That’s not an Onion headline, it’s very real. At about 2 AM on Thursday morning, lightning struck a barn at Classic City Clydesdales that had over a dozen horses plus a three week old foal in it according to WLTX.
“It shook the whole house,” said Shannon Martin, who owns the farm with her husband, Mark. “One minute I am in bed. The next minute I am standing up next to the bed trying to figure out what bomb went off.”
Since the barn is in the town of Bishop, Georgia, 60 miles east of Atlanta and has a population of 230 people, what is anyone to do to save the horses? There was no power, the barn doors were locked, and there’s a scared three week old baby horse in it.
Enter 16-year old Macon Martin, the son of the owners of the farm.
“I just ran right out. I had no clothes on, no shoes, no nothing,” he said. “I just jumped in our Gator and I just ran it right into the door.”
I cannot think of anything more stereotypical Southern than a naked man running a Gator into a locked barn in the middle of a thunderstorm to save horses from a fire. What the hell kind of sentence was that?
“He busted through like Rambo and opened up the end of the stalls and said, ‘Mom, this way,’ ” she said. “And we were able to push the horses out that way.”
Naked Rambo is probably a porn film that exists somewhere in the depths of the internet, and now you’re not getting that thought out of your head for the rest of the day. Better than thinking about a naked 16-year old, I guess.
All of the horses are safe, including one named Phoebe who was expecting a foal of her own on Thursday. However, the barn was torched.
“It will take some time to rebuild,” Shannon Martin said. “This was a dream. We saved and built it brick by brick. We’ll have to start over. “Big horses everybody thinks (are) real tough, but Clydes are sort of the beauty queens of the draft horse world. They can be pretty fragile.”
When internet celebrities are made by doing things as stupid as saying “Damn Daniel”, this story should make Malcolm a hero, considering what group of people makes up the majority of the internet. And I didn’t make any obvious horse jokes, until just now when I mentioned it. Too easy.
Just another normal day in the South, right?
[WTLX]
