Into the Fire

2007 marks the fifth year my husband and I did not take a horse down to the track. It chokes out of my mouth and is never uttered from my husband’s mouth that we are “retired” from horse racing. He literally grew up “there”, spending his summers at Longacres living in tack rooms, from the age of 15 to when we left. In the latter years and during the break between when Longacres was closed and Emerald Downs was built, he took on another profession which he is still doing. He left it for one season to train full time again and returned to it afterward. We had a couple of horses for the last few years before we quit, and my husband would come down early in the morning before his “real” job and exercise ours, then head on to work.

Today I called one of our veterinarians that we rarely have to use anymore with our two horses at home—and I thank the Lord for that—to obtain some cough-aid stuff for our gelding who seems to get a bit of allergies in the summertime. When I went down to the track to pick it up, I was able to give away one of my novels about horse racing to a jockey who rode a couple of horses for us years ago. Then I told the lady who’s been selling my novels at the “kitchen” to keep the money she’d made from them and to dispense the remaining books to those she thought would read them. She was shocked and asked why, and I told her because I wanted people to read the book, to know there was an alternative to the way they lived without leaving what they know, what some of them have done their entire lives. She understood then because she knows the Lord. She told me I had captured the track, that she cried in places, and how it had moved her. Yay!!

As I left the kitchen and headed to the vet’s trailer, I saw many familiar faces. Some of them recognized me with a smile and greeting, and others I passed wondered who the smiling blonde woman was. My hair is very blonde and quite short compared to long and not so blonde when I left. The horses traveling to and from the track made me thoughtful of how many different personalities we’d trained over the years. Some meander to the track, others nervously sidestep their way to it. Coming back, some are sweating and in a restrained jog back to the barn while others are plodding, chewing or jingling their individual style of bits in their mouths. Horses with coolers (blankets) are dragging around the hotwalkers with their counterparts leaping and rearing and enjoying the chaos they’re creating.

The looks on different faces . . . some still haughty and view themselves above the rest, others still seared with the fatigue and limitations of a never-ending 7-day-a-week lifestyle . . . haven’t changed. I doubt they ever will.

Emerald Downs was never to be the familiar place of Longacres, the racetrack I fashioned my track in Hope Of Glory after. It’s modernized, asphalted, less aesthetically pleasing. Longacres was a beautiful racetrack, filled with nostalgia of a bygone era of racing, the history of its origin and survival fascinating. Yet, at Emerald Downs there remains the ambiance of horse racing, the faces, attitudes, animals, and challenges of a sub-culture within its fences.

So many stories, so many lives—both human and equine—walking through time. For me, as I cruised through the backstretch smiling at the various laborers in the sport, time was standing still. Like I’d never gone but yet had left it all behind in the physical realm. Spiritually, my heart returns there in the pages of Hope Of Glory, reaching out to the lost who might just dare to read a story about the sport. Emotionally, it’s tough sometimes to experience the end to such a consuming number of years, growth, beauty, joy and pain of training the magnificent equine athletes.

I’m back in “real” time now.

Father, thank you for those years, some tumultuous as I floundered in being lost, others a struggle as I learned my Christianity in the trenches. You were faithful then and are faithful now and will always be the Faithful One. I can’t thank you enough for my life, crazy, dramatic, lost and found, and utterly redemptive and gracious as it’s been and you’ve been to me. It’s a journey. You are my inspiration, Lord Jesus. I love you with my whole heart and desire to please you above all others. Help me to do just that, Spirit of God. In the Name of Jesus, Amen.