Horses on the Highway

are like the American flag.

A few weeks ago I wrote in one of my postscripts that I’d seen something I just couldn’t forget—horses running up a freeway ramp, featured on the gym TV’s local news channel. With the exception of the baby box I have never seen anything on local TV at the gym that has moved me so much (for context I will say that I am regularly moved by local TV at the gym). In the postscript I wrote

I couldn’t find a place to put this story in: one time when I was at the gym one of the usually-depressing news TVs was suddenly showing footage of some horses that got away, running through freeway traffic, relativizing cars with their enormous size. The image of those horses running up a freeway ramp, the wild freedom of it, was burned into my memory. Here’s the clip if you want to watch it.

Three weeks later five horses in London’s Household Cavalry were startled by the sound of falling concrete, threw their riders, and tore through London. The first image I saw was the thumbnail image above, and it was one of those images you never forget. It doesn’t look real. The background of the city street—the straining forward of those huge animals—the crimson blood on the white horse. Everyone on Twitter joked uneasily that it looked like an omen.

The horses ran around London, collided with a parked cab and a parked bus, and were eventually calmed down (and comforted by some passersby, as the video charmingly points out). They have both recovered. But I have not recovered, and probably will not ever.