1 post tagged “amish”
I have been reading Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetible, Miracle" and enjoying it very much. She is one of my favorite authors, and she is singing to the choir in this book (of course), but I would have preferred for the book to be a tiny bit more candid. So far in their year of sustainable local eating there are no "aha" moments, or funny mishaps. Still, the book is a marvelous introduction to sustainable seasonal eating (complete with recipes) and after reading tonight of the family's visit to Amish friends, who still work the farm with draft horses, and use standardbreds for the buggy, I've been thinking even more about my crazy idea of living somewhere where I could get around by pony cart much of the time. I've also been reading Orion magazine's online version, specifically James Howard Kuntsler's article "Making Other Arrangements" and if things go along the lines of Kuntsler's predictions we really might want to think about bringing back the horse as a good transportation alternative for the short haul.
Okay, yes, I am a horse nut, I admit it. It has long been a goal of mine to figure out a way to have them as part of my life again. But I may not be crazy here. After all, it was the horse, not the bycycle or the car, that made it possible for man to traverse almost every land mass on our small blue/green planet. For the majority of our history the horse was man's way of travelling, and farming, and in that time man put his hand in breeding horses for specific purposes - and we still have those horses with us today. The majority of Amish still use large heavy draft horses for most of their farming needs (and they live and feed themselves from these farms quite nicely thank you) and they have the lighter, long legged standardbreds (bred specifically to trot and trot fast) for traveling by buggy. According to Wikipedia the horse can travel about 25 miles before needing significant rest, which means I wouldn't make it to my mom's house in a day, but then I couldn't make it from Long Beach to West Hills via horse even if I really wanted to. Not as things are set up now, but I could certainly go almost every other place I need to go to run errands - if only the infrastructure were in place.
Kunstler's latest article "Making Other Arrangements" points out that not only have we passed peak oil production in most of our world's oil fields, but our newer technology means we can suck it out of the ground more quickly so we can consume it all the faster. Yikes. He points out that the tracks for passenger trains still criss cross our large country, though most of them are rusting and unmaintained. We need to have safe mass transit, and we need to stop thinking of the car as our right and priviledge just to go get a quart of milk.
When I was a child and taking riding lessons at the beloved "Lucky B" stable in Hollydale (a tiny blot of a city inside the city of Paramount) there was a set of twins who shared the ownership and care of a beautiful Morgan mare. The Morgan is a distinctly American breed of amazing versatility and they were known to be great driving horses. These days Morgans are driven only for the show ring, but thinking back on those twin sisters speeding at a wicked trot down the riverbed training their mare for the show ring, I think it would be a marvelous way to travel.
