When I was eighteen years old in Vancouver B.C. I had made a date with a friend to go horseback riding.

As I was trained by a special person I was always allowed to take the owners horse out. My date was for 10am Sunday morning, in 1947.

As I was waiting for my friend the building began to shake and sway like mad. My furniture rolled across the floor, my ornaments fell off the ledge around the walls of my fourth floor room atop this house. When the earthquake stopped I was picking up my broken things when my friend arrived.

When I asked him how he liked the earthquake he was relieved. Thought he was having an attack. As a soldier he had been wounded in the head in the war. Anyway, we arrived in Deep Cove, picked up our horses and headed out.

We ended up at a road that parralled the Deep Cove highway one block up. I had never been on that road before, but It looked good, as it was dirt/gravel and good for a little race between us. Not realizing that the poor horses had just been through an earthquake we started our race.

I was ahead by quite a bit when my horse went mad on me. I had no control over him and as we sped along with me trying my best to reign him in, we came to a slight rise. As we topped the rise going like mad I saw with shock and a sinking heart that the road made an abrupt left turn in only a few yards and what was right ahead of me was a ten foot heavy steel fence going into a school yard.

There was absolutely no way that this horse was going to turn into the road. It was out of it's mind, heading stright for the fence. As we hit the eight foot grass verge I closed my eyes. There was no way I wanted to see my death coming at me.

Seconds later I opened my eyes to find me and the horse inside the yard. The horse was stopping and calming down. As I was getting off, my friend appeared and went quite a few yards along the fence to struggle with a large gate and open it. When he came up to me I asked him if he had seen what had happened.? It seems that I was already in the yard when he topped the rise and looked into the yard.

Now, anyone on a horse can tell the movement of the horse, as you sway with it when it turns or veers. I felt no such movement. My friend had to struggle to open the gate. It had to be lifted up to move it.

When I told him all this we walked over to the fence to see the hoof prints coming from the fence where we came through the solid steel rings. It turned out that my horse had thrown a shoe. Both the horse and I had gone through a steel fence like smoke.

When we walked the poor horse back to the stables we told the owner what had happened without telling him about me going through the fence. He was so surprised. Seems that he had been the school janitor for years and said that fence gate was always locked. He had never heard of it being unlocked before.

Nina Fulford