A few years ago I gave myself a quest. The quest is, master as many forms of transportation as possible. Or, at least attain some degree of competence. Some small percentage of this is a joke; it’s unlikely that I’ll achieve James Bond-ian levels of being able to flawlessly pilot (and crash) any vehicle that crosses my path, or that circumstances will require me to steer a school bus of survivors away from a zombie apocalypse. But I figure that having an arsenal of transportation options at my disposal goes a fair way in expanding my travel options, and in itself serves one of my basic tenets, Self-Reliance. 

In pursuit of said quest, I took some horse riding lessons a few years ago. This when I was employed and had expendable income, because anything to do with horses costs a good chunk of change. This was fun for a while, but it wasn’t long before paying good money to canter around a riding hall in circles lost its appeal. The cost was outweighing the benefit. After all, my horse goal is to trek outside, and not to compete inside. I was bored, the horse was bored. I stopped taking lessons. A few years passed.

Finding some means to continue the horse quest was always on the list of things to do that I keep in my brain, the one that constantly reshuffles itself as time passes and opportunity allows. This summer I decided to get back to it via volunteer work, and it’s all worked out rather well. I spent a month in the Black Forest, which didn’t include as much riding as I would have liked but was still a valuable experience because it gave me the chance to work with nineteen horses, all of different personalities and dispositions. Now I’m in Carinthia, Austria, with six Icelandic horses. This place is so small and low-key, I wouldn’t even call it a farm, despite the presence of standard banyard residents, pigs and chickens. The horses live as a herd in a corral by the house, and we take them for rides through the woods. I especially like that my hostess here uses them as alternative transport – why drive a car when a horse will do just as well, in addition to being environmentally friendly and simply fun to ride? The first ride she took me on was down to the shops to buy fish for lunch. She also mows grass daily with a scythe, because it’s more environmentally friendly than a power hand mower. I like these Icelandic horses very much, although I’m having trouble pinpointing exactly why. Maybe it’s just because they are very well-suited to trekking.

And there’s something refreshing about rolling out of bed in the morning and shoveling manure for an hour. I’m outside in fresh air, I’m getting a wheelbarrow workout, listening to horses munching on hay, which is one of my favorite sounds. Just over two years ago I was rolling out of bed, riding my bike two miles, and then sitting in an office all day. That was an okay, and necessary thing to do for a while, but I am more content today. And since this is a work-exchange situation, it costs me virtually nothing. I’ve spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 20€ total in the past six weeks.

Other citizens here include three chickens. One is smart enough to know to go to bed in the chicken coop. Two of them always go to bed on the sloping windowsill of the kitchen window, and one of the last things I do each night is carry them to their coop. In one respect this is a pretty high level of service to provide for a chicken, and on the other, I get a fresh egg for breakfast each morning, so I can’t complain about this arrangement. But if I happen to be standing in the kitchen in the evening at a particular time, I am occasionally mildly startled by the sudden appearance of a chicken outside the window. It’s the hour of the chicken. For some reason, the first time this happened, it occurred to me that a chicken may be the same size as a severed head, and at least it was only a chicken appearing outside the window, and not a severed head plopping out of nowhere. God knows why this thought crossed my mind. Either because I was standing in the room with all the knives, or because I’m rereading Game of Thrones. We also have two cats. One earns her keep as a murderous mouse murderess, and the other doesn’t. He sleeps a lot, on my lap if he has anything to say about it, and sounds like he has a combination of smoker’s cough and hay fever much of the time. I’ve never seen a cat cough and sneeze as much as he does. I think he’s too congested to bother running after mice.