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Musings of a Drive-by Hay HurlerNovember 24, 2005 Along the way I started sorting horse-sitting gigs into live-ins and drive-bys. "Live-in" doesn't mean living in the barn, though I did spend a couple of nights sleeping on a sofabed in a client's (heated) tackroom -- even had its own lavatory. It's the only sensible option when several horses and, especially, several feedings are involved. Two round-trips a day are doable, three is pushing it, and four is out of the question, especially when one of them's around 9:30 at night. This long weekend's job is a drive-by. Sally Noonan, a freelance writer-editor who knows her horses, wrote: "I can picture your drive-by job. You throw carrots and flakes of hay in the general vicinity of the horses, as you speed on by. Don't break any windows." The image swirled and morphed: two women in a pickup, one driving, one tossing flakes of hay from the bed . . . Unlike a forcefully hurled newspaper, a flake of hay isn't likely to break any windows, but the Boston Globe doesn't stick to your clothes and get in your boots either. And the little farm I'm looking after for the next few days is in a cul-de-sac off a well-rutted dirt road. Speeding isn't recommended -- Uhura Mazda has already had a central-support-bearing replacement in the less than three years I've had her, and a front-brake job looms in the near future: rutty, puddly roads do take their toll, even if you go dead slow. How about an Automatic Hay Machine? Put it on a timer and it could drop one, two, or three flakes of hay at specified intervals. No fuss, fewer drive-bys, no blades of hay clinging to all things fleecy . . . My bank has Automatic Teller Machines, a walk-up in Vineyard Haven, a drive-through in West Tisbury. I rarely use them. Rhodry won't let me, for one thing, because ATMs don't dispense biscuits the way the real tellers do. (Maybe Rhodry thinks of humans as Automatic Biscuit Machines that malfunction a lot. On the other hand, he's a Malamutt, so unpredictable behavior is part of the genetic program. He's fine with that, as long as he gets fed.) Me, I like a little genuine human interaction along with my cash or deposit slip. Too much interfacing with machines makes Jack a dull boy and Jill a dull girl. We start thinking that no-fuss, no-mess 100% predictability is a good thing, even something we're entitled to. Pretty soon we're voting for anyone who promises to make the trains run on time. Today I'm giving thanks for the wild cards, for all things unautomated, including Rhodry, Allie, and all the tellers at the M.V. Co-operative Bank.
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