JANUARY 1st 2026

Jack is at it again. He comes up with these crack-pot business ventures and then tries to get all of us to go on Facebook and vouch for him. This time he had planned to run a wedding carriage from the chapel to the hotel over in Astoria on the beautiful waterfront, but he couldn’t get a permit and couldn’t afford anywhere to operate so he came back to Dysmal Nitch to run a Christmas carriage service.

I asked him if he had any experience with horses. He told me he had lived in Montana – and I guess I assumed that meant he had worked ranching, you know? Well, damn, all it actually meant was he had been in Montana for two weeks at summer camp and they had gone on a horseback riding.

The whole square was packed because it was the crab-pot-Christmas-tree lighting ceremony with the choir, the local business leaders and everyone in the town gathering. There were candied apples for sale at a booth and the city building had a little craft-fair / rummage sale.

I talked to Jack earlier in the day. Jack, I said, Jack – do you have a horse for the carriage? Well yes, he assured me….I was dubious after his other ventures like wedding photographer… I asked him, “well, it’s used to the harness and everything? It can pull that carriage?” He assured me it would have no problem at all. It was a horse after all, why couldn’t a horse pull anything?

The carriage had been in a video for a heavy metal band in 1986 Jack bragged to the crowd. He had decorated it with a variety of dollar store plastic flowers for Christmas but it was heavy wood, purple and white peeling paint (very popular in the 80’s) with two large wagon wheels. I couldn’t figure out the hitch, but I had never had to worry about hitching up a wagon and maybe I assumed Jack had worked out the details.

A truck rumbled into the square with a 3 horse slant load gooseneck trailer attached. A wiry fellow jumped out and unloaded the largest draught horse I had ever seen, a Shire horse, the fellow was maybe 18, maybe 19 hands high. It was a monster of a horse. He dwarfed everyone and everything in the square. From the back I could have tapped the star on top of the Xmas Crab-tree…

A magnificent horse. He was huge and gentle and gave me a bit of a snort and rested his head on my shoulder. The wiry fellow jumped back into his beast of a diesel truck and pulled away his trailer leaving the horse behind. This gave Jack some consternation because I guess he had rented the horse online and thought the owner was going to manage things.

Jack had zero control of the horse. It went to stand in line at the candy apple stall, quite polite.

The horses hooves were larger then dinner plates and after it had eaten an apple I caught the lead myself and lead him over to the bleachers and the kids took turns getting on and off its back and patting the horses main and telling it that it was a good horse and how much they liked it. The horse loved the children and the children loved the horse.

Jack didn’t make a dime on the day, and it turned out his carriage was only decorative and didn’t have any means of hitching a horse to it and his business venture was start to finish a disaster but the kids really did enjoy meeting Mr. Horse who was calm, kind and good with kids so despite of himself Jack pulled off a win for the Christmas party. He owes the candy-apple stall $15 and she’s pretty cross with him.