Saturday Afternoon at a Rescue

Originally Published November 16, 2021

They were getting blankets on the horses before sundown, on those without winter coats, and those recently from the auction. The donkeys were less of a concern.  Hearty and thick with fur, they watched with detached amusement.  

Debbie has run this rescue operation for years.  With the air of a battlefield nurse, she ignores our offer to help and goes back to blanketing.  She has no time for us or for the single volunteer today.  Decisions have to be made quickly.  There are 40 equines, including a dozen donkeys.   Some will be adopted out. Others won’t make it.  Some will stay indefinitely, watching the new ones come and go.

Ten years ago there were approximately 148,000 equines sent to slaughter.  Last year there were approximately 14, 000.  In the interim, US slaughter houses were banned, Canada stopped taking equines due to the prevalence of drugs, most commonly Phenylbutazone or “Bute,” commonly administered to US horses for pain.  The rest were sent to Mexico to experience the most primitive and grisly of deaths.

The market for horses at auction is a complex one.  There are private buyers, rescue organizations and kill buyers.  Some private buyers may in fact be buying to “fatten up” and later sell to a kill buyer.  Some kill buyers may be purchasing at the “per pound” price only to resell to a private buyer. Some rescue organizations may not truly be able to handle the horses they adopt. All of this raises ethical questions, even among the most dedicated horse lovers, for which there is really no good answer.

Chincoteague

We expected to be surrounded by the Chincoteague ponies for which this barrier island is famous. However it’s November now, and they have moved inland.  They appear when only you are not looking, say, outside your camper first thing in the morning.

Assateague is a national park and at great pains to protect the ponies.  Speed limits are fifteen miles an hour.  Visitors are instructed to stay a schoolbus length away.  Visitors to the park live in a kind of parallel universe, generally unnoticed by the ponies.  There is a sense of removal.

In July it’s total mayhem here as the Salt Water Cowboys drive the ponies from Assateague Island to Chincoteague Island. It’s a three minute event generating much fanfare, followed by an annual auction to thin out the herd. 

The rest of the year it’s quiet.  In the summer the ponies lounge on the beach, while tourists battle the horse flies.  Grazing is plentiful, and attention is closely paid by the park staff to those showing signs of trouble.  Keeping the herd manageable level, mares are darted with PZP, a birth control method.

During our visit the winds grew stronger and the temperatures continued to drop, and so we found ourselves one of the last campers to remain at the campsite. We hunkered down in Olive, turned on the furnace, and thought about playing Honeymoon Bridge.

Originally Published November 11, 2021

Chesapeake

“Do you hear that sound?”  He had a satellite dish outside his RV, and watched the naval station.  “It’s the hovercraft.”  We rushed down to the dock.  There was a sunset, the hum of the large freighters, small fishermen returning to the dock, but no hovercraft.  We had heard sounds all day - pairs of F35’s, helicopters performing maneuvers just offshore, confounding looking planes flying low, and in the distance, an occasional sailboat would appear while a vapor trail scratched the sky.

Chesapeake Bay is a nexus of strategic, commercial significance. Every day a line of freighters sits outside the ports on inland side, a sign of the “supply chain” bottle neck.  One wonders how long they will wait for the results of the new infrastructure bill.  On the Del Marva Penninsula side, the consolidation of rail lines from New York and Philadelphia to ferries bringing one across the Bay to Virginia, and then on to Florida, were enormous, private ventures whose payoff was never fully realized, as the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel rendered the ferries, and to some extent the rail lines, obsolete, and a continual stream of trucks now easily crosses the bay. It was “disruption” twentieth century style.

Driving down the peninsula today, you see remnants of the earlier, pre-industrial landscape. There are intermittent cotton fields, long allayed driveways to retiring looking plantation houses, multiple small churches multiplied by denomination, class and other factors.  Between are gas stations, mini marts, boat dealers, fireworks shacks, cabins for rent, junk dealers and thrift shops.  It’s an economy struggling to catch a world passing it by at sixty miles an hour.

The sky here is larger, bluer and deeper as we head south.  Today when we went for our morning walk on the beach… there was the hovercraft.

Charting our Course

Charting our course between the “open-road” and having a place to sleep, so far we’ve avoided Walmart and Cracker Barrel. No doubt the time will come.

In North Carolina, we are trying to visit our friends, both furred and unfurred.  Leaving Massachusetts later than we liked, the fall weather is now bearing down on us, with every other day rainy and windy. Some days we hunker down in Olive listening to the rain on the roof, emerging like chickens from the shell at the end of the day. 

This morning we met a couple.  They had sold everything they owned except for what remained in the storage trailer behind their camper.  Gone were the house, her mother’s house, and her mother.  They were living in campgrounds now.  There was a sense of “Nomadland” in listening to her story, the need to tell me everything, hoping that the plot was holding together, where they shed everything until they were free from whatever they had left behind.

2021 RSS

The Kids are Alright

The two families camping across the way have five or six children between them.  The parents are young, in their thirties. The kids are home schooled.  They have been travelling for two years. 

The night we arrived, the kids were running around playing, shrieking with laughter.  This morning, an older one came out early, lit a hibachi, and crouched down to get warm.  Younger ones followed.  There were friendly exchanges. 

I asked the parents about the home schooling. There was no mention of religion, only that school turns people into factory workers. They had been dutiful students, they said, and were not about to subject their kids to the same thing.

What about the curriculum?  No, they said, there wasn’t one. They explored history every place they went. The rest took care of itself, with the oldest often acting as an instructor to the younger. 

What it must be like to be a child today with the incessant shower of commerce, media and technology. Here in the park, every morning is like a Saturday in 1960. 

Tucson

Tucson was her favorite. He arrived in the middle of the night squeezed into a three horse trailer with another yearling, a donk, a mini and an injured mare with her 6 month old colt. Equine Rescue Network had outbid the kill buyers at the largest auction house east of the Mississippi: the dreaded New Holland, PA Auction house. Like most of the equines dumped at New Holland, he was underweight, and his coat was dull and matted with rain-rot, still sporting the glued-on sticker that all poor souls are given when entering into the slaughter pipeline.

Before (January 2012) After (August 2013)

Tucson had clearly been handled as a foal, was halter trained and human friendly. Why such a fine young horse would so easily be tossed away is one of the many mysteries of the rescue world.

Today, Jenny visited with ten year old Tucson in Flemington, New Jersey where he lives with Elisa, his owner. It was another family reunion on our trip south to see old friends.

Grace Farms

We spent Sunday afternoon at Grace Farms in Connecticut with our friend, Sharon Prince, the Founder and CEO, on an 80-acre public space that supports nature, arts, justice, community, and faith. 

Sharon is a powerhouse of boundless positive energy, bringing together a group of extraordinary colleagues involved in countless initiatives, and creating an inclusive and friendly atmosphere for families, scholars, organizations and individuals.

At the center of the farm sits the River Building, designed by the Japanese firm SANAA along with the close collaboration of Sharon and Bob. It’s hard to describe the effect of this structure, which practically disappears into the landscape. The attention to detail, or rather the attention to eliminating detail, is heroic. The structure has been disguised, boundaries eliminated, soffits calculated, chair fabrics and curtains nearly dematerializing, and all in support of an atmosphere of quiet contemplation.

6:30 AM Charlestown Beach

There's a quiet anticipation this morning at the campground. The Rhode Island coast is magnificent, and as the sun gently rises, a tropical breeze blows hard, erasing all sense of time.

It was a late night last night at a premier fishing location. The striped bass have been close in the surf, and in the rip nearby fishing boats struggle to maneuver in the current. All here are friends, or maybe just friendly, the friendship of returning year after year. A ventured hello. Never a name mentioned, lest it be forgotten.

It’s a tropical, coastal, beach world. A fellow I see constantly, surely not the same one, grizzled, in waders, rides an electric bike down the beach with a milk cart on the back, poles upright. Moving up and down the beach to the birds and the bait, he moves again quietly when the fishing boats drive the fish away.

Waiting

After nearly a year of waiting, we are preparing to start our trip across the country to visit equine rescue homes and to observe wild mustang habitats. Olive, our beautiful airstream sits patiently in the yard waiting for her maiden voyage, after considerable modifications that allow her to be free of campgrounds and to park herself in the wild BLM lands out west. Solar panels, lithium batteries, water filters, cell signal boosters and other unmentionables, she is itching to travel.

Jenny has been carefully cataloging the bands, their stallion and mare leaders, their offspring and the realignments that occur every spring. We are gathering our snake proof boots and binoculars and readying ourselves for the vagabond life that lies ahead. Do we have a plan? Not really,….

Cam