OK - introductions.
This is Birkir (as far as I can tell - ed.: well, I couldn't - I'm informed by the person who brushes him that he's Naskur). He lives on Butternut Farm with my good friends Chuck and Nancy near East Burke, Vermont.
He comes from a very unique breed of the equine family, the Icelandic Pony.
According to Nancy, who should know (better than most anyone on the North American continent) the breed is incredibly tough, adapted for survival in the hard-scrabble of Iceland.
Icelandic ponies are notably intelligent. Small, tough, they can pretty much be left out in all but the most vicious weather and they'll trot around happy as clams at high tide.
A rider has to be very flexible and clear - they will take advantage of any indecision to take control and correct the rider's gaffe.
They have evolved to exist quite famously on pretty much anything - that is to say, they'll eat anything they can Indian wrestle down their gullets.
Not only hay but lichen, moss, seaweed, straw (which is different from hay, so I'm told), grass, tree bark - pretty much anything remotely vegetative (I'm sure Nancy will fire off a reply to correct me but my policy its that it's easier to apologize than look up facts first - this applies to runes as well as roughage).
To summarize Darwin - Natural Selection doesn't favor the strong or the clever - it favors the adaptable. I feel better already.
This is a fake train.
It runs around a local Mall. It has a dinger, a train horn and wooden cars.
It costs $3 or so to ride and apparently hit a deaf person on its first day of operation. A good business is done with parents whose children ride on their own. The parents walk along beside either taking pictures or saying "you're riding the train! Just like Thomas! Choo Choooooo! Isn't this fun?"
And why are they together?
Well, Nancy informs me that you can kill an Icelandic pony by feeding it the same grain and hay you would a quarter horse. All horses are adapted to get nutrients from hay. Her husband Chuck tells me he cuts their hay after it has gone to seed because most of the nutrients have gone into the seed which gets lost during the process. This means that the horse isn't flooded with more protein than it can handle.
The ponies might get a half-cup of supplemental grain.
A quarter horse might get a quart.
And the children?
Riding a fake train is like hay given to the ponies. It's a denatured experience, it's not really the same thing as a real train.
When I was five or so my parents put me on one of the last passenger trains to leave Tulsa's wonderful Union Station. I was quite alone on a sunny Oklahoma morning - something tells me it was Sunday. The conductor was charged to look after me, I was given a hug and they waved at me as the train pulled out.
My folks piled into their car and raced the train to the station in Claremore (town of my birth at the Indian Hospital) and were waiting when the conductor walked me to the door.
The fact they could beat the train 20 miles to Claremore might be one of the reasons passenger service was on its way out - but that's another story.
Children - all of us - need real experiences - real stories. You can look at a flower on an iPad and define it. If the experience is to enjoy and sense the beauty of a flower you need to see it in the wild - if the experience is defining and looking up info and exercising your mind then the iPad is the real experience.
Perhaps a wooden train will serve until you take a child onto a real train. A pony has to have its grain slightly denatured because it brings so much to the digestive party it really doesn't need more than that.
A Quarter horse needs all the help it can get.
People do better with the real thing - externally, sensorily - or internally, introspectively.
What we share with each other - how we carry each other ..... well, that's another story.
Portland, Maine
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