A Cheap Red Life Jacket Nearly Got Me Killed 2,000 Miles From Home

I, Bernie Harberts, did not use generative AI to write or illustrate this article. Spell check and grammar check, yes. AI, no.

A cheap red life jacket nearly got me killed 2,000 miles from home.

There were saltier ways to make that Last Passage.

Moving in with Neptune would have been okay in a monster gale off Hatteras. Even coming to grief by getting run down by a shrimp boat in Adams Creek would have been fine. But to get flattened by a four-door Honda outside of Plains, Texas for the sake of a life jacket? What a lubberly way to go.

It was all because of the Jerry jugs.

Time for a Rethink

Water’s hard to come by outside Plains, Texas. Especially if you’re on a mule and you have to look for a windmill in the mesquite every time your steed starts slapping his lips and it sounds like applause.

Those Very Fine juice bottles I filled behind gas stations just weren’t cutting it anymore.

I’d always carried two of them in my saddle bags. But out here, a horse needs a drink, not a shot.

It was time for a rethink.

I thought of Sea Bird; the way I used to lash those jerry cans to her rigging before I knew better. Prairie schooners came to mind too, despite the vision of their crews’ tongues hanging overboard and dragging great dusty gouges between the caliche rock.

Hey, wait a minute! Why not make a small prairie schooner and lash the jugs to that?

Bill LaRue

I met Bill LaRue in Brownfield, Texas, and told him that I was worried about what to do for water for Woody and Maggie as we traveled farther west across Texas. Bill owned draft horses and had just come back from the Waverly, Iowa, draft horse sale. “I might be able to help you,” he told me and walked me out behind his office.

He pointed at a gooseneck trailer piled high with wagons, carts, and horse-drawn sleds. Parked on top of the pile was a little black cart that looked like it would be perfect. It was just big enough to haul four 5-gallon jerry cans and a fifty pound sack of horse feed.

I told Bill I’d take it, but it needed modifications. I didn’t need to ride in it. I needed to haul grain and water in it.

Bill spoke with Geno, one of his welders, and Geno ran the little black cart into Bill’s work bay and got busy.

A few hours later, Geno rolled it back out. It was perfect.

Then that old sea-fear came back, the notion of getting run down. No, not by a freighter, but by oncoming traffic.

Back on my boat Sea Bird, I had the masthead light to resort to. I’d spark it up at night and grin the next day when that 75 watt BP solar panel pumped life back into the deep cycles.

But running lights for a horse buggy? During the daylight?

I resorted to one of those big orange triangles with the red border you see on tractors. It clashes with my ninety-year old McClellan cavalry saddle but who cares. Those Amish fellows that raised Woody have come around to mounting those orange things on their buggies so it must be OK.

So my fine troupe hit the road. I rode Woody and towed Maggie and her new cart behind.

Then I saw the life jacket.

It radiated danger red the way life preservers do before they get covered in shad bait and chicken liver. I figured it had blown off a pontoon boat headed for one of the Texas reservoirs.

Danger! Red! Yes! I had to have it! I’d mount it on a pole like a terrestrial version of a man overboard buoy. It would warn oncoming traffic away from my buggy.

I pulled Woody up short and slung my leg back behind the saddle anticipating a quick dismount.

It came quicker than planned.

My spur caught Maggie’s lead rope, that pitched me over backward toward traffic and my other spur shish-kebabed Woody right in the guts.

Oh now came the bucking. He bucked and spun and in a flash I was launched into the air. He’s always been skittish about his flanks.

Then I hit the concrete and the squealing really started in for good.

Face down on the white line, I heard a car slide to a stop and the sound of hooves clattering off on asphalt. Next would come the “BANG!” — the sound of that Honda smashing into Woody or Maggie. The sound of one trip ending and another beginning. The scream of Woody and Maggie in pain and then I’d have to see their smashed bodies lying on the grassy shoulder.

It never came.

I lifted my face off the asphalt. There was a four-door Honda with four grey puffs of smoke coming from under its locked up wheels. The driver giving me a nasty look through the windshield.

Woody and Maggie galloped off down the highway, cut across an open field and tore full tilt toward the only tree in the field, a stout elm tree.

Woody went to port, Maggie went to starboard, the tree brought them up and they clunked heads on the other side of it, Three Stooges style. Then they started grazing, still hung up in the tree.

I got off my face and ambled over to the Honda as the last of the smoke drifted out from under the wheel wells. “Hey, are you alright?” I asked the driver.

That made no sense at all. I had caused the almost-accident and the driver was fine. But it made me feel better. Then I collected Woody and Maggie from beneath their Texas elm tree.

I didn’t go back for the life jacket.

A few days later I found a Watch-Out-for-me-Orange flag that had fallen off a “Wide Load” truck. I hoisted it on a broken CB antenna I found on the shoulder.

I won’t touch another life jacket until I drop anchor back in Oriental.

Thanks Bill and Beth LaRue of B & B Construction for helping Maggie get her wheels.

More adventures by horse and mule: Travel by Horse and Mule.

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