Galloping into the abyss
I broke my back in a riding accident fourteen years ago, when I was 30.
One moment the horse and I were enjoying a hand gallop through the deep sand of a New Mexico arroyo (wiki), and the next, we were tumbling headfirst into a 10-foot hole that hadn’t been there the day before.
Neither one of us saw it as we galloped right into the abyss.
I still remember thinking, as horse and I hung suspended in the ether for one surreal second, that we’d somehow recover. I gathered myself up into the best semblance of a jump seat I could manage, bridged the reins, and rode for my life. The wild hope that the mare would touch down on her front hooves to carry us through and out of this nightmare beat in my head almost as frantically as my heart was pounding in my rib cage. All illusions of control shattered, just as I expected every bone in my body to, as the horse careened forward, then flipped over backwards, hooves scraping against the hard blue sky.
I landed head first on the newly excavated earth, the breath bursting out of me, an explosion of pain. Somehow or other, I wound up laying spread eagle in the dirt road. And that’s when I knew. It was real bad. I’d been reduced to a rag doll. I rolled to the right in a fetal curl of agony, mouth and nose full of sand, and screamed.
The horse, miraculously, was fine. From where I lay, I checked her out from head to tail and remembered to breathe. She was grazing, tail swishing at a fly that's buzzing matched the steady drone in my brain. Air rushed into my lungs, a surge of relief, when I confirmed as best I could that she was standing squarely on all fours. The horse didn’t belong to me and was quite valuable. I’d been exercising her and six others for their owner. She looked up, ears pricked forward towards the rumbling of an engine.
I followed her gaze and saw a truck barrelling down the hill towards me. Self-preservation kicked in. I rolled onto my back and somehow managed to lift a leg so the driver would see me there and not run me over, which would have really been a sorry way to go.
Pretty soon after that, the ambulance came. I remember the EMTs taping me to a very large board and telling me not to move. As if I could.
I spent the next year in a back brace, trussed up from pelvis to chin. I never found out who’d brought in a backhoe and dug himself up some free sand in the middle of my arroyo for a construction project.
I did find out that for thirty years I’d taken my healthy body for granted.
I also discovered that the journey of a thousand miles does indeed begin with a single step.
