Heavy Horses -- Jethro Tull

In these dark towns folk lie sleeping
As the heavy horses thunder by
To wake the dying city
With the living horseman's cry

At once the old hands quicken ---
Bring pick and wisp and curry comb ---
Thrill to the sound of all
The heavy horses coming home.

I'm posting this song today for two reasons.

1.) My friend Pam of Stardust Organics is pursuing a project to promote draft horses and carriage horses as both living history and our living future.

2.) Up in New York, my carriage driving brethren have a hearing tomorrow on two bills in NYC City Council. One proposes to ban all horse carriages in NYC. The other would give the carriage horses and drivers a fare raise. You can read more about it at these blogs: centralparkcarriagehorses and thewhiffletreenyc



Heavy horses
By jethro tull

Iron-clad feather-feet pounding the dust
On October's day, towards evening
Sweat-embossed veins standing proud to the plough
Salt on a deep chest, seasoning
Last of the line at an honest day's toil
Turning the deep sod under
Flint at the fetlock, chasing the bone
Flies at the nostrils plunder.

The Suffolk, the Clydesdale, the Percheron vie
With the Shire on his feathers floating
Hauling soft timber into the dusk
To bed on a warm straw coating.

Heavy horses, move the land under me
Behind the plough gliding --- slipping and sliding free
Now you're down to the few
And there's no work to do
The tractor's on its way.

Let me find you a filly for your proud stallion seed
To keep the old line going.
And we'll stand you abreast at the back of the woods
Behind the young trees growing
To hide you from eyes that mock at your girth,
Youre eighteen hands at the shoulder

And one day when the oil barons have all dripped dry
And the nights are seen to draw colder
Theyll beg for your strength, your gentle power
Your noble grace and your bearing
And youll strain once again to the sound of the gulls
In the wake of the deep plough, sharing.

Standing like tanks on the brow of the hill
Up into the cold wind facing
In stiff battle harness, chained to the world
Against the low sun racing
Bring me a wheel of oaken wood
A rein of polished leather
A heavy horse and a tumbling sky
Brewing heavy weather.

Bring a song for the evening
Clean brass to flash the dawn
Across these acres glistening
Like dew on a carpet lawn
In these dark towns folk lie sleeping
As the heavy horses thunder by
To wake the dying city
With the living horseman's cry

At once the old hands quicken ---
Bring pick and wisp and curry comb ---
Thrill to the sound of all
The heavy horses coming home.

Iron-clad feather-feet pounding the dust
On October's day, towards evening
Sweat-embossed veins standing proud to the plough
Salt on a deep chest, seasoning
Bring me a wheel of oaken wood
A rein of polished leather
A heavy horse and a tumbling sky
Brewing heavy weather.

Heavy horses, move the land under me
Behind the plough gliding --- slipping and sliding free
Now you're down to the few
And there's no work to do
The tractor's on its way.

Arctic Exercize

Tom trots 'round...


...and 'round...


...and 'round...


...and 'round...

It was 18 degrees yesterday in Philadelphia, so all of the carriage horses at 76 were tucked snugly in their nice, warm stalls inside the barn. It was so cold outside that there was ice on the insides of the wooden barn doors where the condensation from the horses' breath had frozen to it. And the horses put off enough heat that my glasses steamed up when I went in from the mid-teens temperatures after having free-longued Tom.

Regardless of the weather, though, the horses must get their exercize rather than being cooped up all the time, so I spent yesterday walking and longuing the 11 horses that aren't on turnout right now. It frigid enough, though, that even the most enthusiastic of yard-goers was ready to return to the warmth after only 10 to 15 minutes of exercize.

All this frozen tundra-cize must have worked up an appetite, though, because the boys were more than ready for their feed, supplemented by a nice warm bran mash. (Or maybe they're all just hungry as a, um, horse.)



Trump, Rex, Tom and Bill eagerly await their hot dinners.

This was the kind of happy day with the horses that reaffirms my belief that I have the coolest (and at times the coldest) job in the world.

Tomorrow we'll be back downtown, after being confined to the barn since Tuesday, because it shall be a balmy 35.

You wanted a Proletarian carriage tour?

(Pete is not advocating Marxist revolution.)

Recently, a mother and her two young children came up to me downtown wanting to pet my carriage horse, the amazingly cute and handsome Pete.

She said that they would love to take a carriage ride, but, unfortunately, her husband had vetoed that idea, claiming that carriage rides were "too bourgeois."

I shrugged, but I wanted to add that if anything we were "too aristocratic." After all, the vis-a-vis is the carriage of royalty.



Carriage rides might also be construed as rural or agrarian or even "developing world."



But "bourgeois"? Really? BOURGEOIS?

A tour by minivan is "bourgeois."

Pete thinks these are "bourgeois":



--------
Photo 1: (by thedrafthorse) Pete on the Street.
Photo 2: The Queen's Royal Carriage (Though I guess it's technically a Landau...but the passengers sit face-to-face: Vis-a-vis!)
Photo 3: This lovely horse in Georgia by Henning(i) is courtesy of flickr's Creative Commons.
Photo 4: (by thedrafthorse) Pete surveys the quack attack.

By the Arc de Triomphe

by the arc de triomphe
Originally uploaded by span

Yet another carriage sighting in Paris by way of flickr. This time, we find ourselves in the middle of the Mother of All Traffic Circles--the Place d'Etoile. (One of the pluses of climbing to the top of the Arc de Triomphe, in a addition to the view, is watching the motorists below navigate the 8-lane, 12-street intersection below.)

Going around even the outside of Logan Circle with a single horse at a walk makes my lines a little clammy. I can only imagine taking the Place d'Etoile at the trot with a pair.

The photo raises a question, though. It shows the carriage and newlyweds on the innermost lane of the traffic circle. How many times did they have to go 'round before they got out? Did they end up braving the Champs Elysees?

Those beautiful black horses with their long team pole seem to be saying, "Attention, Monsieur SmartCar! Nous sommes les heritiers des palefreniers du Moyen Age. Nous vous percerons d'un coup de lance!" ("Look out, Mr. SmartCar! We are the descendants of medieval warhorses. We'll run you through with our lance!")

Happy circling!

Gentrification, then... Aristocratization?

Our carriage company sits in an increasingly-dense forest of half-million dollar townhouses and condominiums. They're springing up like dandelions this spring. Already, we've been in a battle with the construction guys across the street over where they park their backhoe (Answer: NOT in my boss's parking space next to the yard the horses use for R&R).

Daily movements to and from work are a maze of blocked streets, cement mixers, backhoes, and a particularly aggressive construction-cantina-on-wheels driver. Getting hay in and manure out is a headache.

So, it was with great amusement that I read this article in that great fake news source, The Onion:

Report: Nation's Gentrified Neighborhoods Threatened By Aristocratization

WASHINGTON—According to a report released Tuesday by the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, the recent influx of exceedingly affluent powder-wigged aristocrats into the nation's gentrified urban areas is pushing out young white professionals, some of whom have lived in these neighborhoods for as many as seven years.

[...]

"A three-block section of [Chicago neighborhood] Wicker Park that once accommodated eight families, two vintage clothing stores, a French cleaners, and a gourmet bakery has been completely razed to make way for a private livery stable and carriage house," Kennedy said. "The space is now entirely unusable for affordable upper-income condominium housing. No one can live there except for the odd stable boy or footman who gets permission to sleep in the hayloft."

Be sure and read the whole article.

Maybe aristocratization would help the horse and carriage business, after all.

This has been your bit of random sillyness for the day, brought to you by thedrafthorse.com.

The photo of Scott and Rex on Fourth Street is brought to you by b a r t on flickr.com.

There you have it, folks...

IMG_1328
Originally uploaded by inaki_goni

A horse and carriage giving tours in Paris.

But wait, flickr reveals more...

IMG_3207
Originally uploaded by oxfraudm

Here's another image of the horse and carriage on the Champs du Mars... Looks like a Shire... and it DOES like look they're giving tours.

My sympathies are with the driver dealing with the bleak midwinter. She's just got to make it a few months, and then it will be April in Paris. Mmmmmmm...

Just too cool.

Mais, OUI!

Horse and carriage
Originally uploaded by FL370

I was surfing through pictures on flickr.com, and I did a double take just like the lady on the bench, here, but that carriage is absolutely. right. where. it. belongs.

I don't know who the people driving the carriage are, or what they're doing on the Champs de Mars, or whether this is one-time or regular thing, but I do hope it's a regular thing. It would be so nice to welcome more horses back into Paris. (And, it would be a positive thing to welcome carriages into the enlightened City of Light just as the PETA nuts are trying to ban them in NYC...)

I rather fondly remember studying abroad in Paris in 2000, and on the early mornings in the spring that I rode the 89 bus across town, getting stuck behind the ponies in the bus lane on the rue Vaugirard, on their way to work in the Luxembourg Gardens.

Eh, bon...

Un tour en caleche autour du tour Eiffel?

Urban Cowboys

Tyheed and Abdul (13 and 11) riding well-kept urban quarter horses provided by Al Lynch. They are wearing anti-gun violence T-shirts Photo by Sarah Nassauer of the Wall Street Journal.


I don't know if you've ever seen Google maps' street view feature, but check out this view captured of West Cambria St. and N. 17th.

The urban cowboys of Philadelphia are a long-standing, but increasingly threatened, tradition, here. You can read an interesting article about them that was published in the Wall Street Journal. The slide show is particularly interesting (I've borrowed the above image from it)--such lovely horses! One can only hope that the new mayoral adminstration will be friendly to the equines and their owners (and maybe even bring back the mounted police).

Horseback-riding and equine husbandry programs have long been used to remedy the plight of urban youth (one notable example is the Kentucky Horse Park's Mustang Troop), and therapeutic riding programs have demonstrated the healing and healthful effects of human-horse contact. So, why be in such a hurry to drive out these wonderful equine Philadelphians?

The road to the future is not a superhighway, or a cul-de-sac lined with tract mansions, or a new block of condominiums--it most likely is a bridle path.

It's a horse world, after all

Yet another fantastic organization from our friends in France:

Equiterra

For those who don't read French (and the English-language version is done by Babelfish, and thus is largely unintelligible), suffice it to say that their gorgeous logo pretty much sums it up.

I'll have to translate their beautiful mission statement later. Or maybe I'll just have to email them and offer to translate their site for them.



A lovely photo of Bill the horse in Philadelphia traffic from katie.brothers on flickr.com.

An update, on many fronts...

It's been a while since I last updated my blog or my website (before Christmas! Egad!). In the interim, we were very busy at work with the holiday, then Peter and I headed home to Kentucky for a couple of weeks of R & R (and visiting our other equine friends at the Horsiest Place on Earth). Then, my laptop's hard-drive became terminally ill. So... Now I'm back (I still have to reload Dreamweaver on my computer...The hard-drive transplant wiped ALL of my programs and saved only my data).

Several months ago, I wrote about a fantastic blog by Jean-Leo Dugast, percheron-international.blogspot.com. More recently, I linked to an article about the use of urban horses in France. Percheron-International has a new post about Lasso-du-Jardin, a Breton cob gelding who collects recycling in Trouville-sur-Mer. You really must go to Percheron-International to see Jean-Leo's marvelous photos of Lasso in action.

For those who don't read French, here's a translation of the text from Percheron-International.

This title of "accrocheur" does not refer to Lasso-du-Jardin's age. At only nine years old and with two years of professional experience, one could say that Lasso is nothing but a neophyte.

If he "takes up the bottle," it is those bottles of the restaurants and cafes from the city of Trouville-sur-Mer in the Calvados. Seven years ago, the municipality put into place an empty-bottle collection service - Wednesdays for local residents and Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays for commercial establishments.

Lasso-du-Jardin is gradually replacing Festival-de-Mai (May Day), a 15-year-old Percheron gelding who inaugurated the service. Three people, Christelle, Pascal and Sebastien, supervise the four-legged municipal employees, and take turns on the recycling routes.

Trouville, like nearby Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives, is one of the cities spearheading the effort to use draft horses in an urban setting. Today, there are 70 cities in France that use horses for maintaining green spaces, collecting garbage and providing surveillance. This number is growing rapidly.

After only having year after year of hopes without concrete realization, the urban horse is finally taking off. Urban drafts, forestry drafts, agricultural drafts--draft horses give us a message of hope: hope of a world where one can "work differently to live better."

Jean-Leo Dugast, percheron-international.blogspot.com