The first weekend in February I drove with Packy through a blizzard to have what would ultimately be our last Jumper Sunday, and one of our last rides together. Andrea pushed us per usual and we did some ugly learning, but I also felt like we were poised on the edge of having a really great season. However, as my eventing season was starting to shape up in a great way my professional life, and job were falling apart. After two years I finally said enough to what had turned into an emotionally abusive job for me. I knew it was coming to an end as I spent multiple days just sitting in my car at the barn trying to garner the energy to just get out of the car, let alone ride Packy. She was my rock through those hard times, and I launched myself off of that safe haven and rock when I was offered the grooms position with Allison Springer. I knew I loved grooming, or at least I had in the past when I’d been doing it for friends, and I was excited to take the foray into the horse world fully and to immerse myself in the upper level eventing world. It was somewhere I’d always thought I’d wanted to be, but thinking and dreaming versus living are two vastly different things.
I started right as the last Pinetop’s came around so within my trial with Allison, and my first few weeks I was grooming for FEI horses and suddenly not just snuggling my ponies in Vermont while hoping it would stop snowing. As I kept going I waited for that feeling of fulfillment and happiness I normally felt around horses, and instead, I had a whole other slew of emotions I hadn’t anticipated.
Mostly it was in large part missing home and Packy. I never expected to have it hurt so much to leave home, but it did, partially because Bonnie had initially agreed to talk about me taking Packy once I was settled in, and then changing her mind. I won’t lie, losing that thin lifeline of that little mare hurt. I’m incredibly aware we’d never charge around Kentucky, and probably only had a season or two left together she was my adventure buddy through some pretty rough times and a very large part of my life. So it hurt, and it hurt to watch her continue with someone else as if I never existed. It just hurt. However, if I’m being truly honest, there would’ve been no way to have Packy and work for Allison. We spent too much time on the road, the days were too long, and even thinking of affording a horse by myself on a first year’s grooms salary was a laughable thought to be polite. That was without even considering the logistics of where to even keep her when Aiken would be a quick few months after a January intensive and in Virginia, the farms were out of my meager price range. So I kept trucking along with some hiccups and kept watching as the working students and Allison rode six days a week and realized just how much I missed riding. The feeling of needing to ride didn’t go away, even if I pulled that mane perfectly, or even if I had the laundry kept up on. It was still there, and frankly, I’d become miserable. It wasn’t Allison’s fault, I’m not sure if it was my fault, but it wasn’t a good fit. I started dealing with the realization that what I’d thought I wanted wasn’t what I actually wanted, that I was then several hundred miles and a two-day drive away from home, that I’d lost the ride on Packy and wouldn’t be able to truly ride back in Vermont without some sort of minor miracle, and that about a month into a new job that I needed to find another one.
I naively hoped I might be able to stick it out and make it work, but as the Carolina International Horse Trials came to a head and I felt nothing but nausea about it that it needed to end. Somehow I got lucky that Allison also realized that I wasn’t happy, that it wasn’t a good fit and she connected me with a woman who had a small farm in Upperville Virginia and she needed help. So for the fifth time in two months, I packed up all of my stuff into Betty Oops and hit the road. So now its May, almost June, and I found a better fit. A not so nearly illustrious fit, but its a damn good one.
Looking back it’s interesting to see the long ride it took for me to get to where I am now as a groom, but it seems that nothing in life is ever truly straightforward, and perhaps it shouldn’t be. Those nooks and crannies of life that suck us in for blips of time as we work to figure out who we are, what truly makes us happy (because just ponies isn’t actually it for me), and how we can work to get there make life worth adventuring, and they make life worth stumbling through.
So hi, my name is Katelyn Drake. I’m twenty-five years old, a professional equine goom that’s also sort of still and adult amateur, currently horseless, still want to do three-day-eventing even though I have no horse, and am still working on figuring this whole horse world thing out.
The Vermont Eventer 