Horses and Humans

I'll never forget it...my first time riding Virginia. I was just a little country kid from GA who'd been recently transplanted in southwest FL. Much had changed. I'd come from a dense agricultural environment. My family had spent most of their lives on a farm. Much of what we ate, we either grew, hunted, or fished for. My two favorite hideouts and favorite places to be were the nearby sale barn and the dam supported creek tucked a little deep in Georgia's woods that I was forbidden to go to. Who can say no to a good-sized creek in the dead of of Georgia summer that had plenty of room for me to swim along with enormous carp, snapping turtles, soft shell turtles, lamp eels, catfish, beaver, and water moccasins. Yep...water moccasins were the reason I was forbidden. My grandma declared all my childhood that there was a water moccasin bed in the creek. I could never tell her that all the years I'd been sneaking down there to swim, I'd never saw one. However, I saw plenty of rattle snakes on the way there and heard talk of old folks about gators and cougars in the area. We kids knew how the old folks around there were...scared of everything having to do with fun. Therefore, we simply couldn't listen to everything they said. I was a complete country Georgia boy in every sense of the phrase right until tragedy struck.