Bittersweet weekend

This past weekend in North Carolina was mostly wonderful, as I got to spend time with other eventers and my "other" family, the Briggs fam. My BFF Kelsey and I spent every second together from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, and we couldn't have had more fun if we'd actually tried!!! The competition was fierce this weekend and all competitors, volunteers, and farm staff should be commended for the great effort exhibited to put on such a wonderful horse trial. Jim Cogdell, the owner of the farm, is a saint and a soldier for providing us with such a wonderful venue and competition year after year. It is truly world class. I can't say enough good things about him and his show.

On a more somber note, I must add that Kelsey and I had the great misfortune to witness the fall of Lindsay Pearce and her wonderful horse, Dutch Twist, on Saturday morning. Their accident occured at fence #3 on the cross-country course, a solid wooden and stone "table" that presents a horse and rider with the question of both height and width. Kelsey and I were jump judging at fence #4 all day, and we were directly facing the landing side of fence #3. We are not sure what happened, because all we saw was Lindsay and her horse sliding across the top of the table, flipping, and landing heavily on the other side. Lindsay stood up immediately after rolling clear from her horse, but when he did not get up, she fell to the ground beside him and remained there. Dutch Twist actually lifted his head and tried to get up, but he laid back down and did not move again. Unfortunately, he died about 15 minutes after the horse ambulance transported him back to the stables.

We heard that his death was due to a ruptured aorta, but in these situations, it is difficult to know whether it happened before the fence, which is why they would have fallen and not cleared the obstacle, or whether the rupture occured because of their impact with the fence or with the ground during the fall. What I do know is that there were emergency personnel for both horse and rider at the site literally within seconds. We have all heard of this tragedy occuring to either a horse or rider (although it is not a very typical or regular occurence, thankfully) and the reports always say, "medical and veterinary personnel were on the scene immediately." I always wondered how soon is "immediately," but I witnessed their very quick and professional response this past Saturday, and I know they did everything they possibly could to save Dutch Twist. In the blur of what I saw, I do know that he fell very stiffly from the fence, so I believe that whatever was the cause of his death occured before they ever hit the ground. And, whether that happened before the fence or as a result of the impact with the jump, I'm not at all sure. But I do know that if he could have been saved, the veterinarians at the scene would have been able to do so. The most cutting and painful of all the details in this situation, though, has to be the fact that -- as difficult as this is to believe -- Lindsay has been through this before. In March of 2005, her prelim horse chested the final jump (a stone wall) on the cross-country course at Poplar Place in Georgia, flipped, threw her, and died upon landing. Something like that cannot be expected or planned for. It just happens. I cannot imagine what she must be going through for the second time in as many years.

As heartbreaking as this is to recall and to swallow, I am grateful that Kelsey was there with me. To witness something as terrible as that is hard enough, alone, but to have one of my best friends there...someone who knows exactly what I was feeling and thinking the whole time, because she was feeling and thinking the very same thing...made the acceptance of what happened a bit more possible. Naturally, we asked and tried to answer the inevitable question: "How did that happen?" but it is not our place to ask questions that just cannot be answered. What we can and should do is to think of those who have experienced this loss and keep them in our hearts and in our prayers.