The work was easier, the horses were healthier, the tracks were gorgeous. There was even a bus for backsiders — it’d take you to the local mall on your afternoons off. I suddenly had a lot of free time. Never had that in the leaky roof circuit. But my successes as a trainer and exercise rider were greater at those cheaper tracks. I started to think, Wow — this is it? This is terrible. I don’t want to do it no more.

I TRIED TO BE A NORMAL PERSON

For years and years you’re around nobody but racetrack people. You don’t have time for family. Your romantic relationships are short-lived because a rolling stone catches no moss. It’s hard, it’s grueling, it’s up and down. I had a lot of injuries. I could’ve been paralyzed real easy. The doctors stressed that to me — it wouldn’t take much.

I missed my folks. They were getting older. My dad had diabetes, and then my mom got diagnosed with colorectal cancer. My sister was in a mental institution — she couldn’t help.

I suppose I was satisfied with what I’d done. My parents sacrificed a lot for me. It felt like it was time I did something for them. So I moved home and tried to be a normal person. I got a job at a factory.

Nice people I was working with, nice hours. Regular paycheck — it just wasn’t very big and there was no chance of improving it. It was a smaller-scale business, family-owned. They paid what they could pay.

I had Rowdy still, and then I got Mick, a quarter horse off the Turnpike Ranch in Montana. I didn’t stop with horses after I left the track — it was just different. I had my horses for pleasure. Keith Baxter was gone — lung cancer — so I boarded them at Bruce Wexford’s stable. Bruce was in his eighties, half-Indian, fit as a fiddle — a cool old cowboy, an ex-rodeo rider. He was my friend.

After I’d been home a few months, I got a job offer from a top-notch breeding farm in Florida — but how boring. The same old horses, the same old faces, day after day, month after month. At the track it was hundreds of people, hundreds of horses. I turned it down. I clocked in to my shift at nine the next morning and clocked out again at five.

THE HORSE TAUGHT ME ABOUT LIFE

I got another year with Rowdy after I came home. He was thirty-five when he died. Even dying, he was stubborn. He wanted to live. I was sitting on the ground next to him with my hands on his side. We were together twenty-eight years.