The morning of our departure from Amsterdam began with phone calls about Jas's certificate of innocence. We hadn't tracked down the right form and signatures yet. In official terms, his "certificate of isolation" was the piece of paperwork testifying that he had stayed out of the horsey red light district during his European vacation weekend in Amsterdam. He could eat all the leaves he wanted, but the last bit of departure paperwork required the vets to sign off that he'd had an otherwise pure and innocent three days. The US Department of Agriculture quarantines European horses for a sexually transmitted disease called CEM, and any defilement could extend his quarantine by thirty days. It was an important piece of paper. And unlike in Doha, when the piece of paper and actual signatures were missing, the people in the offices in Amsterdam sent around the right forms and got actual vets to sign them. The forms weren't signed before they were filled out. They didn't use blood out of the fridge to run tests they said were done on my horse, but weren't. They did things by the book, just a bit more slowly here in Amsterdam. Without urgency. A few hours before the flight was plenty of time for his innocence certificate. No need to worry. We're all relaxed here.
Like Jas's departure from the airport, the horse box was sealed for his return to the airport, to make sure there were no red light detours. We arrived when were told to be there, and stood at the loading dock to find everyone on afternoon coffee break, no where to be seen. Another truck with a load of tropical fish pulled up next to the horse box, wondering whether a fork lift could be summoned before the end of coffee break. No, it wasn't possible. How about the vet to unseal the truck? No, coffee had to be finished first. Or maybe it was a meeting. Maybe a shift change. But there was no one about except an officially innocent horse and three dozen boxes of live fish, ready to fly.
Eventually Jas was loaded into the official KLM horse transport box, a more deluxe model than we'd flown out of Doha in. Jas was disappointed in the hay, too smelly for his sensitive tastes. Except he's normally a vacuum cleaner and not at all picky. So much for Dutch grass. He went in, eventually, and had the box to himself, thanks to more US quarantine regulations that prevented him from standing next to European horses, meaning this ticket was the price of three of the other tickets. Lucky bastard.
I left him behind in his box with the smelly hay, and went back to the airport terminal to check into the flight as a passenger. The plane was a "combi" passenger and cargo plane. I had a seat in the last row, and then he was placed just behind the catering station on the other side of a wall. A small locked door led back into the cargo area. Once I checked in, I got around to the gate in time to watch them load the cargo. A KLM flight groom stayed with him. Jas was joined on the plane by a couple pallets of boxes, a car, and a stripped down jet engine going someplace for repair, or so it looked like. And then he went on last, again lifted up into the sky and slid into the belly of the plane.
There wasn't a great view of the loading, and as the sun came and went, so too did automatic window shades that blocked a decent camera view of him getting on through a door behind that huge jetway. At some point I peaked through the shades and saw him go in, but it was too obscured to photograph.
When they called for passenger boarding for first and business class, even though I had an economy ticket for the back row, I walked up to the gate attendant and said: "Do you mind if I go on now? I'm with the horse in the back." Having just refused several economy class passengers trying to jump the line, she smiled at me and said, "sure, go ahead." When I arrived at the plane door I used the same line: "I'm with the horse."
(When we were talking about plans for landing in JFK, the groom told me to use the same line at passport control. "Just tell them you came in on KLM with a horse. They'll let you jump the queue." I didn't have to; there was no line at passport control, but apparently it would have worked...)
I met the flight groom at the door behind the catering station, and we slipped back into the cargo section to pay Jas a visit and go over safely procedures for wandering around the cargo area. These were new to me, as on Qatar airways the pilot had just pointed to the location of the oxygen, and that was the safety briefing. The KLM groom took 15 minutes to explain to me what I could and could not do, showed me a laminated demonstration card for the oxygen mask, and carefully explained all the drugs he carried in case the horses became ill or out of control. They used to carry guns in case the horses endangered the crew or structure of the airplane, but that's illegal now. Only sedatives and pain killers are allowed, with the idea that those can get them to the ground with a chance of surviving. This is all made moot by the description of what happens if the smoke detector goes off in the cargo area: the pilot shuts off oxygen to the entire plane to prevent fire, which is why you need the oxygen mask. And the horse? I didn't like that image, and I didn't ask...
The flight passed without incident. I fed him apples during take-off to help his ears pop, and once the flying was smooth and the groom had had his coffee and lunch, we turned him loose stretch his neck and turn around. He could have lied down to take a snooze if he'd wanted to. When I asked if I could go back and sit on the floor in the front part of the pallet to stretch my legs, I got an official and big 'no' from the groom. Remembering my blissful nap on the floor of the cargo plane leaving Doha, I missed Tim. I dealt with my economy seat and had one of those economy seat naps, uncomfortable and fitful. During the flight several passengers in the back rows got wind from my conversations with the flight attendants that there was a horse on board, and a group of college-age students gathered around me at one point and asked a bunch of questions about him. Was he a racehorse? Where did he come from? The flight attendants came back and visited him. He was flight 662's celebrity for seven hours. "Yeah, I'm with the horse..."
As we began our descent into JFK, I found I was out of apples, so I made a molasses bran mash with the water he had refused to drink. You can lead a horse to water, and while you can't make him drink, you can make it yummier to drink. It wasn't quite Fruit Loops, but he slobbered through a whole bucket of it during the descent. The flight groom looked impressed at my concoction.
When we touched the ground at JFK, it was a wet but warm summer day. (Which made me think of that poor guy who fell off his platform shoes and had to have back surgery...) The pilot made a crooked, rough, one-wheeled landing that threw Jas up against the side of the pallet, but he held his feet and managed to stay standing. Sitting in a regular airplane seat you never realize the extent of the g-force at that moment of touchdown and braking. Standing up with him in the cargo area was difficult enough for me, and he weighs ten times as much. His back muscles bulged with tension as I held his head trying to steady him. At least it was over in a few moments.
The arrival agent looks on while I welcome him to America.
After I got off the plane, I met Andrew and we drove around to KLM cargo, where he was about to be offloaded from the pallet and loaded onto the truck to quarantine---as it turned out, simultaneously. I learned what the line item on my invoice for "transfer pen rental" meant: the odd cart-like platform contraption that goes between the pallet and the truck, used for approximately 10 seconds by the horse to walk from one to the other, so he never has to touch the ground. It makes a very good hourly rate, that pen, I will say.
Jas refused to come out of his cargo pallet palace for a few minutes, but eventually thought about it all, looked at everything, snorted at the rain, and decided he didn't want another pat on the rump by the guy in a USDA hat. Yeah, I thought, the USDA scares me too, after all this. But by law I had to bequeath to them my officially innocent horse for a week of quarantine--for the Arabian peninsula worm disease, not the European sex disease. I told the truck driver to tell them he didn't like Dutch hay and to give him something else. They drove away into the summer dusk. Andrew and I walked back through the cargo building, no one taking notice of our lack of official badges or escort. We were "with the horse." Then we drove into Brooklyn.
When I called the next day and asked how he was doing and whether he was eating, they told me that they were used to horses twice his size eating half as much. He's fine, then, I responded. "That's my boy." I guess he likes American grass...
Wow, what an adventure! xo Rika
Posted by: Rika Toll | June 03, 2010 at 01:09 PM