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Fellow Traveller, Horse DogAugust 23, 2008 If there were a Working Horse Companion certification for dogs, Travvy would have earned a leg on it today. Most of the day I spent at the Crow Hollow Farm horse show, judging the trail class. I tethered Trav in the shade where he could see me most of the time, and filled a rubber feed pan with water. (He likes bowls and buckets that either cats or horses have recently eaten out of, and if some of their food is still there, so much the better.) So he was sort of an obstacle -- not a single horse or pony was fazed by the presence of a snoozing malamute a few feet from the trail -- as well as the judge's companion. Rhodry spent three and a half happy years as a Crow Hollow barn dog, but Trav had never been there before. For the first couple of hours, he screeched whenever I disappeared from sight. Then he decided the place was OK and I was coming back soon, so he settled back and waited. We took a late lunch break to run up to our midday horse-sitting job: giving Beeber the pony his lunch hay, picking out his paddock, watering the flowers, and taking three dogs for a walk in the woods. This is Trav's favorite part. The first time we looked after these guys, Trav was a little smaller than the smaller Springer spaniel. The second time he was catching up with the larger Springer. Now he's quite clearly the biggest one of the bunch. His favorite is still 10-pound Pip, a white who-knows-what, probably Maltese, Cairn terrier, and something else mix. Ordinarily I'm not a small-dog person, but Pip is the best. She flies. She runs so fast you can't see her legs, and her endurance is such that she follows her owner on long, brisk carriage drives through the woods. (When she gets tired, she gets to ride.) Then Trav and I returned to Crow Hollow, watched the last few trail class entries, pinned the class, and headed up to our barn. When I'm otherwise occupied (and hence boring), Trav often goes to visit his friend Tilly the Labradoodle. Whether it's due to selective deafness or my voice not carrying that far, he doesn't return when I bellow "Where's Travvy?" so I usually have to hike over the hill and bellow closer to Tilly's house. Today, though, he wandered off twice and I was sure I'd have to go get him -- but no, he came back on his own both times. Good puppy! He was one tired puppy by the time we got home and, as usual, he slept well. I'd heard that Crow Hollow was up for sale, yet another victim of rising land values and correspondingly escalating taxes, but it seems the prospects are not so dire: the owners are working hard on a plan that would turn it into a nonprofit and enable it to remain a lesson barn and horse camp. I hope they can pull it off. Crow Hollow is unique on the island these days, a throwback to the 4-H barns of yesteryear. There's no way it can be exactly the way Pond View or Scrubby Neck or Misty Meadows was (or the way the Dicksons' barn during my own teenage years was), of course. When farms change hands for millions of dollars, the buyers generally are more interested in creating a showplace than in fostering a cooperative kind of place where the older ones teach the younger ones and everyone learns a lot. But in recent years Crow Hollow has come the closest, and it's the only barn that's even making the attempt. I count it among the very special places I've been lucky to be part of in my life: Lammas Bookstore, Wintertide Coffeehouse, and maybe the Martha's Vineyard Times of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Lammas is gone, Wintertide is gone, and the MVTimes, like the island, has changed a lot. If Crow Hollow can manage to hang in there, that's all good.
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