Best Canadian Essays 2019 by Biblioasis

Author:Biblioasis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2019-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

The High and Lonesome Sound

Robbie Jeffrey

Our rural culture is in trouble. But where is help going to come from?

Mike Hennessy was 10 years old when he jogged his first horse, and it tore flat-out across the farm track so fast he thought his father had pranked him. The speed, the smell of the stables, the thunder of hooves on the track and the mountain air whirling across the northern Rocky plains—Hennessy put his heels along the girth line and breathed it all in. In all its dust and glory, the horse-racing life was his, and he was hooked on the thrill of losing control and the chase of getting it back.

Hennessy, who grew up in Calgary and Airdrie, Alta., became a third-generation harness racer. Alberta has raised some of the world’s best, including Red Pollard, who rode Seabiscuit, and Hennessy’s own legendary father, Rod. Horse racing used to move trains in this province: on race days, the Canadian Pacific Railway ran a locomotive from Calgary to Cochrane, early Alberta’s horse-racing mecca. Into this history came Hennessy in his sulky, assuming his role as its next hero. By his early 20s, he was Alberta’s most promising horse racer. His father once said that in racing you’ve either got all the money in the world or you’ve got nothing. Boom or bust. Hennessy was smashing track records, stacking wins and raking in prize money. It was boom time.

Drugs were always around. “The horse-racing community isn’t exactly spiritually fit,” he told me. “The saying is, ‘Win or lose, you drink the booze.’” After alcohol he moved on to cocaine. Then, in 2004, he broke his heel and the arch in his left foot collapsed, and his doctor wrote him a prescription for OxyContin. He began using small, “manageable” amounts, and it helped him quit drinking. Then his use became more frequent and eventually he was racing high. OxyContin led to heroin. “Maybe people knew,” he said. “But if you’re doing well on the track, people believe what they want to believe.” Until you get caught, that is. One day, the race track drug-tested him, and when they got the results they told him not to come back for a month. Hennessy sold two horses he was raising and took a 45-day vacation full of the drugs that had got him there. He wound up on the West Coast.

In Vancouver, Hennessy found that heroin was cheap on the streets, until he needed so much that it broke him. He detoxed a couple times, but always came back to drugs. The recovery house he was living in eventually caught him using and kicked him out, and he ended up at the city’s infamous Whalley Strip, turning to crime to fund his addiction. He had moments of realization that he was choosing drugs over racing. “But when I was at those depths, people weren’t talking to me, they were talking to my disease—and it was talking to them.”

At the bottom, he went to jail, got out, and then landed back in for breaching bail conditions.

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