Horse Progress Days, Day 2

Horses chatting away at Horse Progress Days.
The white & yellow stripe tent and the
plain white tent are both filled with horses.

Saturday at Horse Progress Days was very similar to Friday.  The schedule displayed almost all the same events in a slightly different order.

While Yanni took a morning nap on my back, I listened to the Human Health Q&A in the Homemakers Tent.  The rest of the day I tackled my own tent's homemaking need: laundry.  We were about to run out of cloth diapers and our dirty clothes pile was starting to dwarf the clean clothes.  Ryan generously lent me his rental car to drive to town in search of a laundromat.  Nico kept Moisés at the event and I packed a lunch and took Yanni to town.

Bike and scooter parking at Horse Progress Days.

We pushed all our loads through the machines and ate our lunch.  Yanni bopped around the laundromat and I reveled in the contentment of hitting the "refresh button" on our clothing resources.  As we made our way back to Horse Progress Days, dark clouds threatened from overhead.  The closer I got to the event, the more the streets were filled with people, homeward bound, walking or riding bikes and scooters, and horses clip-clopping along.  I was filled with excitement to see a model of living where it was possible to not own a car in the United States.

A normal street in Holland with separated bike lane
and sidewalk. There is an identical bike lane and
sidewalk going in the other direction on the other side.

When we visited Nico's brother in Holland a year and a half before, my view of human transportation possibilities had been shifted.  I felt the difference that culture makes.  If the culture builds suburban sprawls, emphasizes highways, and has virtually no public transportation options entering or leaving a city with two universities (cough, Harrisonburg), it is very difficult to live without a car.  And if everyone has a car, it's easier to pop up more suburban sprawls, necessary to build more highways, and logical to let go of more public transportation options between cities and across state borders.  But!  What if a culture has trains that shuttle people between any two cities multiple times a day and major roads have car lanes separated from bike lanes separated from sidewalks, as in Holland?  Or as in Amish country, what if the culture has structures and traditions supporting horse and bike culture?  In these instances I can feel the reality that another way is possible.  It really struck me to realize that the vast majority of these folks passing me in the street in droves hadn't left modern American culture to create horse and bike culture from scratch... this is all they've ever known.  And they hold onto it intentionally, knowing full well that alternatives are present.

Lightning and thunder were coming upon us fast.  People ran for cover in the huge barns.  Nico had gone to take our tent down, but when I realized how quickly the storm was coming, the boys and I ran to tell him to forget about it and take refuge with us and the others in the barn.  By the time the boys and I got to the tent it was too late for our family to make it back to the barn.  The storm rolled in and deluged the grounds, canceling the last couple hours of events.  We weathered the downpour in our tent, which did amazingly well keeping us bone dry, as long as Nico was holding up the sides to keep them from folding in the strong wind!

After 15 or 20 minutes, we poked our heads out to see only a light drizzle and made our way back to the grounds to see what was left of the event.  Nico met another fellow "English" man (this is the term Amish use for non-Amish... imagine a Greco-Peruvian being called "English"!) who was willing to take us to the train station in Lancaster on his way out of town the next day.

Jack, probably in his 60's, and his 6-year-old nephew Zach picked us up bright and early the next morning.  They had a large pick-up truck with one available seat inside, a folding chair open in the truck bed, and an RV pulled behind.  I sat in the cab with Yanni, and Nico and Moisés took the outside seating.  Zach was a cute, energetic kid who sometimes overwhelmed his slow and steady uncle.  Nico described to me later how he had seen Jack among the first people he encountered at Horse Progress Days.  Jack had a beard and similar clothing to the Amish and Mennonite folks Nico was expecting to see, but his eyes were caught off guard by Jack's shirt: every button open and his belly hanging out.  Not to mention his leather motorcycle cap, which was absolutely not made of straw.  Apparently he wasn't as worried as we were about fitting in as well as we could.  :)

As the uncle-nephew duo dropped us off at the Lancaster train station, Jack told us in his slow West Virginian drawl,

"I've never ridden the train.  One time I told my friend, 'I'm gonna buy a pinstripe suit and ride the train to St. Louis.  I'm just gonna run around St. Louis all day in my pinstripe suit.'  She asked, 'Now Jack, why would you wanna do a thing like that?' and I told her, 'Because it would be fun as hell!'  I came back the next day and she told me, 'Ya know Jack, Louise and I talked it over and decided you're right, that would be fun as hell.'  So I told her, 'And I'll buy you a parasol! We could just run around St. Louis for a day, me in a pinstripe suit and you with a parasol!'"

He paused and shrugged, "We never did it.  She died a few years back."  After another pause he repeated, "I would buy her a parasol.  It would be fun as hell."  Then he smiled.  He smiled as if it didn't matter that they never went, as if contemplating the idea of going was as fun as having a memory of actually accomplishing it.  I love this story.  I still don't know whether to laugh or cry.