Following in the Wake of a Storybook Pony

Horses lend themselves to stories. In America in particular, wild horses, manes streaming, nostrils flaring, hooves thudding, carry with them something of our projected national psyche.

A woman named Marguerite Henry understood this. In 59 wildly popular books, featuring the mostly true stories of famous equines, from a plucky burro who lived in the Grand Canyon to a plain brown stallion in Vermont, Henry, who died in 1997, harnessed horse stories and turned them into a best-selling genre over which she still reigns supreme. But there was only one place where her stories turned the horses into “forever a part of the rocks and streams and wind and sky”: the islands of Assateague and Chincoteague, in the archipelago of Virginia’s Outer Banks.

And so I found myself one morning last summer, soaked to the bone, enduring the third hour of a deluge of pelting rain, in a little red kayak filled at least a third of the way up with storm water. I was following the myth of a pony Henry launched into legend in 1947 with her children’s book about a real pony that lived here, “Misty of Chincoteague.”

I was not alone. It was by now approaching 8 a.m. All around me on the water in the channel, which runs between Chincoteague Island and the uninhabited nature preserve of Assateague Island, were other pony-seekers. We sat quietly, noses of our craft snug in stands of sea grass to keep the boats still in the pelting rain, craning occasionally to look for wild horses. We were a flotilla of readers whose hearts were stolen by a cream-and-tan spotted pony, a creature we all knew from poring over Henry’s pages in grade school, who once swam these waters.

[In 1947, The Times reviewed “Misty of Chincoteague,” saying, “the simple story is told with a fine sense of values, a feeling for drama, deft characterization.” Read the review. ]

Assateague Island is a 38 mile-long wildlife refuge that since anyone can remember has been home to a herd of wild ponies that fluctuates in size every spring with a crop of new, knock-kneed foals. Henry and local lore pin the ponies’ origins on the fanciful tale of a Spanish shipwreck which deposited the foundation herd — diminutive horses bound for the mines of Peru — on the sandy shore between 300 and 500 years ago. Historians think the ponies more likely escaped from colonists who grazed them on communal land in the more recent past.

But whatever the origin story, what set Henry’s spotlight on this herd was Chincoteague’s unique method of pony population control.

Since 1925, the last week of July has become a weeklong official local holiday known as Pony Penning, that includes tours of the herd and a carnival in the center of town. But the main event, frequently held on the final Wednesday of the month, is the pony swim: Thousands gather to watch, as locals riding horses culled from previous roundups and trained into mounts push the wild animals into the channel itself (this year it will be held on July 24). The “World Famous Saltwater Cowboys,” as the riders are called, round up the animals and herd them across the water. The next day, each season’s new gangly babies are sold off at an auction that draws thousands from around the world for a chance to buy a Misty of their own.

The ponies are the property of the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company, and proceeds from the sales fund things like their new firehouse, hoses and uniforms.

Before Henry, it was a quaint local rite; “If you’re from Chincoteague, wherever you are, you come home for Pony Penning Day,” said Richard Conklin, 78, as he sat on his porch on Main Street. Before Henry’s book, a Christmaslike dinner was served, he recalled, with potpie as the traditional meal, and the auction, held at a fair set up on main street, was a townwide affair.

As he spoke, his granddaughter, Hope Abell, 15 at the time, sat at the foot of his rocking chair, discussing with her grandmother Carolyn Conklin, 76, which colt she was going to buy at the auction the next day with the money she had saved up digging for quahogs, a local mollusk. Hope has been buying ponies since she was 8 years old, she said, training them herself and selling them for a profit. “When I see a pony, it’s like I feel it,” she said, describing how she chooses her mounts. “Like it is meant for me.”

For the more than 70 years since Henry’s best seller, Pony Penning has been a phenomenon — the real Misty was featured in Life Magazine several times, and the birth of her first foal was celebrated in 1960 with a day off from school for the local children. Visitors have swelled the town, population about 3,000, by as much as 40,000 people, on penning day, according to the chamber of commerce. Henry’s story has stoked the equestrian fantasies of little girls the world over, including one growing up in mostly horseless New York City — me.

The Pony Swim

After decades of dreaming, I was breathless as I sat in that kayak in the rain, waiting for the ponies to paddle across the channel. I had chosen the water for the vantage point, at the guidance of Denise Bowden, the spokeswoman for the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company, who warned me that boats book up months in advance. The price was steep: $150 for a kayak tour by an outfitter called Assateague Explorer, which also offers motorboat tours for $200, roughly comparable to other operators.

It’s free to watch from the Chincoteague side of the shore, where the ponies climb out and shake off over the sand, but numerous Yelp reviews complained of not being able to see over the crowds. And there is perennial griping about the fees some residents charge to park on their lawns.

The morning of the swim, an armada of boats congregated alongside a string of pennant flags hung across the channel — the pony swim lane. Locals and visitors hung off the bows, swilling mimosas. Hunky police officers on Jet Skis herded the scores of craft. But even so, Assateague Explorer’s 5 a.m. launch time in the dark to beat the crush — which meant waiting almost four hours till the ponies made their splash — seemed excessive.

(A more savvy traveler than I would sleep in and paddle solo in a rented or purchased kayak; it’s easy enough to follow the paddling pony posse to the site. And skip morning coffee: There’s no bathroom in a kayak, a fact I remembered far too late.)

I was wet and cold and the coffee was getting to me, but the moment the pink puff of a flare gun went off, it was all worth it. The ponies took to the seawater as one, a mass of 150 adult animals, plus babies, who streamed out across the channel and churned the water white with more than 600 hooves galloping beneath the waves.

They swam with their noses held high like crocodiles, tiny new babies at their sides or tangled in tails that streamed out behind them in the surf. At one point, a renegade pack of four broke off, swimming back toward their refuge. Behind them was a coal black foal, who pinwheeled his legs under the water, swimming like a seal after his mother.

I cheered for the escapees. As much as I had always fantasized about capturing a Chincoteague pony for myself, I realized there in the water, that they are special because they are free.

The Pony Parade

Back on dry land, I wrung out my shorts and headed to the center of town. On Main Street, people sitting in beach chairs had been lined up since early morning, waiting for the next event of Hoss Penning (as it is also called): the pony parade. The animals approach was heard first — the rumbling of hundreds of hooves clopping on the pavement — then they appeared in all their shaggy, soaked glory. The cavalcade came down the avenue flanked by a phalanx of Saltwater Cowboys, there to make sure the ponies didn’t break away to munch on someone’s lawn.

The equines were herded to the auction grounds which is inside the Chincoteague Volunteer Fireman’s Carnival at the center of town. They trotted past their likenesses doing a roundelay on the carousel, and plush pony prizes at the carnival game booths. I ducked into a tent selling spurs, saddles and whips — everything I would need to outfit a new pony should I fall hard at the auction the next morning. I limited myself to a $7 iron door-knocker in the shape of a pony’s head.

In a corral at the back of the fairgrounds the hungry horses shoved their noses into bales of waiting hay. Dr. Charlie Cameron, a veterinarian who attended them for 29 years, wandered around the animals, looking for scrapes and bruises from the crossing. Several burly men rounded up a palomino with a bright dash of blood on its ankle.

“There are oyster shoals under that water,” Dr. Cameron said, “sharp as a razor,” as the men pinned the struggling horse down and he administered a sedative. In a few minutes, the horse was sedate enough to have the ankle patched up with a purple bandage. “Good as new,” Dr. Cameron said, tussling its dazed blond forelock.

The swim is not without controversy. Several ponies have died over the past years, including one a few days after I attended. Animal activists say the whole tradition is unnecessary and cruel. In fact, the ponies could also be brought over to Chincoteague on a bridge built in 1962.

“The pony swim is cruel and dangerous to the animals and should end now,” Kathy Guillermo, the senior vice president for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said, comparing the swim to greased pig wrestling and turkey drops.

The fire department has vigorously defended the tradition, rebutting PETA’s claims in an official statement, saying that it sees the ponies “as the beautiful creatures they are and we handle them with the care and respect they deserve.”

The evening after the swim I crept into the fairground after the Ferris wheel had staggered to a stop at 11 p.m. There, the ponies were asleep in the gloom, the little ones stretched out like cats. In the morning, at the sale, most would be separated from their mothers for good, but tonight their dams still watched over them in the dirt, their babies’ milk-full bellies heaving with deep-sleep sighs.

The Pony Auction

At 7 a.m. the next day I was back at the fairground, sitting on my hands trying not to bid. Before me and a cooing crowd, firefighters paraded colts and fillies never before touched by a human hand. Strapping teenagers bear-hugged their fuzzy necks and urged them across the auction arena as they whinnied with the plaintiveness of toddlers.

I pored over a booklet detailing the pedigrees of each animal. The ponies were registered as a breed in 1994, and legions of obsessives document each stallion’s band of mares and track their couplings on Facebook, and local shops sell catalogs of the animals. Some stallions, like Riptide, with his Fabio mane, are celebrities, with fan pages of their own.

I looked up from my book as a collective “aww!” rippled through the crowd. A filly the size and color of a yellow Labrador toddled into the pen and wouldn’t budge. Her handler, a burly firefighter, scooped her into his arms, and paraded her around the auction block. The audience swooned. Somehow I stopped myself from bidding.

Seven years ago, when they were in elementary school, Anna Beer, 18, and her sister, Amanda, 17, bought a pony. The siblings from Clarkston, Mich., have pet their animal, Dreamer’s Gift, precisely once: the day they purchased her. They immediately returned her to the wild, one of several foals each year designated as “buybacks.” Ponies run from about $3,000 to $6,000, but buybacks have sold for more than $20,000, the prices jacked up by consortiums of people who pool their money to buy horses that will perpetuate the herd.

As the Beer sisters stared at Dreamer longingly in the pen last year, I asked if they wished they had a pony they could ride, or at least touch. “She gets to have all those things that a tame horse doesn’t; she doesn’t have to worry about having to work for somebody, having to do what somebody says, all the time,” Anna said.

Amanda finished her sister’s thought: “We bought her her freedom,” she said.

Beebe Ranch

I wondered about the toll the ponies’ fame had on the island. So I called up Evelyn Shotwell, the executive director of the Chincoteague Chamber of Commerce. “Do you ever get sick of Misty?” I asked.

“I can’t,” Ms. Shotwell said. “She’s still here.”

Indeed, Misty herself still stands in the Museum of Chincoteague Island on Maddox Boulevard, stuffed. A few hours after the swim, I sat beside her taxidermied body, which is displayed in the exhibition hall along with her first foal, Stormy (the subject of Henry’s “Stormy, Misty’s Foal”). I was there to attend a lecture by a descendant of the Beebe family who once owned her.

Seeing the beloved creature of my childhood petrified mid-prance in perpetuity was crushing. So, too, was what I learned from the lecturer, Billy Beebe, the cousin of the two children who actually owned her. Stuffed Misty had stood in his living room until he donated her to the museum, he said — then he began to debunk most of Henry’s tale.

“Misty was not a wild pony,” he said. I gasped. She was born in captivity on Beebe Ranch, where he still lives, a few blocks away, he said. Paul Beebe, the little boy who loved her, and a host of other Beebes, were cut down young by car accidents; the little girl who raised her, Maureen Beebe, died in May. I was already white-knuckling the folding chair in front of me by the time Billy, 65, told the crowd that Misty’s first foal (the one with the school holiday) got into some cow feed as a baby, swelled up and died.

After the lecture, he invited me to his and Misty’s old home, Beebe Ranch, which Billy still runs and where he gives tours. Out back was a ramshackle barn with Misty’s old stall, still bearing her name. As he gave me a tour of the barn, a black-and-white pony ambled in. Angel’s Stormy Drizzle is a descendant of the Misty family, six generations removed from the original. Mr. Beebe stuck his tongue out at the pony, and on command she blew a raspberry back.

(Last month, the barn burned down, though all the animals survived unharmed. Mr. Beebe will still be giving tours, his wife, Bonnie, said, focusing on Misty’s history. They are by appointment only. “We are taking it a day at a time right now,” Mrs. Beebe said in a text message.)

Mr. Beebe sold pails marked with the B of his family brand for $100 a piece. They’re from the 1950s, he said, and may have held Misty’s grain and been touched by her velvet muzzle. I started to open my wallet — I had wanted a Chincoteague pony for as long as I can remember, and here was a piece of their history. I put the money back. The Misty I had loved had never drunk from that pail, because the creature Ms. Henry had conjured on the page had never really lived.

I instead bought a copy of “Misty of Chincoteague” at the museum, the story I preferred, and asked Mr. Beebe to sign it.

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