I was 19-years old, waitressing on Mackinac Island, Michigan. At Little Bob’s.
After the day tourists sailed away on the last ferry, I met other young island workers partying on the north side of the island. But I wanted to call my boyfriend, so Herv, a swarthy, wiry, indigenous Chippewa, offered to give me a ride back.
“I can cut right through the island and have you home in a few minutes,” he said.
I lit my cigarette, holding on to it and my drink with one hand and Herv’s waist with the other. Dusty, Herv’s white stallion, was angered at our slow pace. So he reared. High. I felt myself falling backward, unable to hold on. How could I, holding on to a vodka and tonic? Idiot. My head hit the rocks. I saw stars. Dusty fell back on me, then stepped on my crotch trying to get up. Excruciating pain.
Spooked, Dusty ran off despite Herv’s commands. We were stranded far away from anywhere by foot.
My jeans were soaked in sticky blood. Iron-smelling. I could barely walk. It took over an hour from where we fell to stumble to the poverty-stricken Chippewa village in the middle of the island, a side of Mackinac tourists and summer help never saw.
Abject deprivation. Shacks formed an uneven square around a common area where horse blankets and bed sheets were hanging on lines, seen by the light of a half-moon. Herv grabbed another horse, threw a soiled blanket over its saddle, and cautiously hoisted me over it, like an injured cowboy on a Lone Ranger episode.
I made it back to my ‘dorm room’ by early dawn. I soaked in the claw-foot tub and cried, afraid, as caked blood turned the bathwater pink.
A few days later, I left Mackinac Island abruptly and painfully, hitchhiking to Saginaw’s Tri City Airport with an antiquing hippie couple in a beat-up pickup.
Dang it: For some reason I can’t upload any photos:
You will have to use your imagination.
