Pookas, Pumpkins and Swamp Ponies
Being a true tale of All Hallow’s Eve:
in which a couple of tourists brave the wilds of a desert island,
become saltwater cowboys (for at least a few minutes)
and ride in the last great wild horse roundup in the east.
Pooka: an Irish trickster faerie who generally appears as a black horse and takes you on a wild ride.
The U.S. Mail is a time machine; I know, this missive is a product of that warp in the space/time conundrum. Tammy sent me this, when my original had fallen into that mysterious alternate universe where odd socks and pens and coat hangers go; the true tale of how we once were saltwater cowboys on Halloween.
I can’t remember the exact year; it was long ago, before Tammy had her own horse, when I had one of the string of beat up blue trucks that carried me on adventures, before I strapped kayaks to my roof to go to the islands. I had my own Wild Black Mare then, and an older patient bay half-Arabian gelding. It was before I learned to scuba dive, and before I learned that some Wild Black Mares had clouds of canvas and carried cannons. The islands have shapeshifted in those years, the Hook has grown, the beach beyond the parking lot has narrowed, and yet they are the same; wild places of wind and moving sand and tide, endangered species like piping plovers (there are more now) and Delmarva Fox Squirrels, vampiric hordes of bloodsucking saltmarsh insects, migrating birds, and the thunder of uncloven hooves on sand. If you are between the ages of Disney and young adult apocalyptic sci-fi, you likely have read the story of the most famous denizen of these islands: Misty of Chincoteague. Like Frankenstein, and Zorro, and Christopher Lee, she is a classic, undimmed by time. Her hoofprints are immortalized in concrete at the door to the island theater, her hoofbeats still echo here, and we are following them.
It had been One of Those Weeks. If I’d been a comedian or filmmaker, I could have spun it into a great plot for a blockbuster movie. I was neither, so I called my buddy Tammy and said “Let’s escape to the islands.”
No, no, not those islands. Not the blue-green pale-sand palm-fringed reef-ringed places where Johnny Depp left bootprints in the sand, and sang “I’ve got a jar of dirrrrt!”. Nope. You might pack your snorkeling gear, and you might get lucky and have ten feet of vis in the shallows west of Chincoteague, but, hey, it’s October, and you haven’t bought that wetsuit yet. You’d better pack some serious sleeping bags, winter coats, sunscreen, five or six cans of nuclear fission powered bug spray, oh, and throw in the raincoat and the swimsuit, and might as well bring the snorkel anyway, you never know, it is October in Virginia.
Halloween to be exact.
We hit the road, driving south out of Pennsylvania, in a beat up blue ’73 Chevy pickup truck, Beach Boys and Surfin’ USA (I kid you not) blasting on the radio (back when I had a truck with a radio that worked). This was before the GPS, and I am topographically impaired. I’d been driving to Chincoteague and Assateague (off the coasts of Maryland and Virginia) since the truck was new, but that didn’t keep me from getting lost half a dozen times, conversing like a mariner, in the concrete spaghetti that had been growing like kudzu. It was 2am when we finally found the Hanna’s guest house on Chincoteague.
We did not get up at the butt crack of dawn to watch the sun rise gloriously out of the sea. We cranked the truck and ourselves into some semblance of life somewhere just before noon, driving out of Chincoteague to the big barrier island of Assateague. The big island, on a map, or Google Earth, looks like a long lean dragon, its tail wrapped protectively around the egg shape of Chincoteague. Both rise just barely out of the sea, and the salt marsh surrounding them. Chincoteague is home to decoy carvers and gift shops, art galleries and museums, bed and breakfasts, motels and a few limited condos. There are places renting kayaks, bikes, scooters, scooter cars, and those odd things that look like “the buggy with the fringe on top”, only they are driven by people pedaling them like bikes, while their, hopefully lightweight, friends ride in the back. This works fine on a flat island, not so much in a hilly place like PA. There are the cottages painted in seashell colors, Payne’s Sea Treasures (an esoteric collection of found objects and pirate booty), the crape myrtle (in at least six colors), the hibiscus, and the thirty foot Viking. Bookshops, ice cream, salt water taffy, and the McDonalds at the End of the Universe (the last thing you see as you leave the island). There are also the World Famous Saltwater Cowboys. These are guys who have real jobs the rest of the year (often as watermen), but in Pony Penning Week, they saddle up and become cowboys, rounding up the wild pony herds that have ranged the islands since… since…
The legend says a Spanish galleon wrecked and ponies spilled out in the storm, taking up residence on the islands. There are lots of documented shipwrecks on that coast, it eats ships. The sandbars, shapeshifting under wind and tide, snagged the unwary hull as it passed. Then the waves broke up the ship. If you were lucky, you didn’t need the Assateague Lifesaving Station to send out boats to rescue you. If you were really lucky, you salvaged your stuff before the locals did. Some of those wrecks have actually been Spanish galleons, and some of those carried horses.
Colonists also turned livestock loose on Assateague; it formed a natural pasture, fenced by the sea. It also helped the humans avoid certain taxes and other inconveniences. When they needed their stock (to use or sell) they simply staged a roundup. The last sheep, and the last Wild Sheep Roundup ended sometime in the 20th century. The Wild Pony Roundup, being more picturesque, continues today, documented colorfully in Marguerite Henry’s famous Misty of Chincoteague book. That happens the last Wednesday of July, and the island lists slightly to port under the weight of the 40,000 or so tourists (the normal population of the island is about a tenth of that).
This weekend, the islands were full of a different kind of tourist; Assateague’s National Seashore, Wildlife Refuge, and State Park (on the Maryland end) were full of migrating shorebirds; willets and sanderlings and ruddy turnstones and ducks, geese, pelicans, blue herons, great egrets, snowy egrets, cattle egrets, hawks, cormorants, eagles, marshhawks, osprey, warblers, songbirds, owls. We drove over the causeway and through the woods past the lighthouse, winding past roadside lagoons filled with fishing egrets, past the high marsh and its tree islands in the distance. Saw a couple of whitetail deer (there are also sika here), birds, birds, birds… nary a pony in sight.
That’s odd. Where are the ponies? You can usually see them out in that part of the marsh, in those woods by that treeline. We stared, searched; birds birds birds, deer, cowboys, birds, squirrel, birds, birds…
Wait, cowboys?
I shoved the sputtering camperclad Chevy off the road onto the berm, lept out and flagged down the two riders. One of my unfulfilled fantasies was to gallop picturesquely down a beach… any beach, but this was the one I was familiar with, and these two guys looked like they might have some local knowledge.
The first rider pointed, “You can ride horses down the road there, or anywhere the four wheel drives go.” There is a four-wheel drive trail on part of the beach. The sand-pale buckskin Quarter horse he was lounging on poked a friendly nose in my direction. “We’re not just out ridin’, though, we’re on the roundup.”
What roundup? That happens in July. You know, the island sinking under the weight of 40,000 tourists. The auction. The World Famous Swim Across the Channel at Slack Tide. People in trees and kayaks trying to catch pics of something they’ve only read about.
“We round up the ponies in the spring too, for shots and vetting and hoof-trimming and such. This roundup’s to catch the foals we missed in July, get ‘em off the mares before winter.” Winter is not particularly cold or snowclad here in Virginia’s east coast. A little powdered sugar snow falls sometimes. The marsh grass and saltmeadow hay stills stands, but it is lower in nutrition than typical horse fodder, hence the “swelly bellies” on the ponies (the high salt content has something to do with it too). A mare still caring for a foal this late in the year is risking her own survival. The rider pointed up the road to the corral where the ponies are penned in the July roundup. It looked like the entire Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Department and every saltwater cowboy within fifty miles, with a stock trailer and some horses, was parked there. We got some addresses for further local knowledge (this was before I was part of the web) and went on up to the pen.
A few dozen ponies; faded bays and sunburned chestnuts, blondish palominos and sandy buckskins, most with the broad white markings of Tobiano pintos. A variety of conformations… a trace of Arabian… a dash of mustang… some eleven hand echoes of Shetland. Some mustangs brought in from the west to replenish the genetic stock.
The original ponies were of Spanish descent, like the Corollas, Bankers and Shacklefords of the Outer Banks. Or the Marsh Tackies and Cracker Horses of the coasts farther south. Over the years, other blood has been added to the civilized free range ponies of Assateague to make them more salable. Few resemble their Colonial Spanish ancestors. The ponies on the north end of Assateague (the Maryland part) are part of the park system, treated as wildlife, and have less outside blood.
We hung over the fence, contemplating the history of the island, Spanish shipwrecks, Spanish Colonial horses, and color genetics. And the fact that buckskins held up better under the beach sun than bays or chestnuts or the blacks that now looked like burnt toast. We tried not to sound too much like tourists. Islands have a character of their own, they are their own little worlds, insulated and isolated from the Outside. There’s an iconic tale from New England about a guy who was born on the ferry coming over to the island, he lived his entire life there, and died there, and when he was buried, the townsfolk spoke of how wonderful a person this Outsider was.
We tried not to sound too much like Outsiders, even though we could never be anything but.
After awhile, the buckskin mare’s owner moseyed over and said, “If you think this herd’s nice, wait till you see the ones we bring in tomorrow! Twice as many… three times as many. You know where the main wildlife drive is? The one that goes by the goose ponds? There’s a service road right on the left side of that, by the parking lot at the visitor’s center. Big cattle gate there, just drive right on through, like you’re with the roundup. Four, maybe five miles up that road is another corral. You’ll see the trailers, just come on up.”
Whoot! We had an invitation to a local event from the locals themselves! We had backstage passes! We were not Just Tourists!
Sunday morning we woke at the butt crack of dawn, drove the truck over to Assateague packed with a day’s worth of survival gear. We found the visitor’s center, the service road.
And a closed gate. We were not too surprised. It had probably been closed behind the last Saltwater Cowboy truck hours ago, before dawn. We pulled out sneakers, backpacks, stuffed them with extra warm things, binoculars, Peterson’s Filed Guide to Eastern Birds, and several cans of Deep Woods Off. We set bravely off into the bush.
I had back packed on Assateague before, walking five miles of sand with a fifty pound backpack is not a stroll on the boardwalk. You’ll make about one mile an hour. Our packs were a little lighter this time… a little. We were not faster.
The road cut through the center of the island, longways. A very very long ways. On one side were the piney woods, with their fox squirrels and deer and greenbriar and mosquitoes. On the other side was the interdune area, the shrub zone, the occasional pond, and lots of mosquitoes. Canada geese flew in formation, snow geese swept back and forth to water, there were herons, a gazillion gulls, terns, various sandpipers, brown pelicans rowed overhead, looking like a line of pterodactyls. There were fox tracks in the sand, the distant sound of a fox barking.
The sun rose higher. The wind slacked off. It began to feel like the familiar Assateague, the one from summer beaches. The one where a beach umbrella and some cool waves are welcome. We transferred the warm stuff from our backs to our packs. We counted birds, birds, birds. Hauled out the binoculars and the field guide and identified an unusual horned grebe. Birds birds birds, most migrating on the Atlantic Flyway. Most using Assateague as an important roadside stop on their way to their winter homes. We saw no ponies, they weren’t allowed in this part of the Refuge anyway, they’d be farther north, near the corral. We paused, searching the horizon for the glint of sun on metal, for the sight of the cowboys’ horse trailers.
Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
Our feet began to complain. It occurred to me I should have brought more water. A lot more water. I began to feel like Beau Geste. Like those cartoons of people crawling across the desert. Wait, it is a desert; it just happens to have an ocean on one side and a salt marsh on the other.
Still no ponies.
Somewhere about the middle of the day, we came to a barbed wire fence straight out of the Old West. We followed it, and it flowed, prickly and straight, right up the center of the island. I knew there was a fence at the state line between Maryland and where we were: Virginia. It was put in somewhere after the Storm of ’62, when the island became a series of parks and National Seashores, and the Chincoteague Fire Company’s herd was separated from the herd on the Maryland side of the border.
What? Were we there? Had we missed the corral? The state line was a very long way from the visitor’s center where we had started. (I’ve hiked that too… really really looooooong way). We trudged farther, following the fence. It probably had something to do with the ponies, with fencing them in or out of a certain part of the island, so if we went far enough we’d find them. Or we could go back and be complete Frankenweenies.
Trudge trudge trudge. Wishing I had four legs. Wishing I had some Gatorade. Wishing we’d meet those cowboys now.
Then an alien sight in the beiges and sands and faded greens of the Assateague bush; glint of sunlight on metal far off in the dunes! I dove into my pack for Essential Survival Gear Item #2: binoculars. YES! It was sun bouncing off horse trailers and trucks. Civilization! Hallelujah! We’re saved!
We slogged up through the sand and…
…nobody home. Nary a sweat-stained mud-brown Quarter Horse. Nary a rubber-booted coveralled baseball-hatted Saltwater Cowboy. I raised the binoculars again and scanned the horizon like Captain Kirk looking for Klingons. Our fence went on up the island for a few hundred yards, then it met another line of wire angling off towards the beach (to our right). There was a big fat aluminum stock gate in the middle of that fence, and just beyond, another kind of fence: a high wooden one. Inside, something seethed, mostly hidden by candleberry and wax myrtle. We limped over to see the hundreds of ponies they must have rounded up by now.
Half a dozen ponies dozed on their feet, snoozing in the midday sun.
One lone Saltwater Cowboy was guarding them.
“So… where’s the rest?” I asked.
The man waved at the vast expanse of dune and shrub zone. “Out there.”
A brief time check revealed that it was not actually three days later… it only felt that way. We’d hiked four or five miles over sand and got up at 6am. It was still morning, and the roundup was still underway. We hung on the wooden fence, and considered the conformation and probable lineage of the ponies before us. We plied the guard with questions. We sounded a lot like tourists. He replied to all this in the typically loquacious manner of islanders, “Yep. Nope. Maybe.”
The sun rose higher, and began to walk down the other side of the hot sky. We wondered if maybe we hadn’t seen enough ponies for one trip, and should hike back and make use of the rest of our short weekend. We wavered. We hesitated. We’d come a long way for something special, and we felt like we’d found some of it, but… what?
We waited a bit more. Then a disturbance in the force…or the forest… or the dunes on the fuzzy horizon. I squinted through the binoculars. Down the long stretch of interdune sand and shrubbery came a bunch of ponies, not precisely a thundering herd, but, ponies, definitely on the move. In all my years of island exploration, I’d never seen a Chincoteague Pony thunder anywhere. An energy conserving, fly-swishing walk was what they mostly mustered. These were moving at a brisk trot, ears radared in on the corral and its occupants, no pursuers in sight. They came on, were deflected a bit eastward by the fence at the edge of the Refuge. The guard opened the gate, and they trotted in.
Gradually, one by one, every half hour or so, other small bands showed up. They came over the dunes, from the beach, or sweeping down from the north and into the corral as if they knew where to go. As the corral filled up with little bands of stallions and their mares, the number of stallions increased, and so did their tensions. There were no screaming lunges and flying hooves, just a few lowered, snaky heads and baring of teeth and scuttling out of the way.
We finally posted a guard at the gate to keep the corralled ponies from running out as the new ones ran in.
Me.
Whoot! Here I was, a horseman since I was a kid. I’d read all those books, Marguerite Henry’s Misty of Chincoteague, the big Album of Horses (where I first saw Wesley Dennis’ beautiful illustration of Misty and read her story). I’d come here as a high-schooler with family and friends, the last year Misty herself was still alive. I’d sketched her daughter Stormy from life. I’d come back with a backpack and a tent. I’d come later with a kayak and dive gear. This was a place out of a faerie tale, and I was participating in the tale! I was helping with the roundup!
Sort of.
I took the job seriously. Almost as seriously as the little mare who used more moves than a champion cutting horse trying to get past me. She didn’t. I wasn’t so lucky with the black and white pony who came trotting up out of the dunes with a nice big herd of mares. She put the brakes on right outside the corral, stared at us, and decided that’s as far as she was going to go.
With our Saltwater Cowboy back on guard, Tammy and I tried to head’em off at the pass. The pinto flagged her tail and ditzed off into the shrubbery. We circled around again, this time cutting off some of her herd. They knew who the Leader was, ducked around us and galloped off into the brush laughing. They soon came back and stood there, just out of range. Tammy had done her marathon for the day and posted herself by the corral. I circled around again, charging through shrubbery and loose sand and discovering what October on Assateague really means.
It means everything has gone to seed, and all the seeds have little sticky pokey things on them. Soon my sweatpants were covered in little needly pointy things of enough sizes, shapes and varieties to keep a field biologist occupied for months.
On the next round, I tried horse language; lower something resembling a horse’s head (like your pack) and swing it back and forth like a herd stallion snaking his head to drive his herd. They didn’t like my accent and ducked around me, plunging off into the deepest darkest reaches of the candleberry bush. Eventually the cowboy got tired of chuckling at the crazed tourist and called me back to the corral. Those horses would come around eventually if the darned tourists didn’t scare them off.
I began to extract some of the sticky-pokies from my pants. There were still plenty left when a vague moving blur appeared on the horizon. I grabbed the binoculars (still around Tammy’s neck); there was a heat-wavery line across the far dunes, snow geese…a flattish shrub-speckled swath of interdune area… salt flats… an occasional patch of standing water… and a blob of dark and white motion.
The moving blur resolved itself into ponies, a horde of ponies and riders strung out in a line from bay to beach behind them.
Then off to the left, the bayside, a cloud of dust and nearer thunder. Around a bend in the stone road came a bright red pickup, stake-bodied and coolered, with Chincoteague Fire Department emblazoned on the side. Two photographers, like something out of a National Geographic Special, clung to the roof, snapping frantically away with lenses the size of NASA scopes. In front of them ran the ponies, a herd straight out of an old western, cantering in a kaleidoscopic mob of bay and pinto and chestnut and buckskin. Dust from the stone road followed them like a jet trail.
The truck ground to a halt in front of the corral, cowboys leapt off and began herding ponies.
Outside ponies ran in, inside ponies ran out, then they were chased in and some more ran out… then a whole bunch ran out.
Then down the island came the rest of the herd with the riders behind them. Now there were ponies coming from everywhere, through the candleberry and wax myrtle shrub, over the dunes from the beach, down the barbed wire line at the edge of the Refuge. They poured into the corner created by the two converging fencelines, and the riders tightened the knot around them like fishermen closing a seine net.
One outrider paused at the edge of a pond on the far side of the seething mass of ponies, framed against the candleberry and myrtle. A big man who looked like he’d hauled nets most of his fifty or so years, coveralled and baseball hatted on a big bulldog Quarter Horse who looked like he’d been carved out of Sinepuxent Bay mud. Well-worn western saddle, breastplate with the western style carvings lathered and mudded into obscurity, frosting of salt-sweat on the horse’s shoulders. The saddle carried a drover’s bullwhip for popping at ponies. There were assorted ropes and tie-downs around the horse’s neck. Saddlebags and an extra jacket tied behind, a plain practical blanket under the saddle. The horse stood with his ears radared in on the proceedings in the corral, the man lounged as if he was in his easy chair with a remote in his hands.
A thin line of riders continued to straggle in from the north; a few mud-chestnut Quarter Horses, a lean leggy black Thoroughbred type, two lean wiry dirt-colored Arabians. All sweaty and blown, but their movement and eyes said they wouldn’t mind doing it again tomorrow. I scanned over them with the binoculars, then zoomed back to the Black. He danced down the road, jigging sideways, neck arched, practically breathing fire.
He was The Black Horse. Not the white horse of the Lone Ranger or White Knight. Not the golden horse of Roy Rogers or the Sun Hero. The Black carries the One Who Rides by Night; Zorro, Robin Hood, Batman (if he had a horse), Han Solo… or maybe Darth Vader. The Black Horse was the star of my favorite childhood tales; Fury of Broken Wheel Ranch, the Black Stallion. The privateers, defending our freedom in the War of 1812, had wicked swift and agile schooners the British called “wild horses” (they basically thought we were nuts sailing those things). Their hulls were usually black. And sailing the first privateer reproduction in Baltimore, Pride of Baltimore, had once been referred to as "riding a wild black mare through the woods at night". In Irish myth, a trickster/shapeshifter called a pooka most often takes the form of a black horse. The man on the Black was blue-jeaned and plaid-shirted, but he should have been wearing a cape and a sword.
The ponies milled into the corral, jostling, baring the occasional tooth to establish their place in the pecking order, then they buried their faces in the thick dry grass in the corral. Tammy and I went back to fence hanging, studying the ponies. This lot looked pretty much like the one from yesterday, only there were more; more colors, more sizes, more shapes. Most were in that large pony/small horse range, 13 or 14 hands (a hand is four inches, and horses are measured at the withers). They were hardy, solid and healthy, if a bit thin from their wild diet. Most would be fine mounts. Many would be right at home in a showring.
The gate was closed, the cowponies parked, the beer cans popped. The photographers wandered back and forth trying not to look like they were taking pictures. The locals traded jokes and comments about this year’s late foal crop. There were only half a dozen late foals, but that was half a dozen mares who would be fine this winter. And, a good time was had by all.
Presently the buckskin mare’s human came up to see how the tourists were doing. He handed me the reins to his horse. “Here, hold this would’ja?” I took this as a compliment, mere tourists don’t hold your horse. A couple minutes later he came back within shouting range, “Hey, why don’t you take her for a spin!”
I stared for a moment doing a great impersonation of a large-mouthed bass. I was on Assateague and someone had just handed me a horse.
WHOOT!
“Oh, what’s her name?”
“Buck, ‘cause that’s what she does.” He gave me a wicked little cowboy grin.
Oh yeah, cowboy humor. Hah hah. That means she’s dead quiet. Or it’s trick or treat with the tourists. I climbed up, started down the road. Buck was rather like a large couch that moved. She had that pleasant, pragmatic pickup truck quality that Quarter Horses often have. It’s a working breed, the original cowpony, and most of them have some sense. Her human shouted something after me about staying on the road, so we didn’t fall into a swamp or something. Some of the backwaters of Assateague are noted for, if not actual quicksand, gooey, silted, detritus filled guts that are the next best thing to it.
I got a hundred yards or so, and remembered Tammy. Fooey.
I turned around and went back. “Um,” I waved vaguely at Tammy, still aground. Someone handed her a horse. “Here, you can ride, right?” She’s been riding with me since she was a medium sized kid. She’d made her Dad stop at my house once, because she’d seen horses there and wanted to learn about them. She stuck around and became a buddy, and a pretty good horseman.
Well, at least on my nice patient Anglo-Arab gelding.
The horse she had been handed was The Black One.
“Now, “ the Black Horse Rider was saying, “be careful, he has a light mouth.” Light, like airborne. And the curb bit on his bridle had shanks the length of a nice trout. The curb works by leverage, so a twitch of your finger on the reins translates to a heave-ho from Arnold Schwarzeneger in his mouth. The bit was meant to be used one handed, on well trained horses, by people who basically thought about the direction they wanted to go rather than moving the reins.
Tammy put a foot in the stirrup, touched the saddle and the Black Horse spun around. He scuttled sideways, threw his head skyward, hopped up and down a couple times, threw his head up and down some more, dithered sideways the other way, like a crab escaping a hot pot. He did a turn on the forehand and one on the rear, moonwalked and blew sideways like a schooner in a high wind.
“Ah… ahhhhh… Teanna… TEANNAWHATDOIDO?”
I’d ridden a few more years than her, about thirty… on my own horses. On ones I’d trained, worked with, knew every twitch and expression of. Ones I could take the bridle off of and still expect them to behave. Getting on strange horses, especially ones that are trying to become airborne, still fills me with trepidation. I had worked with some horses other than my own, been a working student, taken lessons from a cowboy on the fine art of hanging onto a barrel racing horse screaming around a turn at warp eleven, leaning like a privateer in a ripping good wind.
I was six hours from home with no medical insurance, no helmet, in sweat pants and sneakers (never, ever ride in sneakers), with a botanical collection of stickly pricklies up and down my legs, and every cowboy within fifty miles watching.
“Um. Let’s trade horses.” I said.
The Black was 16.2 if he was an inch. My horses were 14.2. That’s eight inches shorter at the withers. His rider must have been 6’3” and the stirrups hadn’t been changed in fifty years. I tried to change them, the Black doing a square dance around me. I gave up after the tenth dosey-doe. I hauled myself up, managing to land with the Black more or less under me. I remembered the “light mouth” admonition, and let him dance instead of trying to whoa him, which would have sent him skyward.
Now the botanical collection in my sweats made itself apparent. I thought I had removed them, but they are persistent little migrants, and had left the important pointy bits in my pants.
Yeah, OK, cattle look spooked in the lower forty, let’s ride.
I got about fifty yards before I decided I would have another go at the stirrups from hell. I bailed out in one piece, and while the Black danced an Irish jig around me, I heaved, hauled, poked and conversed like a mariner. The ancient stirrup leathers finally gave way, and I shortened them as far as they would go. The test is to put your hand on the saddle, and the stirrup should fit under your armpit. The Black was so tall I couldn’t reach the saddle seat… and anyway, he was still doing circles at warp eleven. I hoped I’d guessed right about the length.
That, of course, put the stirrups just out of reach of my left foot, which needed to go in that stirrup so I could swing myself up. I hopped, and the Black jigged, and somehow I found the stirrup and landed in the saddle.
Off into the sunset. Yee-hah!
(Don’t make me look bad in front of all these watermen.)
That’s the thing about the Black Horse; he is what he is. He is a Force of Nature. He is pure wild energy. He is the storm and the wave and you either know how to ride that or you don’t.
Or you get lucky.
We eased into the jigging trot he’d shown me coming down the road earlier. There was no sign of immediate revolt, just coiled energy suggesting he could maybe finish the Iditarod today. Maybe round up a couple hundred more ponies. Maybe do the entire Pony Express route all by himself. We jigged down the road to the north and the pricklies in my pants rubbed themselves into obscurity. The wind came up from the sea, the gulls wheeled and wailed overhead, a shining bay lay to the left, and beyond it all of North America, the sun beginning to sail down the sky over it. I could probably stay on, even if the Black took off. Even if I didn’t, the ground was all sand and shrubbery. I let up on the reins, twitched a leg muscle, asking for a canter. The Black leapt like an arrow from the bow, like a manic impala, all long leggity strides that went up as much as forward. Buck fallumphed along behind us in an easy rocking chair canter, Tammy yelling over the wind what a great time she was having.
I kept one hand on the saddle horn, trying to remember how I’d ridden those crazy barrel horses.
Good horsemen do not look at the ground. They look out between their horses’ ears. "Rider who look at ground likely to end up there". I peeled my eyes off the sand and bush blurring by and saw snow geese. Gulls, pelicans. Little things flew out of the bush. The bay gleamed like silver to the west. Beach dunes rose on the east, castle walls protecting Assateague from the devouring sea. We flew like birds on the wind. We were Heroes out to save the world from Impending Doom. We were cowboys on the Last Roundup. The loose sand we’d been trudging through all weekend had no more power over us. We were Horsed, we sailed over it as easily as an osprey.
We would have eventually come to the fence at the end of Virginia. Or run out of island altogether. We turned back before then, reluctantly, before the locals sent out a posse in search of their horses.
We ambled back. And right in the middle of our road was a band of wild horses. I thought of all the tourist signs that say things like “Do NOT feed or pet the wild horses, they kick and bite.” This is mainly for the benefit of the horse-impaired, who tend to do stupid things like put their three year old on top of an untrained wild stallion because he happened to be mugging them for cookies. Still… bunch of wild ponies, and us needing to go right through them. Would they choose to have a toothy discussion with our horses? Would they kick as we passed? (My half-Arabian tended to kick other horses who got too close, and once hit me instead).
“Sure. No problem.” Yeah, the herd leader would probably have a discussion with the Black over right of way, or take off with the Black following at warp eleven.
We rode through. They flowed aside like a bow wave before a schooner, dozens of ponies swirling around us like a vast school of tropical fish. The white patches of the pintos blurred the distinction between one pony and the next. They thundered, even on sand a hundred ponies can thunder, off toward the beach. The Black danced sideways, wanting to follow. The ponies poured around again, back through the brush, to stand in front of the corral. Some of the mares had foals in there and weren’t ready to leave. A couple of the islanders noticed Tammy and I were the only ones still horsed and yelled to us to “chase those ponies outta’ there!” There was some chuckling and rib-poking at this, I think it’s called having fun with the tourists.
We turned our horses and in our best tacky western movie style yee-hahhed out across the interdune area. We swept back and forth across the rear of the herd, ramming into wild pony rumps, diving and dodging. The Black breathed fire again. The ponies dived into the shrubbery, into the candleberry and wax myrtle; a green, thigh high sea with no bottom I could see. We dived in after them, brush scraping at my knees, grabbing at my stirrups. I gave the Black his head, pulled my toes in out of the brush. The Black charged after the ponies with glee, his feet finding solid ground where my eyes couldn’t see. Like a privateer roaring on a reach, cutting the waves, he leaped up hidden sand swells, dived down into the troughs between them, splashed through a shallow marsh, leapt up the bank on the other side, nearly airborne.
Too soon the ponies were gone, over the dunes and into the marsh and woods. Back to being wild things, living with the wind and the sand and the stars.
At least until next spring, when the World Famous Saltwater Cowboys ride again.
I handed the Black Horse back to his owner with a big stupid grin and thanks.
“By the way, you never told me his name.”
The answer couldn’t have been better if I’d made it up; “Zorro,” he said.
I can’t remember the exact year; it was long ago, before Tammy had her own horse, when I had one of the string of beat up blue trucks that carried me on adventures, before I strapped kayaks to my roof to go to the islands. I had my own Wild Black Mare then, and an older patient bay half-Arabian gelding. It was before I learned to scuba dive, and before I learned that some Wild Black Mares had clouds of canvas and carried cannons. The islands have shapeshifted in those years, the Hook has grown, the beach beyond the parking lot has narrowed, and yet they are the same; wild places of wind and moving sand and tide, endangered species like piping plovers (there are more now) and Delmarva Fox Squirrels, vampiric hordes of bloodsucking saltmarsh insects, migrating birds, and the thunder of uncloven hooves on sand. If you are between the ages of Disney and young adult apocalyptic sci-fi, you likely have read the story of the most famous denizen of these islands: Misty of Chincoteague. Like Frankenstein, and Zorro, and Christopher Lee, she is a classic, undimmed by time. Her hoofprints are immortalized in concrete at the door to the island theater, her hoofbeats still echo here, and we are following them.
It had been One of Those Weeks. If I’d been a comedian or filmmaker, I could have spun it into a great plot for a blockbuster movie. I was neither, so I called my buddy Tammy and said “Let’s escape to the islands.”
No, no, not those islands. Not the blue-green pale-sand palm-fringed reef-ringed places where Johnny Depp left bootprints in the sand, and sang “I’ve got a jar of dirrrrt!”. Nope. You might pack your snorkeling gear, and you might get lucky and have ten feet of vis in the shallows west of Chincoteague, but, hey, it’s October, and you haven’t bought that wetsuit yet. You’d better pack some serious sleeping bags, winter coats, sunscreen, five or six cans of nuclear fission powered bug spray, oh, and throw in the raincoat and the swimsuit, and might as well bring the snorkel anyway, you never know, it is October in Virginia.
Halloween to be exact.
We hit the road, driving south out of Pennsylvania, in a beat up blue ’73 Chevy pickup truck, Beach Boys and Surfin’ USA (I kid you not) blasting on the radio (back when I had a truck with a radio that worked). This was before the GPS, and I am topographically impaired. I’d been driving to Chincoteague and Assateague (off the coasts of Maryland and Virginia) since the truck was new, but that didn’t keep me from getting lost half a dozen times, conversing like a mariner, in the concrete spaghetti that had been growing like kudzu. It was 2am when we finally found the Hanna’s guest house on Chincoteague.
We did not get up at the butt crack of dawn to watch the sun rise gloriously out of the sea. We cranked the truck and ourselves into some semblance of life somewhere just before noon, driving out of Chincoteague to the big barrier island of Assateague. The big island, on a map, or Google Earth, looks like a long lean dragon, its tail wrapped protectively around the egg shape of Chincoteague. Both rise just barely out of the sea, and the salt marsh surrounding them. Chincoteague is home to decoy carvers and gift shops, art galleries and museums, bed and breakfasts, motels and a few limited condos. There are places renting kayaks, bikes, scooters, scooter cars, and those odd things that look like “the buggy with the fringe on top”, only they are driven by people pedaling them like bikes, while their, hopefully lightweight, friends ride in the back. This works fine on a flat island, not so much in a hilly place like PA. There are the cottages painted in seashell colors, Payne’s Sea Treasures (an esoteric collection of found objects and pirate booty), the crape myrtle (in at least six colors), the hibiscus, and the thirty foot Viking. Bookshops, ice cream, salt water taffy, and the McDonalds at the End of the Universe (the last thing you see as you leave the island). There are also the World Famous Saltwater Cowboys. These are guys who have real jobs the rest of the year (often as watermen), but in Pony Penning Week, they saddle up and become cowboys, rounding up the wild pony herds that have ranged the islands since… since…
The legend says a Spanish galleon wrecked and ponies spilled out in the storm, taking up residence on the islands. There are lots of documented shipwrecks on that coast, it eats ships. The sandbars, shapeshifting under wind and tide, snagged the unwary hull as it passed. Then the waves broke up the ship. If you were lucky, you didn’t need the Assateague Lifesaving Station to send out boats to rescue you. If you were really lucky, you salvaged your stuff before the locals did. Some of those wrecks have actually been Spanish galleons, and some of those carried horses.
Colonists also turned livestock loose on Assateague; it formed a natural pasture, fenced by the sea. It also helped the humans avoid certain taxes and other inconveniences. When they needed their stock (to use or sell) they simply staged a roundup. The last sheep, and the last Wild Sheep Roundup ended sometime in the 20th century. The Wild Pony Roundup, being more picturesque, continues today, documented colorfully in Marguerite Henry’s famous Misty of Chincoteague book. That happens the last Wednesday of July, and the island lists slightly to port under the weight of the 40,000 or so tourists (the normal population of the island is about a tenth of that).
This weekend, the islands were full of a different kind of tourist; Assateague’s National Seashore, Wildlife Refuge, and State Park (on the Maryland end) were full of migrating shorebirds; willets and sanderlings and ruddy turnstones and ducks, geese, pelicans, blue herons, great egrets, snowy egrets, cattle egrets, hawks, cormorants, eagles, marshhawks, osprey, warblers, songbirds, owls. We drove over the causeway and through the woods past the lighthouse, winding past roadside lagoons filled with fishing egrets, past the high marsh and its tree islands in the distance. Saw a couple of whitetail deer (there are also sika here), birds, birds, birds… nary a pony in sight.
That’s odd. Where are the ponies? You can usually see them out in that part of the marsh, in those woods by that treeline. We stared, searched; birds birds birds, deer, cowboys, birds, squirrel, birds, birds…
Wait, cowboys?
I shoved the sputtering camperclad Chevy off the road onto the berm, lept out and flagged down the two riders. One of my unfulfilled fantasies was to gallop picturesquely down a beach… any beach, but this was the one I was familiar with, and these two guys looked like they might have some local knowledge.
The first rider pointed, “You can ride horses down the road there, or anywhere the four wheel drives go.” There is a four-wheel drive trail on part of the beach. The sand-pale buckskin Quarter horse he was lounging on poked a friendly nose in my direction. “We’re not just out ridin’, though, we’re on the roundup.”
What roundup? That happens in July. You know, the island sinking under the weight of 40,000 tourists. The auction. The World Famous Swim Across the Channel at Slack Tide. People in trees and kayaks trying to catch pics of something they’ve only read about.
“We round up the ponies in the spring too, for shots and vetting and hoof-trimming and such. This roundup’s to catch the foals we missed in July, get ‘em off the mares before winter.” Winter is not particularly cold or snowclad here in Virginia’s east coast. A little powdered sugar snow falls sometimes. The marsh grass and saltmeadow hay stills stands, but it is lower in nutrition than typical horse fodder, hence the “swelly bellies” on the ponies (the high salt content has something to do with it too). A mare still caring for a foal this late in the year is risking her own survival. The rider pointed up the road to the corral where the ponies are penned in the July roundup. It looked like the entire Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Department and every saltwater cowboy within fifty miles, with a stock trailer and some horses, was parked there. We got some addresses for further local knowledge (this was before I was part of the web) and went on up to the pen.
A few dozen ponies; faded bays and sunburned chestnuts, blondish palominos and sandy buckskins, most with the broad white markings of Tobiano pintos. A variety of conformations… a trace of Arabian… a dash of mustang… some eleven hand echoes of Shetland. Some mustangs brought in from the west to replenish the genetic stock.
The original ponies were of Spanish descent, like the Corollas, Bankers and Shacklefords of the Outer Banks. Or the Marsh Tackies and Cracker Horses of the coasts farther south. Over the years, other blood has been added to the civilized free range ponies of Assateague to make them more salable. Few resemble their Colonial Spanish ancestors. The ponies on the north end of Assateague (the Maryland part) are part of the park system, treated as wildlife, and have less outside blood.
We hung over the fence, contemplating the history of the island, Spanish shipwrecks, Spanish Colonial horses, and color genetics. And the fact that buckskins held up better under the beach sun than bays or chestnuts or the blacks that now looked like burnt toast. We tried not to sound too much like tourists. Islands have a character of their own, they are their own little worlds, insulated and isolated from the Outside. There’s an iconic tale from New England about a guy who was born on the ferry coming over to the island, he lived his entire life there, and died there, and when he was buried, the townsfolk spoke of how wonderful a person this Outsider was.
We tried not to sound too much like Outsiders, even though we could never be anything but.
After awhile, the buckskin mare’s owner moseyed over and said, “If you think this herd’s nice, wait till you see the ones we bring in tomorrow! Twice as many… three times as many. You know where the main wildlife drive is? The one that goes by the goose ponds? There’s a service road right on the left side of that, by the parking lot at the visitor’s center. Big cattle gate there, just drive right on through, like you’re with the roundup. Four, maybe five miles up that road is another corral. You’ll see the trailers, just come on up.”
Whoot! We had an invitation to a local event from the locals themselves! We had backstage passes! We were not Just Tourists!
Sunday morning we woke at the butt crack of dawn, drove the truck over to Assateague packed with a day’s worth of survival gear. We found the visitor’s center, the service road.
And a closed gate. We were not too surprised. It had probably been closed behind the last Saltwater Cowboy truck hours ago, before dawn. We pulled out sneakers, backpacks, stuffed them with extra warm things, binoculars, Peterson’s Filed Guide to Eastern Birds, and several cans of Deep Woods Off. We set bravely off into the bush.
I had back packed on Assateague before, walking five miles of sand with a fifty pound backpack is not a stroll on the boardwalk. You’ll make about one mile an hour. Our packs were a little lighter this time… a little. We were not faster.
The road cut through the center of the island, longways. A very very long ways. On one side were the piney woods, with their fox squirrels and deer and greenbriar and mosquitoes. On the other side was the interdune area, the shrub zone, the occasional pond, and lots of mosquitoes. Canada geese flew in formation, snow geese swept back and forth to water, there were herons, a gazillion gulls, terns, various sandpipers, brown pelicans rowed overhead, looking like a line of pterodactyls. There were fox tracks in the sand, the distant sound of a fox barking.
The sun rose higher. The wind slacked off. It began to feel like the familiar Assateague, the one from summer beaches. The one where a beach umbrella and some cool waves are welcome. We transferred the warm stuff from our backs to our packs. We counted birds, birds, birds. Hauled out the binoculars and the field guide and identified an unusual horned grebe. Birds birds birds, most migrating on the Atlantic Flyway. Most using Assateague as an important roadside stop on their way to their winter homes. We saw no ponies, they weren’t allowed in this part of the Refuge anyway, they’d be farther north, near the corral. We paused, searching the horizon for the glint of sun on metal, for the sight of the cowboys’ horse trailers.
Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
Our feet began to complain. It occurred to me I should have brought more water. A lot more water. I began to feel like Beau Geste. Like those cartoons of people crawling across the desert. Wait, it is a desert; it just happens to have an ocean on one side and a salt marsh on the other.
Still no ponies.
Somewhere about the middle of the day, we came to a barbed wire fence straight out of the Old West. We followed it, and it flowed, prickly and straight, right up the center of the island. I knew there was a fence at the state line between Maryland and where we were: Virginia. It was put in somewhere after the Storm of ’62, when the island became a series of parks and National Seashores, and the Chincoteague Fire Company’s herd was separated from the herd on the Maryland side of the border.
What? Were we there? Had we missed the corral? The state line was a very long way from the visitor’s center where we had started. (I’ve hiked that too… really really looooooong way). We trudged farther, following the fence. It probably had something to do with the ponies, with fencing them in or out of a certain part of the island, so if we went far enough we’d find them. Or we could go back and be complete Frankenweenies.
Trudge trudge trudge. Wishing I had four legs. Wishing I had some Gatorade. Wishing we’d meet those cowboys now.
Then an alien sight in the beiges and sands and faded greens of the Assateague bush; glint of sunlight on metal far off in the dunes! I dove into my pack for Essential Survival Gear Item #2: binoculars. YES! It was sun bouncing off horse trailers and trucks. Civilization! Hallelujah! We’re saved!
We slogged up through the sand and…
…nobody home. Nary a sweat-stained mud-brown Quarter Horse. Nary a rubber-booted coveralled baseball-hatted Saltwater Cowboy. I raised the binoculars again and scanned the horizon like Captain Kirk looking for Klingons. Our fence went on up the island for a few hundred yards, then it met another line of wire angling off towards the beach (to our right). There was a big fat aluminum stock gate in the middle of that fence, and just beyond, another kind of fence: a high wooden one. Inside, something seethed, mostly hidden by candleberry and wax myrtle. We limped over to see the hundreds of ponies they must have rounded up by now.
Half a dozen ponies dozed on their feet, snoozing in the midday sun.
One lone Saltwater Cowboy was guarding them.
“So… where’s the rest?” I asked.
The man waved at the vast expanse of dune and shrub zone. “Out there.”
A brief time check revealed that it was not actually three days later… it only felt that way. We’d hiked four or five miles over sand and got up at 6am. It was still morning, and the roundup was still underway. We hung on the wooden fence, and considered the conformation and probable lineage of the ponies before us. We plied the guard with questions. We sounded a lot like tourists. He replied to all this in the typically loquacious manner of islanders, “Yep. Nope. Maybe.”
The sun rose higher, and began to walk down the other side of the hot sky. We wondered if maybe we hadn’t seen enough ponies for one trip, and should hike back and make use of the rest of our short weekend. We wavered. We hesitated. We’d come a long way for something special, and we felt like we’d found some of it, but… what?
We waited a bit more. Then a disturbance in the force…or the forest… or the dunes on the fuzzy horizon. I squinted through the binoculars. Down the long stretch of interdune sand and shrubbery came a bunch of ponies, not precisely a thundering herd, but, ponies, definitely on the move. In all my years of island exploration, I’d never seen a Chincoteague Pony thunder anywhere. An energy conserving, fly-swishing walk was what they mostly mustered. These were moving at a brisk trot, ears radared in on the corral and its occupants, no pursuers in sight. They came on, were deflected a bit eastward by the fence at the edge of the Refuge. The guard opened the gate, and they trotted in.
Gradually, one by one, every half hour or so, other small bands showed up. They came over the dunes, from the beach, or sweeping down from the north and into the corral as if they knew where to go. As the corral filled up with little bands of stallions and their mares, the number of stallions increased, and so did their tensions. There were no screaming lunges and flying hooves, just a few lowered, snaky heads and baring of teeth and scuttling out of the way.
We finally posted a guard at the gate to keep the corralled ponies from running out as the new ones ran in.
Me.
Whoot! Here I was, a horseman since I was a kid. I’d read all those books, Marguerite Henry’s Misty of Chincoteague, the big Album of Horses (where I first saw Wesley Dennis’ beautiful illustration of Misty and read her story). I’d come here as a high-schooler with family and friends, the last year Misty herself was still alive. I’d sketched her daughter Stormy from life. I’d come back with a backpack and a tent. I’d come later with a kayak and dive gear. This was a place out of a faerie tale, and I was participating in the tale! I was helping with the roundup!
Sort of.
I took the job seriously. Almost as seriously as the little mare who used more moves than a champion cutting horse trying to get past me. She didn’t. I wasn’t so lucky with the black and white pony who came trotting up out of the dunes with a nice big herd of mares. She put the brakes on right outside the corral, stared at us, and decided that’s as far as she was going to go.
With our Saltwater Cowboy back on guard, Tammy and I tried to head’em off at the pass. The pinto flagged her tail and ditzed off into the shrubbery. We circled around again, this time cutting off some of her herd. They knew who the Leader was, ducked around us and galloped off into the brush laughing. They soon came back and stood there, just out of range. Tammy had done her marathon for the day and posted herself by the corral. I circled around again, charging through shrubbery and loose sand and discovering what October on Assateague really means.
It means everything has gone to seed, and all the seeds have little sticky pokey things on them. Soon my sweatpants were covered in little needly pointy things of enough sizes, shapes and varieties to keep a field biologist occupied for months.
On the next round, I tried horse language; lower something resembling a horse’s head (like your pack) and swing it back and forth like a herd stallion snaking his head to drive his herd. They didn’t like my accent and ducked around me, plunging off into the deepest darkest reaches of the candleberry bush. Eventually the cowboy got tired of chuckling at the crazed tourist and called me back to the corral. Those horses would come around eventually if the darned tourists didn’t scare them off.
I began to extract some of the sticky-pokies from my pants. There were still plenty left when a vague moving blur appeared on the horizon. I grabbed the binoculars (still around Tammy’s neck); there was a heat-wavery line across the far dunes, snow geese…a flattish shrub-speckled swath of interdune area… salt flats… an occasional patch of standing water… and a blob of dark and white motion.
The moving blur resolved itself into ponies, a horde of ponies and riders strung out in a line from bay to beach behind them.
Then off to the left, the bayside, a cloud of dust and nearer thunder. Around a bend in the stone road came a bright red pickup, stake-bodied and coolered, with Chincoteague Fire Department emblazoned on the side. Two photographers, like something out of a National Geographic Special, clung to the roof, snapping frantically away with lenses the size of NASA scopes. In front of them ran the ponies, a herd straight out of an old western, cantering in a kaleidoscopic mob of bay and pinto and chestnut and buckskin. Dust from the stone road followed them like a jet trail.
The truck ground to a halt in front of the corral, cowboys leapt off and began herding ponies.
Outside ponies ran in, inside ponies ran out, then they were chased in and some more ran out… then a whole bunch ran out.
Then down the island came the rest of the herd with the riders behind them. Now there were ponies coming from everywhere, through the candleberry and wax myrtle shrub, over the dunes from the beach, down the barbed wire line at the edge of the Refuge. They poured into the corner created by the two converging fencelines, and the riders tightened the knot around them like fishermen closing a seine net.
One outrider paused at the edge of a pond on the far side of the seething mass of ponies, framed against the candleberry and myrtle. A big man who looked like he’d hauled nets most of his fifty or so years, coveralled and baseball hatted on a big bulldog Quarter Horse who looked like he’d been carved out of Sinepuxent Bay mud. Well-worn western saddle, breastplate with the western style carvings lathered and mudded into obscurity, frosting of salt-sweat on the horse’s shoulders. The saddle carried a drover’s bullwhip for popping at ponies. There were assorted ropes and tie-downs around the horse’s neck. Saddlebags and an extra jacket tied behind, a plain practical blanket under the saddle. The horse stood with his ears radared in on the proceedings in the corral, the man lounged as if he was in his easy chair with a remote in his hands.
A thin line of riders continued to straggle in from the north; a few mud-chestnut Quarter Horses, a lean leggy black Thoroughbred type, two lean wiry dirt-colored Arabians. All sweaty and blown, but their movement and eyes said they wouldn’t mind doing it again tomorrow. I scanned over them with the binoculars, then zoomed back to the Black. He danced down the road, jigging sideways, neck arched, practically breathing fire.
He was The Black Horse. Not the white horse of the Lone Ranger or White Knight. Not the golden horse of Roy Rogers or the Sun Hero. The Black carries the One Who Rides by Night; Zorro, Robin Hood, Batman (if he had a horse), Han Solo… or maybe Darth Vader. The Black Horse was the star of my favorite childhood tales; Fury of Broken Wheel Ranch, the Black Stallion. The privateers, defending our freedom in the War of 1812, had wicked swift and agile schooners the British called “wild horses” (they basically thought we were nuts sailing those things). Their hulls were usually black. And sailing the first privateer reproduction in Baltimore, Pride of Baltimore, had once been referred to as "riding a wild black mare through the woods at night". In Irish myth, a trickster/shapeshifter called a pooka most often takes the form of a black horse. The man on the Black was blue-jeaned and plaid-shirted, but he should have been wearing a cape and a sword.
The ponies milled into the corral, jostling, baring the occasional tooth to establish their place in the pecking order, then they buried their faces in the thick dry grass in the corral. Tammy and I went back to fence hanging, studying the ponies. This lot looked pretty much like the one from yesterday, only there were more; more colors, more sizes, more shapes. Most were in that large pony/small horse range, 13 or 14 hands (a hand is four inches, and horses are measured at the withers). They were hardy, solid and healthy, if a bit thin from their wild diet. Most would be fine mounts. Many would be right at home in a showring.
The gate was closed, the cowponies parked, the beer cans popped. The photographers wandered back and forth trying not to look like they were taking pictures. The locals traded jokes and comments about this year’s late foal crop. There were only half a dozen late foals, but that was half a dozen mares who would be fine this winter. And, a good time was had by all.
Presently the buckskin mare’s human came up to see how the tourists were doing. He handed me the reins to his horse. “Here, hold this would’ja?” I took this as a compliment, mere tourists don’t hold your horse. A couple minutes later he came back within shouting range, “Hey, why don’t you take her for a spin!”
I stared for a moment doing a great impersonation of a large-mouthed bass. I was on Assateague and someone had just handed me a horse.
WHOOT!
“Oh, what’s her name?”
“Buck, ‘cause that’s what she does.” He gave me a wicked little cowboy grin.
Oh yeah, cowboy humor. Hah hah. That means she’s dead quiet. Or it’s trick or treat with the tourists. I climbed up, started down the road. Buck was rather like a large couch that moved. She had that pleasant, pragmatic pickup truck quality that Quarter Horses often have. It’s a working breed, the original cowpony, and most of them have some sense. Her human shouted something after me about staying on the road, so we didn’t fall into a swamp or something. Some of the backwaters of Assateague are noted for, if not actual quicksand, gooey, silted, detritus filled guts that are the next best thing to it.
I got a hundred yards or so, and remembered Tammy. Fooey.
I turned around and went back. “Um,” I waved vaguely at Tammy, still aground. Someone handed her a horse. “Here, you can ride, right?” She’s been riding with me since she was a medium sized kid. She’d made her Dad stop at my house once, because she’d seen horses there and wanted to learn about them. She stuck around and became a buddy, and a pretty good horseman.
Well, at least on my nice patient Anglo-Arab gelding.
The horse she had been handed was The Black One.
“Now, “ the Black Horse Rider was saying, “be careful, he has a light mouth.” Light, like airborne. And the curb bit on his bridle had shanks the length of a nice trout. The curb works by leverage, so a twitch of your finger on the reins translates to a heave-ho from Arnold Schwarzeneger in his mouth. The bit was meant to be used one handed, on well trained horses, by people who basically thought about the direction they wanted to go rather than moving the reins.
Tammy put a foot in the stirrup, touched the saddle and the Black Horse spun around. He scuttled sideways, threw his head skyward, hopped up and down a couple times, threw his head up and down some more, dithered sideways the other way, like a crab escaping a hot pot. He did a turn on the forehand and one on the rear, moonwalked and blew sideways like a schooner in a high wind.
“Ah… ahhhhh… Teanna… TEANNAWHATDOIDO?”
I’d ridden a few more years than her, about thirty… on my own horses. On ones I’d trained, worked with, knew every twitch and expression of. Ones I could take the bridle off of and still expect them to behave. Getting on strange horses, especially ones that are trying to become airborne, still fills me with trepidation. I had worked with some horses other than my own, been a working student, taken lessons from a cowboy on the fine art of hanging onto a barrel racing horse screaming around a turn at warp eleven, leaning like a privateer in a ripping good wind.
I was six hours from home with no medical insurance, no helmet, in sweat pants and sneakers (never, ever ride in sneakers), with a botanical collection of stickly pricklies up and down my legs, and every cowboy within fifty miles watching.
“Um. Let’s trade horses.” I said.
The Black was 16.2 if he was an inch. My horses were 14.2. That’s eight inches shorter at the withers. His rider must have been 6’3” and the stirrups hadn’t been changed in fifty years. I tried to change them, the Black doing a square dance around me. I gave up after the tenth dosey-doe. I hauled myself up, managing to land with the Black more or less under me. I remembered the “light mouth” admonition, and let him dance instead of trying to whoa him, which would have sent him skyward.
Now the botanical collection in my sweats made itself apparent. I thought I had removed them, but they are persistent little migrants, and had left the important pointy bits in my pants.
Yeah, OK, cattle look spooked in the lower forty, let’s ride.
I got about fifty yards before I decided I would have another go at the stirrups from hell. I bailed out in one piece, and while the Black danced an Irish jig around me, I heaved, hauled, poked and conversed like a mariner. The ancient stirrup leathers finally gave way, and I shortened them as far as they would go. The test is to put your hand on the saddle, and the stirrup should fit under your armpit. The Black was so tall I couldn’t reach the saddle seat… and anyway, he was still doing circles at warp eleven. I hoped I’d guessed right about the length.
That, of course, put the stirrups just out of reach of my left foot, which needed to go in that stirrup so I could swing myself up. I hopped, and the Black jigged, and somehow I found the stirrup and landed in the saddle.
Off into the sunset. Yee-hah!
(Don’t make me look bad in front of all these watermen.)
That’s the thing about the Black Horse; he is what he is. He is a Force of Nature. He is pure wild energy. He is the storm and the wave and you either know how to ride that or you don’t.
Or you get lucky.
We eased into the jigging trot he’d shown me coming down the road earlier. There was no sign of immediate revolt, just coiled energy suggesting he could maybe finish the Iditarod today. Maybe round up a couple hundred more ponies. Maybe do the entire Pony Express route all by himself. We jigged down the road to the north and the pricklies in my pants rubbed themselves into obscurity. The wind came up from the sea, the gulls wheeled and wailed overhead, a shining bay lay to the left, and beyond it all of North America, the sun beginning to sail down the sky over it. I could probably stay on, even if the Black took off. Even if I didn’t, the ground was all sand and shrubbery. I let up on the reins, twitched a leg muscle, asking for a canter. The Black leapt like an arrow from the bow, like a manic impala, all long leggity strides that went up as much as forward. Buck fallumphed along behind us in an easy rocking chair canter, Tammy yelling over the wind what a great time she was having.
I kept one hand on the saddle horn, trying to remember how I’d ridden those crazy barrel horses.
Good horsemen do not look at the ground. They look out between their horses’ ears. "Rider who look at ground likely to end up there". I peeled my eyes off the sand and bush blurring by and saw snow geese. Gulls, pelicans. Little things flew out of the bush. The bay gleamed like silver to the west. Beach dunes rose on the east, castle walls protecting Assateague from the devouring sea. We flew like birds on the wind. We were Heroes out to save the world from Impending Doom. We were cowboys on the Last Roundup. The loose sand we’d been trudging through all weekend had no more power over us. We were Horsed, we sailed over it as easily as an osprey.
We would have eventually come to the fence at the end of Virginia. Or run out of island altogether. We turned back before then, reluctantly, before the locals sent out a posse in search of their horses.
We ambled back. And right in the middle of our road was a band of wild horses. I thought of all the tourist signs that say things like “Do NOT feed or pet the wild horses, they kick and bite.” This is mainly for the benefit of the horse-impaired, who tend to do stupid things like put their three year old on top of an untrained wild stallion because he happened to be mugging them for cookies. Still… bunch of wild ponies, and us needing to go right through them. Would they choose to have a toothy discussion with our horses? Would they kick as we passed? (My half-Arabian tended to kick other horses who got too close, and once hit me instead).
“Sure. No problem.” Yeah, the herd leader would probably have a discussion with the Black over right of way, or take off with the Black following at warp eleven.
We rode through. They flowed aside like a bow wave before a schooner, dozens of ponies swirling around us like a vast school of tropical fish. The white patches of the pintos blurred the distinction between one pony and the next. They thundered, even on sand a hundred ponies can thunder, off toward the beach. The Black danced sideways, wanting to follow. The ponies poured around again, back through the brush, to stand in front of the corral. Some of the mares had foals in there and weren’t ready to leave. A couple of the islanders noticed Tammy and I were the only ones still horsed and yelled to us to “chase those ponies outta’ there!” There was some chuckling and rib-poking at this, I think it’s called having fun with the tourists.
We turned our horses and in our best tacky western movie style yee-hahhed out across the interdune area. We swept back and forth across the rear of the herd, ramming into wild pony rumps, diving and dodging. The Black breathed fire again. The ponies dived into the shrubbery, into the candleberry and wax myrtle; a green, thigh high sea with no bottom I could see. We dived in after them, brush scraping at my knees, grabbing at my stirrups. I gave the Black his head, pulled my toes in out of the brush. The Black charged after the ponies with glee, his feet finding solid ground where my eyes couldn’t see. Like a privateer roaring on a reach, cutting the waves, he leaped up hidden sand swells, dived down into the troughs between them, splashed through a shallow marsh, leapt up the bank on the other side, nearly airborne.
Too soon the ponies were gone, over the dunes and into the marsh and woods. Back to being wild things, living with the wind and the sand and the stars.
At least until next spring, when the World Famous Saltwater Cowboys ride again.
I handed the Black Horse back to his owner with a big stupid grin and thanks.
“By the way, you never told me his name.”
The answer couldn’t have been better if I’d made it up; “Zorro,” he said.
The original tale was typewritten, well before I had a computer with word processing capability. It has no date on it. Since I mention the working student stint I did in 1987 or ‘88, I suspect this Halloween excursion happened in the late 80s or early 90s. I don’t remember the cowboys’ names, but I remember the horses, Buck and Zorro. Thanks to all of them for making this a Halloween to remember.
I adopted my own wild black horse from the BLM in 1985, she had run wild for 8 years. She lived to 29 and fell facing west, whence she had come.
In 2019, I can mark 47 years of going to the islands: with cameras, backpack, kayak, dive and snorkel gear, occasional equines, sled dogs, and some mermaid tails.
I now have a ridiculous library of photos and videos from the islands too, but of course on this expedition, I was not carrying a camera! I still am fascinated by horse color genetics and have regaled many tourists with what color that pony actually is...
wait, wait, come back here...
I can also, with help from various field guides, websites and facebook pages, identify and follow the lives of the ponies living there today.
I've also written a whole lot of fiction/contemporary fantasy/YA/middle reader stories taking place on the islands. See them here: (click this)
Pics on this page are from various expeditions, mostly Pony Pennings past. Header is Ace's Black Tie Affair, the only black stallion presently in Assateague VA's herd, and he is technically a black pinto (minimally marked). The MD herd has a black named Charcoal. The MD herd is managed as any other wildlife by the park service. The VA herd is owned and managed by the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company. The herd is limited to 150 ponies, what the island can safely support.
I adopted my own wild black horse from the BLM in 1985, she had run wild for 8 years. She lived to 29 and fell facing west, whence she had come.
In 2019, I can mark 47 years of going to the islands: with cameras, backpack, kayak, dive and snorkel gear, occasional equines, sled dogs, and some mermaid tails.
I now have a ridiculous library of photos and videos from the islands too, but of course on this expedition, I was not carrying a camera! I still am fascinated by horse color genetics and have regaled many tourists with what color that pony actually is...
wait, wait, come back here...
I can also, with help from various field guides, websites and facebook pages, identify and follow the lives of the ponies living there today.
I've also written a whole lot of fiction/contemporary fantasy/YA/middle reader stories taking place on the islands. See them here: (click this)
Pics on this page are from various expeditions, mostly Pony Pennings past. Header is Ace's Black Tie Affair, the only black stallion presently in Assateague VA's herd, and he is technically a black pinto (minimally marked). The MD herd has a black named Charcoal. The MD herd is managed as any other wildlife by the park service. The VA herd is owned and managed by the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company. The herd is limited to 150 ponies, what the island can safely support.
Assateague Horse Color 101 for the Horse-impaired:
- Horses have two color genes: red (chestnut) and black (black)...
- and stuff that modifies those into a red/yellow/black/blue/brown/golden/spotted/striped rainbow of weird.
- Points are mane, tail and lower legs.
- dropping an agouti gene into a red/black mix shoves the black bits to the edges and you get Bay, various red-browns with black points.
- Chestnut is any shade of light to dark red-orange-brown, and some colors like chocolate and liver, points same color or lighter than the body. A dark "liver" (dark chocolate) chestnut can be darker than a faded, sunbleached black.
- Flaxen gene creates blond manes on chestnuts, as well as blond lower legs, and sometimes countershading; pale undersides like a deer.
- Diluting chestnut with one cream gene gives you palomino, golden with white mane and tail.
- Diluting bay gets you buckskin, golden with black points.
- Diluting black with a cream gene gets you... black. Though it might look a bit "off".
- Dun, which looks like buckskin, and champagne, which looks like palomino, or buckskin, sort of, are a whole ‘nother set of genes and do not exist on the islands.
- Diluting palomino and buckskin farther with two cream genes gets you cremello and perlino.
- “White” horses are usually grey, which starts as a normal horse color, then greys out like humans do as they age. Assateague no longer has greys.
- Albino does not exist in horses.
- Assateague's white horses are actually pintos with extremely small amounts of color (like a tiny bit on the head or tail)… or double dilutes (2 cream genes) like perlinos or cremellos or smoky creams (2 cream genes on black).
- Most of the ponies are of the Tobiano pinto pattern, with dashes of splash or sabino, and cat tracks sometimes. Tobianos often look like they are wearing a pirate treasure map; Misty famously had a reversed USA map on one side. The patterns look nothing like a spotted dog or the cow that gave you your Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia.
- in 2019 there are 14 bays, 38 bay pintos, 4 blacks (and Ace who is mostly black but technically a pinto), 8 black pintos (including Ace)(Calendar Girl appears brown because probably faded or smoky black), 9 buckskins, 8 buckskin pintos, 19 chestnuts (ranging from golden red to dark chocolate), 31 chestnut pintos, 6 palominos ranging from sand to golden, 8 palomino pintos many of whom are very pale sand and appear all white from a distance.
- The pale palominos are distinguishable from double dilutes (cremello) by their dark skin and eyes. Double dilutes have pink skin and blue eyes.
