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
2012.10.15
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
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 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, 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. 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 two 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 real 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
19th century. The Wild
Pony Roundup, being more picturesque, continues today, documented colorfully in
Marguerite Henry’s famous Misty of
Chincoteaguebook. 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 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; big-headed
straight-shouldered long-backed… a trace of Arabian…a dash of mustang… some
eleven hand Shetland types… 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 digress for a moment.
Horse Color 101 for the Horse-impaired: Horses
have two color genes: red and 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. Bay is brown with black points. Chestnut is any shade
of light to medium red-brown, and some colors like chocolate and liver, points
same color or lighter than the body. Diluting chestnut gives you palomino,
golden with white mane and tail. Diluting bay gets you buckskin,
golden with black points. (Dun, which looks exactly like buckskin, and
some champagnes, which look exactly like palomino, are a whole ‘nother set of
genes.) Diluting those farther
gets you cremello and perlino. “White” horses are usually grey (starts as a
normal horse color, then greys out like humans do as they age), except on
Assateague (greys are rare to non-existent), where white horses are actually
pintos with extremely small amounts of color (like a tiny bit on the head or
tail)… or perlinos or cremellos. Most of the ponies are of the Tobiano pinto
pattern (can be any color, it’s the pattern of white we’re talking about). It
looks nothing like a spotted dog or the cow that gave you your Ben and Jerry’s
Cherry Garcia.
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 (epic fade). 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, umpteen kinds of 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 (they’re actually limited to keeping
about 150 on the island).
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, a sort of scraggly lot, like refugees
from a pirate film. 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…
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. 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, galloping 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 typical 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… 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 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). 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, buy people who basically thought about the direction they wanted
to go.
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, a hundred 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.
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
2012.10.15
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
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 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, 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. 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 two 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 real 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
19th century. The Wild
Pony Roundup, being more picturesque, continues today, documented colorfully in
Marguerite Henry’s famous Misty of
Chincoteaguebook. 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 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; big-headed
straight-shouldered long-backed… a trace of Arabian…a dash of mustang… some
eleven hand Shetland types… 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 digress for a moment.
Horse Color 101 for the Horse-impaired: Horses
have two color genes: red and 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. Bay is brown with black points. Chestnut is any shade
of light to medium red-brown, and some colors like chocolate and liver, points
same color or lighter than the body. Diluting chestnut gives you palomino,
golden with white mane and tail. Diluting bay gets you buckskin,
golden with black points. (Dun, which looks exactly like buckskin, and
some champagnes, which look exactly like palomino, are a whole ‘nother set of
genes.) Diluting those farther
gets you cremello and perlino. “White” horses are usually grey (starts as a
normal horse color, then greys out like humans do as they age), except on
Assateague (greys are rare to non-existent), where white horses are actually
pintos with extremely small amounts of color (like a tiny bit on the head or
tail)… or perlinos or cremellos. Most of the ponies are of the Tobiano pinto
pattern (can be any color, it’s the pattern of white we’re talking about). It
looks nothing like a spotted dog or the cow that gave you your Ben and Jerry’s
Cherry Garcia.
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 (epic fade). 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, umpteen kinds of 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 (they’re actually limited to keeping
about 150 on the island).
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, a sort of scraggly lot, like refugees
from a pirate film. 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…
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. 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, galloping 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 typical 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… 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 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). 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, buy people who basically thought about the direction they wanted
to go.
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, a hundred 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.
RSS Feed
