September 21, 2017, Thursday, morning, to the horses

Thursday, September 21, morning

First light and the only thing we could think of was the horses. Are they safe? Are they okay?

We paused long enough for coffee but then Elaine, Marie, and I got in the truck and started the first post-hurricane adventure: getting to the horses.

It was a tense two hours, working our way around downed utility poles, trees blocking roads,cables lying across the road. Worse than the cables lying in the road were the cables hanging like snakes from jungle trees from leaning or broken poles waiting to tangle in a vehicle. Many of them are small, unexpected, hard to see.

There was a surprising number of vehicles out on the roads. I guess people just had to get out and see.In some ways it made our quest, our mission more difficult but in other ways easier: we could follow other cars through. At least we could until a road was completely blocked and we all had to turn around and find another way.

With increasing anxiety we worked our way to the drive back to the horse pasture. We could see the wires of the fence were down meaning the horses were free. We drove up the first rise and there was Zip, standing in the middle of the road. Elaine and Marie jumped from the truck and ran toward him, hugging each other and crying. I was crying tears of joy and relief as I slowly drove up the road behind them. As we topped the rise, there were KTJ and Chocolate, calmly grazing in the pasture.

More tears. More hugs. Hugs for each other, hugs for the horses.

We spent the next couple of hours checking them over. The wooded area around two sides of the pasture was completely stripped bare of leaves. A street light was hanging and banging against a pole. Worried about what could have flown through the pasture during the storm, we checked the horses for injuries. Amazingly, incredibly, there were none. Not one horse had so much as a scratch. Nothing! They were all fine. While Elaine and Marie continued checking them and feeding them grain, I put the fence back up. There were some trees and brush down across the fence that would require more work later but for the time being the horses would be fine.