Living With Horses (or Ponies)

Point Roberts, the land of gas stations and Icelandic ponies. The gas stations are there not because the ponies run on gas, but because the Canadian government lays a sizeable tax on gasoline in its country and not even the burden of crossing the border is sufficient disincentive for driving down to the Point to fill up. In Canada, gas costs around $1.10/liter; in Pt. Roberts, it costs about $3.50/gallon. Because the U.S. and Canadian dollars are about the same now, Canadians save slightly less than a dollar/gallon (assuming they don't use credit cards to pay for the gas and thus get hit with an additional 2-3% charge for the effrontery of buying in a different currency). Also, they have someplace to drive to once they get back across the border. Like Los Angeles, Vancouver is a commuter’s game, though not a paradise because Vancouver decided long ago not to build any rapid, freeway-type access through town. There are highways around Vancouver, but once off the highways, it’s traffic all the time, everywhere, as far as I can tell.

Here on the Point, once again, not so much. I can walk from north to south and from east to west if I really had to, I suspect. A local contractor, who retired from Seattle and opened a new frontier here, felt a need to buy a red Hummer once he moved to Pt. Roberts. Periodically I get a chance to drive on the local road ahead of Hummer Bill and I make absolutely sure at those times that I am driving just below the speed limit (which is probably 30 m.p.h.)…well, maybe a little more than just below. Actually, way below. It’s my way of reminding him of where he is, a fact he doesn’t otherwise seem to grasp.

Where we are is in a very slow speed place. It is the kind of place where you might have horses, but not the kind of horses that race across the plains, not the kind of Arabians in ‘The Black Stallion” that race down the beaches in wild abandon. Here we have Icelandic ponies: wide, short, heavy-coated, stubborn horses that eat and amble. I have no idea how many of these ponies there are on the Point, but you see groups of 3-7 of them in fields all around. And you see them on the road, meandering along, ridden almost always by girls or young women, obstructing Hummer Bill's passage, no doubt. They are here because the original settlers of Point Roberts (the original White settlers, that is) were from Iceland by way of Vancouver Island. I guess they brought the horses with them and they have thrived here, even though we're not much like Iceland, I'd think.

Recently, a neighbor decided to take in a trio of ponies and I got to learn a little about horses and their needs. First of all, they seem to need to go somewhere else. The first few months of the ponies’ residence involved their picking up the fences by putting their heads underneath and pulling the fence up and then strolling out and away down the road. Finer fences simply produced new ways of putting their heads under to remove the offending bars. One of my quilting students, herself an owner of ponies, says to me, ‘They’re herd animals. They’re just looking for some more of themselves.’ And sure enough, it would not be hard for them to find other ponies to visit: down the road, turn left and walk three blocks and there are some more of them right there. They can’t cross the border because they have no passports and they don't like the ocean, so even wandering around, like us, they are not really going anywhere.

My student also says of them, ‘They like to eat.’ And eat they did; in no time at all, all the lush grass in the big meadow in which they were (more or less) enclosed, went away. Horses, it seems, like chickens, will just eat and eat and eat, as long as there is something for them to eat. And finally, she says, ‘They like attention.’ And when the field owners went away for awhile and those attention levels dropped, the ponies simply chose, in a fit of irritation, to eat all the bark off the apple trees that were enclosed with them, thus killing the trees.

So, that’s what I’ve learned about horses via the Icelandic ponies. They are a lot more like people than I would have thought.