| 9/17/2005 7:32:00 AM | Email this article • Print this article |
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| Linda Losey and her horses are spending three nights in Jefferson County during her 5,000-mile ride from coast to coast in memory of her 10-year-old son who died. (Staff photo by Peggy Vlerebome)
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Mother celebrates son’s life with cross-country adventure
Peggy Vlerebome
Courier Staff Writer
Five months into a 5,000-mile, coast-to-coast horseback ride, a Maryland mother feels that she making progress toward healing from the death of her 10-year-old son. She’s doing it in his memory, inspired by his idea for a cross-country horseback trip to raise awareness about animal abuse.
“I don’t think you ever heal completely from the death of a child,” Linda Losey, 43, said Thursday as she and her two horses started a two-night break as the guests of Ed and Marianne Eberth at their Little King Farm, a miniature-horse farm near Hanover. “There’s always going to be a gaping wound. There is a hole in my heart for Sammy.”
But the trip she began on Sammy’s 11th birthday has “accelerated the healing,” she said. “I can talk about him. I can tell his story. I can say his name.” Her voice started to break. After a pause she said, “I realize there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.”
Her son Sammy died in June 2004 when a piece of heavy equipment fell on him at a friend’s farm near their home in Baltimore, Md.
“I took my other children to a good healing point, and my ex-husband to a good healing point, and realized I hadn’t gotten myself healed,” Losey said.
Sammy was the youngest of her four children. Cara, 20, is away at college. Eric, 17, splits his time between her house on a 100-acre farm she rents and across the road at his father’s, whom Losey described as being on excellent terms with. Peter, 14, lives with his father.
On Sammy’s next birthday, March 29, she left Baltimore for San Diego, Calif., where she and her horses began the ride April 7. She started in San Diego for the psychological effect. “Each step I take takes me closer to home,” she said. “It would have been much easier to go 50 miles from Baltimore and say, ‘I don’t think so.’ They say the first two months are the most difficult. They’re right.”
She started out traveling about 12 miles a day, but now most days she tries to cover 20 miles, stopping for 10 minutes each hour for rest and water for Rocky, a 5-year-old Tennessee walker she got just three weeks before the trip began, and Val, a 6-year-old quarter horse mare who was an abused horse that she adopted three years ago.
They take an hour break at mid-day. Rocky seems attuned to the passage of mile markers when they are on marked roads, and turns his head to look at her when it’s time to stop, Losey said. Val seems to be able to read trail markers; twice when Losey could not spot the blue and white marker on a tree deep in the woods, Val pointed by staring at the marker Losey was looking for.
They traveled only 12 miles Thursday, starting at the home of Larry and Debbie Oberlien in Lexington, where they spent a night. Many nights she and the horses wilderness-camp for the night, but many nights they have stayed with people arranged by one of Losey’s three-member trip coordination crew, sometimes with families whose have lost one or more children.
Farriers have been provided to shoe the horses and vets to tend to wounds. A water company in Arizona left water every 20 miles because it was so hot and dry, and there was no water anywhere.
Every five days there is a delivery of feed provided by a Kentucky feed business that is sponsoring the eating needs of her horses. On those days, Losey and the horses stop for two nights.
Tonight, she and the horses will stay at Shilo Farm in Canaan, then continue eastward. She hopes to be home by Christmas, and at the rate she and her horses are traveling, she said, they could be there sooner, in about 70 days.
Losey has pretty much followed the American Discovery Trail, the only coast-to-coast, nonmotorized recreational trail in the United States. The trail, which is used mostly by hikers and bicyclists, connects the Pacific Crest, the Continental Divide and the Appalachian Trail, and is tied in to several trails along the way such as the Lewis and Clark Trail, and the Santa Fe Trail.
She said she is the first woman to ride the trail cross-country on horseback. She has made some adjustments to the route when she feels it is safer, such as to avoid cities, and has accepted offers of rides for her and the horses when the weather was particularly bad or there was an injury or the distance left was just too great. She had to leave Rocky at a host’s for 10 days while she and Val traveled in Illinois and Indiana because another horse kicked him in the hock and it got infected. She took a week off, leaving the horses behind, to go home at her family’s suggestion to be there around the first anniversary of Sammy’s death, the Fourth of July and her birthday.
“I don’t know if I would do it again,” she said about going home for a break. “When I got home my life didn’t fit. It was chaotic, overwhelming. I’ve lived simply for five months. I’m going to have to live simply when I get home.”
Sometimes riders will join her for a day, but most of the time for the past five months it’s been just her and the two horses deep in a woods or on a road. She talks to the horses, gets lost in thought, and enjoys the scenery. One day, though she says she cannot sing and it annoys the horses when she tries, she decided to sing. “I belted out ‘Amazing Grace,’ thinking we were alone,” she said. She met the odd stare of a fisherman whom she hadn’t seen. She apologized and kept riding.
Some of her hairiest road moments were in Missouri, where the driver of a truck hauling a 28-foot camper blew around them on a one-lane bridge, brushing the packs on Rocky’s back. Indiana drivers, she said, have been the most courteous and safe.
Her scariest-to-anticipate experience was when it was time to cross the Mississippi River on a ferry boat. She was positive the horses would balk, or worse. They didn’t, and four days of worry turned out to have been unneeded.
Losey had never been West before, never seen the majestic vistas.
“My first visit to the West made me feel vulnerable, small and insignificant,” Losey said. “I think that had a lot to do with my healing. It put my life in perspective.”
She grew up in the East. When she was 16 and the president of her 400-member high school class in Buffalo, N.Y., her father came home one day and said he was moving the family to 10 acres in a rural town in upstate New York. He promised Losey and her sister a horse if they would go without a fuss. “And I haven’t looked back,” she said.
Losey is on the board of directors of Equine Rescue and Rehabilitation Inc., a local organization in her area, and Sammy did community-service there to work toward being certified. “He rode with me,” she said. “He was my horse partner.
“He came home one day and said, ‘Mom, wouldn’t it be great if we could ride cross-country and stop at horse rescue places and raise awareness.’” He researched the locations of horse-rescue operations and realized there weren’t enough to support a cross-country trip, and had drawn a route through Ohio and West Virginia before he died.
“He was a published poet, an exhibiting artist,” she said. “He was one of those kids who crammed so much into his life before he died. I’m blessed to have been his mother.”
In addition to raising money for horse rescue, Losey is raising money for the Sam Losey Memorial Scholarship Fund, which will award its first scholarship in 2012, the year Sammy would have graduated from high school. Applicants for the scholarship, which will be offered in the Baltimore area, will have to write an essay interpreting one of Sammy’s published works, Losey said.
She isn’t accepting money as she goes along, but hands out her Web site address, www.americandiscoveryride.com. The site has information on where to donate, and also information about Sammy and a journal that Losey writes on the trail and pictures that she takes.
The only modern conveniences on her roughing-it trip are a wireless laptop computer, a cell phone and a digital camera. “Everything else is based on survival,” she said. A freelance writer and graphic artist with corporate clients, Losey hopes to turn her experience into a book.
She’s shipped gear back home three times, including extra saddles and pads, a global positioning satellite unit — she uses a compass instead — dehydrated food, “books I thought I’d have time to read” and a camp stove. “I hated cooking at home, and I hated it more on the trail,” she said.
After sending the extra gear home, she is down to a tent, sleeping bag, and food and medicine for her and the horses, with her food not requiring cooking.
But one thing she wouldn’t part with is her hat, which she bought at home to take on the trip. “I thought this was the coolest hat ever,” she said. It looked like a cowboy hat, then. The first rainstorm on the trail, and the hat lost all resemblance to a cowboy hat, and instead has a brim that looks like a light-colored wave. When she got out West, “cowboys were appalled” by the hat, she said. “Everybody has tried to exchange it out for a more honorable hat,” she said, but she’s not accepting. “It’s my trademark.”
Along the way, people she met have given her decorative pins that she attached to the top.
The hat will be with her until she reaches Chesapeake Bay at the end of her journey, a trip that has left a mark on her even with at least two more months to ride.
“I think I take away from this a sense of generosity of spirit of the people I’ve encountered,” Losey said, figuring she has met at least 300 people, all of whose names she has written down. “The goodness is still there in America.”
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