Horse Experience: Notes on Recovery from the Louisiana Floods

The first thing they ask when you show up at Barn 5 of the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center in Gonzales to help with the orphaned horses of the Great Louisiana Flood of 2016 is whether you have Horse Experience. This is shorthand for “Can you handle yourself, or are you a liability? Do we need to send you to the cat shelter? If a horse takes off in the direction of the highway, are you going to fall apart, or are you going to wrassle that horse to the ground?” Needless to say, you get increasingly nervous every time you have to tell someone that you don’t have Horse Experience.

I drive the hour from New Orleans wanting to do something tangible with my hands. I just broke up with someone and I need to be reminded that my tragedy is the weakest kind. I’m still in the pitiable stage: not eating, resistant to the comfort of my own bed. I am dizzy and wobble-legged, like a foal, and prone to fits of blind weeping. I get in the car with the hope that it will drive me out of myself.

When I get to the sprawling disaster headquarters of Lamar-Dixon, I shuttle between trade marts and livestock arenas and an endless row of open-air barns, feeling like Odysseus; at each stop, a weary volunteer points me onward, or backward. It’s hot, the box fans only stir up the dust, and the black line of clouds on the horizon makes us lick our lips. The first person to accept my offer of help is Karen, who’s sitting in a camp chair by a pile of pine shavings at the back corner of Barn 5. She sizes me up pretty quick: Though I’m rumpled and unshowered, I lack the set jaw of the flood victims. Karen is local—her house was on high ground—and she came with no Horse Experience seventeen days ago, as jittery as I am. Today she shows me a picture on her phone of the horse she’s adopting. It’s what I would call a brown horse, and it looks like all the other brown horses in Barn 5. “Oh, it’s beautiful!” I say.

Karen hands me off to the head volunteer, Shelby, for the afternoon shift. Shelby is twenty-two, peach-faced, with blue eyes that have helped make her the target of relentless flirtation from the National Guardsmen. She sports a neon top and black leggings, and over the next four hours, she fails to ever look dirty. She’s the one with Horse Experience, having loved and lost four horses during her young life, the last of which she had to sell this spring because she broke up with her boyfriend, who’d been stabling it at his place. (I’m here for you, sister.) But she too has fallen in love with one of the rescued horses—Whiskey, an owner-surrender and a famously productive stud—and when this shelter closes its doors, she’ll take him home. Her refrain about most of the horses in Barn 5 is that they’re “so sweet,” except for the ones who “think they’re studs.” Either you’re a stud or you’re not. Shelby knows how to jerk a horse’s lead so that it minds.

On August 17, The Advocate reported that the Lamar-Dixon temporary animal shelter housed 450 dogs, 333 horses, 139 cattle, 123 goats, 109 cats, 44 pigs, and 27 exotic animals. The horse population here is gradually shrinking as owners get back on their feet and rescue organizations find welcoming pastures for fosters—the initial five hundred-plus horses have dwindled to around a hundred—but when a staffer for the Louisiana State Animal Response Team drops by and, positioning herself safely behind a manure cart, breaks the news that everybody’s got to be out by Friday, Shelby puts her head in her hands. What do you do with one hundred horses in four days? People are still ripping out carpet and drywall, the old muck-and-gut, after the flood. They don’t have refrigerators. They don’t have beds. Rebuilding stables is low on a long list.

Shelby and Karen would take all the horses home if they could. I briefly consider whether Stella, the leggy yearling with honey-colored hair, would fit in my New Orleans backyard: I picture her standing politely between the birdfeeder and the sprawling cantaloupe vines, cocking her head every time the public bus trundles past. I want to ask Shelby what they’ll do, but she’s already back in the stalls. I gaze at the hay bales and wonder how deep I can bury myself. These women are not interested in how my fears have been fed by recent abandonment. We all get abandoned every day. Look around.

My first task is to walk a horse. I attach a rope lead via carabiner to the metal ring on the bridle—that’s right, the ring that hangs under the horse’s throat, inches from the horse’s teeth—and coax the horse out of its stall and through the barn and across the parking lot, either to the arena or to the patch of grass by the formation of evacuees’ campers. “They can tell if you’re afraid,” Shelby says helpfully. “They actually feel your heart beating faster. So you’ve just got to be confident.” The horse and I pass a parked construction vehicle as it lets out a loud squeak of steam, and I inadvertently leap. My horse nearly bolts. I learn that it’s very hard to avoid getting behind a horse, which is the one place I know not to be. I find myself doing rear-end avoidance gymnastics far more than the other volunteers. At the arena, I get squeezed between two horses as they grab at some hay; once I have to climb up a fence to keep from getting smushed against it.

Mucking the stalls brings new terror. I thought the horses would come out before we went in, but with few volunteers, that’s a luxury. No, you waltz in the ten-by-ten-foot stall with a rake (“Just be confident!”) and make polite, comforting noises while pulling piles of dung out from their shifting legs, all without getting behind the horse or accidentally letting the horse escape through the door. At one point I find myself trying to block the half-open door with my legs akimbo and my arms occupied with a heaping poop rake while a horse named Lilly butts my back with her chest and snorts wetly against my neck, feeling around my collar with her lips.

The horses must be watered; Blue chomps on the nozzle while I fill his bucket, and we have a water fight. The barn must be swept. Hay and pine shavings and dropped Nutrena Stock and Stable 12 Percent Pellet Horse Feed and stray dung and all the flies in Christendom. The owners must be listened to. One of them comes by to check on her limping horse and says she can’t find her dogs—she thinks they’ve been rescued, but in one of those spun-out conspiracy theories that can breed after disaster, she’s convinced the animal shelter has kidnapped them, shipped them to Jackson, adopted them out for a cash premium. Karen and Shelby nod, calming her; it’s the same way they nod at me.

Taking a break to chug Gatorade, the volunteers whisper about the pencil-pushers in Barn 2, the OSHA people, the FEMA people, the way Red Cross won’t let you help without a two-hour training, the no-kill shelter with questionable finances, the evacuees who are angry at the government, and the government that can’t control the chaos. If you’re not railing about something, you’re not really at a disaster relief camp.

Jeff, a florist for the Rose Bowl who drove down from Indiana, tells me that Barn 5 is the only place you can fly under the radar, which is why he’s here. Every other volunteer station requires prior registration, forms, practical skills. We at Barn 5 are renegades, the Breakfast Club of the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center. Suzanne, the no-nonsense nurse practitioner, is the dark one. She tells us of a cardiology patient who has a tumor growing inside his right ventricle. It’s got its feet suckered in the walls of the heart, so if the chemo successfully dissolves it, the whole heart could open up like a burst balloon. I feel an echoing tremor in my chest. If they asked what my story was, I’d have nothing interesting to say. A boy wanted me, and then he didn’t; I’m hiding my hurt under the rug of repetitive labor.

It helps to watch people who are more capable than me. The people with Horse Experience treat the horses like mammoth dogs. They pat their sides, scratch their ears, get playfully rough with them, slap their noses when they’re bad, yank their leads when they’re not paying attention, shove them into stalls with the whole force of their human bodies. Shelby calls them sweethearts; Jeff calls them boogers. They know the difference between bays and sorrels; know when a hoof needs a farrier; know that a yearling lying down is not sick but resting; know that if you go around petting mares, watch out for your fingers next time you pet the stud. “If you trust them,” Shelby says, “they’ll trust you.” Her advice is the kind that only applies in hindsight.

By the second day, I can start telling the horses apart. Stella is the obvious vixen, but Oreo has a sly way about him, and Tornado is a goof. I spend a minute staring at his half-dozen eyelashes, whisker-long; one white lash extends straight out from the far corner of his whale eye, and I tug on it. He sighs. The colt bites. Whiskey lets you do anything to him; Sammy whinnies if Peanut gets walked without him; Baby looks downright shaggy; Tornado has rain rot from being so long in the high waters. The horses are noticeably themselves, beneath the trauma. When Friday rolls around, I wonder where they’ll go. Where I’ll go.

Louisiana is always ready to humble its humans. “You think you’re in pain, child? Watch our waters rise.” Resilience here doesn’t mean listening to sad songs in tears, but shoveling shit in summer. It’s the eleventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina; after that flood, I washed filth and oil off rescued dogs at the fairgrounds in Jackson, Mississippi. Some of these horses have also been rescued from floodwaters, and have not found their owners yet. They too are in a strange place, and are deeply alone. I feel as alone as they are, but there’s a difference: Though I can see their anxiety—the piebald Lady neurotically kicks her stall door every few minutes—they’ve also achieved a degree of complacency. Their eyes are still curious; they still nuzzle around a stranger’s neck.

When Shelby hands me the lead for Doc and tells me to guide this traumatized, thousand-pound beast across an August parking lot with only a loose rope, I think: I can’t do this. I’m not strong enough. I don’t trust the horse or myself or Mother Nature or men. I’m probably not strong enough; I spent the last five days failing to eat. But Doc has been through a flood and was stuck in a hot stall and doesn’t know where his people are and is being tentatively dragged by a sickly, scared human across blazing pavement. He doesn’t bolt, he doesn’t tremble, he doesn’t kick. He keeps my pace until we get to the sand-filled arena, and when I let him off his lead, he tosses his lonely head and goes galloping across the dust like he’s a prince of the desert.

• 0