This One Time: Injured while Illegal

This one time, way back in the days when I was still an illegal alien, I was very seriously injured by both someone else’s incompetence with a horse and my own shameful unwillingness at the time to stand up to my boss. I do accept now that I was young, and intimidated, and I really, really needed to keep that job, though, so I don’t blame myself as much as I used to.

I wonder how many of the people reading this have ever been in the position where this one thin, oily, scum of employment on the surface of your life is the only thing between your family and literally zero income, and know what that feels like. To know that if something goes down tomorrow you won’t have food within a couple of days and in three weeks you’ll be warned about eviction – with nowhere to go. In our case we would have faced deportation, but not to where we came from: we had it on reliable authority that they would drive us to another country and put us out to figure out what to do. We would have been, in that case, among the privileged few who can react to circumstances like that by going to an embassy and slinking home in shame (and in debt for the flight and legal handling). Many people don’t have that option.

People say to me about those days, sometimes, “Well, why didn’t you ‘just*’ max out a credit card?” I didn’t freaking have a credit card. Dip into savings? Ummm, what savings? Sell something, then! Well, you know, I kind of already did that. I didn’t actually possess anything of value anymore. Clones of this conversation continue even now, when people can’t fathom that I can rent a house and feed my family and still be poor. Somehow the simple act of not living on the street conveys to people that there is a bank account with enough in it to handle even a major emergency, and that it must therefor be my own lazy choice to have not replaced the shredded linoleum in the pantry and I’m just asocial or something when I can’t afford to go to dinner or the movies or take the train to the beach. Generally once people have stopped grilling me about all the things I “should have just” done and throwing advice at me to which I am forced to respond that I have already tried that or that it is impossible for me, they’ll either throw their hands up and say they were just trying to help and storm away self-righteously, or start lecturing me, a person who has with much fear and immense dissatisfaction cut my own hair for purely financial reasons for decades, about budgeting.

Whatever.

So this one time, anyway, I was working at this place. Where I come from, at that time the illegal immigrants with whom I worked side by side for the same pay at one of the three jobs I needed in order to pay the rent and the gas to get to the three jobs were mostly Mexican. Even then I was fabulously privileged because when the long day ended, they would have to crash out in the trailer provided on site, and I would leave and go home to my own pad with cable TV and hot running water and a toilet right in my own home. And unlike them I didn’t live, yet, under the threat of discovery and deportation. Once I moved over here, the fellow illegal immigrants I worked with were mostly Polish – an American scrounging for underpaid, illegal manual labor hours was something of a curiosity. Things were egalitarian this time, though – just like them, I was over-paying for a dismal tiny freezing-and-boiling illegal sublet apartment so small that my husband and I could not both move about the room at the same time, and the toilet door wouldn’t close because it would hit you in the knees. We lived there for seven years.

This job was at a stable; that was a no-brainer to look for first because I had a lot of experience doing the drudgery-type stuff around horses because I love horses so much and maintenance is an integral part of anything you invest your self in. (I miss horses.) I found the job via a girl who worked in the art supply store we used for watercolors and brushes at the time; she took lessons there and said she would ask the instructor to ask the owner if he needed anybody. I was paid a to me amazing 50 Guilders a day, which at the time was 8 cents above half of the legal minimum wage. I was very grateful to have the work. A typical work day would be 10 or 12 hours and begin at 05:30, and would, as anyone who knows stables knows, start with the mucking out. Three of us did that but once, this one time (ha ha), I was alone: no-one had told me that some kind of big job was going down far off in the pastures and when I got to work there was nobody around except the owner, who I’d learned to avoid by then, so I just started mucking out. One thing about me is that when I work, it’s with a will, and my spine was only in its early 20’s at the time – I thought I was indestructible. I did all the stalls that day. When everyone got back, it was almost lunch and I joined them at the table; after a while, one of the stable-hands wandered up, spoke with the other one, and they both approached me and said, “You did a lot of work this morning.” It was a compliment, and I was proud to have distinguished myself.

After the mucking out would be feeding, and then odd jobs. In the months that I worked there I cleaned and polished tack (and once, on the way home, cleared out an entire train car with how that made me smell), jogged along leading ponies with toddlers on them (the riding instructor, who came in from elsewhere a few times a week, was delighted when he learned I had extensive experience doing exactly that), dug holes for fence posts in frozen earth in weather so cold I didn’t notice when the shovel rim eventually sliced through my boot soles and abraded my feet, learned how to use a scythe (I spent half a day chopping down a three-meter-tall nettle field, screaming and running in terror over and over when the stalks threatened to topple onto me), bringing in the hay and straw deliveries (once I worked a 12-hour day lifting and tossing hay bales into a tractor while suffering from a high fever, but when you need the work, you do the work – illness is no excuse), and learning why it’s a bad idea to let juniper shrubs scrape you when they fall. Sometimes, one woman would let me ride her horse. She taught me to ride in the local style. Her horse had been burned in a barn fire long before, as a colt, and needed a very gentle seat. He loved me and she saw it, and he needed more exercise than she could give him, so she said we should give it a shot and see if I could ride him right. He moved like a dream, floating around the ring and jumping so smoothly I sometimes didn’t think we’d landed yet. That was the last time I had the opportunity to ride a horse, more than half my lifetime ago. Not doing so since remains a gaping, unhealed, screaming wound but it is what it is. We all have our psychic scars.

Some mornings, the sun would be shining on the grassy pastures, illuminating a magical ground mist, and the prevailing atmospheric conditions would shift, rendering the chocolate factory upwind. Do you know what it smells like when they roast kilos and kilos and kilos of cocoa beans? Trust me, it’s heavenly. Almost as nice was when I used to ride my bike intercity to work and sometimes a factory out there would be smoking bacon. And then, that other time, there was that one tiny street downtown, so narrow I could brush the houses on one side and only had to step sideways one pace to brush the opposite ones, which I passed once and lingered at the mouth because somewhere down there, curry powder was being made. Oh. My. God.

At any rate, it came about one time that the owner of this place, who stinted on feed and pay and griped about everything and was a real fucking pain in the ass, bought some kind of auction lot of three bad horses. Don’t get me wrong, just like dogs I don’t really believe in bad horses… just damaged ones. And these sure were. One gelding with a slight limp was just dumb and slow, and actually fit right in with the toddler program because as long as someone had his head he’d do whatever was asked of him and he liked having his ears scratched. Something was wrong with another one and I never saw it; I was told he sold it on, somehow, right away. And then there was Jamboree.

Jamboree was that most dangerous of combinations: young (4 years old), dumb, unspecial (wonky conformation) and thus “unworthy” of a trainer’s valuable time**, and a stallion. Yes, stallion. Someone had thought it was a good idea not to geld this animal. So here was this horse which had never really been given any attention or training and was packing a lot of testosterone. He was broken to the saddle, but he had attitude. His stupidity manifested not in insecurity but in raw aggression. Everything startled him. He hated other horses and clearly wanted to kill them all. Mucking his stall was an adventure, but I have mucked under the gaze of worse; I was the only one, back in the day, who would muck out “el caballo peligroso, el caballo del diablo” – but he and I really rather got along. I grokked his biz and he mine. Jamboree was actually a little guy, but that Caballo Peligroso was huge. Back in those days (years before the incident in question, and on another continent) I was responsible for working up the dangerous horses like that one on the longe line, tiring them out until the trainer felt safe enough handling them. At this new stable in my new homeland, the owner was a complete dumbass, but at least he didn’t insist I handle that high-strung, obtuse-as-mud little horse. He did insist, however, that he was fully capable of it himself. He was wrong.

Some weeks of this status quo later and we get to the day in question. This man of little character was trying to exercise the stallion in a hot-walker for the first time, and it was only now that I realized that his was the terrible electrified kind (I mostly worked down at the other end of the facility). I’m pretty sure those were illegal here even then but what did I know? I still barely even spoke the language. I was disturbed about it, though.

The owner had told me to bring another horse up to go in next. This was a placid chestnut gelding I knew well by this point, and we hung out a ways away; I was letting him crop some grass growing there, to keep him distracted. I could tell, though, that he was getting agitated about what was going on in that hot walker. Jamboree, the owner holding him from outside the walker with a long line, would hold still until each panel swept up to his backside and delivered an electric shock, and then would squeal and leap forward. It was totally obvious to me that he both knew exactly what would happen when that panel hit him and saw it as a challenge. He was working himself up to fight the hot walker. It was about then that the owner saw me “hanging back”.

In my mind, I was keeping the animal I was working with safely unstressed on the perimeter, awaiting our turn. In his mind, however, I was being inexcusably inefficient, probably out of cowardice. Any second now he was going to decide that stallion was tired enough and cut him loose, and I should be ready to get this gelding in there (for no particularly good reason) in eight seconds flat. I was berated, I was reproofed, I was excoriated and in the end, I was cowed. I took that gelding closer.

It should be pretty obvious where this is going. Jamboree was just waiting for his frustration to reach flip-out levels. Ever seen a really angry stallion? Flat ears, veins standing out everywhere, body language broadcasting barely contained violence. Rolling eyes, nostrils blasting superheated air. And then Jamboree took that hot walker apart. He started bellowing and kicking the electrified panels and walking backwards, and when this led to them sweeping across his entire back, he shifted to taking out the walls. Massive plywood planks were shrieking and buckling, and still the electrified chain link was smacking that horse in the ass over and over. Eventually he managed to break one wall out entirely and, spurning the owner’s attempts to keep a grip on the lead rope, hightailed it for the open fields. By then, though, I had kind of lost track of poor Jamboree’s misery, because the dear sweet terrified gelding I was holding onto panicked and went straight up. Literally. And when he came back down my foot was in the way.

The girl who saw it happen said it was the look on my face that made her drop everything and run to take the gelding from me.

I did keep trying to work. I tried so hard. We didn’t have medical insurance so I just wrapped my foot up in a lot of layers of Ace bandage and kept on keeping on. But the pain was incredible. The walk from the bus to the stable, which normally took around ten minutes, was taking me over an hour. I couldn’t run with the ponies. I couldn’t walk with a straw bale, couldn’t use a shovel, and I was in too much pain to concentrate on anything. Thus, I was fired after a week of this for “being too slow now”.

Obviously I did go to a doctor then. It wasn’t getting any better. I knew I’d be paying cash and we’d have to borrow that, but it was also my first comparative experience with how overinflated medical costs were where I come from: it wasn’t all that bad after all. A lot in our circumstances but a fraction of what we’d expected. I first tried going to a hospital but they insisted that I should have gone to a general practitioner because the injury was older now, and I didn’t have one, which puzzled them. I was suffering very badly by then and was in no state to try to figure out how one goes about getting a general practitioner, so I just went to another hospital and lied and told them that the injury was a week old, yes, but had suddenly flared up again when I tripped on a curb. They were willing to see me. An exam and a couple of x-rays later and it turned out that I had three metatarsal greenstick fractures (they had been badly bent, then sprang back into their original shape, riddling them with tiny cracks) and the ligaments connecting my foot on the right side to the rest of my body were “spaghetti” (actual term used by the radiologist). All of the muscles on that side of my foot were “pulped”. I was instructed in wrapping my leg to the knee with a thick cotton underlayer to protect the screaming tissues, and told to keep it elevated for a few weeks. It was years before it felt OK most of the time; nowadays it only pains me in some winter weathers.

So there you have it, that’s the story of how I got hurt that one time.

* Don’t get me started on “why don’t you just”

** One of my favorite horses ever, a lesson horse at a stable I worked at, had insane conformation. His withers were so high we had to get seriously creative with the saddle pads. His front end was so much taller than his rump that he made me think of a giraffe. He had a neck too short for his head that was too big in its own right. I wish I could remember his name. He was a dream to ride! So smart he didn’t need any guidance before a fence: just get out of his way and let him get on with it. Savvy on the trail and nearly impossible to startle. He could go straight up a sand bank like it was a grassy slope. He was very friendly, too, kind of like a huge dog, and liked to just hang out with people and watch the world go by. I loved that horse.