In somewhat sad news, Barbaro was euthanized earlier today. I say ’somewhat’ sad, because although a horse lost its life, I am hard-pressed to really care. I mean, I’m not a horse-racing fan, nor an avid horse-lover (yikes, some of those entries are creepy), and quite honestly, I think the story of Perky The Duck is much more awesome.

However, the Barbaro story brings back fond memories of the time that I took care of a horse for a few days.

It was 2001. I had come home for the summer after my first year of college. Despite two jobs - a part-time internship and a sales position at The Gap (true story, I swear) - I had plenty of time to just hang out with my old high school friends.

At one point that summer, my close friend Carrie’s family had to rush out of town for a family emergency. Now normally when they left town, they hired a vet or some other experienced animal professional to come over to their house and tend to their dogs, cats, bird (I think there was a bird), fish, and horse.

(Wait a second, even I’m blown away by that sentence. Carrie, as I write this, I realize for the first time how incredibly strange and amazing it was that you had a horse in your backyard. I mean, my backyard - and the backyard of just about everyone I know from home - was pretty much 6 feet of grass followed by another house, and you, you were running a friggin farm over there. I don’t know why I’m just now finding this amazing after nearly 10 years…)

Anyway, given that Carrie’s family had to rush out of town on such short notice, they weren’t able to hire their regular animal care-taker. My best friend John and I, being the loyal and caring friends that we were, stepped up.

Now the conversation should have gone like this:

John/Amish: We’ll take care of the animals!
Carrie: Yeah, right. You guys are a bunch of morons, and just want the keys to our house so you can drink beer.
John/Amish: That’s not true! OK fine, we will probably drink beer and crash on your couch, but we’ll take care of the animals too.
Carrie: Forget it, I’m gonna look in the yellow pages, or call some other horse-owning friends, or find anyone not entirely lacking horse-care-taking skills like you two assclowns.

Instead, it went like this:

John/Amish: We’ll take care of the animals!
Carrie: Really? I’ll ask my parents.
John/Amish: (Oh God, what have we done?)
Carrie: OK, they’re cool with it. Come over tomorrow morning…

The next day:

Carrie: Walk the dog, feed the animals, blah blah blah…
Carrie’s Parents: Thanks so much for doing this, guys. There’s beer in the fridge.

(Um, not sure if that last part was true. Either way, we drank the beer in the fridge.)

So Carrie’s family left, and John and I found ourselves looking forward to taking care of the animals. I was already fond of one of Carrie’s dogs, so coming over two or three times a day to hang out with it would be fun, and taking care of a horse would offer some brief excitement from the otherwise boring life as a Gap fashionista.

We came back later that day to walk the dog and feed everyone. The dog part was easy, though we noticed that he didn’t poop. “Maybe he’s not ready yet,” we thought, as we tried to force feed one of the cats his medication. “We’ll try again later.”

Then came the horse.

He was off wandering around in the woods that comprised Carrie’s backyard/corral, but we went ahead with getting his food and water ready. As John filled his feed bucket, I went into the fenced-in area with a fresh bale of hay and turned on the hose to fill his water bucket. As I stood there waiting for it to fill up, I heard John shout out from the outside of the fence.

“Amish, look out!”

I spun around and nearly crapped myself. The horse was coming straight for me. Or rather, the water bucket. But that was where I was standing.

Now, I have had experiences with horses in the past, albeit small ones (both, experiences and horses). I had taken my fair share of horseback rides on vacations to national parks, had petted Carrie’s horse a few times from over the fence in her barn, and had occasionally dabbled in My Little Pony (What? I had a sister.) But all of these experiences contained a couple of key ingredients - the presence of an experienced horseback rider, and horse-controlling things like ropes and saddles and eye patches. (Or, you know, sometimes the horse was 5 inches tall and fake.)

So here I was, standing unguarded with a hose in my hand, while a mature, adult horse weighing at least 3 or 4 tons was honing in, unrestrained, on the very spot where I was standing.

As John let out a string of OMIGODDUDE’s, a gutteral shriek came forth from my throat. I dropped the hose into the bucket and took off, ending my sprint with a head first dive, like a lion through a ring of fire, through the horizontal fence posts. I landed, bruised and scraped up, on Carrie’s driveway and looked back to see the horse calmly drinking from the water bucket, now overflowing from the still-on hose. I was out of breath, and John was doubled over in his laughter.

And so it went. We’d show up mid-afternoon, John would make me handle the water bucket (I now had “experience”), and the cycle would repeat itself. I’d run out, turn the hose on, drop it in the bucket, and jump through the fence as the horse came near. My adrenaline would be pumping, and I felt that the horse was silently mocking me. It was a rough four days, but I made it through without killing anything.

(Side story: remember how the dog never crapped on the first day? We came back that night to drink Carrie’s beers walk him again, and he didn’t crap then either. The next morning, I showed up at the house to walk him and found like 17 different turds around the house. They were everywhere! I spent the better part of the morning tracking down turds and cleaning them up.)

(Also, Carrie, if I missed any turds, I am deeply, deeply sorry.)