Re: RC: Re: Death Visits Ridecamp (rewritten)

[Howard4567@aol.com]

In a message dated 7/3/01 2:04:01 PM Eastern Daylight Time, lbm@ici.net 
writes:

> Some people gave him hell for the story,
>  complaining of what they "heard" as a "flip" tone in
>  the account.  To see all the hubbub, go to the Index
>  for that week:

Yes, I remember receiving private death threats, which was a bit 
disconcerting when you consider the title of the story.  I saved most of 
them, for the FBI, in case they found my body somewhere filled with bullet 
holes or blows to the head.  I even put one of them on RC, blocking out her 
name and email address, although I think I should have left that in.  Her 
response to me, after I did this, was even more scary than the first email 
she sent me.  I don't normally do this with private email, but I do feel hate 
mail received, especially if one thinks you should be shot, should be shared 
with others and not kept to oneself.  Oh, yes, those were the days.  haha.  
If you want to read what she wrote to me go to:

http://www.endurance.net/RideCamp/archives/past/00/12/msg00542.html

I did get another guard dog, electrified my fence, and spent more time than 
usual target practicing with my gun in the back yard.  I wasn't going down 
unarmed without a fight.  And I waited 6 months to ride Dance Line, again, 
but this time in a 25 miler. I was very nervous at that ride, but we had 
trained hard, I got extra weight on him (not an easy task on a hyper horse 
whose body never ends), and he was fine.   We didn't try a 50 again until 3 
months after that 25, our first 50 mile completion at Goethe.  My happiest 
moment in endurance; I was very proud.

I'm not trying to relive those Ridecamp experiences back then, last year in 
March.  I rewrote the story, eliminating anything that I thought others might 
find offensive. This required a lot of deletion on my part.  No sex talk, no 
showers, no witches.  Most kids would be able to read this version, and maybe 
some of them should.  Kids like to be competitive, and, if not shown what to 
do, might race their horse when they should be "running."  We teach children, 
early on, about competition, but some might not tell them it's different when 
a horse is involved.  I'm still learning that one. 

Thanks, Linda, for explaining what happened.  There's a bit more to it.  I 
sent the story to Endurance News, the first part got published, and the 
response on Ridecamp got purty nasty.  Quickly, a bunch of folks got 
together, called and emailed the AERC office, there was a change, 
coincidentally, in the AERC Presidency, and Part two never was printed.  I 
sat back and watched it all happen, knowing I was partly to blame because of 
some subsequent posts I made concerning the story.  When you open yourself 
up, like I do sometimes, weird stuff can happen.

Anyway, even if it doesn't make it back to EN, at least some new people on RC 
read it for the first time.  It's a tough subject to talk about, a difficult 
issue to discuss.  Case in point is what happened at the NASTR ride.  
Nobody's talking about that one and I am amazed, considering it's not the 
norm for Ridecamp to be so quiet about such a thing.  I did have the death 
confirmed by a couple reliable sources, otherwise, I would not have mentioned 
it. I'm finding the silence kind of eerie.

cya,
Howard (Happy 4th of July.  Hope Wolfgang is enjoying his visit to America.)