Celebrating Horse, Hound and Wine
A few months ago some friends clued me in on the annual Horse, Hound, and Wine Festival in Bedford County at Peaks of Otter Winery. The horse part of this festival is a Parade of Horses with each participant getting the opportunity to display their breed, brag on it, and then allow festival goers to make nice with the pretty ponies.
Well, we have pretty ponies and we also like wine a little so we contacted the horse coordinator and opened a dialog. I offered to bring a Davenport Arabian. She countered with the Straight Egyptian that Mark Burke brings every year. My response was that Davenports are an entirely different animal from Egyptians while crossing my fingers tightly behind my back. I also offered to bring a brood mare with foal at side and dress in tribal garb.
It must have been the promise of a baby, everyone loves babies, and baby horses are real crowd pleasers, because we were officially invited to participate. About two months later, when we had pretty much forgotten all about the affair, a letter arrived containing four complementary tickets, a map, and a short description of what was expected.
I decided that showing a mare and foal at liberty to the Rolling Stone’s rendition of Brown Sugar would be a hit so made plans for this. Four summer slaves would be stationed around the arena with empty plastic grocery bags or soda cans full of pennies, their job to shake up the horses and get more action out of them. I would be in the arena with them, charging around in my sweat-soaked burka waving a longe whip and wailing a Bedouin war chant.
We were ready! Everyone was psyched up for a sterling performance, including Patina and Patent Pending. Patent Pending, AKA Max, watched his momma get a shampoo and marcell and then step confidently onto the trailer. He rolled his eyes when asked to do the same but when four of us converged on him to lift him bodily into his coach, he played the better part of valor and jumped up beside momma like the trooper he will one day be.
An hour later we arrived at the festival grounds and discovered that the arena I had been envisioning was nothing more than a few rolls of drift fence tied to T-posts! The show we had so carefully planned would have consisted of a mare and her son smashing through the drift fence and heading for the Peaks of Otter at warp speed.
After a lightening change of plans, we decided that it would be far safer, if a lot more boring if we just walked them around the ring a few times while the announcer read our material over the loudspeaker. All in all, it went just fine, everyone behaved perfectly and Max even managed to kick up his heels a little much to the delight of the crowd.
Afterwards we talked to people who were interested in Arabs and thrilled to be able to play with a friendly little fellow who by this time was exhausted and asleep with his head resting atop the drift fence. We then walked mom and pup back to our trailer, allowed them to drink and graze a little then loaded them up for the ride home. Fortunately the trailer was in full shade and the two of them were quite content to nibble hay and drowse in the afternoon warmth while we humans headed off to the festival.
We tasted quite a few wines, mostly made from various and sundry fruits, none much better than Weyr Wine actually. They were even serving wine made from jalapeño peppers! There should be a law against this stuff but the younger crowd seemed to enjoy sipping fire then licking aerosol cheese from their hands. I guess it takes all kinds….
We finally left for home when we discovered that the muskrat races that we had eagerly anticipated actually consisted of two men in a john boat dragging a stuffed sock in the pond while an eager muskrat dog leaped off the bank and pursued and captured it. Two rounds of soggy sock and frantic dog inspired us to rise as a single organism and head for the rig and home.
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