What could go wrong with a little hop to Jamaica with some broodmares? Plenty, and plenty scary, tooAir transport has made the movement of horses so easy and convenient that today horsemen think nothing of entering a New York-based runner in a California stakes race or purchasing a mare in an English sale and shipping her to Kentucky to foal and be bred back. Air travel has shrunk the horse world.
Over the years, I have issued shipping papers on hundreds of horses and sent them on their way. A few years ago, however, I was asked to accompany a shipment of seven mares to Jamaica. It was approaching winter and, knowing that January in Jamaica is highly preferable to January in Kentucky, I agreed to babysit the mares.
Scheduled
departure
The seven mares were shipped by van to the quarantine station in Miami. Two days later, I flew down to join them. On Wednesday, I checked with the air freight company. "The flight is scheduled to depart at 6:30 a.m. on Thursday," I was told. The problem here, I later figured out, was mine. The woman, choosing her words carefully, had said "scheduled to depart," and I naively concluded that, somewhere around 6:30 on Thursday morning, we would be winging
our way southward. Schedule and actual time were kept by different timepieces, I discovered.
I hate being late. I hate it so much that I am always early. Usually when I arrive at a social function the host is in the shower and the hostess is still getting dressed. Anyhow, I arrived at the quarantine station at 5:45, anticipating a fairly imminent departure.
To my dismay, I found I was alone. Yes, the seven mares were there-I could see them inside the holding barn-but no other living creature was around. I looked through the fence to see what marvel of modern aeronautical engineering we would be soaring through the heavens in. There was no plane in sight.
I always carry a crossword puzzle book when I travel, so I sat on my suitcase and occupied myself with that. A few miniutes past 7 a.m., a young man appeared and opened the holding barn.
"I'm here to travel with those horses," I said. "When are they going to leave?"
"Beats me. I just work here," he replied.
Another hour and two crossword puzzles later, a woman came and opened the office of the federal veterinarian. I went in and asked her about the flight. She flipped through some papers and said, "It's scheduled to depart at 6:30."
"It's 8:15," I pointed out.
"Sometimes they run a little behind. Anyhow, the horses can't go until Dr. Smith gets here to sign the papers."
"When will that be?"
"Soon."
I went back to the barn to wait and work crosswords. At 9, the young man who just worked there called to me.
"Plane's here," he said.
I had always flown in big, sleek, shiny airplanes. Getting them off the ground always seemed an improbable feat, but their sheer beauty lent an air of confidence and competence, a feeling of well-being.

The plane
I went out the back of the barn to see it, but sitting there was an aeronautic heap that looked like a World War II reject. It was little, dingy, and clumpy and it had ... propellers!
Gulping back my amazement, I asked, "When will the horses load?"
"They gotta load the belly first."
"The belly?"
"Yeah. Boxes and crates and stuff. Cargo. That'll take a while."
A small truck pulled up with three flat trailers filled with cargo for the plane. There were five men, but only two of them were actually working; the other three-dressed in T-shirts and scruffy khaki trousers-stood and watched.
About the time the third trailer was unloaded, another truck with three more trailers drove up. Surely they were joking! This dumpy little crate could not hold all that. But it did. The two workers got it all in while the three watchers continued to watch.
It was after 10 a.m. A short man with a clipboard came to the barn and asked the young man, "Are these the horses?"
No other horses were in the barn, but the young man nonetheless assured him that they were. The short man looked at them, signed several papers, stuck the documents in a large manila envelope, and went out to the plane. I learned later that he was Dr. Smith.
Around 11 a.m., the young man was joined by one of the guys who had been loading cargo. Each took a mare out of a stall and led her up a long, sloping ramp to the plane. I was not sure the horses would fit-the plane was very narrow-but they did. There was at least six inches behind them and a good eight or nine inches in front. The loading went remarkably well, and all seven were on within 15 minutes.
"If you're going, you better get on," the young man said to me. "Go through there." He pointed to a small door from the area where the mares were.
I did. I was in the flight cabin. Alone. Zillions of dials, levers, gizmos, and lights, but no other people. There were two seats up front and one behind, so I sat in the behind seat. A few minutes later the three men who had been watching the loading of the cargo entered. Two were in their 40s or 50s, pot-bellied, unshaven, and hair uncombed; the third was probably 30 and had a dark complexion. He was the neatest of the three.
"You can't sit there," one of the older men said to me. "If you're goin', sit over there." He pointed to what appeared to be a small wooden bench attached to a wall. "There's a belt down there somewhere. Put it on."

The crew
This was not the flight crew as seen in airline television commercials. Far from it. No, this looked more like the captain and crew of a tramp steamer-or a garbage barge. Dreading the answer, I asked: "Are you guys the crew?" The other older guy belched. "Yup," he said. "I'm the pilot. We'll be off in a minute."
He took the front left seat, the younger man sat in the right seat, and the third man sat in the seat behind. The plane started making noises. Finally, the pilot said, "Okay. We're off." The young man spoke in a Latin accent. "Is that engine supposed to be working?" he asked, pointing out his window.
The pilot craned his neck to look where he was pointing. "Oh, hell. Yes, it's supposed to be. Damn." And he shut down the engines.
"Look, " he said to me, "you might want to get some lunch. This'll take a little while."
I had noticed a fast-food restaurant about two blocks away, so I walked there, ate quickly, and walked back. I had been gone maybe 30 minutes.
"Where you been?" demanded the pilot. "We've been ready. We've got a schedule, you know."
I chose not to remind him that the schedule called for a 6:30 a.m. departure. It was now approaching 1 p.m.
The mares were taking the delay remarkably well. I assumed it was because they did not understand the situation. The plane started again. "Is it working now?" asked the pilot. "S'," the young man answered tentatively. "Okay, then, let's hit it!" And the plane turned in a half-circle and taxied down a runway.
It was a long taxi. For a moment I thought we were going to drive to Jamaica, but then I felt a small shudder around me and the plane lifted off the ground. I looked out. We were over water, but not far over it. "Let's get this crate up," the pilot said. It disturbed me that he called it a crate. "We gotta clear Cuba." We did. By about ten feet.

No maps, either
While we flew, the guy in the third seat continuously looked at dials and wrote things on a clipboard. A large dial right above him did not register, so every few minutes he would reach up and rap it sharply. In response, the needle would swing up, stop for a second, and then return to its zero reading. I was pretty sure it was not supposed to work this way.
From their conversations, I learned that the two older men had made the flight to Jamaica many times, but it was the first trip for the younger man, who turned out to be a first-generation American born of Cuban parents.
We finally gained some altitude after we passed over Cuba. After a couple of hours, the guy in the third seat said, "We oughta be there pretty soon." The pilot agreed. Another half-hour passed. The pilot looked at his watch and remarked, "I woulda thought we'd be there by now."
This was worrying. I had no desire to be lost at sea. I began to say as much when the young fellow pointed out his window to the right of the plane. "There's an island over there," he said.
The pilot craned his neck to see. He was good at neck craning. "Yeah, that looks like it," he said, and abruptly turned the plane to the right. I never knew planes could make such sharp turns.
Just before we landed, the third-seat guy opened a small bag and handed white short-sleeved dress shirts to the other two and took one for himself. They put them on and looked much more like a flight crew, albeit mostly unshaven and unkempt.
We finally made it safely into Norman T. Manley International Airport in Kingston and the mares were unloaded, unaware of their peril in getting there. After the horses left us, the pilot asked, "You goin' back with us? We're scheduled to leave at 7 in the morning."
I do not know when they left, but I was flying commercial, or so I thought. I had a return ticket for six days later on Air Jamaica. On the morning I was to depart, the airline's pilots went on strike. But that's another story.