By: Rad Watkins

This last Sunday, tragedy struck the Watkins house. I had borrowed a friend’s skid steer to get some work done around the barn. It was a great deal of work and I was at it for hours, from Friday night through most of the beautiful 85° weekend. By Sunday afternoon, I was running out of time and had a ways to go. By the time 3:30p rolled around, I could see the end was in site.

Just after that, I tipped the Skid steer forward while throwing a bucket of sand over the horse gate. Tipping the machine forward was not a big deal but smashing the gate was. Now, I had to jerry rig the gate to make it look like it was still working so the horses would not escape. I did that and decided to change my work priority. I threw a bale of hay in the bucket and headed for the far pasture, leaving the other gate open as I went through.

My horses pretty much will come running over if they see a whole bale of hay presented, regardless of the state of the gate, that is, except for Scarlet. Scarlet (A Pretty Te) is my 12 year old Quarter Horse. She is impeccably bred with world champs in her bloodline.  She is also the easiest to handle horse I have ever been around. Because of that, we breed her to a Seven-Time World and Reserve World Champion Buckskin Quarter Horse, Klassy Celebri Te, a beautiful and well-behaved stallion.

Well, Scarlet was the first horse to see the hay and she slowly started making her way across the field. I took the skid steer back towards the gate and saw the Scarlet doubled back around me and she too was heading for the gate. While pregnant the last 10 months, Scarlet has been let out of the paddock freely and eats her special meals at the barn. So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised she was heading that direction.

I jumped off the machine and headed for the gate to scare her away. Scarlet did turn back, but then ducked into the horse loafing shed. The shed has two doors, one on either end, and one of those opens directly to the gate. The gate was open to the inside. I had just placed a bunch of sand in front of the gate so it was not swinging freely. In the shed Scarlet was making her way to the open gate where I could not get to her to scare her back. I lifted the gate and pushed hard to get it to close. Scarlet saw the gate closing and decided to make a break for it. She was only 6 feet away as the gate was closing and Quarter Horses are the fastest accelerating horses in the world, and with Scarlets huge, muscular hips she’s probably right up there. In a blink of an eye she went full speed into the closing gate and the little 3-inch nubbin of steel that connects with the latch harpooned her in the side and dug in. As she went through the narrow opening the latch dug into the muscle, plowing out a channel as her skin tore and peeled back along her ribs.

It happened so fast and then it was over. She was perfectly calm on the outside of the paddock as she stood there with her side ripped open. I could not believe what I had just done. I could have just let her go through the gate and grabbed a rope and brought her back in. In 15 years of having horses I have never gotten one hurt to this degree (only two other injuries ever). Now I had just slammed a gate on the most beautiful horse I have ever owned and literally ripped her side open. I honestly could not bear to look at it.

I quickly called the vet, Dr. Graper, and there was a little more excitement as I tried to keep Scarlet from rolling in the loose sand, a favorite horse activity, and at the same time keep the other horses from leaving through the jerry-rigged gate. Bottom line was, the vet was working on another emergency and he would not be over for about an hour and a half. The only thing he told me over the phone was that he probably could not stitch it up and to keep water on it. I was the only one home and my job was to keep a hose of cold water running over the wound.

I walked Scarlet up to the house, still pretty much unable to look at it. She acted like nothing was wrong at all even though there were strips of muscle hanging off her side. My cell phone was just about dead so all I could do for an hour and half was watch the water run over the wound, talk to Scarlet, and think.

I must have apologized to Scarlet 500 times. I felt SO bad. I also felt helpless and fragile. I am a do-it-yourselfer to a fault, mostly because I hate to be powerless, hate to know there is nothing I can do to better my situation, but this was beyond me.

Scarlet was a champ, but my sorrow was pretty overwhelming. I do not enjoy the anatomy of real-life gore and I honestly could only glance at this disaster for a second or two before I had to look away. Plus it made me feel worse about what had happened. Typical stuff was going through my head like “If only I hadn’t…” I knew I had to change my attitude so I worked on the one guaranteed method for that, feeling grateful.

I started giving thanks that this probably would not kill my horse. I gave thanks that this was only my horse, and not one of my loved ones, especially not my kids. I gave thanks that I have been so blessed not to have seen much suffering in my life. I gave thanks for the wonderful, plain old day I was living in, rather than a war-torn existence so many people have to deal with (where, injuries that look like this are happening to people all the time). I gave thanks for my family, my friends, and my wonderful wife. I gave thanks for everything I could think of and I grew stronger.

As I adjusted, I did become accustomed to looking at the wound. I did think about how fragile life is and how quickly things can change. I thought about how careful we must be and how stupid things like texting and driving are. I mean, that is really stupid! You see people traveling 75 miles an hour and texting. Do you know how quickly things can change at 75 miles an hour? Way faster than me closing a gate to the pasture. Anyway, life is fragile and we often take that for granted.

Dr. Graper showed up and the first words out of my mouth before hello were “thank you.” It turned out he did think he could stitch her up and I was thrilled about that. My family came home just after Dr. Graper arrived, and I was thankful for that too. My little daughter Lena who considers Scarlet her horse, burst into tears at the site on the wound. Lena stood there and watched as the doctor cut out shredded muscle that stood no chance of healing. The vet slid a drainage tube behind a pocket of 2 inch muscle and then sewed around that. By the end Scarlet, who stood quietly through the procedure, looked pretty good. That vet visit was the best $500 I have ever spent.

So this is not the blog I intended to bring you this week. None of this was intended. But I think it’s important to share a story like this, that life is not all sunshine and rainbows. We have an extra couple of hours of care to provide a day, but we are lucky. Oh yeah, and the foal should be fine as well! We saw it kicking before the doctor left.

I guess in some ways this was a good thing. If there is a lesson here it is to please be careful; things can happen very quickly. I guess also, that the power of gratitude is really life changing, so practice it when you can and certainly when you need to. As the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir has said, “this is a song about tragedy narrowly averted.” May you all be so lucky.

Keep leading,
Rad