Somewhere not too far from Iffley Road, somewhere east of Laramie and Wichita and just a few miles south of Walden Pond, along a bucolic suburban byway where the houses give way to a surprisingly large expanse of open land occupied by agricultural activity – sometimes kale sometimes brussel sprouts plus a field of sheep and another full of turkeys come early fall – there is also a small space by the roadside dedicated to ponies. Not the kind you have to feed or might take to a kid’s birthday party to make a few bucks, but that other kind, the one your kid rides in the playroom or the basement, that might bounce or rock but otherwise goes nowhere except down the avenues of a child’s imagination. Kids with vivid imaginations and poor balance and motor skills might get bucked off sometimes, but they won’t fall too far.
At some point children outgrow their toys and move on to different but often not much better things, and the pony (or unicorn or dragon or dolphin or even rocket ship I suppose, as most anything can serve as a medium upon which to rock or bounce) ends up in the attic or garage and if there are no younger sibs in the pipeline it might go to a friend or acquaintance’s aspiring buckaroo. Or to a thrift store or most ignominiously and pathetically out to the street and the garbage truck where it will sit there, kind of sad and forlorn, until the truck arrives or it gets rescued in the nick of time by a passerby.
Or in these parts, it just might end up in this little field by the roadside out there by the brussel sprouts, joining any number of its fellow toymates in all their cloth and wood and plastic glory, exposed to the elements, bouncing or rocking free at last, free at last like all those self-respecting “real” creatures after which they’ve been fashioned. How long this gathering has been here might be known to a few locals (and surely to the land owner) but otherwise it is all a wonderful obscure mystery.
There is also mystery as to how or why the equine selection seems to vary in style and number and arrangement, as the years go by. It seems likely that by now appropriate candidates for the herd that turn up in all the usual places might be getting scooped up and brought here by supporters of the arts or the cult or whatever motivations keep the thing going and changing. The location of this place is readily available on the internet if you’d like to take part.What is especially intriguing and charming is how an oddity such as this can become a reflection of the times, often expressed with a dose of humor. The pictures reflect this to some degree, taken over a period of several years, and the most recent images at the bottom, taken this week, should require no explanation.
