by Dan Rosenberg
Ask any farm manager to name the position that is toughest to fill and keep filled, and without a doubt they will all tell you it is the night watch person. Grooms working the dayshift often think it is an easy job and will complain about what he or she has or has not done. The water buckets were left too full. The water buckets did not have enough water in them. He gave the horses too much hay. The horses did not have any hay.
Try it some time. See what it is like to be all alone with no one to talk to, with the wind howling, and the shadows doing weird things. See what it is like to make rounds from barn to barn, from field to field, filling water buckets, picking stalls, feeding, counting horses, watching and observing, taking temperatures, and giving medications on schedule.
See what it is like to wonder what to do, knowing that you will be in trouble if you do not wake someone when you should have or that you will be in trouble if you do wake someone when you did not need to.
It is not so easy to sleep in the daytime when everyone else is awake. It is not easy to get your daily chores done and keep appointments when you are sleeping all day. It is not easy to have a marriage or a family when you are always passing like ships in the night.
It is a tough job, and an important job, a job with heavy responsibility. And it is not a job a lot of people want to do.
We managers can sleep at night because the night person is there. If we have a good night person, we can sleep more soundly. To a large degree, they are unsung heroes. Without getting a lot of credit, they save horses’ lives by letting us know when a horse is starting to colic. They get horses up when they are cast.
They notice the foal that is not nursing and get us out before it reaches crisis proportions. They know when to call and when to let us sleep. They get us there in time to foal the mare without making us wait around for hours. They let us go home to get a little sleep before morning by taking care of the foal that is not too quick to learn how to nurse.
“Unusual characters”
With all respect and gratitude to those who do it, and with the understanding that there are some great ones out there, there are an awful lot of them who are, shall we say, “unusual characters” or just plain weird.
A lot of them are working alone at night because they cannot get along with people in the normal course of events. And if you were not a little strange to start with, working alone night after night just might make you strange. I have had my share, from the best to the worst.
One trait many night watch people share is that, because they never get to talk with anyone, they are starved for human contact and conversation. Once they start talking, you cannot get away. Many is the time a manager has already put in a very hard 14-hour day. We are exhausted, and all we want to do is go home to relax for a little while, spend a little time with our families, and get something to eat before the phone rings and we have to go out again.
We stop at the barn on the way home to check in with the night person to give instructions and to check one more time on the mare that is overdue or the foal that has not been nursing well. But before going home, we have to hear all their personal problems, everything the day crew is doing wrong, and whatever else they have on their minds. They have to talk, and we have to listen. And just when you think you are about to get away, it’s, “How about them ’Cats?” or whatever was on Paul Harvey or Rush Limbaugh lately, and we literally have to get in our cars and drive off, watching them through the rearview mirror, still talking as we disappear around the corner.
They tell us the oddest stories and their bizarre versions of reality.
I had one very old guy who reminded me of a turtle without a shell. One night when he checked in, he told me he had a headache. “Would you like me to get you some aspirin or something?” I asked.
He replied angrily, “I don’t take no pills from nobody! Once I had a headache and someone gave me a tiny purple pill. It took me six months to get off that stuff.” And then he went into a long saga of his addiction and battle for recovery from this one tiny purple pill, and his views on drug addicts and pushers.
Once I got a call in the middle of the night from the game warden. He saw a light and heard sounds by the farm pond and found my night watchman gigging frogs with a twitch. The night watchman’s story was that he heard noises by the pond (the game warden) and went down with his flashlight and twitch to investigate. I should add that this same night watchman regularly hunted rats at night, killed them with a twitch, and then carefully laid the dead rodents out in a line for us to see in the morning. Go figure.
A week off
Another night watchman said to me, “I need to take a week off.”
“What for?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“If you can’t tell me, you can’t have a week off.”
“Well, I need to go home to see my probation officer.”
“I’m sure we can make arrangements then. Just curious, but what are you on probation for?”
“Well, I got in a fight with a guy in a bar and got thrown out of the bar so I waited for him in the parking lot and when he came out I shot him with a shotgun. But I didn’t kill him!” Just the kind of guy you might not be completely comfortable being alone with at night.
And because not enough people want this job, we end up with some who are not so good at it. Like the guy who calls in a panic in the middle of the night because one of the mares is dead lame and has enormous swelling in the ankle. Good observation, except that he has been working there for months and the mare is 18 years old and broke her sesamoid when she was a two-year-old and has been living with that gimpy ankle ever since.
Or the night watchman who calls saying, “Hurry, this mare just broke water!” You throw on your clothes, and you’re in the barn five minutes later to find a foal standing up, bone dry, obviously having nursed some time ago. “She just lay down and foaled. She never made no signs. She just broke water, and I called you, and she just spat him out!” Like we’re stupid or something.
A lot of them think we are stupid. Some of the excuses we hear are priceless. One night watchman called me just before his shift was to start to say he could not come in that night.
“Why not?”
“Well, I fell asleep in the tanning booth, and I’m sunburned.”
“Why does that keep you from coming in to work?”
“Because I can’t sleep.”
“I’m not paying you to sleep!”
Another night man called me in the middle of the night to say he was stung by a bee and was highly allergic to bee stings and had to go to the emergency room. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be right there to take you.”
“Oh, that’s okay. My girlfriend is here, and she’ll take me.”
“Your girlfriend is there? That’s okay, I’ll still take you.”
So he and I and the girlfriend went to the emergency room at 3 a.m., and, of course, there was nothing wrong with him.
Or another who said: “I need to take off next month to visit my great-aunt. She’s 95 years old, in a coma, in Hammond, Indiana.”
“You know, I think if she’s 95 and in a coma, maybe you should go now, not put it off until next month.”
“No, no. I don’t want to go until next month.” Honest.
Not so short shift
More innocently, or maybe not, we had a lovely young woman, a college student who did the short shift until the regular night watchman came on. She was great. So was he. One night I got a call from her father. “What time does she get off from work?”
“9 p.m. Why?”
“Why isn’t she getting home until midnight?”
“You know, I think you’d better ask her that question.”
One of the best night watchmen I ever had was Bill Fahey. Bill cared more about his animals than he cared about himself. This was demonstrated once when he called me to say he was in the hospital and could not come to work because he had been run over by a train. Literally!
He was walking his dogs along the railroad track, the train was coming, the dog was on the track and was not responding to Bill’s calls, so Bill threw himself on the track in front of the train and saved the dog by shoving it off the track.
And that same love of animals was evident in his dedication to the horses. I remember foaling a mare one subzero night. First thing in the morning when I went to the foaling barn to check on things, I found Bill not in the toasty warm room, but huddled and freezing with his coat and a horse blanket around the foal because he was worried about him.
On the night of a severe blizzard, snow drifted over the fences and all farm roads impassable. Again, checking on Bill first thing in the morning I found him covered with snow and nearly frozen to death because he had trudged miles through the drifts all night long because he needed to check the horses in all the barns. Bill never missed a mare foaling, never missed a sick foal, never missed an injury.
I have had lots of great night watch people—people who were dedicated and concerned, who showed up no matter what the weather, and who saved horses’ lives through their dedication. Some were stranger than others, but I am grateful to them all. The good ones for all the good work and good deeds they did for me, and the rest for at least providing some entertainment and good stories.
Dan Rosenberg, owner of Rosenberg Thoroughbred Consulting, is a consultant to “Farm Management News” and a regular Thoroughbred Times columnist