My credo on my road-trips-with-horse-friend – in fact, my credo on any travel adventure of any type at all – has been that if everything goes to shit, at least you have something interesting to tell people. The converse being, of course, that smooth sailing makes for tragically boring stories.
The last few days of my West-East journey to PEI – the legs from Massey to Cornwall, from Cornwall to Trois Rivières, from QC to Kedgwick in NB, and from NB to home on PEI – were problem-free and uneventful, and, hence, difficult to spin a good yarn about. Here’s how they went:
During my stay in Cornwall, I was able to park Pai at the wonderful TP Quarter Horses, a short drive from my Dad’s place, where they offered short-term boarding accommodation. Having someone else look after the kiddo allowed me a very relaxed visit with my Dad. I did take the chickie out for a little spin in the small nearby Warwick Forest trail system.
My next stop was at the very uptown Ferme Georgette Guillemette located in Bécancour, near Trois Rivières. A few days earlier, I’d put in a phone call to the office at Hippodrome 3R, the local harness racing facility, where, as a legit Standardbred Canada member, I was hoping to be allowed to park for the night and throw my gal into a stall. That idea turned out to be a no-go, but, the efforts of a very helpful receptionist put me in touch with farm owner and former Standardbred Canada Chairman Pierre Guillemette, which lucked me into an overnight at his gorgeous farm. This Standardbred and Combined Driving operation is a facility to die for. To reach the track, you drive along a gorgeous tree-lined allée, from which the carriage horse obstacles are visible scattered here and there across the property.
My final stop before crossing the bridge to PEI was at the farm of barrel racer Maureen Murray, a new friend found via a plea on one of my Facebook veterinary groups. When I asked about her local trail access, Maureen pointed me out the back gate, and off Pai and I went on a nice little evening jaunt.
A happy, busy summer of racing my PEI Standardbreds and riding Pai on Island trails saw me malingering long past my planned Labour Day-ish departure date for the drive back west. The main reason for the delay was that Sporty, the utterly unambitious younger sister to my racehorse Sweet, had met the extremely low bar for qualifying for the matinee (amateur) race series finals, which meant I’d have the opportunity to drive her myself on the big track in Summerside. Who cares if we’d be going glacially slow? I was in! The race date was set as September 26. We’d race on the 26th, and I’d hit the road October 1.
And then forecast for the upcoming race weekend crystallized into something much more significant: a hurricane was coming to town. And this girl was predicted to be bigger than Juan, bigger than Dorian. She was going to be a brick house: mighty-mighty, and letting it all hang out.
I felt pretty darn prepared. I’d been on PEI – avec dog but sans equine – for Hurricane Dorian back in 2019, and the bugger left me without power (and thus water) for 3 or 4 days. When Teddy threatened in 2020, my days of Dorian-induced generator-free time sent me scrambling to buy one. Teddy turned out to be a one-star, would-not-recommend fizzler of a hurricane, but the purpose-bought generator was still waiting and ready for the predicted Fiona-induced outages. I do spend time at the cottage in the off-season when the water is off, so I know how much I go through in a week, and I filled my big lobster boilers and my empty jugs with enough water to last at least that long. I had my camping lanterns and my camping battery pack, and the cottage stove runs on propane. I figured I was set.
In the day or two before Fiona’s predicted grand entrance, I eyed up the temporary T-post and 3-strand electric paddock that had been Pai’s backyard home at the cottage, and realized that my original leisurely plan to get started on a more permanent horse paddock before I left needed some serious acceleration: just one big branch coming down on that electric tape would render it useless. My fence posts were already in place, and my handy-with-a-chainsaw cottage neighbour Mark generously came over helped me notch my rails when I’m sure he had more pressing things to do, and I banged my fence together the day before the hurricane was due to hit.
As Fiona approached and outdoor horses began to move into unoccupied stalls at the Tyne Valley racetrack where I keep Sporty and her sister Sweet, my PEI friends and family gave me the side-eye when I said I was planning to leave Pai out back the cottage. I don’t think any of them believed me when I said we get big wind at home, and that it never even crosses my mind to move my outdoor horsie into a barn when a Vancouver Island windstorm is predicted. When our Solstice Eve windstorm hit in December of 2018, with sustained wind speeds of 85 km/h and gusts over 100 km/h, I can’t say I gave Pai a second thought out in her big field, as the wind raged, and big trees came toppling down around our house.
My main but (probably naively) minor concern about my horse was that the storm surge would become deep enough to be problematic. During Dorian, the water, which normally laps all quiet and kitten-like at the shore 200 ft away, at a height that is a good five to seven feet lower than my front lawn, surged high enough to tease the corner pier of my cottage. Fiona was predicted to bring a worse storm surge, and so I hooked up the truck and trailer and parked it on higher ground in preparation to make a getaway if needed.
And so, on Friday night, we waited.
It began to rain, the wind started to rise. I went to bed.
I got up and checked on the state of the world sometime after 0330. My phone weather app said the wind was at 72 km/h. The cottage windows were covered in a film of needles and salt spray, but by pressing my phone flashlight up against the glass, I could see enough to catch Pai in her reflective winter coat standing at the back of her paddock. The water was where it belonged down at the usual high tide line. I went back to bed.
An hour or so later, the dog snoozing beside me jumped out of his skin, waking me up. I decided to get up and once again check on the lay of the land. By the light of my phone flashlight, I was fairly shocked to see that both of the 50-year-old spruce trees beside Pai’s paddock had come down (“Oooooh, so that’s what freaked the dog out…”), and were resting either on or beside the cottage. The water had risen a solid four or five feet to the corner pier of the cottage. The wind was at 85 km/h. Pai was still standing steady.
I crawled back into my warm bed to wait for enough daylight to see more clearly. In that space of about an hour, the water rose a foot or more, with waves beginning to slap the underside of the cottage. When I went outside in the dim, raging dawn, and stepped off my deck, the water filled my rubber boots. There were whitecaps on the front lawn, and the picnic table was bobbing. Out back, Pai had her feet on the last remaining patch of dry land in her paddock as the water continued to creep up.
High tide had come and gone at around 0500, but I was uncertain as to whether the water might yet continue to rise. With two-by-fours and plywood and other construction debris from my neighbour’s cottage bobbing into Pai’s paddock, the water seemed much less benign than it might otherwise have. I decided it would be wise to load her into the trailer with some snackies, and for the pooch and me to hang out in the truck for an hour or so, and decide whether we should stick it out or just leave Dodge.
I had very cleverly parked the rig with its ass to the predicted wind direction, as I’d been concerned that the force of the hurricane might well topple the empty trailer. I had not, however, been at all clever enough to pre-load a few necessities into the trailer before the storm hit, nor had I been clever enough to foresee that parking the trailer backed up to the wind meant that the trailer doors would be positioned in such a way as to very effectively capture the full force of the gusts.
And so, quite predictably, when I opened my tack room (= LQ) door, the wind blew it right off its hinges and onto the grass ten feet away.
Rats.
Moments later, my lovely year-round neighbours drove up to check up on me. While ready to help hold doors if needed for me to load Pai, they were pretty confident that the water had reached its peak, and so I decided to cool my jets and keep an eagle eye on the water from the comfort of the cottage.
Pai remained unconcerned on her little peninsula of dry land.
My neighbours were correct, and the tide never got any higher. The gale gradually died down to a normal sort of windy by evening, the rain on the western end of PEI never amounted to much, and all the water went away, leaving behind piles of crap (docks, chairs, outbuildings, oyster cages, kayaks, lumber, buoys, boots, gloves, branches, leaves…) on lawns and beaches. The day after Fiona had had her way with PEI, the sun rose in a cloudless blue sky, and people crawled out to survey the sea of felled trees, the 488 snapped power poles, the abolished sand dunes in the National Park, the washed-out roads, the collapsed barns and silos. People had lost buildings, boats, businesses.
My hurricane experience was merely inconvenient. My power was out for 9 days, and it took 10 days to get new hinges shipped for the tack room door. On that day 10, I drove Sporty in the rescheduled and then re-rescheduled matinee D class finals. She made a break in the first turn, which should have been an extremely deflating end to the story of hanging around for an extra month waiting to race her, but it totally wasn’t. We still had a blast, and I’m still glad I stayed.
Two days after I left, a radio article on the CBC mentioned that there are still folks on PEI heading into the Thanksgiving weekend without power. It described the destruction to the landscape and to all the structures upon which people’s livelihoods depend. The situation reminds me of my friend Big Jim’s comment on wrecks involving horses, when I said, “No one likes a wreck,” and he said, “Everyone loves a wreck, so long as no one gets hurt.”
Fiona was a wreck. I didn’t get hurt, but a lot of folk on PEI did, and they will be feeling the pain for a very long time.
una chica y su caballo 