The Thousand Pounds of Quiet Energy
In 1979, I was drifting. My twenties were almost over, and I didn’t have much to show for them besides a string of half-starts and bad habits. Ranae had moved up from Southern California to be with me, and two years later, that decision looked like a raw deal for her. I was lost. She wanted something steady in her life, and that something turned out to be a horse.
A friend’s parents bred racing Quarter Horses, and Ranae arranged to buy a foal before he was even born. Seven hundred and fifty dollars, paid off in installments. Vandy’s Big Skoal hit the ground March 29, 1979, all legs and promise.
A year later Ranae wanted a place with room for him. The house she found was a half-acre with a tired fence and no business housing a year-old colt. We rebuilt it together: a real corral, a couple of stalls, a proper perimeter. It was the first useful thing I’d done in a while. As the place became a home for Vandy, it became a home for us. We got engaged the next year.
While I had been a veterinary tech for 7 years, it was mostly dealing with dogs and cats. I didn’t know much about horses. My role was simple: hay in, manure out, fix what broke. I spent my free time on tennis courts, golf courses, and mountain bike trails. Horses were Ranae’s world. I was the support crew, nothing more.
She rode Vandy everywhere. Weekends, warm evenings, and the odd trail ride. He spooked at blowing trash now and then, and once a pit bull came out and bit him on the leg. Ranae stayed in the saddle and Vandy almost repaid the favor with a headshot the dog would’ve remembered. I tended the wound.
Every now and then I climbed on. We have a canal at the end of our block that runs for miles. I loped him along it a few times. He’d hug the edge like he was running the inside rail at Los Alamitos. If you let him go, he shifted from a lope to a gallop like someone had hit a switch. He wasn’t a gentle old trail horse. He was bred to run, and he knew it.
When the Yard Went Quiet
That’s how it went for 20 some years. Ranae had her horse, I had my pastimes. Then one day we came home to find him barely able to stand. His back was a wreck. There were no clues in his paddock about what had happened, but this was bad. We thought that was it. The vet came out and treated him, but offered little insight to his condition. Later, a chiropractor put him on pasture and worked on him for two months. Coming home without him there was strange. Horses don’t greet you like dogs do, but you feel their absence. A thousand pounds of quiet energy missing from the yard.
We nursed him back, inch by inch. Herbs, vitamins, oats, molasses. The whole kitchen-sink approach. Against expectations, Ranae got to ride him again—slow, careful, grateful miles. Borrowed time.
In early 2005, he started leaving most of his hay. He’d pick out the carrots and the grain and ignore the rest. Out in the yard, he still grazed, so we hoped it was nothing. Ranae scheduled a wellness check.
The vet listened to his heart and didn’t like what she heard. Bloodwork confirmed it: liver failure or hepatitis. Nothing to do but keep him comfortable.
His decline from Saturday to Tuesday was steep. He stopped drinking. He’d only take carrots. His urine smelled sharp and wrong. The decision was obvious, but obvious doesn’t make it easy.
On Wednesday morning, he barely had the strength to get in the trailer. They put him in a pasture so Ranae could sit with him a while. I went to work because I didn’t know what else to do. The vet handled everything with care. He slipped away quietly.
For more than twenty years, Vandy held a place in our lives I didn’t appreciate until it was gone. The corral looked wrong without him. The yard felt hollow. Even now, it’s the quiet I remember most—not dramatic, not tragic—just the heavy absence of a horse who shaped more of our life than I ever understood at the time.
Next: Dusty Enters the Picture