Conflatulations Again!

 

I was at a high school track meet taking photos one day.  Having just gotten some shots of the long jump I was moving down the field and thinking about the next event I would shoot when I heard one of the track workers yelling to get my attention.  She was assisting a girl off the track and helping her sit down in the infield.

“Watch her,” she demanded as she trotted off.  “Where’s her coach?”

I pointed to where I had last seen the man, then turned to see if I could help the kid.  I jumped to the conclusion that the girl, who had been running last in her event, was just exaggerating how out of breath she was, so I recommended, “Relax and breathe deep.”

She inhaled and looked up at me, speaking softly, “My blood sugar is low.”

I understood then that she wasn’t just tired, and her approaching coach verified that when he pulled a box of juice out of his pocket.

She needed sugar.  She was a type 1 diabetic.

I was a little embarrassed that I had misjudged her, but I doubt I was as uncomfortable as the girl would be in just a minute.  A couple bystanders helped her to her feet and, as they did, a very unladylike sound came from her, uh, rear.

Honestly, I didn’t know for sure it was her at first.  Heck, it could have been any one of the several people who were helping her, but she chose that moment to reach behind her and make a show of dusting off her backside.

Yeah, it was her.

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Now, all of us around the girl were adults and we probably all had kids of our own, and had heard plenty of those noises.  That didn’t mean the poor girl wouldn’t be embarrassed though.

There was one time I was absolutely mortified by the passing of gas…and it wasn’t even mine!

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As my longtime readers may recall, in 1972 I was 14 years old and spent the summer working at Mountain Lake Hotel in Virginia.  That resort is where they would film the movie, “Dirty Dancing” a decade later.  Even though I’ve joked about it, nothing I did was the basis for the character played by Patrick Swayze in the movie.

Let me illustrate.

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Although I spent the entire summer washing dishes, my cousin John got promoted out of the kitchen.  He had quite a bit of experience with horses, and even owned one himself so, when the horse boy quit partway through the summer, he was the logical replacement.  Heck, at fourteen he was more of a horse “boy” than the sixty-some year old man he had replaced.

John’s job was to feed and water the horses, saddle and unsaddle them, and see to all their needs as well as take the guests on trail rides through the beautiful mountains surrounding the hotel.  As the manager’s nephew and the horse boy’s cousin, I was allowed to go along on trail rides whenever I was off work and there was an extra horse.

Now I may have been pretty naïve, even for those simpler days, but I soon learned that the cutest city girls who stayed at the hotel just couldn’t get enough horseback riding.  In those desperate times, it made sense to me that they would also fall for the dashing fourteen year old who went along with them, even if he did have an outdated hair style.

For some reason, I thought that would be me, rather than John, the rugged fourteen year old who was actually wrangling the horses.

As it turned out, it didn’t really matter.

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One day five people signed up for a trail ride.  There was a man, his wife, her two daughters, and the younger daughter’s best friend, who had come along on their vacation.  The youngest daughter and her friend were both fourteen and cute.

Perfect.

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Whereas John was the strong silent type, I was the kind who liked to entertain.  As we rode along the tree-lined mountain trails I regaled the group with the history of the sites we passed, told them about the animals we saw, and filled in the quiet moments with witty comments.

Lame, huh.

Oddly, it seemed to be working.  All five of them smiled and even laughed at appropriate points in my stories.  I swear, they were laughing with me, not at me.

Really.

The trail ride was over all too soon and we found our way back to the shed where the horses would be hitched between rides.  It was built with individual spaces on each side where the horses could be tied and a trough down the middle so that they could nibble on some hay to keep them from getting too bored.

The man and his wife joined John and me on one side of the structure, leaving the three girls to go around to the other side.  While I was hitching the horses on our side, John went to help the girls on the other.  One of the girls’ horses balked at something and she squealed so of course the mom and step-dad went to help, leaving me with three horses to tie up.

Are you keeping up?  Everyone was on the other side of the shed except for four horses and me.

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Horses, by nature, are grazing animals.  They eat grass.  To get enough energy from their high fiber diet they have to eat a lot of grass.  One of the byproducts of digesting all that grass is gas.  Not being well versed in manners, horses let loose whenever they feel the need, no matter who is present.

Now humans who are not horse people don’t realize how, uh, flatulent horses are.  The girls and their folks were not horse people.

Yeah.

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As I said earlier, all the people were on the other side of the shed but me.  So, of course, one of the equines on my side released a little gas.  It wasn’t one of those “horsey” sounding toots, and it wasn’t one of those drawn out ones that even city folk can locate the exact source of.  No, this was one of those gentle releases of gas that sounded very human-like…like it came from a fourteen year old boy on my side of the shed.

Yeah.

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I was so accustomed to horse flatulence that I barely noticed…for a split second.  Realizing what someone might think I looked up to see six people as they looked back…directly at me.

I don’t remember exactly what happened after that.  What I do remember is the family heading back to the hotel.  As they passed out of sight, one of the girls started to giggle, then another.  Soon the whole family was cracking up.  John even laughed.

But I didn’t.  I didn’t think it was funny at all.

Not at all.

 

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