All the Pretty Horses

As seen in The Virginian Pilot – 04-09-2006

By Diane Tennant

The typical sad beginning:

Thelma Jarvis Peterson always wanted a horse.

She had to settle, as a child, for grooming her tricycle and leading it around the block in Norfolk, where, incidentally, she loved to ride the amusement park carousel in Ocean View.

One day, while walking Trigger, her tricycle, she saw the mean neighbor girl’s head rise above the hedge and then disappear, again and again. The mean girl was riding a carousel horse, a real carousel horse, that her father had attached to springs and placed in the backyard. As Peterson crept closer to look, the mean girl said, just loud enough to hear, "And you will never ride my horse."

Peterson now lives in Machipongo, on the Eastern Shore, where she has managed to make most of her dreams come true. She is a successful artist with her own gallery, someone else to run it so she can work at home most days, a budding career in music writing, two lovely grown children, a bird feeder between the couch and the view of Jacobus Creek, fragrant shrubs in the yard, a sprouting coconut in a flower pot and the admiration of Dickie Foster, developer of Bay Creek Resort and Club with its upscale community and Nicklaus and Palmer golf courses.

One day, Foster thought of putting a carousel at Bay Creek

The action-packed middle of the story:

Young Peterson was not about to let the mean girl win. That very night, she sneaked out of her house and into the mean girl’s backyard, and Peterson bounced on that carousel horse for hours

The next night, she did it again.

And again.

And again.

And she never got caught, not once. Not by her parents, not by the mean girl’s parents and not by the mean girl herself.

Life was good.

Life got better when Foster asked Peterson to design the carousel. What resulted are plans for a magnificent merry-go-round with 46 animals (called "rides") that will be hand-carved from basswood in Mansfield, Ohio, and that completely, totally reflect the culture, heritage and habitat of Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

Half the rides will be horses, and they are all Chincoteague ponies, and, more significant, they are replicas of the famous Misty and her actual descendants: Black Mist, Twilight, Stormy, Twister, Sunshine, Misty II. Each horse is decorated in some elaborate (because they are, after all, carousel horses) and significant (in an Eastern Shore sense) theme.

Misty has a conch shell on her rump and a garland of scallops and starfish. Twister carries a golf bag with "Arnie’s Army" written around its neck. Misty II is the Native American ride. Heat Wave carries apples and corn and farm tools. Black Mist is swathed in gill nets and cork lines.

The other 23 rides are Shore natives, too: a brown pelican, a gull, a rockfish, a sea horse, a great blue heron. Peterson extensively researched her designs. Each fish is adorned with the type of pole and lures used to catch it. The gill net on the waterman’s horse is tied with the correct gill net knot.

The Carousel Works Inc. of Mansfield will make three-dimensional patterns from Peterson’s watercolor paintings and carve the animals. It will take her designs of lighthouses and blue crabs to decorate the center of the carousel and the boards that round the canopy. It will do all this in about 18 months or so, for a price that hasn’t been completely figured out yet.

Peterson imagines school field trips to the carousel, with each student assigned a project about the animal he or she rides, and why it is decorated the way it is and what it all means. She knows the National Carousel Association and its enthusiastic members will come ride – she is a member, and they’ve already said so.

Peterson will ride, too, on Black Mist, the horse who bears the fishing nets like the ones she worked on years ago, stitching with a wooden needle the lead lines with her father and grandfather.

The happy ending:

Traditionally, carousels have three kinds of horses. Standers, on the outside row, are larger and more opulent than the others, but they are stationary, with three or four feet on the platform.

Prancers have two feet off the ground, but they also hug the deck.

Jumpers go up and down on shiny brass poles, rising and falling with the ecstatic swirl of the merry-go-round.

All the rides on the Bay Creek Carousel will be jumpers, because nobody likes sitting still. One chariot will be wheelchair-accessible. Four of the horses will be the famous Misty of Chincoteague because, Peterson’s preference not withstanding, she figures the star of film and novel will be the favorite of little girls who love horses but whose daddies will not move to the country or buy a real horse for them or even put a carousel horse on springs in the backyard.

But the best part of designing her very own carousel has to be this – nobody will ever, ever tell Peterson that she cannot ride the horses.

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