Wild Ponies Couldn't Drag Me Away

I took my first trip to the legendary Assateague Island. Those of you who were properly obsessed with horsies as a little girl will recognize Assateague as the sister beach to Chincoteague, where Misty of Chincoteague lived. For those of you who grew up in a more deprived environment, it's the barrier island on the Maryland shore that offers camping, surfing, glow-in-the-dark wildlife, and wild ponies, all wrapped up into one convenient excursion. Unfortunately, beach rules stipulate that nude metal detecting is not allowed, which really threw off my morning, since I was forced to take my metal detector back to the campsite and throw on some clothes.

While you might have thought the highlight of the trip would have been the wild ponies, they were actually a bit of a disappointment.

As I approached the island, ominous signs flashed dire warnings to approaching tourists, "Wild ponies kick and bite!" "Do not feed the wildlife!" "Wild pony poop piles!" "Keep a safe distance from the wild ponies or you will die in a horrible fashion" "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, save us from the wild ponies!"

What with all the warnings, I fully expected a wild pony to charge me with thundering hooves, eyes wild and nostrils flared, rear up, unleash a stream of projectile pony poop, take a chunk of flesh out of me on the way back down, and then gallop off into the mist.

None of this happened. These ponies didn't even frolic. They just munched grass and unsuspecting campers' foodstuffs, then walked around sniffing piles of pony poop and peeing on them, whcih I thought was very curious and not a little kinky in a vaguely disturbing way.

Also, not to be a know-it-all, but wild ponies on the beach should look like this:

















Assateague ponies looked like this:









That's not a pony! That's just a little horse! And not a very nice one- look how it's kicking over a perfectly nice sandcastle that probably took someone all morning to make.

What is the difference between the two, you wonder? I have no idea why you're asking me, since I thought the difference was that one had rainbow-colored hair, pastel fur, and a precious emblem flanking its hindquarters. Apparently not. Following Droopy's Razor, the most boring explanation is also the most likely explanation: It's mostly just a size thing, but also temperment and thickness of mane and tail.

Snooze.

But wait! Don't sleep just yet, as at the last minute, the wikipedia comes through with the best horse fact ever!

"Breeders have also tried crossing various species of zebra with mares or female asses to produce "zebra mules" (zorses, and zonkeys (also called zedonks))."

Zedonks! Officially my New Favorite Word.

After the no nude metal detecting debacle, The Object and I walked back to the beach to check out the surf. Having read on the interweb that the weekend's surf report was lousy, he had only packed one shortboard and the body board and flippers. When he saw the chest to shoulder high waves, he bolted for them, surfboard in tow, leaving me to fend for myself in the waves with his body board and flippers made for a foot roughly three times the size of my own.

This turned out not to be a problem. In all the hustle and bustle of packing I forgot to pack clothes, inclusing my modest Patagonia swimsuit. This turn of events forced me to go to the surf shop and buy a new swimsuit, where the only suit available in my size covered roughly one third of my ass and had a stringy, padded halter top. I'm pretty sure it was designed either by a frat boys with a subscription to the Girls Gone Wild video of the the month, or a cadre of giggling junior high girls who think there's nothing more totally adorable in the world than to embroider a heart across the minimal ass coverage. Thanks, but the last thing my ass needs is the suggestion of a shape that's round on the edges and split up the middle. Ugh, I hate redundancy.

Surfer dudes are really nice to you when you give them the illusion of having more than an AA cup. Generally, my newbie surfing self is ignored in dude-infested waters, left to my own devices to figure out how to establish enough balance to sit up on the surfboard and actually look at the waves. On this particular session, however, dudes flocked to me, pointed out the best waves for me to catch on the body board, offered to push me in so I wouldn't have to paddle so hard (and thereby obstruct their view of my newly acquired tracts of land), then got up to do fancy surf-y moves in even the paltriest of waves. I've never seen the Object surf so well. Even a pod of dolphins frolicked not ten feet away, jumping out of the water to cath a glimpse. Behold, the magic of the stuffed bra. Had I learned that lesson back in the seventh grade, I might be a professional surfer by now.

Sigh, for now, I'll just have to get my jollies at work by threatening to show my coworkers my sunburned ass, which looks not unlike a candy cane.

Stupid Monday morning at work, forcing me to bend to society's mores, confining me in a shirt and shoes.

I can't wait to retire. By then, no one will be forced into the sadistic pratice of wearing clothes on the beach, and we won't have to have jobs. The hardest decision anyone will have to make will be beach house or mountain house as their primary residence.

I'll be the nastiest-looking old lady on the beach. My leathery tanned skin will resemble a crocodile hide, and my buttcheeks and AA breasts will flap about in the wind, unencumbered by emroidered hearts and stuffed bras, sagging so far that scientific journals will use my picture to demonstarte the principle of gravity. I'll live in a gated treehouse community, a la Swiss Family Robinson. Rufus, my monkey butler, will follow me around to refill my salted maragarita on the rocks whenever my glass is in danger of being half empty. I might even take up smoking, just to complete the look and get the scary gravelly voice. But oh, how the kids will revere me as I regale them with stories of when I was a little girl, the wild ponies all had rainbow colored hair and wings, and we didn't even need a bridge to get to the island, we just rode our periwinkle pony friends, and then left them to frolic with the zedonks. The I'll grab my longboard and ride toes on the nose into the pods of wild dolphins waiting just off the coast play with me.

My God; I'll be beautiful.