Runaway!

As I was walking home today, the first odd thing I noticed was a coat in the middle of the road. I checked the size and thought my husband must have dropped it on his way home, so I picked it up. A few houses later I spotted two pumpkins in the middle of a neighbor's yard. "That's odd," I thought.

When I turned the corner by my house I saw broken eggs in the middle of the street and as I looked up I saw grocery boxes and oxygen tanks - all piled up at the side of the road. Several of my neighbors were walking around picking up the boxes and organizing everything; that was when I heard it - "runaway."

Teams of horses do occasionally run away on Mackinac Island. A runaway is when a horse or a team of horses get scared by something and bolt - usually without a rider or driver to control them. Even if there is a rider or driver, the horse or horses are often so scared that they can't be controlled very well anyway. They just want to get away from whatever scared them and get away now! Often the runaways are dray teams since the drivers have to let go of the lines and climb down from the dray to load or unload it.

Today a dray was delivering oxygen tanks to a lady who lives around the corner from me when one of the valves on one of the tanks broke and started leaking oxygen - causing a very loud "shhhhhhhh" noise. That spooked the team and they took off like wildfire running down the street - dropping pumpkins, boxes and eggs as they went. At one point the driver chased after them and caught up, but was run over as he attempted to stop the team. The horses just kept right on going and didn't stop until they ran down a dead end street and ended up stuck in the trees on the edge of the woods.

We had to convince the driver to go to the Medical Center - he told us, "I'll walk down later." We called him a cab after we noticed how he was holding his arm and how his hand looked blue. If he doesn't end up with a broken rib or two I will be shocked. Hopefully that's all it is - given that the horses ran right over him.

The groceries can be replaced and the lamp post on the corner can be repaired. I'm just thankful the kids and I weren't walking home from the sitter's house when that team plowed through - those horses ran through about 3/4 of our walk home.

Kind of scary? You bet! But when horses are your main form of transportation, runaways are a fact of life. When you consider that there are hundreds of horses on the island in the summer, I'm really impressed that we have so few accidents. I bet if you compared the number of car accidents in a town our size to the number of horse accidents we have in a year, we'd come out on the safer side.

I've had enough excitement for one day and I'm hoping for a nice quiet weekend. How about you - any plans?