Around The MOB: Forrest Chad Wilkinson
By Mitch Berg
Next stop on the MOB tour: Forrest Chad Wilkinson.
I’ve never met Wilkinson (that I know of), but I feel like I read him a lot anyway; he’s fairly prolific on Facebook. But his blog is fairly new by MOB standards; it started last year.
Wilkinson reads like a classic tea party libertarian/conservative. He’s a Navy veteran – a sonarman, who seems to have that “sonarman” personality in his writing (and if you know enough “bubbleheads”, you know what I mean). But he’s also a stable hand for a living, a line of work I hadn’t encountered since I left North Dakota.
And I liked this “day in the life of a stable hand” piece, from which I’ll excerpt a bit:
Some, when taken together go at such different paces that you are nearly pulled in two between the slow poke and the “I want my hay” quick-stepper. Lots of pulling in both directions can leave you very frustrated, especially when your trying to shut a paddock gate snaphook and chain. Ahggg!
Sheesh, lets get these animals out of the barn and get some peace and quiet so we can get the stalls cleaned.
Some, like Sulivan, are such a pacing bother that they go out early and, being part of a set of four, he can go out with Max right now. Then I can get Dancer out on the return and start to take advantage of the back and forth pattern as I enter and leave one end of the barn, then the other, leading horses out to paddocks and their morning hay.
It’s kinda like being a bartender at an unruly road house, or a manager at a hotel with very noisy and demanding customers.
You can’t lead these two together but you can those two, but one has to have his halter removed at the paddock gate, he has a sore that is healing on the nose.
And on and on it goes, every day at many horse barns throughout Minnesota, as it has for decades, centuries…
And this barn eventually returns to a relatively normal routine as the horses go out into this winter wonder-land, snorting and stomping into paddocks, jumping and kicking…and rolling, lots and lots of rolling and then getting up and shaking and settling into some nice hay.
Now to clean the stalls.
It is kind of fun in its own annoying way.
So check out Forrest Chad Wilkinson!
