In the Good Ole Summertime
I'm writing this travelogue even though I didn't really travel today -- just drove out through the country to western Howard County to my horsie's doctor. There was nothing especially wrong with my horse, but the vets were having an Open House so that people could come see their new clinic facility.
So the barn manager where my horse lives and I drove out there through the soybeans in her pick-up truck to see.
We ended up having a really old fashioned American summer day. Sky was blue, sun was high, weather was in low 90s but dry, breeze was up, farmland was deep green, oak trees were tall, creeks in the bottoms of the hollows were full. We drove north and west from Potomac, out beyond the strip malls and ticky tacky lawn ornament neighborhoods. We went west of Laytonsville. We went through a half mile of deep woods and emerged on the other side into true Maryland farm country.
Winding one or maybe two-laned roads, up and down short but steep hills covered in corn, soybeans, oats. Lines of trees along the creeks and property lines. Long dirt driveways with rows of oaks, or locust trees heading off the country road back into the back of the property, around a large old wood white house with a dairy barn, or a horse barn, out back. Roads with names like "so-and-so's corner" or "so-and-so's hundred." Then you pass a little country church with a cemetery filled with gravestones with so-and-so's name on them. Then a little country store called "so-and-so's store." The fields were full of rolls of hay -- fading into the sun. Deer followed us through the woods. We saw some fox. Which seemed appropriate because our vet at is also the master of the hunt and we have both gone foxhunting with him in the past. We head down into a deep steep gully over a one lane bridge. We wonder how on earth anyone would make it up and down these roads with a horse trailer. Then we head straight up the hill and at the top is the clinic.
The clinic is in a converted diary farm. The dairy is still there as are the old grain silos. One of the vets (there are six in the practice) lives on the property with his three little girls and 10 horses. We step out of the truck in our well-worn jeans, tank tops and sunglasses into a sea of other people in well-worn jeans, tank tops, and sunglasses. Soybean and cornfields slope away down behind the dairy -- a dirt road rolled away lined with oak trees into the creek bottom somewhere. We could hear cows.
Inside the clinic is basically two very large rooms. One room has one very large stall in it, with two windows and sawdust on the floor. The rest of that room is large wooden pillars where you can tie up a horsie. This turns out to be the "waiting room" which I thought was HILARIOUS. A horsie waiting room. All it needed was horsie reading material. The other room is also very large with wood pillars to tie up at and then an assortment of enormous horse medical equipment. Giant-sized X-ray machines to X-ray the entirety of a horse's neck, enormous throat culturing equipment to get all the way down a horsie's throat to see if it has strep, etc., huge horse-sized ultrasound equipment to look for tumors, monstrous horsie toothbrushes, etc. Our vet's daughter (with whom we have been foxhunting also) showed us everything with glee. We poked around I buckets full of horse medicine. We looked at X-rays and sonograms and tried to guess who's horse it was.
We watched a sonogram on the ultrasound for a while. There was a blue and green and red dot in the middle of the sonogram, presumably meaning something to a professional. I said out load (without really meaning to) "the problem with this here horse is it has a blue dot on its insides." People actually thought that was very funny.
We looked at X-rays and I kept asking whether I was looking at an abnormal or normal X-ray. One of the vets kept saying excitedly to me "uh, I dunno about that horse, its not my patient
, but come over here and look at my polo pony's shin splint!' I assumed it was an X-ray too of some old injury so I kept saying "yeah, in a minute." I finally went over there and he did show me some X-rays of his polo pony's shattered looking knee with a splint popping off it and then he whipped out a plastic baggie with something that looked like a pork chop in it and said, "See! Here it is!" And there it was. He'd popped it off his horse the day before during a polo game and had gone immediately to the horse hospital in Leesburg, Virginia and they had cut it right off. Totally fascinating in a gross kinda way. There the splint was on the X-Ray right in front of us -- and there it was in the plastic baggie with the vet's name in magic marker on the outside. I don't know what was weirder -- that the vet had ridden his horse through a whole polo game with a giant split popped off the front of its knee (he's a vet! For crying out loud!), or that he was so excited to show it to me. I asked him if a splint was supposed to pop right off the front of a horse's knee like that. He said, "no."
This particular vet turns out to have been in the Peace Corps in Togo doing large animal stuff on the indigenous N'Dama cow (naturally resistant to the Tse Tse fly) and so we talked about horses in Africa. He was intrigued at the notion of playing polo in Southern Africa with German expats and white African farmers. He confirmed for me that in fact "African Horse Sickness" is a real disease -- I always thought I was mis-remembering my youth because no-one in America seems to worry about something so generic as 'horse sickness." He said yes, you cannot ride your horse for a while after it gets vaccinated for African Horse Sickness, which explains the involuntarily time off from riding we always had in Zambia. We chatted away gaily about sleeping sickness, hoof and mouth disease, and other tropical and sub-tropical animal ailments. Turns out his wife learned to ride dressage as an expat in Korea -- which sounds equally as bizarre as learning to do stadium jumping in Southern Africa.
Then we wandered outside into the summer afternoon. Parking lot full of dusty farm equipment and
trucks, lots of dogs, kids running around climbing trees, horses snoozing in the paddocks, farms, post and rail fences, tractors, other large animals, summer foliage, friendly people, lots of blue sky. Our farrier Tom showed up in his farrier clothes (jeans). A table was set up piled high with watermelon.And when I say jeans, I mean real work jeans, you understand. Like "I'm gonna go ride a horse" kinda jeans. Not Dolce & Gabbana. Flat-fronted, Levi's 501 jeans with big, useful leather belts. No stupid preppy pink pants and straw bowlers. No loafers. No BMWs or Mercedes. Dirty trucks or dirty station wagons. Flip flops or work boots. Everyone's hair tousled and au naturel. Wind blown and slightly bleached from sun. People are tan from being outside, not from a tanning booth or even a swimming pool. Folks were pretty dirty frankly -- most having come from some barn some where or other (including ourselves).
These were long-standing Maryland horse people -- casual, unpretentious, original names that are now memorialized in the names of counties and towns across the state. Not the nouveau polo crowd. These are the original crazies. Our vet inherited the hunt master's job from his father-in-law -- his brother-in-law raises the hounds, his wife is whipper-in. The man has been riding this terrain for over 50 years. One of the days I went hunting with him we were on the Carroll's property which is one of the places where George Washington used to foxhunt. The original house is there (it's all conservation easement now). You're miles in from the little country roads and you see nothing for miles that would give you any hint you were in the 20th century. Just 50 or so horses with people all dressed up on them following a pack of hounds pell mell over hill and dale….
But I digress. Today was not freezing cold foxhunting season. Today we were all standing out on a dusty country road in our blue jeans on a warm blue sky day, under the oak trees, eating watermelon and spitting out the seeds. We talked about dogs and horses for a while. We talked about various horse ailments. It was utterly silent except for the sound of the breeze in the oak trees and coming through the soybeans. The dogs were asleep in the shade. We sat out there for a while, squinting down the road every now and then. We ate a lot of watermelon. The breeze blew. No-one was in a rush. The stayed high in the blue sky. We talked about not a whole lot for a while. Some people were chewing on blades of grass. Some people lay down in the shade of the trees and took a little nap. We drew in the dust with sticks. Every now and then someone new would show up and get some watermelon and stand around for a while talking about horses and dogs, too.Then we all got up to go because it seemed like it was time to go. We got back in our dusty truck and drove off through the oaks and locusts, back through the creeks and hollows, over the soybean and cornfields, past the white houses in their stands of tall trees, past the hay bales. Eventually we starting passing ticky tacky lawn ornaments again, then we were back in Potomac, at our barn. We went to say hi to our horses and called it a day.
I love summer.
Labels: Damascus, equine, summer, watermelon
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