Horse Racing Weekend
Just don't drink the water!
In August 1986, some of us cowboys and cowgirls shifted gears from doing horse shows to going horse racing. One weekend Mark and I travelled a couple of hours away from home, to the town of Melville, Saskatchewan.
We set up camp at the race track. I had brought along my ‘blow-up tent’, which used two long inner tubes from each corner, that connected at the top. It took about five minutes to get our tent set up, and everything sorted.
We unloaded the horses made sure they were fed and watered and went to find food for ourselves. We ate some supper and then checked on what races we were in and got ready for the next day’s activities.
Everyone had gone around visiting and having a few beers. About an hour after we went to sleep, we heard a very loud kaboom! All of the sudden, we felt the tent fall in on top of us. It took us a minute to find our way to the door and get out of the fallen tent. Upon my closer inspection, I noticed that the tent popped right at a spot where there was a trademark stamp on it.
Unfortunately, the kaboom had startled the horses as well as the neighboring campers. It had apparently got weak from us using it all summer. We got the horses calmed down and the neighbors back to their beds and climbed in the back of the truck to resume our sleep! The next day we had to get up early and be ready for a race at 8 AM. We didn’t do too bad throughout the day with our two horses. Between races we gave then a bath and some water to drink as it was pretty hot out. Though we didn’t place first we did have a lot of fun and won enough prize money to cover our expenses.
Saturday night we decided that we should stay in a hotel because we didn’t have anywhere to sleep. We went and got one of the last rooms at a motel not too far from the track. On Sunday morning we both got up and showered, and headed back for another day of racing. Once again it was hot so we drank a lot of water and cooled down the horses.
At the end of the day on Sunday, we started to pack our things and got the horses loaded. Just as we were pulling out and hit the highway. A news story came on the radio that said they had just found the body of a missing man floating in the water reservoir! It was a big tank above Melville. To our horror, we realized that we were drinking that water, showering in it, and our horses were also drinking it.
I wanted to puke. Mark did.
By this time, apparently the men’s body had been in there for a long time, and the people who found it only found bones. The news stated he opened the hatch at the top, climbed in, and the hatch closed. Some say he was apparently a town worker that was fed up with his job and distraught. He had been in there for 5 months or so. I read somewhere about many people throwing out their preserves or anything they canned during that summer.
It took me a while, but I found a link to the news story.
Well that's pretty gross!! Yikes!