she was parked there on the side of the road, it seemed like a good idea to try to get Beau used to cars by walking him past a parked one. (As opposed to letting a moving one come zooming past him just in time for him to throw me onto it's hood). So Kallie got into her car and I pointed Beau towards the car and gave him a little kick.

He went about three steps and then turned back around in the opposite direction.

I turned him back toward the car.

He turned back the other way.

We repeated this several times.

Finally, I gave him a little smack on the neck with the reins and tried to turn him back around. (You really can't let a horse think he's the boss of you.) Instead of turning back around, he started to walk backwards. Towards the ditch. Nothing I did got him moving frontwards again, so I tried talking to him, calmly..."Hey, dumbass...if you don't stop backing up, we're both going to wind up in the ditch!". This was absolutely true, but utterly failed to convince Beau to stop backing up.

And then I felt his back legs drop into the ditch and remember very clearly thinking, "Oh shit...this is going to be bad." This was also absolutely true.

As much as Beau hated cars, he evidently felt even worse about ditches, because at that point, he reared up onto his hind legs. (This is the point at which I did NOT fall off). I was hanging in there just fine, and then came this moment when I realized that he had reared so far up, that he was going to go right on over backwards. That was one of those crystalline moments that seemed to last forever, and I had time to think, "Oh shit...this is going to hurt." This was also absolutely true.

And over we went. I hit the ground at the same time Beau hit the ground. He landed with most of his weight on my left leg and while it hurt, I was miraculously unbroken. So far.

As it turns out, horses don't much like lying on the ground with their feet in the air. It freaks them out. So he started trying to get up by heaving his body up and then flopping back down on me. It was during one of those first flops that I felt my wrist break. After a couple of more flops, I started to be genuinely afraid that I was going to get broken to death in that ditch. I looked for Kallie and saw her getting out of her car, and started to say things to her which seemed to make a lot of sense at the time, like, "Help!" and "Get him off of me!"

Unfortunately Kallie couldn't really help me. The horse was on his back flailing with all four legs. If she'd gotten closer, he would have kicked her brains out, so she did the only thing she could. She screamed at the horse, "GET OFF HER!" And amazingly, he did. He gave a last mighty heave and got his legs under him (his right rear hoove landed squared on my inner left thigh -- the bruise wrapped entirely around my leg) and stood up.

What followed was a harrowing ride to the hospital, surgery on my arm, and months to recuperate. I still have a limited range of motion in my right wrist, but I consider myself lucky nonetheless. It could have been worse.

We sold Beau a year later after Kallie got into a similarly serious horse wreck on a different horse. I haven't been on a horse since the accident (mine, not hers), but I think about it a lot. I dream about it. And one day, I'll do it.