Sometimes it takes getting hit pretty hard by reality for one to get the assumptions knocked out of them. As our program develops and expands the tension between looking "nice" and being authentic has never been stronger. I am willing to spend what I must and work as hard as I can for projects that increase our educational capability or for those that are functional in protecting and providing for the animals.
I will not spend a penny or lift a finger for "improvements" that would make us look like a petting zoo. It is even more important for our operation to be real, honest, and authentic than it would be for others. We routinely do things that are not viewed as possible. Children tame and train wild horses, crippled horses are healed and ridden thousands of miles without further problems, a fifteen year old stallion is trained to saddle and takes to the woods as if he had been doing it all of his life, a ten year old boy with cerebral palsy becomes the first person to mount a small string of wild horses, formerly wild mustangs approach visitors to be handled, and ridden, some of the oldest and rarest distinct genetic grouping of American horses, rare colonial goats and chickens walk around visitors' feet, hams and smoked meat hang from a real smokehouse where they were cured---yes that is real. That is what we do.
That is why we can never take a single step to make our facility look like a Bush Gardens exhibit.
This weekend a family of city people spent much of the afternoon at the horse lot. They were mesmerized by the sights, smells, and sounds of a real agricultural operation--an operation as real as the horses that I ride, the eggs that I eat and the hogs that I raise, slaughter and eat.
Dan has built a beautiful kiosk that will advance our educational efforts immeasurably. It will be impossible to look at the structure and not walk over to see what is posted on it. One cannot look at the smokehouse without asking about it.
Education does not begin with answers. Real education begins with questions. I want all of our visitors to be filled with questions that they can't keep to themselves. I want them to feel like they are going to explode if someone does not answer their question, "What's that?"
I bet if you pulled into our horse lot and saw the structure in the picture above you would ask the first person that you saw at the horse lot, "What's that?"
On the other hand if you pulled into the horse lot and saw an beautiful, modern visitors center you question would just as likely be , "Where are the soda machines?"
(Don't worry we won't be having any soda machines.)
(But don't drink out of the horse trough..)
ReplyDeleteI am re-reading Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear Saga, with it's rich collection of skills and crafts that were critical to daily life some 10000 years ago, and I think of the Anthropologists and Archaeologists who seek out and discover, and piece together what life for primitive peoples must have been like, (and their grad student slave labor)and it gives me a warm and happy feeling knowing that a 1000 years from now somebody is going to dig up the horse lot (Probably a construction site for a strip mall or something equally dumb) and it will confuse the daylights out of them. I enjoy that sort of irony...
Speaking of archaeological pursuits..oftentimes the real answers are to be had simply by scratching the surface...a single bifacially worked arrow head leads to an entire settlement's history, Things are much the same at Mill Swamp, someone who simply saw the place with no one around may think that it is a poor grade of scrapyard...but as Steve points out above the beauty is just beneath the skin, The priority is the experience, knowledge, welfare of the horses, and the memories built, not in shiny white fences and manicured grass...such things are for golf courses. (potential pastures..ashes to ashes..)
Imagine, Just imagine, if a person could mine the memories of a place as an archaeologist does..uncovering Century after Eon of actual memories from a given place..Stonehenge, a little stretch of prarie beside the Greasy Grass River...and thousands of others, right back to darkest Africa and the beginning of man some 65,000 years or so ago...Mill Swamp would be one of the bright points, the memories laid down here are those of the most valuable sort, the currency of the soul as it were, more valuable than any physical collection, and, as Steve says, you can do it, all it takes to start is one horse, and one kid, and off like a rocket from there.
I have said before that Mill Swamp is a unique place in this world, in the face of societal norms, we are an anomaly, Who in their right mind would put a child on a wild horse? Well...For some reason, I don't think we will be totally unique in that sense for very long, I also don't think that the use of wild Spanish horses in such an endeavor will be very unique for very long. Those memories, rolling back through the centuries...I think I can feel Sitting Bull and Black Elk, Crazy Horse, and Geronimo smiling down across the years..The ponies that were the core of their lives will pass on to other generations. It is a good thing. -Lloyd