Field Notes from Equestria

by Admiral Biscuit

Rating: teen
Tags: Slice of Life, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Human, Other, Original Character, Comedy
Length: 38247

A modern-day explorer gets his chance to visit Equestria, and writes down notes about the ponies he meets.

A modern-day explorer gets his chance to visit Equestria, and writes down notes about the interesting ponies he meets and the stories that they tell.

Published 2017-12-04 00:10:07 UTC
Last updated 2020-05-27 03:32:27 UTC

Joe

Field Notes from a Tourist in Equestria
Admiral Biscuit

When I was a kid, I'd always liked to read stories of adventure. Stories about explorers visiting new and strange lands.

It was a great disappointment to learn that there weren't any new lands to be discovered. Mankind had visited every corner of the globe, and the days of boarding a sailing ship and sailing off to some unknown destination were for the past.

Other books were fantasy, pure and simple.

I suppose that's a lesson every child has to learn, just like how Santa Claus isn't real. But that never stopped me from resenting Mrs. Hawkins.

And as it ultimately turned out, Mrs. Hawkins was wrong.

• • •

I quit my job and sold my house and even though every one of my friends said I was nuts, I didn't care. I'm sure that half the explorers back in the olden days had heard the same thing from their friends.

And I have to admit that I had plenty of second thoughts. Plenty of days when I thought that ponies were just a mass hallucination. After the initial hoopla, there didn't seem to be any major changes, and I couldn't help but wonder if that's how people felt back in the old days. Were Italians celebrating in the streets when Columbus returned from the New World, or was it just another little bit of news that didn't affect them much? I don't know. I think that when you're living in history, it's hard to wrap your head around what will ultimately come.

• • •

It wasn't until I got through the portal that things started to change.

On the one side, it was not too much different than any other government building. There were little offices and men and women in uniforms asking me questions, inspecting my luggage, inspecting my documents, and filling out forms.

I got to spend the night in a guest room that wasn't much nicer than a prison cell.

When I passed through, it was more of the same. The men and women had been replaced by mares and stallions, and of course the architecture and infrastructure in the building was different, but the experience was the same, and after an initial burst of enthusiasm it quickly wore down into tedious boredom.

At least the guest room I stayed in on their side was nicer.

I remember that night, I looked up at the ceiling for a long time and I thought about all the life security I'd just given up and thought that maybe I'd made a really bad choice.

And I wondered how many times Columbus had thought that, as he drifted off to sleep in his bed on the Santa Maria.

• • •

The next morning, I got one more round of inspections and questions, and then I finally was allowed to cross the gates into Equestria proper, and as I stepped outside and saw pegasi soaring through the air and a small steam train waiting at the platform, I knew it had all been worth it. I felt like a kid again.

I was the last person to board—there was nothing on the platform I didn't want to inspect, no motion that I wanted to miss.

I had my eyes glued to the windows for the entire journey. It was probably rude; I could have struck up a conversation with any of the other ponies who were sharing my car, but I needed the time for the atmosphere to sink in.

When we finally got to Manehattan, I made my way to the street, and got whisked off to my hotel by a stallion pulling a small cart, what I think was probably called a hackney.

My room was up on the fifth floor, and it was the kind of room that would have been described in a brochure as "rustic" or perhaps "charming," since it had little else going for it in terms of amenities. Still, the bed was big enough to fit me, and the windows opened onto the street.

The bellhop showed me the bathrooms, which were down the hall, and informed me of when meals would be served, if I chose to eat at the hotel, and then he was off with a little skip in his step as a result of the bit coin I'd given him as a tip.

I had no intention of spending too much time in my room, so after I'd freshened up a bit, I decided to go out exploring.

Golden Prize

Golden Prize
Admiral Biscuit

I decided that I'd just wander around Manehatten for a little while, and maybe look at some of the shops. I didn't have a specific destination in mind, so I just flipped a mental coin when I got out to the street and started walking.

The streets were a mix of shops and apartments, with a few carts here and there on the sidewalk or the street. Between the residents and the ponies who were shopping or commuting, it was crowded, but not uncomfortably so. It reminded me of what New York or London must have looked like at the turn of the last century—streets full of pony-drawn carriages and wagons, foals playing on the sidewalk or even out in the street, and some tourists walking around looking at everything while the locals seemed to be more interested in getting to their destinations than beholding the wonders around them.

I went a few blocks north, and then I turned towards the east. I thought that it might be nice to get a look at the bay, since I wasn't all that far away from it. Some sentimental part of me really liked seeing all the sailing ships in the harbor.

This road was a little bit wider, and it even had traffic signals on some corners. They seemed kind of pointless to me—I didn't think that the ponies were pulling their wagons fast enough to collide. But I knew that they took them seriously: on my second day in the city, I'd ignored one and I'd only made one step into the street before I felt teeth in the back of my shirt and I had to endure an explanation of traffic signals from a young stallion. I would have blown him off, but he was so earnest.

After the signal was in my favor, I crossed the street and made it another couple of blocks before I came upon the mare. She was sitting on her haunches on the sidewalk right up against the road. Her head was down, and when I got closer I could see a damp patch on her cheek.

She was right in front of a bank, so my first thought was that she'd been turned down for a loan or something. I couldn't decide if I should talk to her or let her mope in peace. The ponies seemed to generally want to comfort each other, but as far as I could see, everybody was avoiding her.

I decided to hedge my bets, and instead of approaching her right away, I went around her, but I kept my eye on her back all the way around. There wasn't anything that struck me as dangerous about her, so I finally sat down next to her.

It took me a little while to draw her out of her funk—at first, she just ignored me completely, occasionally looking up and down the street, but for what I couldn't say.

That gave me a little bit of time to study her. She had an ash grey coat and a dark mane—it wasn't black, exactly, but it was close. I finally figured out that it was more of a deep purple.

I couldn't make much sense of her cutie mark. It looked like some kind of sack with a mask laid across it, at least that was the best I could figure. Her tail was curled along her side and it obscured the bottommost part.

Finally, I couldn't take just sitting there anymore, and when she sniffled and wiped her nose, I asked her what her name was.

“Oh, um, it's Golden Prize,” she said.

“Golden Prize?” I held out my hand. “I’m Joe. You look kind of sad—bad news in the bank?”

“I guess you could say so,” she said, and looked back down at the ground again.

I didn't think that she was going to say anything else, but she finally scraped her hoof across the concrete and looked back over at me. “I tried to rob the bank.”

Had I been thinking better, there were a lot of questions I could have asked at that point, but my mind went on a temporary lockdown. Being a bank robber wasn't something that you'd expect someone to confess to a few minutes after you met them, especially if they were still in front of the bank in question..

“I . . . see.”

“It's my special talent.” She sniffled again, and then shifted around her tail so that I could see all of her cutie mark. “Only, this time I got caught.”

“When?” Maybe she was trying to get back on her feet, and I could help out.

She turned back and looked at the clock on the wall. “Um, let's see, it was about ten minutes ago.” She sighed. “I wonder what's taking so long?”

“If you got caught, why are you still here?”

Golden Prize perked her ears up. “'Cause I got caught. I was coming out the door and a policepony was coming in and he saw that I had a mask on and a sack of bits in my mouth, and he told me to take off the mask and spit out the bag, and when the teller told him that I'd robbed the bank, he told me to go sit on the corner and wait for a paddy wagon.”

Author's Note

Author's notes and author's explanation here!

Crystal Pony

Crystal Pony
Admiral Biscuit

I'd inadvertently picked a really good hotel—not in terms of its accouterments, but rather its location. Being fairly close to the Manehattan train station meant that I could do lots of ponywatching out my window when I was in my room, and the bar constantly had new ponies coming and going.

Although it did feel kind of like cheating to meet ponies in a bar, and I made a note to myself to explore a little bit more going forward.

Most of the seats were already taken, although there were a few tables near the back that were fairly unoccupied, so after I'd gotten my drink I walked over to one that had a cluster of mares on one side of it and open seats on the other. I thought that since there was a group of them, they wouldn't be intimidated by me.

Indeed, that turned out to be the case. The four of them, I found out, were cheese-makers from Landias, and had come in the hopes of getting export contracts at some of the fancier restaurants in Manehattan. They called their cheese Chabichou, and one of them had a sample that she let me try.

It smelled vaguely like goat, but after I'd gotten over that, it was pretty smooth, and it paired well with the white wine that they were drinking.

We talked for a little bit about exotic or unusual foods on Earth and Equestria, and they complained about the difficulties in opening new markets, and we might have continued in that vein if another pony hadn't entered the bar and sat down near our table.

I didn't notice him right away—I was caught up talking with Bonne Bouche—but eventually it made it through my thick skull that the other three sisters were all looking in his direction while trying to pretend like they weren't.

So of course that got my interest.

He was a crystal pony, and it was true what I'd heard about them: you could see right through him. Not completely clearly; he wasn't entirely transparent, but I think that was more a case of his coloration than anything.

Since it was rude to stare, I kind of gave him a few sideways looks and at the same time tried to focus my attention on my companions, which turned out to be a nearly impossible task, since they too were distracted by him.

It wasn't too long after that my four new friends had to leave—they said that they had an evening gala to attend, although before they left, they insisted on taking a picture with me. Luckily, their camera had a self-timer, and with a bit of fiddling, they managed to balance it on a pair of wine glasses.

After they'd departed, I moved over to the crystal pony's table, ostensibly to free up the larger table I'd been at for other ponies, although the truth was I just wanted a closer look at him, and what better way than to be sitting right across from him?

He was probably curious about me, as well, because he had kept shooting surreptitious glances in my direction after my companions had left.

Most transparent animals are only mostly transparent—you can see internal organs or bones or something—but not in his case. I had to assume that he had bones and nerves and organs inside him, but those were as transparent as the rest of his body.

He introduced himself as Neighls Bohr, and insisted that I should try a small glass of crystalberry gin, which he said was a favorite of crystal ponies.

It had a gin-like taste, which I could have done without, but it also had the curious property that it stayed cold despite the temperature of the bar, and I ultimately wound up purchasing a bottle of it to experiment with in my hotel room. Neighls didn't know why it was like that, but said that that was how you could tell the fake stuff apart from the real thing.

Interestingly, after I drank it it did warm up, I think. I imagined that if it stayed cold, I would feel it in my stomach, but I resolved to get a small ice cube and verify that theory when I had a chance.

I hadn't known why he'd wanted a table to himself until his dinner arrived, and then once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. The gin was clear, but his hayburger wasn't, and it was like he was chewing with his mouth open only more so: I could see the food being masticated inside his mouth, even though I couldn't see any teeth. And then the bolus of food traveled down his neck and I started to wonder if he'd been starving before he came to the bar, because I started to think about what else I ought to be able to see.

Of course, he noticed my look, and he somehow blushed—another thing I couldn't even begin to understand.

“It's why I picked a table by myself,” he admitted. “I'm sorry.”

I assured him that I wasn't all that bothered by it, which was only half a lie. It was equal parts disgust and wonder, to be perfectly honest.

We didn't talk while he was eating, and I managed to make the observation that somewhere around his chest, the food began to fade out and by the time it got to where I assumed his stomach probably was, it had completely vanished.

I was completely boggled by this, and since it seemed to be happening more quickly than his body could actually break down the food and digest it, it must have had something to do with his nature, that whatever made him transparent did the same to his food.

It wasn't until I was back at my hotel later that night that I started to wonder what happened at the other end of the process.

Typewriter

Typewriter
Admiral Biscuit
for ROBCakeran53

Manehattan always had the feel of an older Earth city—maybe turn-of-the-century London or New York—and many of the businesses were only marked by a small sign out front. If they had display windows, they'd often showcase their wares, but even that didn't seem universally necessary for the ponies.

Or else I just hadn't figured out what they felt needed to be displayed and what didn't.

I was a few blocks from my hotel, and I came across a small store that had a shingle with a typewriter on it out front. I had no need of a typewriter or any sort of typewriter related services, and I passed by the store without a second thought and was all the way to the end of the block when I started to get curious about how a pony typewriter would even work. Since I didn't have anything else to do, I figured I might as well take a look.

Somehow, I'd been imagining it was going to look like an Apple store inside, but of course it didn't. If anything, it was closer to a mad scientist's laboratory, with bits and pieces of typewriters strewn all around. In the center of the chaos, bent over with a screwdriver in his mouth, was the proprietor. He was a heavyset stallion with an orange-sherbert colored coat and a white mane and tail, and he had a friendly if somewhat deranged mien. His name was Tachigraph, and unsurprisingly he was an expert in all things typewriter.

“Hate unicorn typewriters,” he told me. “All spells and crystals. There's nothing to fix in them. When they break, they can't be fixed unless they're re-bespelled. Now this—” he lovingly patted a bulky iron monstrosity “—is made the proper way. All levers and springs and pivots.”

I nodded politely, and I was about to take my leave when I noticed a strange contraption over on a shelf. It was a kind of hemisphere, with typewriter keys stuck in it. I thought that maybe it was some way of storing the keys, but the longer I looked at it, the more deliberate it seemed. Nothing else in the room was well-organized (at least not to my eye; to him, it probably made perfect sense), so I asked him about it.

“Ah, yes, the writing ball.” He glanced at his desk for a moment, and then looked earnestly at me. “I have a little museum—perhaps you'd like to see it? I have a complete writing ball back there.”

That sounded somewhat more interesting, so I agreed, and he led me through his cluttered workplace to an unremarkable door.

Inside it was slightly more organized, but only slightly. Things weren't piled one on top of the other, at least.

As promised, right at the entrance was a complete writing ball. If I'd been confused by the two-key typewriter, this one really took the biscuit. My grandfather had had an IBM Selectric typewriter with the writing ball, and this was basically the reverse of the idea.

Besides the odd key arrangement, the paper was curved underneath it on a complicated cradle, with little clips on the corners holding it in place.

“Go ahead and try it,” he said. “The letters are plain to see.”

And indeed they were. I wasn't that good at writing in Equestrian, although I could speak it and read it well enough, but I managed to type out a short sentence watching in amazement as the entire paper carrier moved under the typehead.

“It's not very fast,” he admitted, “but it's good for a novice who doesn't type too much and who doesn't want to memorize key combinations.”

“This,” he said, pointing to the next typewriter, “is a telegraph typewriter, and one of the first that was produced.” It looked like the one on his sign; it had two hoof-sized buttons and a long spacebar; other than that, it was arranged like an old-fashioned typewriter, with a roller that the paper went into.

“What use is only having two keys?”

“Well, the messages came in telegraph code, which is long and short beeps,” he said. “Dah and Dit. Or dots and dashes, if you prefer. This key is the dah key, and that one is the dit key. So a telegraph transcriber just types out what he hears, and then re-writes it or typesets it later.” He moved down to the next machine. “Of course, somepony decided to improve it and tie it right into the telegraph line.”

That machine would have been right at home in a steampunk convention. Rather than being built into an integrated case, the original typewriter had been modified to have an apparatus above it which could push the keys down automatically.

“Other ponies got to thinking that if you could put the letters right on the paper—like a self-inking typesetting machine—that would be convenient for everypony, and pretty soon somepony had invented the first spell-powered typewriter.”

This was an ornate box, with an exposed roller and a vial for ink, and a small brass spike on one corner. There were no buttons.

“How did that work?”

“Somepony just thinks what she wants to write, and it comes out on the paper. She focuses her energy on the antenna, and it types for her.” He snorted. “Useless. Not only were the mechanical components cheap and badly-designed, the spellwork was terrible, too. Look, I have some letters that were written with one.” He reached under the shelf and pulled out a mouthful of papers. “Lots of unicorns bring them to me because they think that their typewriter is broken when really it’s doing just what the spell intends for it to do.”

I took one from the center, figuring that it probably had the least amount of drool on it, and started reading.

Dear Spark, I most enjoyed your visitflanks last coat like blueberry muffind weekend I should what was that noise to get back no not back your house your sister no why we could a picnic would be nice wait what are stupid Luna-curssed typewriter just st

“Turns out nopony is all that focused when they type,” Tachigraph told me. “The improved models have normal buttons to push for words that you want to write down, and it's not much faster than a normal typewriter.”

He moved on to another normal-looking pony typewriter. “This one was a big innovation. It's called the Perotype, and it uses rolling keys.” He expertly slipped a piece of paper into it and demonstrated it for me.

The movement was mesmerizing. Both of the large hoof-sized keys tilted forward and back and to both sides, and were pushed down to type the letter. “You have to set the left one first, then the right,” he explained. “It was the first compact typewriter that had all the important letters, so that you could write something in plain Equestrian.”

Next to it was a similar-looking typewriter. “This one is called the Chirographer, and it uses sliding keys instead of rolling keys, but otherwise it uses the same principle of operation. The left key sets the register, and then the right one types the letter.”

“Which is better?”

Tachigraph shrugged. “The Perotype is a little bit faster—the rolling movement of the keys is more natural. But it's mechanically more complicated, and if you type carelessly, you can jam it more easily.”

“With both of these, you'd have to memorize the key combinations,” I observed. True, the letters were printed on the keys, but it was an unholy mess, since each position struck multiple letters depending on where the other key was placed.

“And that's why the Typographer was invented,” he said, leading me along to another machine. Rather than have two keys, it only had one. Then, at the front of the machine was a dial with letters printed on it. “You turn the dial to the letter you want to type, and then strike the key.”

It reminded me of the label maker that my grandfather had which embossed text on a sticky plastic ribbon. I'd used it a few times as a kid to label my possessions, but it was really slow.

“It isn't a quick machine,” he said, “but it's simple and easy to understand. No professional would use it, but for somepony who needs to only occasionally type something, it's cheap, and it's really reliable, too.”

I couldn't argue with that; instead of the complicated arrangement of springs and levers that I'd seen on the other typewriters, this only had one.

“It's also nice for traveling ponies, because it's considerably lighter and more compact than all the other models. I know a few journalists who use them, and some of them are really quick with it. I've had to replace the index wheel on Quick Lede's machine several times—she wears out the mechanical indents.”

We'd reached the back of his little museum, and there was only one more typewriter to examine. This one actually looked much like a human typewriter, although it had far more keys. A quick scan revealed that lowercase letters and capital letters each had their own key.

“The Cutter,” he said. “It was originally designed as a stencil-cutter, and then somepony got the idea to shrink down the mechanism and use it as a typewriter. It's practical for unicorns, because they can strike the keys with their fields, and just like the Typographer it can easily be used by anypony without training, but it's really bulky.

“Some print shops use them, because the font can be changed.” He pulled out a drawer on the bottom of the typewriter that looked for all the world like a cash drawer. Inside were neatly arranged collections of keycaps, some of which were quite ornate.

“How many different kinds of typewriter are there?”

He frowned. “You know, I honestly have no idea. These are the most common that I've seen, at least in terms of concept. Minotaur typewriters are a lot like the Cutter, although without as many keys—they usually have a shifting carriage and use two letters per key. Lots of Earth ponies have invented new arrangements, or improvements to existing models. I've fixed treadle powered machines before, and—“

“Treadle powered?” I shouldn't have interrupted him, but I really wanted to know what that was.

“To make it easier to hit the keys. There's a lot of mechanical parts to move, you know.” He folded the cover up on the Cutter to let me examine the arrangement of springs and levers that made it work. “It's a little more complex to power it, but it lets it strike the letters more firmly, and is easier on the hooves. Unicorns especially like them, because it's hard to push firmly with their magic.”

“Interesting.” I'd never really thought about that aspect of magic. It seemed so effortless for the unicorns to lift and carry things, but I suppose that there must have been some effort involved, or else everything in Equestria could be powered forever by a couple of unicorns turning a giant flywheel or something like that.

We probably could have kept talking for quite some time, except that we both heard the jingling of the bell above his door, and both of us simultaneously remembered that he was running a business rather than a museum.

“Just a moment,” he called out in the direction of the doorway, then turned back to me. “It's been real interesting talking to you, Joe. You're the first human who's had any interest in my little collection.”

“Thank you,” I said, sticking out a hand. “I never realized that there was such an interesting variety of typewriters.”

He chuckled. “Feel free to come back any time.”

Author's Note

Chapter Notes!

Flower Fight

Flower Fight
Admiral Biscuit

I was sitting in the park, ponywatching.

It was a good afternoon for it. As was usual, the skies were clear, and there was just enough of a wind that a couple foals were flying kites. A few ponies were picnicking, and several entrepreneurial souls had set up little stands in the park.

As I watched, another one of them came along. She was a bright yellow mare, with neatly-braided brown hair—something that I didn't see a lot of earth ponies bother with.

She had a little wagon behind her, hooked to a simple harness. When she found a nice, sunny spot, she backed the wagon into place, reached back, and unhooked the poles with her mouth.

She had to nose it into position a little bit, and then she moved off the path long enough to slip off her harness. After that, she folded down a hinged cover on the wagon, and I had to admit, it was clever how it had been built. Inside were neat arrangements of flowers, and the backside of the cover served to both hide the wheel and display her price board.

I thought about going over and getting a flower, but I wasn't sure what I'd do with one if I had it, so I gave her a friendly nod instead and then went back to ponywatching.

It was maybe ten minutes later that another enterprising mare made her way up the path. She didn't have a wagon, but she did have saddlebags bursting with flowers, and an odd contraption slung across her back.

Her mane was frizzy and there was mud on her hooves, but other than that she could have been the twin of the mare manning the flower stand.

I had just enough time to snicker at the thought of them competing, but I didn't think that the disheveled mare would actually set herself up directly opposite the other one.

It was only a moment before the yelling started, unsurprisingly from the neatly-groomed mare. “Darn it, Goldenrod, I was here first.”

“So?” Goldenrod looked around. “It's a public park. Anypony can be here.”

“That's not the point! Somepony might want a flower and they might buy one of yours.”

“They should—my flowers are better.”

“Your flowers are weeds.”

“Are not. They're feral.”

“Feral means weed, you idiot.”

“It means wild, Lilium. Which you'd know if you could read.”

Lilium stamped her hoof. “Whatever. Nopony's going to pay for a wildflower. Anypony can pick them. I pick your dumb flowers out of my beds all the time.”

“'Cause your flowers aren't smart enough to get out of their beds and go live in the wild.”

“Neither are you! You stay in bed until noon, and then go around the woods until you've found a couple of mouthfuls of sorry weeds to stick in your saddlebags.”

“Nothing wrong with staying in bed late. At least my flowers can grow by themselves. They don't wilt if they miss a watering, and they don't have to live in glass houses to keep themselves warm.”

“My flowers are delicate and beautiful.” Lilium stuck up her nose.

“You can't even eat them. They taste like perfume. Nopony likes the taste of perfume.”

“How would you know? You should try it; maybe it would make you sweeter.”

“My flowers are full of nutrition that makes a pony healthy. Yours just give ponies stomachaches.”

“Do not.” Lilium bit the head off one of her flowers to illustrate her point, chewing it noisily before she spoke again. “There. My tummy feels fine.”

“Hmph.” Goldenrod didn't seem to have a witty retort, and instead went back to setting up her sign and arranging her flowers on her portable stand. By the way her tail was flicking back and forth, I could guess that she was still angry, but I figured that their little spat was over.

I was somewhat curious about what flowers ponies liked and which ones they didn't. Now was probably not the time to ask, though; I could see myself all too easily getting drawn into their argument if I spoke, so I contented myself with just watching them to see what they'd do next.

I wasn't disappointed. A stallion came up to Lilium's booth and after briefly bartering, left with a bouquet of lilies in his mouth despite Goldenrod's entreaties to try her flowers instead.

The moment he had started down the path, Lilium stuck her tongue out at Goldenrod, who responded by flinging a bundle of her flowers into Lilium's neat arrangement.

“Worthless weeds!” Lilium grabbed them out and I thought she was going to pitch them on the ground and maybe stomp on them, but she didn't. Instead, she stormed across the pathway and smacked Goldenrod in the face with the flowers.

“Dumb mule!” Goldenrod responded by kicking a clod of dirt onto Lilium's coat. “Go on, keep that dirt on you so ponies think you actually work for a living.”

“Just 'cause I know how to bathe doesn't make me lazy.” She scraped a couple of clumps of dirt off her chest. “Something you've never learned. Why don't you at least scrape your hooves on some of those weeds? They're bristly enough. Just like you.”

“Maybe I will. At least my flowers can stay up without help.” Goldenrod jammed the somewhat depleted bundle of flowers into the ground. “Betcha can't do that with your flaccid-stemmed lilies.”

“Why would I want to? Mine are for nice things and nice ponies. Your flowers are fit for . . . “

Goldenrod narrowed her eyes. “Say it. I dare you.”

“The midden heap! That's where they belong. That's the only thing they'd pretty up.”

“Hmph. You can make teas and tinctures from my flowers.”

“You can make tea from my flowers, too.”

“Who'd want to? It would just look pretty. Lily tea doesn't taste good.”

“Does, too.”

“Just like your flowers.”

“My flowers taste fine. I haven't seen you eat one of yours.”

“I won't give you the satisfaction.”

“Coward.”

“These are for paying customers.”

“Which you've had none of.”

Goldenrod nipped the top off the bunch that was stuck in the ground. “Are you happy now?”

“No. First, you're spitting on me. Second, chew with your mouth shut.”

“Whatever you say, Mom.” Even from my distance, I could see the spray of leaves and petals as she spit the last word.

“Ew.” Lilium wiped off her cheeks then bore down on Goldenrod. “You're just mad 'cause I got here first, and my flowers are better. Mom wouldn't've had you if she'd've known you'd act like this in public.”

“She had me 'cause she screwed up with you and wanted to try again. Always playing with your pretty flowers and never wanting to help plow the fields.”

“As if. Where were you when there was work to be done? Cavorting around in the fallow fields looking for some smelly stinkweed.”

“Stinkweed is better company than you ever were.” Goldenrod jabbed a hoof into Lilium's barrel.

“You still hit like a yearling.” Lilium slammed her hoof into Goldenrod and sent the younger mare down to her rump. “See, my flowers make—urk!”

Goldenrod had seized the initiative, and tackled her older sibling.

I didn't really want to get involved, and I was also somewhat curious how a pony fight would go. By the same token, now was probably the best time to calm things down before one of them got a knife out of a flowerpot or something.

I wasn't just going to wade into the middle of their brawl, though. I had no desire to become an unwilling participant.

Lilium had a watering can on the back of her cart; I'd seen that when she arrived. And when I picked it up, I found out it was full, so I just unceremoniously dumped it on the two mares.

It had the effect I'd hoped, briefly. They stopped brawling and both of them looked at me.

“Hey, that's my watering can!”

“She started it!”

“You started it.”

This was not going how I'd expected. “Listen here, you two. If you don't stop right now, I'm going to grab you both by the scruff of the neck and throw you in the pond.” That was a total lie; Earth ponies were heavier than they looked and I doubted that I could lift either one of them. I also wasn't sure if ponies had a scruff to grab.

“I'd like—“

“Shut up for once in your life, Lilium.” From the way she was looking at me, I thought that Goldenrod at least thought I actually could throw them in the pond. “The mangy minotaur's right. We shouldn't be fighting. Not out here in public where anypony could see.”

“You shouldn't've started it.” Lilium blew a lock of hair out of her eye. “Shoulda stuck to the merchant's quarter instead of following me here.”

“Uptown ponies got more bits.”

“Uptown ponies don't buy weeds from dirty mares.”

Goldenrod started snickering. “You oughtta look at yourself, then. Nopony's gonna buy from you now. Not unless you come back to midtown with all us mudponies.”

Indeed, as a result of their scuffle, the two were practically twins. All the hair that had come loose from Lilium's braid had frizzled out like Goldenrod's mane, and they both had grass stains and mud in their coats.

“I'm going to the pond to get cleaned up.” Lilium looked over at her sister. “Watch my cart, will ya?”

“Fine.”

“And don't eat any of my flowers.”

“As if I would!”

Goldenrod waited until Lilium had disappeared around the corner of the path—presumably towards the pond—before nipping the top off one of the lilies.

Amorosa

Amorosa
Admiral Biscuit

Nobody was really sure how cutie marks worked. The ponies said that a pony got hers when she realized her special talent or what set her apart from everypony else, and maybe that was true. But were they granted by some kind of all-knowing being, or were they an outward manifestation of an internal epiphany? Could a pony really, really wish for one and get it?

And if she did, would it be a cutie mark for having her wish granted?

It was something that I often thought about at night, and I wasn't the only person who did, I was sure.

I had come up with a few general rules. Earth ponies tended to have obvious marks, typically of some kind of plant or rock. Pegasi most often had weather-themed marks, although that wasn't an always rule. I'd also learned that nearly all pegasi had earned their marks while flying, although there were some exceptions to that.

Unicorns usually had the most symbolic marks.

I still hadn't figured out if it was polite to study a pony's mark before we even spoke, but I could never help myself.

I was at my usual bar, and a mare I'd never seen before came in beside me. I could tell right away that she was either high-class, or perhaps aspiring to be. Her mane was well-styled, with highlights on the tips, and her coat was silky-smooth. When she set a hoof on the bar, the glossy shine of hoof paint was smooth enough to show reflections. She was also the first earth pony I’d seen with earrings—not just a pair, but a whole arc of diamonds glittered in the dim light of the bar.

I glanced down at her flank.

Maybe I'd had a little bit too much to drink, because I could have worded my question better. Or else just kept my stupid mouth shut.

"Is that a hot dog eating cutie mark?" It didn't seem likely; she was really slender, especially for an earth pony. Of course Takeru Kobayashi was, too. . . .

She snorted. "Sure it is, champ."

Author's Note

WIth apologies to naturalbornderpy.

The Sandwich Sorcerer

The Sandwich Sorcerer
Admiral Biscuit

There were a lot of restaurants around my hotel, ranging from quite fancy to rather bland. Thus far, the plainest I'd encountered was the Thermopolium, which sold two kinds of porridge and two kinds of bread. The choices varied by day, and it was quite popular for laborers and taxi-drivers. The most exclusive one as far as I could tell was La Valette du Var—the doorpony just shook her head as I glanced at the menu.

Judging by the fact that they had a doorpony, it was probably out of my price range, anyway.

There were plenty of other choices, though, and I made an ever-widening culinary circle of my neighborhood in Manehattan.

I'd passed The Sandwich Sorcerer several times before I finally went in, mostly because I hadn't realized it was a restaurant. There wasn't any outside seating, and it was on the second floor, which was not where I'd expected to find a restaurant.

The dining area was best described as Goodwill chic—none of the furniture matched, and the walls were covered with slightly garish pictures of unicorns. The only thing that they were lacking was a velvet pony-Elvis painting.

Nevertheless, they seemed to have a decent clientele, mostly of young college-aged unicorns. Some of them were still sporting backpacks, and over at one table, a small group of students was studying together while eating lunch.

Every head in the place turned when I walked in—I guess this restaurant didn't get too many human customers—and a moment later, there was a unicorn who was so attentive that she could only be the owner.

I honestly liked it better when I got a more jaded waiter, who didn't feel the need to ask if I wanted to use silverware or if humans could drink apple juice. But I couldn't hold it against her; she was completely sincere.

I'd been in a few themed restaurants back on Earth, and I also hadn't gotten fully accustomed to pony menu conventions, so the fact that the sandwiches all had names didn't strike me as all that odd.

But as I kept looking, I didn't see what I'd consider standard sandwiches on a pony menu. Things like a daisy sandwich, which was their version of PB&J, simply weren't on the menu, but there was Burning Heart's chocolate and onion sandwich (not as strange as it sounds) and Cayenne's hot hot pepper on spicy sriracha bread (it's hot!), neither of which sounded terribly appealing. Star Swirl's coffee bean butter on thick pumpernickel bread (keeps you up all night), Mistmane's asparagus, egg and blue cheese sandwich (tastes better than it looks), and Snowfall Frost's old bread and hay sandwich (cheap). Besides the parenthetical notes after each ingredient list, there was a number.

I could have asked what she'd recommend, although I had a deep dread that that would turn into a long Q and A session about what humans ate, and there was the possibility that I could die of starvation before she finally recommended a sandwich.

So instead, I pointed to Zesty Gourmand's toast on bread sandwich and asked her if anypony actually ever ordered it.

“Of course,” she said brightly. “It's the quintessential sandwich, don't you think?”

“It's toast on bread. That's not a sandwich.”

“But it is! That's why it's so genius; it reduces a sandwich to its most basic elements. And it was a very daring choice for her to make.”

“Okay.” I held up my hand and ticked off the problems with the sandwich on my fingers. I should have considered a different gesture; I think she was paying more attention to my finger counting than my point. “First, it's bread on bread. On Earth, we call that a loaf of bread, and that's how it comes from the store. Second, that's the most boring sandwich ever. Even Snowfall Frost's old bread and hay is gonna have more flavor. Third, do you know what a hipster is? And fourth, what do you mean by daring? A three-year-old could do better.”

She rolled her eyes. “Zesty Gourmand is the most brilliant restaurant critic ever. Just because you don't understand the genius and daring of her sandwich doesn't make it any less great!”

I held up my head. “Maybe we're misunderstanding each other here. I don't mean to insult your sandwiches, but—“

“My sandwiches? Mine isn't even on the menu. I thought. . . “ she wrinkled her muzzle. “Well, if you must know, I thought that I didn't deserve to be in such good company.”

I was completely confused. “Such good company?”

“You know.” She motioned around to the paintings on the walls. “Starswirl? Clover the Clever? Mistmane? Zesty? Where does little Spuckie fit among them all? I haven't done anything great; all I know how to do is make sandwiches. I flunked out of Canterlot University.”

“What does that have to do with sandwiches?” She'd lost me somewhere along the line.

“What does that have to do with sandwiches? That—that was the one test that I did pass. Every unicorn's got to invent food to graduate from a proper university.”

“Invent . . . food?”

“Yeah. Like, a sandwich or salad or dessert.”

“That doesn't make any sense.”

“Sure it does.” I could see as Spuckie shifted into lecture mode. “Back when the Wendigos first started freezing everypony out, but before it got too bad, Princess Platinum realized that to be a proper unicorn, you had to be able to feed yourself, and the only way that you could prove that you could do that was to invent some kind of food.

“That didn't work out like she'd planned, 'cause it turns out that you can't make very good food from dirt no matter how hard you try or how good at spells you are. You burn up more energy than you can make, usually, because of—well, you're not a unicorn, you probably wouldn't understand the technical reasons. Anyway, after unification she was gonna take that out of the laws, but decided to keep it as a reminder. But you don't have to enchant dirt anymore.”

“So all these sandwiches, they were literally invented by the unicorn whose name is in the menu?”

“Yup! I just went through a lot of the old records. And some of the more contemporary ones, 'cause ponies' palates have changed since the old days.”

“I see.” I glanced back down at the menu with my fresh understanding of the historical context behind the sandwiches. Maybe I would have appreciated it more as a unicorn. “What kind of sandwich did you invent?”

“Um.” She scuffed her hoof on the floor. “It was an apple sandwich with cashew butter and a little bit of black pepper to spice it up.”

“Can I have that?”

I thought she was going to come up with some reason why she couldn't make me one, but Spuckie grinned. “I'd love to.”

It was delicious.

Author's Note

Click HERE for story notes!

A Trip North

A Trip North
Admiral Biscuit

There was more to Equestria than Manehattan, and it was time to explore. I didn't understand why more people didn't. I guess there was plenty to see in and around Manehattan. There were guided tour vacation packages and the ponies even had cruises—both daily and weekly.

I thought it would be more fun to go somewhere not-touristy. I figured that I'd meet more interesting ponies there. With that in mind, I'd gone to the train station and copied down their timetables.

Back on Earth, it took very little effort to pick a destination and then use Google to find a way to get there. It would even sometimes make suggestions about when you could find a cheaper flight. It would tell you if roads were closed. There were reviews of places. Between that and Street View, you could visit places you'd never been while sitting in front of your computer.

Ponies didn't have any of that technology. I was sure that there were travel agents in Manehattan, and it probably wouldn’t be too difficult to find one. Or, I could just ask around and see what ponies at the bar thought was a good place to visit. Surely the front desk ponies at the hotel would be able to offer suggestions—but I wanted to pick a place on my own.

Interestingly, the train station did have lots of helpful information. It was really basic, but there were icons next to each stop that told if the destination had a hotel or restaurants, and that was really all I needed to know. At least I wouldn't wind up getting off the train at a whistle stop somewhere in the middle of nowhere and be stuck on the platform until the next train came through.

It wasn't going to be cheaper to leave my old hotel room and start over. I hadn't known that this was a thing, but the pony hotels had weekly and monthly rates, and was significantly cheaper overall to pay by the month.

I figured one bag would be all that I'd need, so after breakfast I packed up and waited out in the taxi stand for a taxi to arrive.

There were all kinds of ponies—and a few other creatures—who worked as taxi drivers. Or maybe it was taxi-pullers. I wasn't actually sure what the proper name would be. That made a lot of sense; it was the kind of occupation that would really be open to anyone who was fit and had a good sense of navigation.

The mare pulling mine was like no pony I'd ever seen before. She was a unicorn, which was odd in and of itself, and she was a beautiful golden-green, almost like a field lit by the sun right after a rainstorm.

She had a really strange gait, too. I couldn't say quite what it was, exactly, but I'd been around enough ponies to know that this was unusual.

I didn't think it would be smart to draw her into conversation. I'm sure that there were rules of the road and expectations of other ponies, but what they were was completely lost on me. All I could say for sure was that there were no kinds of turn signals or brake lights on any of the wagons and carriages that ponies were pulling, and there was a constant shifting of traffic across multiple lanes of the road. It seemed like complete chaos, and her ears and head were constantly moving around, judging the best route. The last thing she needed was for me to distract her.

Out of necessity, she took a different route to the train station than I had. We ultimately wound up on a broad strip of cobblestones crowded with taxis and omnibuses and all sorts of freight wagons.

The only spot that appeared to be reserved was the one for mail wagons; those signs were ones that all the ponies respected. Back on Earth, someone would have stopped there anyway 'just for a moment.'

“Half bit,” she said.

I nodded and got out a bit coin, which she levitated into a small coin pouch on her harness. “Keep the change.”

She tipped her hat to me and then merged back into traffic, and moment later she was lost in the sea of wagons, before I could even ask her her name.

Waiting in line for a ticket gave me plenty of time to think. These days, a lot of taxis were dispatched by radio, and of course there were apps like Uber and Lyft that could be used to summon a car wherever, but of course it hadn't always been done that way. There had to be a lot of circling around, waiting for a fare to appear. Maybe there was some kind of hierarchy or territories that different ponies had. Some of them probably stopped working during slack times of day, while others were willing to stay out there in the hopes of making a profit somehow.

I had to be careful to not get so lost in thought that I tripped over the ponies in front of me.

When I finally got to the front of the line, I made my way to a younger pony, figuring that they were more likely to be receptive to me. “One ticket to Greenock, please.”

“Return?”

“I can buy a ticket at that station, can't I?” I wanted to make sure.

“Yeah. Or from the conductor on the train if there isn't a stationmaster on duty.”

“Then just the outbound ticket, please.”

“Private or general seating?”

“General.”

He nodded and wrote a few scribbles on a yellow slip, and then stamped it and punched it, before handing it to me. “Greenock, general seating. The train leaves from platform 12 in an hour or so. That's down the main hall and to the left, then across the tracks and down to the platform.”

“Thanks.” The ticket was something to keep for my scrapbook, if for nothing else than the railroad name. The Manehattan, Paisley & Greenock Northern Steam Railway & Mumbles and Pit Wagonway. It had a nicely-embossed steam locomotive on the corners of the ticket, along with the ticket agent's writing, stamp, and punch.

I hadn't expected to go back outside. In hindsight, it should have been obvious that trains should be kept outside whenever possible. I did know that historically ventilation in tunnels had been a problem and I was sure the same extended to completely covered platforms like the giant glass train sheds that had been popular in Europe.

There was a wide bridge that led over the rails, with stairways extending downwards to paired platforms. Those were covered, and they had numbers painted on their roofs to make it obvious where to go.

A few colts and fillies were trainspotting—or maybe ponyspotting—up at the railings, but for the most part I was the only one who was really interested in anything more than getting to my destination.

I figured that with general boarding I would probably want to get to the train early to make sure I still had a seat. It was hard to imagine how without computers they knew for sure that there were still tickets available for that particular train. Maybe when the ticket book ran out, he knew that the train was full, or maybe once all the seats were taken, it was standing room only.

The train was at the platform already. The locomotive wasn't, which struck me as odd. The few times I'd ridden a train before, it had had the locomotive attached to it long before the journey began. It was what provided power for the lights and the air conditioning and everything else.

When I got aboard, it became obvious why they wouldn't need it—there was nothing on the train cars for the locomotive to power. There were no lights and the air conditioning was the open windows.

There were racks at each end of the car for luggage, which was nice. Overhead clearance was already tight for me, and above-seat bins like airplanes had would have been intolerable.

I put my suitcase in, tucked neatly against the wall, and picked a seat on the platform side next to the window.

I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew the train jolted and I put my hand out to brace myself, completely unaware that there was now a stallion in a suit sharing my bench.

“Hey!”

“Sorry, sorry!” I jerked my hand back. “I wasn't—you surprised me.”

“Hmf.” He shifted on his seat. “Ought to be more careful next time.” Then he brightened. “First time on a train?”

“In Equestria,” I said. “I'm Joe.”

“Pegasus Lane.”

“You're not a pegasus,” I blurted out before I could even consider how rude that might sound.

“Well, my mom thought I was, and so the name kind of stuck.”

He rolled his eyes at my incredulous look. “That's what my dad says. He says that she was really loopy after she had me and when the midwife picked me up she thought I was flying and so that's what I got named.” He sighed. “Mom isn't exactly the brightest flower in the field, you know.”

“I didn't mean to be insulting.”

“I get that a lot, honestly.” He looked at my clothes. “Those are pretty fancy. Where do you work?”

“Oh, I don't. I'm just visiting Equestria.”

“I see. I—don't think I'm trying to be rude, but I've got a book I'm reading, and. . . .”

“No, that's fine. I was planning on looking out the window at the scenery, once we get out of the station.”

“Alright. Nice to meet you, Joe.”

“Same here.”

***

On Earth, cities have suburbs, which sometimes go on nearly forever—sometimes the suburbs are even bigger than the city proper. I was sure that Greater Los Angeles and Greater New York City were far bigger than the cities they surrounded. That wasn't the case with Manehattan, at least. We were in the city, and then suddenly the country. There wasn't an actual wall, but there might as well have been.

Our last sign of the city was a large rail junction. We had to wait for a few minutes while an express train went past, and then we crawled through a few crossings and switches before picking up speed again.

For a little bit, the train ran alongside a canal and road. I saw a few teams of ponies towing barges along the canal; they mostly ignored the train as it went by.

Our first stop wasn't all that far out of town. I stuck my head out the window and watched as ponies up front swung a spout over to the tender and refilled it with water, and then we went on our way again, curving away from the canal and taking a route that went through fields of crops.

Back on Earth, my experience with fields had been that they went on for acres and acres, and they were generally growing all the same crop. Pony farmers weren't so inclined, and we'd pass right by a cornfield to a field of daisies and then hay. We'd occasionally whisk by farmponies working in their fields and sometimes they'd wave at the train.

The track curved again, and we cut through a forest. As it blurred by, for a moment I could have been back on Earth, and it was a weird feeling. Turning around and looking at my seat-mate didn't entirely make it go away, either.

Just after the forest, the train stopped again. The station was on the other side of the tracks, and I suppose I could have looked across the aisle, but I was more fascinated by the pegasus refilling the water tank. He had a bunch of small clouds all trailed out behind him, attached together with a rope. He'd push one over the open top of the tower and jump up and down on it a few times, and it would suddenly start raining until it completely dissolved. Then he'd tug on the rope and get the next cloud into position and repeat the process.

He went through four clouds before the train started to move again.

We went past a few more fields, mostly hay or some other kind of pasture grass, and then we were back in the wilderness.

The train was climbing into hills. Every valley it went down had another train station where we'd stop, which seemed kind of unfair for the poor locomotive. Any momentum it picked up going down the hill had to be shed to stop at the train station, and then it had to work hard to pull the train up the next hill. While I wasn't an expert, I couldn't help but think that back on Earth, they would have either routed the tracks through the valley or else put train stations partway up the hills and required people to walk the rest of the way to town.

That clearly wasn't the pony way of doing things.

***

Four stops later, Pegasus Lane got off the train and I had the bench to myself for the rest of the journey. The train was slowly emptying out; I guess ponies wanted to go to points north from Manehattan but not so many wanted to go from point to point.

I tried to remember what the timetable had said—was there another major city on this route, or did the train just go until the tracks stopped and then turn around and come back? I didn't think that there had been any overlaps in its schedule from northbound to southbound, but then once I’d picked a destination, I hadn't paid that much attention to the rest of the schedule.

It wouldn't be fair to say that I got bored on the journey, but there was a point where it did all start to look kind of the same. Maybe that was just my poor human attention span, or maybe there were only so many fields that you could see before you'd really seen them all.

Had the ceiling in the train cars been higher, I might have been inclined to get up and walk around a bit, but the fact was that I'd had to keep my head slightly bent as I got into the coach, and it'd be just my luck to be walking just as the train hit a bumpy spot of track.

Pegasus Lane had had the right idea with his book. I should have brought something to read for when the boredom inevitably set it.

My mind went back to the Manehattan taxi system, and while I'd come up with a few ideas about how it worked, I had no satisfactory answers and I resolved that when I was back in town I was going to pay more attention to the ponies I saw. At least they had a lot of color variation which ought to make it a bit easier to tell if I kept seeing all the same ponies in the same places.

The one that had pulled me to the train station would certainly be an obvious one. I’d never seen another pony quite like her.

We passed through another little bit of forest near the top of a hill, and then the train dropped down again, and I managed to remember that my stop was either the next one or the one after it. The conductor had made multiple announcements, but I'd sort of stopped paying attention to them. I was sure he'd remember where I was supposed to get off the train, but what if I did forget? Would I be kicked out at the next stop? Would anyone notice? Would I have to pay extra before they'd let me off the train?

What if I didn't have the money? Would I have to pay off my debt by peeling potatoes in the dining car—if the train had one—or more likely shoveling coal in the locomotive? Given the sort of informal attitude ponies seemed to have, maybe you could ride for free if you shoveled coal. Maybe not on a train, since if you weren't very good at it, the train would go nowhere, but what about the cruise ships?

That was probably a silly idea. Nopony would want to have a trip at sea where they only got to enjoy the engine room.

“Next stop, Greenock!”

That was my destination.

Most of the stops were kind of slow, since the locomotive had to take on more water, which meant that ponies didn't queue up at the exits, so I stayed in my seat until the train had come to a full stop. I remembered to get my suitcase and as I exited the train, I almost asked the conductor which way to the inn, but then I remembered that he probably didn't know. His view of the world was likely just the train station and anything that was in eyeshot of the tracks.

A Trip North: Greenock

A Trip North: Greenock
Admiral Biscuit

There was a string of hopper cars on the other side of the station platform, and a boardwalk path with a set of short crossing gates to close the way when trains were moving. A spur track led off to the west, and I looked both ways to make sure that there were no trains coming, just in case I was wrong about the purpose of the gates.

The inn was just down the main street, a spreading three-story building with a thatched roof. That was my first stop, even though there likely wasn't much of a rush to get a room. I'd been the only person to get off the train at Greenock, after all.

Then again, maybe they also rented rooms by the month.

What I could see of the village had a boomtown feel. I couldn't tell if that was because it was a boomtown, or if that was just how the ponies had felt like building it. While there was surely some sort of rhyme and reason to their architecture choices, I'd never been able to make any sense of it. Things ranged from somewhat modern, to traditional European, to straight-up fantastic.

It would be like seeing a Rolls Royce and the Weinermobile both for sale at the same dealership—that was the best comparison I could come up with.

But then I got to thinking that the start of the Industrial Age on Earth had produced similar results, at least as far as I could remember. I probably should have studied up on my history a little bit more before coming to Equestria.

Inside it was inviting and what I'd consider conventional pony. It wasn't as fancy as my hotel back in Manehattan—there wasn't much in the way of furnishings, and the front counter was just unfinished wood. The stallion at the front counter was trying to lend an air of high class to the place that it hadn't earned: he was wearing a waistcoat with golden pinstripes.

He took a step back before recovering and smiled politely. “Good evening, uh, sir. Are you looking for a room?”

“For a couple of days. I'm traveling.”

“Very good.” He glanced down at a book on his desk, which I assumed was some sort of reservation book. Or maybe it was his first day on the job, and that was the book of employee guidelines. Inkeeping for Dummies.

That was a rather uncharitable thought, but for some reason I had gotten stuck on the thought of John Cleese in Fawlty Towers. He'd have a long-suffering wife who tried to rein him in. . . .

“Would you prefer an upper floor or lower?” he asked, interrupting my thoughts.

“Either is fine.”

“Mm-hm.” He glanced back down at the book. “I have a room on the north side which I think will suit your needs. We have a dining room where you can take your meals if you like, and each floor has its own toilets. There's a spa to the west of the hotel for your hygienic needs as well, or a bath can be brought to your room.”

Said bath would likely consist of a washtub and a pony with pails of hot water which in some way was kind of tempting and I wasn't sure why. “I think that the spa will be fine.”

“Very good.” He wrinkled his muzzle. “There's also a public house down the street, if that's something you're interested in.”

It was, but I didn't want to press him on the issue. Maybe it was cliched, but it was a great place to meet ponies, and I was fully intending to go there as soon as I put my bag away in my room.

***

The bar had the same kind of boomtown feel to it, but at least they weren't trying to pretend that they were something else. Interestingly, instead of having art or decorative woodwork to liven the place up, they had flowers. Some of them were cut and in vases; others were in small pots.

I took a seat right at the bar where I could keep an eye on the entrance, in case any interesting ponies came in.

That was a good choice—I'd barely taken a sip of my beer when a cluster of mares came through the door. They were all wearing hard hats with little lights mounted on front, and all of them looked like they'd just gotten done with a hard day's work.

I turned enough to see them out of the corner of my eye. Unfortunately for me, they'd chosen a table a bit closer to the back.

It didn't take long at all for them to get in an argument with the waitress. “How come we can't pay in gems?”

“That's the rule here.” The waitress had that slightly exasperated note in her voice like she'd had this same conversation dozens of times before.

“We've got rubies.”

“Yeah. A whole bucket of 'em.”

“You're not the only ones to try and pay in gems, you know.”

That conversation was getting my interest. A bucket of rubies? They probably weren't paying any attention to me, so I turned around to get a few view of the developing situation.

They did, indeed, have a bucket, and I was immensely curious, so I quickly finished my drink and walked over to their table, where their conversation with the waitress was becoming more heated.

As promised, the bucket was full of rubies, some of them nearly the size of my fist. Probably a million dollars worth or more . . . at least, back on Earth.

“Do you have any actual bits?”

“Back in Pit Town.”

That perked my interest even more. What was Pit Town? I didn't remember seeing that on the timetable, although there was ‘pit’ in the railroad name.

“Give us a break, we didn't know.”

“Maybe you could keep the bucket, like for insurance that we'd come back to pay.”

“I don't think so.” The waitress flicked her tail. “If you had something worthwhile.”

“I'm hungry,” one of them grumbled. “I don't wanna walk all the way back to Pit Town.”

“Ask real nice and I'll let you ride back in the wagon.”

I reached my decision. It was a dumb decision, in the grand scheme of things, but I was utterly confident that I would never in my life be able to buy that many gems that cheaply. So what if I could never take them back to Earth? Maybe I could trade them for something back in Manehattan, and if not, I could just enjoy the experience of holding a king's ransom worth of jewels.

“I'll buy your bucket, and pay for your dinners in exchange. And one beer each, if you want.”

“Only one?”

“Shut up, Lignite.”

“Have you got bits?” The waitress narrowed her eyes.

“Yeah.”

“You'd better.” She took her order pad back out of her apron and looked around at the table. “Okay, who's going first?”

***

Naturally, I got invited to stay at their table for the meal. They were all pit ponies who worked in a coal mine, and apparently the gems were something that they found frequently and had no particular use for.

The foreman—forepony—was named Longwall, and she was accompanied with Assay, Gytta, Overburden, and Lignite.

We spent all of our dinner swapping stories, them about mining and me about life on Earth, and I was having so much fun talking to them that I relaxed my one beer rule. Only a little bit, though. I'd heard about roughnecks on Earth and their legendary drinking prowess, and I didn't want to wind up being bankrupted by them.

They also had a room at the inn for the night, and they said that they were going to spend tomorrow at the spa before going back to Pit Town. They invited me to join them; Assay said that she could put me temporary on the mine payroll as a consultant as a way of saying thank you. I politely declined that offer.

They were, however, insistent that I come and visit the mine, which they were quite proud of. And I had to admit, I was curious about it myself. I wasn't sure what I'd get to see; at least back on Earth they'd just show you the visitor's center for safety reasons, but Longwall was insistent that she'd give me a tour of the mine.

Gytta had an objection. “He's kind of tall for it. He’ll bump his head unless he walks on all fours.”

“He can ride in a cart,” Lignite said.

“You get to pull it.”

“Fine. I don't mind.”

***

It was a lot later than I'd planned when I finally got back to my hotel room with my bucket of rubies. I set them in front of the nightstand, dropped my shirt over the top of it so it wasn't too obvious—not that I thought that anyone would bother them—and stretched out on the bed. I figured I'd get up early, look around town a little bit and then follow them back to Pit Town and their mine sometime in the afternoon. It’d be a nice day trip, and I wouldn’t have to pack anything.

A Trip North: Pit Town

Pit Town
Admiral Biscuit

A train woke me up. For a moment, I thought that it was the afternoon train, the same one I had arrived on, but the room was too dark for that.

It could have been the southbound train, but I thought that that arrived later in the day. Not that there was a rule that there could only be two trains, of course.

This wasn’t a passenger train. It was a long train of coal cars, slowly making its way towards the main line. The gates I’d seen yesterday that protected the sidewalk were down, and I could see the gate tender standing there. As I watched, she waved to the crew of the locomotive, then went back to scanning the sidewalk just in case someone was so oblivious as to bump into the side of the train.

Given my experience back on Earth, that was actually a reasonable worry.

I watched as the entire train snaked by and the gate tender winched the gates back up, then made her way back to the train station.

There wasn’t much point in going back to bed, so I decided that it was time to explore.

It turned out that there wasn’t a whole lot to the town. Besides the inn, spa, and bar, there was also a general store, a small cafe, a smithy, and a library, all of which were currently closed. Small towns just didn’t have the 24-hour cycle that cities did.

The side street was lined with simple homes. Most of them looked hastily constructed, yet they were all well-landscaped. A couple even had small orchards in the backyard.

Just a ways out of town, the farms began, and those buildings generally appeared more substantial. At a guess, this had started off as a small farming town and then the railroad had come and it had turned into a bit of a boomtown.

As I surveyed the four blocks that made up the town proper, I thought back to the railroad clerk asking if I wanted a return ticket and I think that he had known what I was going to find out here. Maybe I should have at least looked at a travel guide before choosing my destination.

But then I remembered the mares I’d met the night before and their offer to give me a tour of a coal mine, and that wasn’t something that was likely to be on a travel brochure. In that regard, at least, I’d done well.

The pub didn’t have its hours posted. Probably ponies who lived in town already knew, and for visitors, it was either open or not. Surely there had been a time in human history when stores didn’t post their hours, either. It was something that I’d never really paid attention to in Manehattan, since there always seemed to be something to do or someplace to go.

I went back to the hotel for breakfast. They, at least, were open.

Their selection was porridge, bubbling away in a large kettle over the fireplace, bread, with various selections of jams and jellies and cheeses, and fresh timothy grass. Nowhere near the selection I’d come to expect in Manehattan, but what they lacked in variety they made up for in quality. It was easily the best porridge I’d ever had, and the bread was amazing. The loaf weighed about as much as a brick. It did have a bit of a grass flavor, but that was easily offset by the creamy butter and serviceberry jam they had.

My five new friends hadn’t come to the dining room yet and I wondered if I should wait for them.

The hotel had a copy of the Manehattan Dispatch in the lobby, but it was yesterday’s. I was about to ask about that when I realized that it had probably arrived on the same train that I had. So if there’s a war, towns like Greenock won’t know until a day later. Well, the late afternoon, anyway.

I seemed to remember reading once that the eruption of Mt. Krakatoa was the first quickly-dispatched news article in history. And even that had taken some time to get down to the man on the street.

And the ponies did have a telegraph system. Plus, for really pressing news, they probably had a system of pegasus messengers who would fly from city to city.

Basically, the Pony Express.

***

It was almost noon before we set out to the coal mine. Besides the spa, the mares had also gone shopping, and their wagon was loaded up with all sorts of dry goods from the general store, along with a couple boxes of beauty supplies from the spa. Those had been bought on mine credit, Longwall told me.

“How far is it, anyway?” I should have thought to ask that before we left town. It’d be just my luck that it was ten or twenty miles.

“Three, four hours.”

“We’ll be there in plenty of time for dinner,” Longwall said.

“And if you get tired, we can move our stuff around and pull you in the wagon,” Lignite added.

“I thought you were joking about that last night.”

“Nope!”

Gytta nodded. “We carry foals to town in the wagon all the time.”

“There are foals at the coal mine?” I had sudden visions of past human labor practices.

“Where else would they be?”

“Yeah—what do humans do with their foals? Do you kick them out of the nest like birds do?”

“No, but we don’t let them work in coal mines. Any more,” I hastily added, lest one of them be a student in human history.

“How else are they going to learn how to do it?”

That was actually a surprisingly reasonable question. I was all ready to give some explanation about how it wasn’t right to let kids risk their lives in a coal mine or use kids because the labor was cheaper, but I hadn’t really thought about it from a training perspective.

I still wasn’t sure that that was a proper thing to do, but I thought I ought to keep my mouth shut until after I’d actually had a look at the mine. There was no sense in offending my new friends before I even knew what the situation actually was.

Besides, I’d already learned that pony morals were a bit different than human morals.

***

I refrained from ever once asking ‘are we there yet?’ and I made it without riding in the wagon. That was more a matter of pride than anything. I think if they’d been unencumbered by it, they would have left me in the dust.

Aside from sore feet, though, the trip passed quickly enough. We had a lot to talk about, things that we’d never mentioned at the bar last night. I found out that I was right; Greenock had just been a small farming community before the railroad had come through, and the railroad was also what had allowed them to expand their mine and improve Pit Town.

Longwall explained to me that the tracks I’d seen the coal train on had been the wagonway that was in the railroad’s name; they’d converted it to actual railroad tracks a couple of years ago, and were working on putting a line in to Mumbles. She said that if I’d gone further north I would have seen sidings full of flat cars with rails and ties. Lignite said that it was fun to watch them work and that there were some really lonely stallions at the camp.

That was something I didn’t feel that I’d needed to know.

Pit Town was a collection of simple stone houses with thatched roofs, arranged in two rows along a central street. The mine shaft was at the end of the street, and the railroad came in from the north. The tracks had been dug down into a cut, so that wagons coming from the mine could be dumped right in, which was a nice, simple arrangement.

A steady parade of loaded wagons came out of the mine, returning a few minutes later empty. The second wagon I saw get unloaded was pulled by a bright red pony with a blonde mane, one I was sure I’d recognize from a distance if I saw her again, so I kept watch to try and get an idea what the turnaround time was. We were all the way in town and I had to stop watching since we’d arrived at their house—I hadn’t seen her return yet.

“So some ponies pull wagons and others mine coal?” If there were foals in the mine, it would make a lot more sense to have them loading the wagons rather than pulling them.

“We take turns, mostly,” Lignite said. “It’s boring doing the exact same thing every day.”

“Except for Assay,” Longwall said. “She likes pulling wagons.”

“’Cause I’m clumsy with a pickaxe, everpony knows that.”

“You are the only pony I know who can hit yourself with the pickaxe.”

“It’s a point of pride.” She grinned. “The five of us work as a team. Those four share all the mining jobs, and I pull the wagon.”

“How come you weren’t pulling it on the way here?”

“It’s my day off.”

That was reasonable.

“If you wanna look around,” Longwall said, “you can. We’re gonna unpack the wagon and put things away and then make dinner, and then after that we’ll go look at the mine, like we promised.”

“It’s going to be pretty late by then, won’t it?” And then I felt like a real idiot, when I remembered that we were looking at a mine.

“Funnily enough, the mine’s just as bright any time of the day.”

“You do have caves and mines on Earth, don’t you?” Lignite frowned. “You said you did.”

“I just forgot that it was dark inside, that’s all. Do you want any help?”

“Nah, we know where everything goes. Won’t take very long to put it all away. Assay, why don’t you show Joe around?”

“Okay.” She turned to face me. “What do you want to see first? We can go visit the loading dock, or the mine office. That’s kind of boring, though. It’s mostly paperwork. Oh—I bet you’d like to see our gem pile. Every now and then when we get enough good gems, we send a couple of carloads out with the coal.”

“Yeah, let’s look at that.”

***

I didn’t know a lot about mining, but I knew that all mines wound up taking out material that they weren’t actually looking for. Unless they were particularly lucky and had a seam of coal that was exposed on the surface which they could just follow down, they had to dig their way in, and all that dirt had to go somewhere.

The overburden was sorted into two piles. One of them was ordinary rocks and dirt, and looked like the pile you might see in any quarry. The other pile was like something out of a comic book: it was a mound of gems that was taller than I was. Every color of the rainbow, ranging from pebble-sized to a few that were nearly the size of a watermelon. I hadn’t seen any security ponies anywhere, and it seemed obvious that my tiny little bucket of rubies had little chance of being stolen. Any pony who wanted gems wouldn’t waste their time with that bucket; they could literally get them here by the wagonload. If this had been Earth, they wouldn’t have even bothered with the coal in this shaft, no matter how good it was.

“Where do they come from?”

“The ground?”

“I get that. But—there must be lots of gems, or else these would be worth something. Back on Earth you could polish them up and make tens of millions of dollars.”

“Why? Gems are everywhere. They’re pretty, and some of them are useful, but a lot of them are fairly useless or commonplace. That’s what we keep in the pile here. Dragons like them, though.”

“Dragons?”

“Yeah. They eat them like we eat plants. And they hoard them, ‘cause they’re afraid that they’ll run out and starve if they don’t have enough gems.” She snorted. “I’ve heard that they horde practically anything that they can get their talons on. So we trade most of the commonplace stuff to the dragons in exchange for pure metals.”

“Pure metals?” My head was spinning.

“They breath fire, you know. And can swim in lava. So it’s easy for them to purify metals. It’s a lot harder for ponies to do it, ‘cause you’ve got to build a really big furnace. About the only metal they won’t do is gold, ‘cause they want to keep it for themselves.”

“So you exchange gems for steel?”

“Yeah. Pretty smart trade, really. That pile of gems could be traded for enough steel to make another set of rails all the way back to Greenock.”

It still didn’t seem like a fair trade to me, but then I remembered that a planet had been discovered which was made largely of diamond. Someplace like that, diamonds would be nearly worthless, and things like steel might be quite valuable.

“It all gets sorted out in Manehattan,” Assay said. “I’ve been there—a whole bunch of unicorns look through everything and decide where to send it on to. It’s kind of neat to watch for a little while and then it gets boring.” She tilted her head towards the loading dock. “Wanna watch wagons get unloaded?”

I wasn’t sure how exciting that would actually be, but she was enthusiastic about it. I took one last look at the hill of gems, just to fix it firmly in my mind. That was something that I didn’t think I’d ever see in my life again, and followed her to the loading dock.

***

The loading arrangement was clever. The tracks had been built on an incline, so every time a railroad car got full, they’d release the brakes and let the train roll one car further ahead, then start loading that car.

The coal chute was attached to the loading dock in such a way that the ponies didn’t even have to back up. There were slats across the platform that the coal fell through, and a painted mark on the boards where a pony would stand to be on-target. It was obvious that they didn’t actually need that mark; of the mares and few stallions I saw unloading, not one of them bothered to look down at their hooves to see if they were on the mark.

An assistant—who was a foal—tugged a lever on the wagon, and the body tilted, dumping out the coal. He had a hoe that he’d use to pull any stray bits out, and then he’d trip a release and the wagon body would drop back down.

Every now and then, he’d kick a few lumps of loose coal into the chute before the next wagon arrived.

“Pretty neat, huh?”

I nodded. “How many teams do you have down there?”

“Usually a dozen or so. Any more than that and it gets too crowded. Sometimes if we’re working a narrow seam or side shaft, we don’t pull very many wagons up and stockpile it underground, and then spend a couple of days bringing it all up. Right now, though, we’re on a wide seam, so it’s working really efficiently. Kind of like harvest time on a farm, but we mine all year long.” She sighed. “Don’t tell Longwall I said this, but it used to be more fun before we had a train. We take turns having a couple days off now, but it used to be that we’d shut down the mine for a few days once or twice a moon, and just have fun. I liked that a lot better than the rotating schedule we have now. Maybe once they get the tracks built to Mumbles we can go back to that.”

“So the mine is always running?”

“We all get festival days off,” she said. “And Hearth’s Warming and I really shouldn’t be complaining. Is there anything else you want to see before dinner?”

“Is there a hotel here?”

“Nah, you can stay at our house. You can sleep in Lignite’s bed. She won’t mind.”

“I don’t mind the floor,” I said. I didn’t want to impose, and I wasn’t sure by what Assay had said if Lignite was going to be in the bed, too.

“Whatever you prefer. Alright, if you’ve seen everything, let’s get back home. Maybe dinner is ready.”

A Trip North: The Mine

The Mine
Admiral Biscuit

We really should have worked out what I could eat before Overburden and Gytta had prepared dinner. The centerpiece of the meal was a grass and flower casserole, and I wasn’t sure if I could or should eat too much of it. There weren’t many plants that ponies ate that were actually poisonous to humans, which was nice, but there were lots of them that humans couldn’t digest.

So I had a fairly small piece, and picked it into really small bits before putting it into my mouth, since I had my doubts about how well my teeth would do on all the pasture grasses. At least the bread they had was edible, although that, too, had a really high hay content.

The sun was just setting as we made our way to the mine. Lignite had put on her harness over my protests, because she was determined to actually pull me into the mine. It didn’t seem right, but it was probably better than walking hunched-over all the way down and then all the way back up.

We were on the left side, which actually felt a little bit wrong to me. Obviously, back on Earth I was used to driving on the right side of the road, and that idea seemed to have carried over to traffic in Manehattan. “How come you’re on the wrong side?” I asked.

“It’s how mines always run,” Overburden said. “Everypony knows that.”

“Always keep your left flank to the wall,” Gytta explained. “’Cause it’s easier to turn right.”

“It is?” Was there a way that it was easier for me to turn? I’d never thought about it. Surely it was more of a production to turn with four legs to contend with.

“Yeah.”

Lignite stopped for a moment and bent her head down to the shaft, pushing a lever with her nose. “Gotta set the brakes a little bit. I can run the cart down empty easy, but it’s heavier with you in it.”

“I can get out,” I offered again.

“You’ll bang your head on the ceiling.” That was almost certainly true; we weren’t even in the mine yet, and I was feeling a bit claustrophobic. Maybe this hadn’t been a good choice.

“Gotta have a hard hat, too.” Longwall opened up a wooden cabinet and got one out, then plunked it on my head. It was pink, and it had a light fixed to the front just like theirs did.

“That’s it for gear? No reflective vests or gas detectors or anything like that?”

“Pfft, you’ll hear if Lignite’s got gas.”

“Puhlease.” I could hear the eye roll. “Gytta farts way more loudly than I do.”

“But not as often,” Assay countered.

I tuned their bickering out and studied the entrance to the mine. The archway was carved with dozens of pictograms that I couldn’t quite puzzle out. They weren’t warning signs, I was pretty sure of that.

Then we got inside the mine itself. I’d seen a few construction sites where they had big signs giving safety information and posters about labor laws and things like that. Here, there was a bit of a bulletin board with flyers and oddly crude drawings tacked up on it. On the opposite wall, there was what I could only imagine was a job board, showing the work schedule. I saw Longwall’s cutie mark on the map.

“You don’t mind sitting on some coal on the way back, do you?”

“Why?”

“It kinda seems a shame to go all the way down in the mine and not bring back at least one cart of coal.”

“Plus, then you can see how we get it out of the walls,” Gytta said.

“His clothes will get dirty,” Longwall said. “And he hasn’t got any more with him.”

“What if I also tow a cart?” Assay offered.

“Then we’ll haveta wait for you to get hitched up, and—”

Longwall shook her head. “No, we’ll be going slow, to show Joe everything.”

“I’ll be right back,” Assay promised.

The first thing I noticed was how smooth the floor was. There were a few ruts and hoofprints, but not as many as I’d imagined. It seemed like with constant traffic, the floor would be quite uneven.

The next thing that caught my eye was the support beams. While Westerns weren’t known for being terribly accurate, the wood supports probably were the bare minimum required, and not finished. At least, that’s how it would have been done on Earth.

The ponies had other ideas. All the support beams were not only finished, but they had vine scrollwork and flowers on them, which had been painted bright colors. Each one also had a pair of brackets holding crystal lanterns. Looking further down the mine, I could see that there were occasionally lit pairs. The last ponies out probably turned off most of the lights for the night.

The taxi that I’d ridden from my hotel to the station had been fairly smooth—how much of that could be credited to the wagon’s suspension and how much of it was the skill of the pony, I didn’t know. But even at slow speeds, the mine cart was not nearly as smooth. It bumped hard over the few ruts, and I could feel the sway of Lignite’s hips in the cart.

“The cross supports are made by a couple of ponies in Pit Town,” Gytta said. “They come down every day and fit a couple of new pairs to make up for the day’s mining. That’s why almost all the building are made out of stone, ‘cause we haven’t got enough trees for both the town and the mine.”

“Sometimes we get a couple of rail cars back full of wood,” Longwall added. “It’s not as good as what they can get, though.”

“We had to import the lanterns, too. It’s dangerous to have oil lamps in the mine, ‘cause sometimes there’s methane pockets.”

“Only behind you.”

Lignite stuck her tongue out at Overburden.

“If you strike a fresh one, you can usually smell it right away, but sometimes it builds up and if you’re used to the smell, you might not notice that it’s getting dangerous, and then boom!”

“It’s really bad when that happens. A lot of times, the mine caves in, too.”

“So what do you use to smell for methane?”

“We used to use canaries. It was nice to hear them singing while you worked, and if they stopped you knew that there was too much methane.”

“But you don’t use them any more?”

Longwall shook her head. “It wasn’t good for the canaries. Even if we got them out of the mine in time, they’d be really sick and listless for a long time. Now we’ve got special crystals on the support posts, and they start glowing when there’s too much methane. Plus, we can absorb a lot of it.”

“Yeah, we’ll show you how it’s done when we get down to where we work.”

That was something I was curious about—seeing some kind of pony air scrubber.

***

As we walked, Longwall and Gytta pointed out other features of the mine and also gave me some history of it. The coal seam went all the way to the surface, and the first settlers had found loose coal on the ground. Once that was exhausted, ponies had started to chip the coal out of the rock face, ultimately undercutting the embankment too much, and it collapsed in a rainstorm. “Everypony knew it was going to go,” Longwall said. “My granddam said a few ponies tried shoring it up with any timbers that they could find, but when the ground started to slip and a few trees fell off the front of the rock face, everypony knew that it was too late and just galloped for high ground.

“It took months to clean everything back up and rebuild some of the houses, and then everypony decided since the seam went deep into the ground it made more sense to dig a normal mine and follow it down that way.”

“That was when they built the road to Greenock,” Gytta added. “Well, to the railroad, since there wasn’t much of a town there yet. Most of the buildings got built out of the trees that were cleared to make the road.”

“There wasn’t even a railroad there yet,” Lignite said. “Just the old road to Manehattan. That was where they put the tracks.”

“Nuh-uh, they had the railroad back then, but it was just a wagonway and went to the canal instead of all the way to Manehattan.”

“You can still see where it was; it’s overgrown now but you can see it if you go right to the end of the road in Greenock and then look to the forest on the other side of the tracks.” Longwall stopped suddenly and pointed to a support. “Right there, that’s a methane detecting crystal.”

Lignite obligingly stopped the mine cart so I could examine the crystal. It was a single crystal, about the size of a soda bottle, and wrapped in copper.

“How does it work?”

“Some unicorn puts the enchantment in them—we didn’t used to have them—and then as long as the spell stays active, we can recharge them.”

“How?”

Longwall sat on her rump and put both forehooves on the crystal, one on top and the other on the bottom. “Like that.”

I wouldn’t have believed it, but the crystal actually started glowing when she did that.

“It’s a lot easier when it’s not mounted on the wall,” Gytta said. “We’ve got extras, so we rotate them out and let the fillies and colts charge them for practice. And there’s a couple of older miners that still charge them, too.”

“We’ve only ever had to send back one,” Longwall said proudly. “It musta gotten overlooked, or else the spell on it didn’t stick.”

We weren’t very far in the shaft, and already it was pretty dark. My eyes had gotten a little bit adjusted, to the point where I could see a continuous row of lights stretching off into the distance.

I could also feel the gravity pulling me downward. The mine wasn’t at a terribly steep angle—if it had been, the ponies would have had trouble getting the wagons out.

As we got further in the mine, there really wasn’t much to see. Here and there, side paths branched off, following seams. Longwall knew when each one had been started and when it had been mined out.

“Down here,” she said, “We use this room to help clear out methane.”

Lignite moved towards the center of the path to turn, since she had to go left.

At first, I didn’t believe what I was seeing. It looked like there was a pine forest in the room, but that wasn’t possible. Trees couldn’t grow underground.

“Spruce trees breathe in methane,” Gytta said. “So that’s what we use.”

“How do they live down here?”

“We carry down bottled sunshine.”

“Bottled sunshine? How does that even work?”

Longwall and Gytta started laughing. “We bring them down every couple of days and then take them back up. When they get too big, we plant them.”

“That sounds like a lot of work.”

“It’s better than getting blown up.”

***

Assay joined us with an empty wagon shortly after we left the tree room, and we continued our descent.

I noticed that we were getting close to the end, because the lights stopped. It was weird, though, because I couldn’t see the end, and for all I knew, it actually did continue deeper but there weren’t any more lights.

The illusion continued until we were almost at the wall, when I finally saw a few glints of light off the rocks across the path.

Turning around was an interesting experience. “Hang on to the sides and don’t move around too much,” Lignite advised. “The cart’s tippy and we’ve got to make a really sharp turn.”

She wasn’t kidding. They hadn’t made the shaft much wider than they needed to, and she almost scraped up against the wall before starting her turn.

I could get an idea of how her hooves were moving by watching her hips and shoulders—I wanted to lean forward and get a better look, but the cart did feel unstable already.

She had one advantage that a wheeled vehicle didn’t: she could step sideways, which she did, getting an immediate angle on the shafts.

After that, it was a conventional turn, and then we were facing uphill. That felt really weird after facing down for so long.

It took her a moment to straighten out the cart, and then she released the brake and backed near the wall.

Assay did the same thing with her wagon, then turned and backed along the opposite side of the path.

The other three had to go get their mining tools—they kept those in a nearby side shaft—and then they came back down to the front wall.

The process of mining wasn’t anything too technically amazing. I’d long since gotten used to ponies using tools with their hooves and mouths, and as I’d suspected, the process for getting coal out of a seam was to chip it out with a pick and then shovel it into the waiting wagon a bit at a time.

Just the same, there was something mesmerizing about their choreography. Both Longwall and Gytta chipped at the wall, alternating strikes, and Overburden reached in between them with the shovel, raking a mound of coal back and then lifting it up into the cart.

What was a surprise—which I should have been prepared for—was when Gytta’s pick made a different sound hitting the wall. She’d found another gem.

She worked around it with the pick until it came loose and plunked down to the shaft floor, then she kicked it away from their coal pile.

I couldn’t help myself and picked it up. That was a bit of a mistake; it was naturally covered in oily black coal dust. For a moment, I considered wiping it off on my shirt, then I remembered that if I did, I was probably never going to get the black streaks out of it.

The only other option that came to mind was a sock, so I untied my shoe.

“You don’t mind if I keep this, do you?”

Longwall shrugged. “There’s plenty more where it came from, and it’s not worth much.”

“I think that one was an emerald,” Gytta said. “Sounded like it, anyway.”

The three of them worked until they’d filled Assay’s cart to the brim and then it was time to leave the mine. Longwall and Gytta put away all the tools, and when they came back, they helped push Assay’s cart to get it moving. “The hardest part is getting it rolling,” Longwall said. “After that, it’s pretty easy.”

“Sure.” I had my doubts. I didn’t know how much coal weighed, but when Lignite started pulling me, nobody helped push us. Therefore, I weighed less than a load of coal.

The ride back up was slower, since it was of course all uphill, and everyone wanted to stay together with Assay. I kept an eye out for the tiny point of light that marked the entrance to the shaft, but I couldn’t see it at all, even when I thought that I should be able to.

“Everypony does that their first time down,” Gytta said. “You won’t see it for a while, ‘cause it’s not any brighter than the crystal lights.”

“You won’t see it at all,” Assay said. “’Cause it’s dark outside now.”

My face went red—I’d somehow forgotten about that.

A Trip North: The Return

A Trip North: The Return

Sure enough, it was dark outside, almost as dark as it had been in the mine. Maybe darker; the mine had had lamps, but the village didn’t have street lights. Even so, it certainly felt brighter. Just the feel of the gentle wind blowing was a change from being inside the shaft.

Assay turned off to go to the rail siding, and Overburden followed her. Lignite didn’t choose to accompany them, which was fine; I'd seen the unloading arrangement before.

“There wasn’t a whole lot of space at the end of the shaft,” I said. “How do you have multiple miners all working down there at the same time?”

“Well, you’ve got to be friendly,” Longwall said, “’Cause it’s crowded pretty close. A lot of times, we’ll have one crew move in at a point, and then two on either side clearing behind them. Plus, there’s a lot of coal in the side shafts to get out, and so a coupla teams will work in those, too, until they’re played out.”

“Makes sense.”

“And we keep rotating, so nopony spends too much time with a pick or a shovel.”

“Another thing I was wondering about—how come it's so clean in there? I thought mines were really dusty places.”

“We have cleaning crews,” Lignite said. “Some of the foals that can't spend a whole day with a pickaxe or a shovel, plus there are some ponies who like sweeping. I guess it's kind of like chipping rocks, but with a broom.”

“Good ventilation's important, too,” Longwall added. “We didn't—I should have showed you. There's lots of different ventilation tunnels here and there to keep a bit of a breeze going. Sometimes on really still days, we've got to have a few ponies running the fans, but normally just a little wind does the trick.”

“The mine stays at about the same temperature all the time, but the air out here doesn't. So sometimes it wants to go up and sometimes it wants to go down, and as long as the dampers are set right, the wind practically makes itself.”

“Pegasi can help, too. The emergency ventilation shaft is strong enough to support a tornado,” Gytta said. “We've never had to use it for real, but we've practiced with it before.”

“Remember that one time the pegasi got too enthusiastic?”

Gytta nodded. “We spent the rest of the shift looking for our tools and hard hats. I think they'd have gotten it going fast enough to start pulling coal out, except that the pit boss yelled at them to stop when a shovel went through the mine office and stuck in the wall.”

That was something I would have liked to have seen. From a safe distance, of course.

“Oh, hey, Lignite, I forgot to tell you, Joe’s gonna get your bed tonight.”

“What?” She stopped so abruptly I had to grab on to the sides of the wagon, and then I suddenly found myself wondering why I was still in it. We weren’t in the mine any more; I could walk.

“Yeah,” Overburden said. “You’re the youngest, so you’ve got to give it up.”

“I can sleep on the floor, it’s fine.”

“You’re not sleeping on the floor.”

“You wouldn’t be so insistent if it was your bed,” Lignite said.

“Probably not. I get to make the rules, though.”

“Fine.” She shook her head. “I’m taking the extra blankets and making a pegasus nest, then.”

“That’s the spirit.”

***

It felt somehow wrong to watch Lignite and Assay get out of their harnesses. Like I had somehow stumbled into a woman’s locker room or something.

Which was weird; obviously, once they got out of their harnesses, they were only as naked as they normally were.

“You want to wash off? Me and the rest of the girls are going to rinse off in the town shower.”

“Uh. . .” I didn’t really have anything much with me—I’d thought that I’d be going back to Greenock tonight. Certainly, I didn’t have a change of clothes or even a towel.

Plus, I couldn’t help but imagine that the camp shower was much like the one I remembered from Boy Scout camp, just a series of fences around a bunch of showerheads, which wasn’t really my thing. “I . . . I didn’t really get all that dirty, you know? And, it was kind of overwhelming being underground.” That wasn’t actually a far stretch. “I think I’d rather stay out here, until you’re done.”

“Greenhorn,” Longwall said, but there was kindness in her voice. “That’s fine, just don’t go wandering off.”

“We don’t want to have to go searching for you,” Lignite said.

“Especially not down a ventilation shaft,” Gytta added. “Luna forbid you fall down one of those.”

* * *

Even though I couldn’t see it very well, I took the gem out to polish the rest of the grime off it. My sock was probably already ruined, but I used the grass to clean the gem just the same. There was no sense in making my sock any dirtier than it already was.

It was only when I held the gem up to study it that I remembered that some of the ponies might occasionally snack on the grass in the field, and hopefully they wouldn’t mind if it had a bit of a coal taste to it. They probably wouldn’t; surely everything in Pit Town had a bit of coal taste to it.

The gem glistened under the light of the stars, and looking at the moon through the edge I could see that it was, in fact, green.

I lost myself in its beguiling facets, turning it this way and that, looking through it at the stars and the windows of the village—and ultimately, the bemused face of Lignite.

“He’s just like a dragon starting his hoard.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have that,” Assay said. “We didn’t know that humans got all greedy when they got their paws on gems.”

“I’m not greedy,” I said defensively, but I didn’t put it down. “It’s just—I don’t think that there has ever been an emerald like this on Earth. Back in the old days, kings would have started wars to get their hands on this emerald.”

“Yup, he’s trying to hoard.”

“I’m not! I’m just telling you how it is.” I did put the emerald down. “I could never in my life afford to even touch a gem that beautiful. I can’t help it.” I thought for a moment. “It would be like if you came to Earth and saw one of our coal mines, maybe you’d be amazed and mesmerized by it.” Or, given the popularity of mountain top removal, maybe they’d be horrified. “Tell you what. I’d really like to look at it in the day, and then we’ll throw it on the gem pile. I can’t take it back to Earth with me anyway.”

“That’s fair,” Assay said.

“If you try to hoard it, I’ll buck you until you give it up,” Longwall promised.

“Deal.” I stuck out my hand, and she bumped it with her hoof.

* * *

I objected one more time to taking Lignite’s bed, but I got outvoted.

They had a large sleeping room on the upper floor of their house, which kind of reminded me of the Seven Dwarfs’ house. Lignite opened up a wooden chest and got out some heavy blankets, which I assumed were their winter blankets, and arranged them in a pile on the floor—her pegasus nest.

“Are you going to be okay walking back to Greenock tomorrow?” Longwall asked as I was getting into bed. “I can send Lignite with you, but then our crew would be short-hooved.”

“Yeah, I should be. Just stick to the main road, and I’ll get there eventually.”

“If you’re not sure—”

“I’m sure.” I felt like I was really imposing on them already. They were probably normally in bed long before now, but I’d wanted a tour.

* * *

Gytta talked in her sleep, and both Assay and Overburden snored. Lignite was an active sleeper, sometimes even sleep-trotting. Maybe she just wasn’t comfortable in her so-called pegasus nest. Only Longwall slept well--every time I opened my eyes during the night, she was in the exact same position, her chest rising and falling the only sign that she was still alive.

All five of them were up before the sun, and if I’d had any illusions of getting a decent night’s sleep, the five of them waking up shattered it. More specifically, Longwall shattered it.

I couldn’t blame her; she had probably forgotten that I was there. Sleeping in was a thing that ponies did, I'd thought; I’d been up before them yesterday.

“Wake up, everypony!” As a morning greeting, it was lacking, but I suppose if she did it every day she’d tend economize her words.

I expected a lot of grumbling and complaining, but there was hardly any at all. All of them got right up except for Lignite—she wrapped her hooves around her pillow and briefly tried to shut out the world, something I was intimately familiar with.

“You awake, Joe?” Longwall asked, rather unnecessarily.

“Yeah,” I muttered.

“Did you sleep well?”

“Sure did,” I lied.

“Ought to have, my bed is really comfortable.” Her voice was muffled by the pillow. Then her head popped up. “Hope you didn’t smoosh down my favorite spot.”

Without waiting for an invitation, she got up and pushed her hoof against the mattress. “Let me get out,” I suggested. “Then you can test it properly.”

“Yeah, okay.” She arched her back and cracked it while I was getting myself out of her bed. My neck hurt and my legs hurt but not too badly. I hadn’t walked as far as we did yesterday in years, and my body was letting me know about it.

Everything worked well enough that there wasn’t much chance I’d pitch out of bed and land on my face, so I slid off to the side and she didn’t even wait for me to get all the way out before she was in bed with me.

“How much do humans weigh, anyway?” Gytta asked.

“Um.” I’d learned Equestrian weights, but of course I couldn’t remember them at all.

“Less than you do.” Lignite rolled into the center of the bed, reclaiming her normal spot. “Still feels okay. That’s good.”

“You are pretty scrawny,” Longwall said. “I don’t mean to be rude.”

“You ought to eat more. Hardly ate any of the casserole last night.”

“I can’t eat hay,” I told them. “Not much of it, anyway.”

“Too bad. That gives you lots of energy.” Assay tapped her hoof on the floor. “Well, we’ve got some wheat bread; you can have that for breakfast. Then we have to go and work in the mine.”

“And before we do, you’ve got to give up your gem.”

* * *

We parted ways the next morning. We had breakfast together, and Longwall thanked me for coming to visit. She said that not many ponies wanted to see where their coal came from.

Assay got in her harness, and then the six of us walked over to the gem pile. I admired my emerald one last time in the sunlight, tracing my fingers over its features, and then placed it gently into the pile. Maybe in time I’d be riding on a stretch of rail that had been paid for with that emerald.

Lignite told me that I rode better in the cart than some of the colts and fillies she’d known, and I don't know why, but that was really flattering.

I said my goodbyes and hugged all of them--it seemed like the right thing to do. And then they were off to the mine.

They of course weren’t the only ponies going to the mine. Rather than turn and head back to Greenock right away, I leaned up against their house and watched the workponies. Some of them hitched up to carts and the rest went into the mine with just their normal equipment.

I counted three fillies and one colt that also went into the mine, and while that bothered me a little bit--it seemed like they should have been in school instead of working--it certainly wasn’t a sign of child labor. Probably the best way to think about it was as an apprenticeship, a way of learning a useful life skill. I’d seen a few young ponies in fields and working in Manehattan, and was this any different? I didn’t think it was, not really.

There wasn’t much else to see, so I headed down the road. If I kept up a good pace, I’d get back in time to catch the afternoon train back to Manehattan.

Author's Note

Click HERE for story arc notes!

The Jacks

The Jacks
Admiral Biscuit

There were a lot of things in cities that you noticed and then didn’t pay any attention to. Things like manhole covers—they were ubiquitous, but normally unless they were fenced off and somebody was down them, you paid them little to no mind.

And the little partitions in some alleyways in Manehattan were like that. I’d seen them before but not really registered them. They reminded me of bollards that were spaced too wide to have any real effect, or else the little gate around turnstiles. Maybe what a subway entrance would look like if they decided that they weren’t going to be charging fares any more.

I’d probably seen a pony go down one of those alleyways before, although if you’d asked me to swear in court that I had, I wouldn’t have.

And in hindsight, it should have been obvious. After all, I’d been to Central Park before and seen the carriage horses.

I’d been out later than usual: I’d gone to a movie theatre to see a movie called Desert Orchid, which was about a racepony of the same name. It was my first experience in a pony movie theatre, and much like a human cinema, the seats were uncomfortable and the concessions overpriced.

The movie wasn’t all that great, either, although the rest of the audience seemed to like it.

I was walking back to my hotel when a flickering light down an alleyway caught my eye. When I took a closer look, I saw a wagon sitting kind of crosswise in the alley, and I could see a head silhouetted by the lantern, although it took me a moment to figure that out, since the rest of the pony was underground.

That was an unusual sight, so I turned down the alleyway to see if I could figure out what was going on. Most of the roads were cobblestone, and that took a lot of work, so maybe she was repairing the road.

The smell hit me when I got a little bit closer, and if she hadn’t popped out of her hole to investigate me, I think I would have just turned and walked away.

She was wearing a full-body suit that looked very much like a hazmat suit, which was something that I hadn’t known ponies had invented. She’d pushed the hood off, probably to get a better look at me.

Without even thinking, I stuck out my fist, and she lifted up a forehoof, then thought better of it and reached forward to bump me with her nose instead.

“I’m Joe,” I said.

“Tam Tam.”

“You’re—”

She nodded. “I’ve gotta work at night. Manehattan law. Got to stay out of the way of the ‘nice ponies.’” She made adorable little air quotes with her hooves.

I was really curious what her cutie mark was, but I wasn’t going to ask her to take off her suit so I could see. “The city has running water and flush toilets.” I’d heard that some of the more rural areas didn’t.

“Not everywhere,” she informed me. “Most of the buildings do, sure, but what’s a pony to do when she’s hitched up to a wagon?”

“So you’ve got drive-through stalls.” Now that I knew what they were for, it made complete sense. The wagon behind would provide some privacy, and the half-walls would complete it. I suppose if anypony was really curious, they could look over the stall, but maybe they had social rules for that, like in the men’s restrooms back in America.

Or maybe since they went around naked all the time, they really didn’t care.

“Yup. And they’ve got to be cleaned out every now and then, ‘cause they get full.”

Back on Earth, of course, there were all sorts of septic tank cleaners out in the country, and of course the guys that hauled the outhouses around. I suppose they must have emptied them out, too—I wasn’t sure how that worked. Was there a hose that went in them, or a drain valve at the bottom? Probably a hose; a drain valve might leak.

And did they swap them out when they got full, or have some kind of a rotating schedule where they went by with some kind of a hose truck and sucked them out then put more of that blue stuff in them?

Tam Tam didn’t have blue stuff. She only had an open wagon which at least had a tarp to cover it, although that was currently rolled back.

I thought about asking her about leaks, then decided I probably didn’t want to know. Surely there was some kind of liner in the wagon. She must know what she’s doing.

“How many of you are there?”

“How many of me?”

“Working for the city? Cleaning up—this.”

“Couple dozen,” she said. “Me and my brothers, we’re the biggest crew. Most everypony else is one or two at most.”

“Where do you take it when you’re done? The sewage treatment plant?” I didn’t know if that was a thing, but it was on Earth, and they did have plumbing, so it seemed logical.

“Sometimes. Kinds depends. There isn’t space to compost it in most of Manehattan and it takes too long to get it out to the outskirts of the city by wagon, you know? But we’ve got our own rail siding, and we ship it out to Appleoosa so they can improve the soil out there.”

“Isn’t Appleoosa kind of desert?” That was what I’d heard.

“Yeah, so the soil’s not too good. Weather patrols can get the rain, but if there aren’t any nutrients in the soil, the plants won’t grow, and the sand will just wash away. It’s kind of difficult to improve land like that, you know. Gotta work slowly and get hearty plants in first to fix the soil in, and then start improving it. We bought some land out there; ‘cause it’s really cheap, and when my little sister gets old enough, she’s going to start working it and improving it, and once it gets good enough that we can grow crops, the whole family’s going to move out there. Until then—” she motioned at her cart.

“Does it pay well?”

She nodded. “Not a lot of ponies really want to do it. Gonna be weird when I quit, though; working during the day instead of the night. Hey, I don’t mean to be rude, but—”

“No—I’m sorry for taking your time. It was good talking to you, and good luck with your farm.”

“Thanks!” She pulled the helmet back over her head and I stayed around long enough for her to drop back in the pit, then walked out of the alleyway and back to the street.

Author's Note

Back in Ye Olden Times, having a horse-powered city came with certain drawbacks, and there were people whose job it was to keep the streets clean. Night Soil men, as they were sometimes called, or gong farmers. They often worked at night, because nobody wanted to see (or smell) them during the day.

Which, incidentally, is where Tam Tam’s name came from--that’s a type of gong.

Desert Orchid was a real racehorse.

Also, FWIW, they normally suck out port-a-potties with a vacuum truck; they don’t transport them full (for what I should expect are obvious reasons).

Jacks is Irish slang for the toilet.

Strucia

Strucia
Admiral Biscuit

Most of the ponies I’d seen took their coats seriously. I was sure that there was some kind of social rule about that, but thus far I hadn’t figured it out, and it felt gauche to ask.

Besides, even if I did, I might not understand the explanation. I still didn’t understand why men’s bikes needed a crossbar at the top when women’s bikes had a lower frame, and I’d lived on Earth all my life. The nuances of pony coat grooming would likely be completely lost on me.

Mostly, it appeared to be a spectrum from good to better. A lot of ponies, especially working ponies, had decently-groomed coats, while the white-collar—if that term could be said to apply to ponies—took more care. They often looked glossier.

Of course it was possible sweat and dust from work could dull their coats, and I had to admit that they wouldn’t be able to have much of a society if they groomed themselves at the exclusion of all other tasks. The coal-mining ponies had had slightly dirty coats, no doubt an occupational hazard.

Even when they were doing the same thing, though, there was clearly a personal aspect. Goldenrod and Lillium were very similar in appearance, although not at all in personal care.

I was waiting for an omnibus to take me back to my hotel, and the last thing I should have been thinking about was pony coats, but just across the street from me, in a little shelter that was a mirror to my own, sat a mare who was nearly shaved bald. It was hard to judge from my distance, but she looked balder on the chest and belly than on top.

The two initial thoughts I’d had was that she was rebelling against the coat brush industry, or else she was sick. And as much as I wanted to know, I wasn’t sure that it was the right thing to ask. Kids could get away with that; kids could go up to a person in a wheelchair and ask why their legs didn’t work and that was cute, and a learning opportunity. Adults couldn't, not on Earth anyway.

Granted, she’d probably never see me again, but it was still rude.

Just the same, I checked the traffic signal and it was in my favor, so I got up from the bench and walked across the street. I could get on whatever omnibus she was taking and maybe there’s be an opportunity to talk, an opportunity to sate my curiosity.

Maybe there wouldn’t, and that was okay, too.

I noticed that her eyes and ears followed me across the street. I hadn’t encountered all that many human tourists. If she was curious, I could answer her questions and she could answer mine. Ponies were generally more social, and would strike up conversations with strangers.

As I got closer, I noticed some white smudges on her short fur and in her mane, and I could see the tired droop of her eyelids. The latter didn’t rule out anything.

Her cutie mark was a loaf of bread, which suggested that there was a good chance that the white smudges were flour, although I didn’t want to jump to that conclusion right away.

“Tourist?” Her voice had a bit of roughness to it, which again could have been from anything.

“Yeah.” I sat down on the bench, which brought me closer to her height.

“Where you heading?”

“Well.” She’d surely seen me across the street, and if I told her, she’d inform me that I was getting on the wrong omnibus now. But I didn’t want to lie, either. “Nowhere in particular. Just looking around the city, you know?”

“It’s a big city, plenty to see.”

“Yeah. You from here?”

“Born and bred.”

Our conversation was interrupted as the omnibus arrived. I had a monthly pass which I showed to the cubrside pony towing the wagon. She was a familiar face, and they let her board unchallenged.

She was covering a yawn as I took the seat beside her, wondering if I was being rude. Maybe she liked to doze as she rode home.

Instead, she smiled. “I don’t usually get company on the ride home, not unless one of the girls is headed uptown.” She held out a hoof, and I bumped it. “I’m Strucia.”

“Joe.”

“Good to meet you.”

“Same.”

We fell silent for a moment. I really wanted to ask her about her coat, and she surely had a question or two for me, but we were both too polite to ask, until I decided I might as well be the dumb tourists. “So, forgive me for asking, but is that flour on your coat?”

She nodded. “I’m a baker.”

“So you’ve probably been up all day.”

“Yeah.” She grinned. “Ponies want fresh bread in the morning, which means I’ve got to get up before anypony else, and get to work. It’s nice, though; I get to see a side of the city that not many ponies do.”

I thought back to my chance meeting with Tam Tam. “I know what you mean; I’ve been wandering off the beaten path myself. It’s more interesting than the parts of the city that the tourists see, don’t you think?”

Strucia nodded. “Sometimes it’s kind of creepy, though. I don’t like the way that my hooffalls echo on empty streets. There’s a newspaper colt who’s usually at the corner by the time I get there, but sometimes he isn’t.”

“Do the omnibuses run that early?”

“No, but I don’t mind walking to work. It helps wake me up.”

“I suppose it would. Say, you don’t mind me asking—”

“Because it’s hot in the kitchen.”

“—why your . . . okay, yeah.” That made perfect sense. All the ovens. I’d worked in a restaurant back in high school, just a little hole-in-the-wall type of place, and the kitchen was hotter than the hubs of hell in the summertime. The owner was too cheap to install air conditioning, so we just suffered in the heat.

“Easier to keep clean, too.” She reached up and brushed at a spot of flour. “Well, mostly. I shoulda cleaned off before leaving, but I just didn’t feel like it.”

“I can understand; I used to work in a restaurant myself. Nothing special, just fast food.”

“Like the Thermopolium?”

“More like a Hayburger.”

She stuck her tongue out. “Their food isn’t all that good. Some ponies swear by it, though.”

“Ours wasn’t, either,” I admitted. “It was cheap, and it was fast, and that was the best that could be said for it.”

“Well, if you want some quality bread sometime, you should stop by my bakery. It’s called Strucia’s—creative, I know—and it’s not far from the omnibus stop. A couple of blocks west, that’s all. You can’t miss it.”

“I think I will,” I said.

Author's Note

IRL, working horses are often shaved so they don’t overheat. Assuming the same principles of thermodynamics apply to ponies, some working ponies might also choose to shave their coats, especially winter coats.

Source

What Applejack is sporting is called the blanket clip, which is idea for horses doing medium work.

Strucia is a type of sweet bread, and I don’t know more than that about it.

Canal Boat: Aire and Calder Navigation

Aire and Calder Navigation
Admiral Biscuit

Manehattan Harbor tours were popular with tourists, pony and human alike. While the ponies lacked Duck Boats, they had various sailing ships, sidewheelers, and steamboats offering short cruises, as well as a few water taxis—primarily for transportation, although I’d been told that the captains often pointed out things of interest to the passengers.

I was standing in front of a sign with the silhouette of a boat. Beneath it, two other signs, one which said “Fens Waterway,” and a second advertising Aire & Calder Navigation Co. That sign was shaped like an arrow, and also had an icon of a castle tower and a rose.

It was also pointing away from the Manehattan Harbor. I had a more interesting day trip in mind.

My first sight of the Fens Waterway brought to mind an industrialized Venice. It was picturesque and traditional-looking, like most pony construction, but instead of apartments overlooking the canal, my side had a small railroad yard, and the other side was lined with squat warehouses. In the early-morning light, everything looked dingey and grey, with the exception of a thermopolium. A few ponies in harness were lined up in front of it, no doubt getting breakfast before they went on to their next task.

Aire & Calder’s warehouse clerk directed me dockside, towards a long canal boat. It had an unmistakable workhorse look to it; it was well-kept, but showed signs of hard labor. It was double-ended, with three open holds—one long one in the center, and two shorter ones at either end. A cabin fore and aft separated the cargo holds.

A yellow mare and a bulky blue stallion were busy loading the boat. The stallion was rolling barrels down a spindly gangplank, and as each reached the deck, the mare rolled them into place and set them on end. I noticed that she was working across both sides of the centerline of the boat, in order to keep it level.

I didn’t want to interrupt them, so I looked around the area for other activity.

Just downstream, next to the rail yards, was a coal dock. A large open barge was being emptied into rail cars by means of a clamshell bucket crane. Instead of the crane swivelling, like I would have expected, the bucket moved transversely along its arm, until it was over the rails.

That in and of itself wouldn’t have been too interesting; any number of Earthly cranes worked similarly. What was interesting was that the ponies who built it were apparently afraid it might topple over, and added a counterweight. Since the load moved, so did the counterweight; it slid across a track on top of the crane, staying opposite of the loading bucket.

Its movements were mesmerizing, and I didn’t turn back around to look at my boat until the third time the train moved forward to put another empty railcar under the crane.

The center hold of my barge had been loaded, and the ramp pulled away. The mare and stallion were working in the stern hold now, passing crates and sacks in. I waited until they’d finished and put the deck covers back on before making my way to the edge.

“Is this Aire and Calder Navigation?”

The mare glanced up at me. “Sure is. I’m Flash Lock—who are you?”

“Joe. I booked passage to Stroudwater.”

“All right. We’re almost loaded, but you got time to get to the thermopolium if you want something to eat before we set out. Won’t be any food ‘til noontime or thereabouts. You can use the front cabin—do you need a gangplank or can you jump across?”

It really wasn’t a long jump—not even a foot—and judging by the size and load of the boat, I wasn’t going to move it much getting aboard. “I think I can make it on my own.”

“Watch your head, it’s not very tall in there.”

•••

She wasn’t lying. It wasn’t very tall in the cabin even for a pony. That was fine; I wasn’t planning to spend much time in my cabin.

As far as amenities went, there were the bare minimum. A couch, a bed, and a table. I could sit on the couch and not have my head touch the ceiling, and I could almost lie on the bed, as long as I had my knees hunched up. This wasn’t luxury travel by any means, but it didn’t claim to be. It was cheap, a way for Flash Lock and her crew to make a few extra bits on a route they were already travelling.

I assumed that they used these cabins for themselves when they didn’t have passengers, maybe one for each of them? Or else they might hot-bunk, if they needed to keep a watch during the night.

America had some canals, most famous of which was the Erie Canal. If there was still water in the canal, it might be used even now; I wasn’t sure. Regardless, it lacked the authenticity of a pony canal.

I heard hoofsteps above my head, and looked out the window just in time to see Flash Lock hop off the roof, a rope in her mouth. She went all the way up to the bank where a pair of ponies were waiting. One was the stallion I’d seen helping her load the barrels, and he was standing beside a pony in harness who was his mirror-image twin—white where he was blue, and vice-versa.

“You ready?” Flash Lock poked her muzzle into the cabin. “We’re loaded and as soon as Swanky gets the rope on Mersey, we’ll be ready to go.”

“Yeah.” As soon as she moved back, I got out of the cabin. It had generous windows, but I didn’t want anything to restrict my view.

Mersey had a half-harness. I wasn’t an expert in how pony harnesses worked, but I’d seen more than enough of them to have a general idea of what they ought to look like. This one was only the front half.

Mersey was also a mare, something I hadn’t realized until she turned to face down the towpath.

She pulled the line—which was attached on top of my cabin—until she’d taken the slack out. Flash Lock had already taken the stern-rope off the bollard and pushed away from the dock; Swanky had the bow-rope in his teeth. He tugged on it to get the barge moving, then jumped aboard and we set off.

He stopped at my cabin and held out a hoof. “Swanky Brook, and that’s Mersey, my twin sister, up there on the tow-rope.”

“Joe.” I gave him a fist-bump.

“So I hear you’re bound for Stroudwater. Got business there?”

“Just curious,” I admitted. “I’ve never ridden on a canal boat before.”

“It’s a real nice trip,” he told me. “Once you get out of Manehattan, anyway. You’ll want to watch your head on bridges, and I hope you ain’t scared of tunnels.”

“Tunnels?”

“Yup, they built some of the city over the canal. That’s a mile ahead or so. Some ponies don’t like it, if it bothers you we can stop at the mouth and let you out, and you can walk to the other side and we’ll pick you up there.”

“I’ll be fine,” I assured him. “I went down in a coal mine.”

•••

The entrance to the tunnel reminded me of a scene in a movie. The curved stone wall arcing over the river, the city atop. It was smaller than I’d imagined, and I couldn’t see any light through it, or in it.

We stopped before entering. Swanky Brook tossed the bow-rope around a bollard as we passed, letting it slide as the boat braked and sprung back slightly.

He had a brief conference with a colt who was the tunnel attendant. It was too narrow for two-way traffic, so we had to wait until a barge came through before we could start our journey.

Swanky took that opportunity to hang a lantern—similar to the miner’s lamps—on the front of Mersey’s harness, and another on the bow of our boat.

“You’re gonna want to watch your head,” Flash Lock advised. “The center part of the tunnel’s real low and narrow, not much higher than the posts on the cabins.”

“Got it.” That would make it lower than the mine shaft, at least as much as it mattered to me. I didn’t know how deep the water was.

•••

I could see moving lights in the stygian darkness of the tunnel, and it seemed like forever before a pair of ponies finally emerged. They were walking single-file, rather than side-by-side. For longer than I thought possible, the illusion that the rope trailing behind them connected to nothing persisted, before the boat finally came into view.

It wasn’t until they’d fully emerged from the tunnel that I realized they were on the same side of the canal as we were—apparently there was only one towpath through the tunnel. I assumed that the ponies had figured this out, and indeed they had. The pair stopped pulling as soon as the bow of the boat emerged, and their helmsmare pushed the tiller hard over, angling the boat across the canal.

The two of them, still attached to their rope and each other, hopped up on the stern and trotted across the deck. The bow was nearly at the other bank and they only had to wait a moment before it brushed the edge.

They jumped off and hurried forward to pull the slack back out of the line, while the helmsmare straightened her course, now on the opposite side of the canal.

Flash Lock waved as they passed, and Mersey started to pull us into the tunnel. As she moved into the shadow, her coat seemed to turn grey, and then she became a shadow, only illuminated by the lantern on the front of her harness.

Then it was our turn; the front of the barge passed under the arched stones and towards the shadow.

Swanky glanced up as the tunnel portal passed by overhead. “Did Flash warn you about how low it gets in the middle?”

“Top of the cabin, she said.”

“Yeah.” He sat down on the bow. “It’s dangerous. They ought to put crystal lamps in, but nopony wants to spend the bits.”

•••

I hadn’t thought I was claustrophobic, especially after the mineshaft, but the tunnel was a different matter altogether. Swanky Brook was keeping a close watch on the bow of the barge, ensuring it didn’t get too close to the wall. He had a barge pole to push off if needed, and I didn’t want to distract him by trying to carry on a conversation.

In the stern, Flash Lock was concentrating on the helm, keeping the boat centered in the canal by the feeble light the bow lantern gave off.

I just listened to the weird sounds of Mersey’s hooffalls reflecting off the walls, the echoing sounds of drips from the ceiling and the occasional splash of water. In the dim light of the lanterns, the roof appeared to be rushing by faster than the walls which I imagined was some kind of weird optical illusion.

For a while, I could see a spot of light behind us, and then it faded and was gone. The tunnel might have curved, which would have covered any light from the entrance or exit. I didn’t know for sure; all that I knew was that I was stuck in a pitch-black cave.

I didn’t want to risk moving—overhead was the roof and its dangers; and I had an idea that if I were to fall out of the barge, they’d have a hard time finding me in the darkness. So I instead concentrated on the wall passing alongside, and the bounce of Mersey’s lantern as she plodded through the tunnel and wondered how soon we’d reach the other end.

•••

We eventually emerged from the mouth of the tunnel. Not only was the open air around us a welcome change, but the scenery was different, too. It was a more suburban neighborhood, rather than the crowded city center.

There was a large basin where barges could wait for their turn to get into the tunnel—Swanky Brook told me that they tried to leave as early as possible in the morning to avoid traffic. The tunnelmaster prefered to send barges through in clusters, since that was most efficient; while we were in the tunnel, a cluster of barges had accumulated.

“A lot of times, we’re bucking canal traffic,” he said. “’Cause we leave the city in the morning and return in the evening.”

“You’ll be back tonight?” I’d looked at the map and maybe it was possible, although only if there were no delays and the cargo got quickly loaded and unloaded.

“No, tomorrow. We lay up in Stroudwater for the night.” He yawned, and covered his mouth with a hoof. “Sorry, long morning loading. Just gotta stay awake until the first locks, then I can go back to the cabin and have a catnap.”

“If it’s something I can help with, I will,” I offered.

“Well, if Flash Lock says it’s okay. It’s her boat.”

“I’ll go ask her.”

•••

The ponies didn’t go for handrails, and I wasn’t sure how sturdy the barrels were. Probably quite sturdy, but I didn’t want to get in trouble for stepping in their cargo, whatever it was. So I followed along the edge, keeping my arms out for balance.

I offered to help at the lock if I could, and she gave her assent. Swanky Brook retired to the cabin, and I stayed in the stern of the boat.

“So what’s the big advantage of your barge versus a train or a cart?” I asked.

“It’s cheaper for some bulky things,” she said. “And we can service customers right on the canal, while a train would have to leave it at the station for pickup. Stroudwater isn’t on the same division as Manehattan, so even though the train’s faster over the ground, it would have to go to Fens Junction and then the car’s gotta be taken out of the train and set aside for another train to take it the rest of the way.”

“Unless they built tracks from Manehattan to Stroudwater.”

“Then we might be out of a job,” she admitted. “Or find something else to carry on the boat. Lots of ponies live alongside the canal, even on boats anchored in basins, and it’s really convenient to have things delivered right to you.” She moved the tiller as the boat came up to a bend in the river. “I’m more worried about Swanky and Mersey; some ponies have invented steam engines small enough to fit in a canalboat, and if those get cheap and popular, a lot of towponies will be needing to find new work.”

“We have the same problems on Earth,” I told her. “Jobs change, or how jobs are done changes, and people who work one job might find that nobody wants that product or service any more. There’s a lot of debate about what to do about that, if people should be re-trained or if the government should help prop up industries that are past their prime.” We’d pulled clear of the basin and back into the narrower canal proper. “But never mind that, I’d rather focus on the positive. It’s really pretty out here already. Is this what the rest of the trip is going to be like?”

“Mostly. After the second set of locks, we’ll be along fields and forest for a while, before we come along the edge of Fens Junction—it used to just be Fens before the railroad came by—then we cross a valley on a bridge. We’ll get lunch on one side or the other, it depends on whether we have to wait for traffic.”

“The bridge is only one barge wide?”

She nodded. “And then a couple more locks, more forest, Oakton, Lock Lake Causeway, Lock Lake Basin, more fields and forests, and eventually Stroudwater around dinnertime.”

•••

Locks were another holding point for the boat. “The gate’s open,” Flash Lock said, “so we just go right in. Mersey’ll get to the end of the lock and loop around that capstan and then walk back; she’ll wind up right alongside. You gotta go uptop and cross over the gates on the uphill end, ‘cause all the valve controls are on the other side of the canal. I’ll shout instructions to you, it’s not hard.”

“Is there any way I can mess it up and make the boat crash through the gates?”

“No.”

“Good.” I jumped off the boat where Flash Lock indicated, and walked up the ramp alongside the lock. She hadn’t said, but I assumed that Mersey would ride the barge up, her first break since we’d left the tunnel.

I’d gotten to the controls before the barge was all the way in, and looked down inside the lock to watch the progress. The capstan was shaped almost like a fat T. Mersey walked up to it, waited until the boat’s momentum had given her a bit of slack in the towrope, then dropped it over the edge and started walking back the other way.

They’d obviously done this a time or two; Mersey stopped before the entire barge was in, but it coasted the rest of the way, until Flash Lock looped a rope over a bollard near the stern and brought it to a stop.

Mersey hopped aboard and brought in the towline, while Flash Lock looked up to make sure I was in position. “First thing is to close the gates—do you see the big lever? That’s the gate lever.”

It was impossible to miss; like the tiller was hooked to the rudder, it extended from the top of the gate. A linkage ran across the top of the lock so both doors could be operated together, and it was sitting in a recess in a stone pillar.

“Lift it up to get it out of the lockstone, and pull it to the other lockstone. Make sure it’s seated in the notch.”

“Got it.” I lifted it up and began pushing. At first, it didn’t want to move, but as the doors started to push through the water, it got easier.

I held back at the end; I wasn’t sure if they could be damaged by closing them too enthusiastically.

“There’s a wheel next to that, you want to turn it all the way sunwise to close the paddle gate.”

“Sunways?”

“Yeah, how the sun goes around on a dial.”

“What if I don’t know which way that is?”

“Um, you should see a rack gear sticking out of the ground next to the mechanism. If it’s up, the paddle gate is open.”

“How far up?”

“At the uphill end of the lock, there’s another one just like it, they both should look about the same. Just turn it so the rack’s moving down, and won’t move down any further.”

“Got it.” The wheel was too large for a human—I imagined that ponies would hook something on their harness on it, and turn it that way.

It moved easily, and the rack came up, so I turned it back the other way. “It’s all the way closed.”

“Good. Ponies are supposed to leave it closed when they leave the lock, but sometimes they’re in a hurry and don’t. Now go to the uphill lock and open the paddle gate there.”

“Same process?”

“Yes.”

“Do I have to stop it when the water gets at the right level?”

“No, it will level itself.”

I should have remembered that water worked that way.

•••

The boat rose slowly. Mersey sat on the gunnel and snacked on an oatcake while Flash Lock checked on the load.

She didn’t trust me to close the valve; once the barge had reached the top of the lock and I’d opened the uphill gates, she hopped out and checked both valves wheels to make sure they were set in the right position for the next barge to come through.

I boarded the barge while Mersey disembarked and started walking down the towpath again. Flash Lock waited until the rope pulled taut, then gave the barge a shove, leaping aboard as it started moving.

The terrain on either side of the canal was hilly, and we passed through several cuts and across the top of a couple embankments. It was hard to imagine how the ponies had built all that, although historically, humans had done the same thing.

We passed by a couple having a picnic on the bank, and further along a small flock of ducks who were very familiar with passing barges. Flash Lock tossed some bread in the water for them.

Every now and then, we’d pass a coal barge headed the opposite way, towards Manehattan. Flash Lock admitted that she didn’t like them, but that they were helping to keep the canal open and keep towponies at work, so they were a mixed blessing.

•••

Just before reaching the next set of locks, we did our first barge-to-barge transfer, which caught me totally by surprise.

“Hoy! Mersey! Transfer!”

Mersey glanced over at the approaching boat and adjusted her steps, enough to stop pulling but not to let the rope completely slack.

Flash Lock angled the barge towards the center of the canal, and I could see that the tillermare on the other barge was doing the same. Both of them clearly knew exactly where to position themselves in the canal.

I’d expected to stop completely and rig some kind of a transfer ramp, but instead Flash Lock tossed a sack across as the sterns slid by, and then we were on our way again.

“What was that?”

“Fresh bread and cheese,” Flash Lock said. “From Manehattan.”

I thought about that. “They’re downbound, why don’t they just get it in town themselves?”

“Barge is too tall to fit through the tunnel,” she explained. “So I get it for them. Every couple of weeks they pay me back with a case of wine from a vineyard on their route. It works out well for both of us, and we bargees gotta stick together.”

“So they don’t go all the way into Manehattan?”

“No, they stop just above the first lock, that’s where their final delivery is.”

Canal Boat: Fens Junction

Fens Junction
Admiral Biscuit

I got to send the barge through the second set of locks as well. Now that I knew what I was doing, it went much more efficiently, even though this time they were still set for upbound traffic—I had to drain it out before I could open the lower gates.

This time, I didn’t have to cross over the canal; there were controls on both sides. Flash Lock said that this one had two sets of paddle gates, and each side’s controls operated one. That was one of the reasons why it was important to make sure that they were closed after transiting the lock, so the next pony to come along wouldn’t have to cross over and set the gates on the other side.

•••

We passed under a railroad bridge, then intersected a small river that ran more or less parallel to the tracks. On both sides, there were floodgates which could be raised if the river level was too low, and moveable wooden bridges for the towpath.

“Those gates weren’t there when I was a filly,” Flash Lock said. “Used to be late in the summer, the water level in the canal between here and Fens Junction would sometimes drop low enough that you could only carry a half-load. Putting them in really helped things out, kept the water from draining down that canal, but there was a lot of debate from some of the farmers.”

“Why’s that?”

“They’d run their crops in flat-bottomed boats down to the canal and then ship it to Manehattan that way. The original idea at the river was to just build a wall that was at the minimum water level for the canal—that would have been the cheapest—but then the farmboats would get stuck on it, so they compromised and came up with the gates. They were going to build a full lock system on the upstream side, but then the trains came through and the farmers stopped using the river at all.”

“Well, not having a permanent gate is probably better for the fish,” I said. “Are there fish in the canal?”

“Of course there are. Some places it isn’t good for fish to live—the bottom’s not much deeper than a barge’s draft, or it’s all stone. But a lot of places the canal was a river before, and wherever it’s deep enough and there isn’t any trouble with soil getting deposited, it’s a nice bottom for fish. Some of the good spots, you might see pegasi fishing.”

•••

The fields gave way to forest, and I started to notice more wildlife. Turtles sunning themselves, otters playing on the bank, and a heron eying the water for a fishy meal. He apparently didn’t like our barge, and flew off when we got close.

A little further on, we came to a set of sturdy stone abutments with a ramshackle cabin nearby.

“That’s the old toll bridge,” Flash Lock explained. “Used to be across the canal. You had to pay the bridge operator one bit to put it down for you, if you were on the road. Just a little bit ahead, you might notice some newer stones on the edge of the canal, ‘cause ponies who weren’t towing a wagon would just ford the canal.”

“What happened to it?”

Flash Lock rubbed her chin. “Well, I heard two stories. The boring story is that it got old and fell apart, and there wasn’t enough traffic on the road to pay for a new bridge. They dug out one side of the ford and for a while there was a rope ferry, but there wasn’t enough road traffic to make that worthwhile, either.”

“What’s the interesting story?”

“That the bridge tender thought he could make more bits by leaving the bridge down and making bargees pay for passage, so one night they burned down the bridge.” She shrugged. “It’s been gone since before I was born, so I don’t know which is true. My mother says it fell down; my father says it was burned down.”

“Which do you think is true?”

“I think the canal’s been around long enough that a bridge might get old and fall down,” she said. “But if the bridge tender blocked the canal, bargeponies would burn it down rather than pay him a bit each time they passed.”

•••

We passed out of the forest into marshland. It reminded me of swampy areas around home—besides the clear path of the canal, there were other low-lying areas with standing water, along with hummocks of grass and clusters of trees in the drier, solider spots.

There was also another canal intersection; this one was a proper junction. Each of the quadrants had a swinging bridge for the towpath. Our route was clearly the principal route, since the bridges on both sides were closed, while the cross-bridges were open.

“Are all canals built like this? When they intersect?”

“Depends on how important they are. You can make bridges tall enough that the towpath clears barges in the other canal, but if you’ve got four, the rope won’t clear. If both canals have heavy traffic, and if the terrain allows, it’s smarter to have one canal cross the other on a bridge. But if the canal levels are too close, it would take just as long for the top route to lock up and down.

“Further along the canal, past Stroudwater, there’s a fording canal crossing. That’s nice for towponies on summer days, but not so much on cooler days since the water’s at about mid-barrel. Sometimes when we’ve got to pass it, Meresy or Swanky Bank will start pulling faster so we can coast by and they can ride the boat instead of getting wet.”

“You could do that at a lot of the intersections,” I said.

“Usually, but it depends on barge traffic, if somepony is trying to make a turn from one canal into the other, or how the wind’s blowing—that’s why it’s smart to have bridges. Otherwise somepony with a heavy boat or who isn’t too good on the tiller might clog up the canal for everypony else.”

“So I assume this intersection is why it’s called Fens Junction?”

“It was actually the railroad that gave the town its name,” Flash Lock told me. “’Cause it was also a good place to transfer things between the north/south route and the east/west route. So after they built the interchange, they put up signs at the switching yard saying that it was Fens Junction, and then some of the bargees decided that this junction was the original Fens Junction and the railroad was just some johnny-come-lately.”

“It would have stopped there but the tavern decided that the main crossroads in town was the original original Fens Junction and put up a sign, and then a couple farmers who had paths that crossed said that they were the original and it all got very silly. An intersection on a cowpath became the Original Original Original Fens Junction, and the railroad didn’t want to be outdone so they called the yard Fens Junction Junction and after that everypony decided it was silly and all the signs got taken down and the town was called Fens Junction after that.

“The land gets higher and not as swampy past the bend, and, you’ll be able to see the railroad yard.”

“Fens Junction Junction?”

Flash Lock stuck her tongue out at me.

•••

True to her word, after we came around the bend I could see the railroad yard. They had a loading dock that went right down to the canal, and there was a barge tied up there, although I didn’t see any activity around it. Most of the trees along the canal had been cut down, and I could easily see a few strings of railcars lined up on the sidings, as well as a few ponies working in the yard, coupling and uncoupling cars.

One of the railroaders was a pegasus who flew along lines of cars, occasionally swooping down between the rows, before flying back up. I assumed he was some sort of car inspector or car locator—it seemed a needlessly complicated way to find railcars, but then I remembered that there were no better solutions humans had come up with, not unless they were installing GPS in railcars now.

A lot of public vehicles like police cars and busses had numbers on top of them, which was something that the ponies apparently hadn’t thought of. I hadn’t seen any like that at the train station, anyway, but maybe that was less important for passenger trains.

I lost sight of him as a train rounded the very outside track, blocking my entire view of the yard. One of the ponies in the cab leaned out and waved, and I waved back at her.

“That was Reuben,” Flash Lock told me. “In case you were wondering.”

“Do you know all the train engineers?”

“Not all of them, but I know her and her whistle. She usually runs the west route, ‘cause she’s good at getting trains over hills. I don’t see her this far east too often. Somepony must have called in sick.”

•••

The tracks curved away from the canal, and we settled back into swampland for a short stretch before we came to the actual town of Fens Junction, which was largely situated on a rise above the canal. A pair of fillies peered over the edge as we passed below, and we waved back. As the barge went under the bridge, they crossed over the road so they could get another look at us, and then the two of them galloped off into town. While it was possible that they were excited at having seen a barge, I thought it was more likely that I was the first human they’d ever seen.

Sure enough, as we neared the end of town, the two of them were again leaning on a railing overlooking the canal, and they’d brought some of their friends with them to see, as well. I wasn’t sure what I should do—stand up so they could get a better look? Wave to them like a benevolent monarch as we passed by?

I settled on waving to them, which resulted in not only waves back, but also a cheer from one pony. Mersey turned around to see what the commotion was, looking first at the bank and then back at me before shaking her head and carrying on.

I got the feeling that she wasn’t the kind of pony given to enthusiasm. And now that I thought about it, I hadn’t ever heard her talk. Was she mute?

“Looks like you’re famous,” Flash Lock said.

“There aren’t too many humans out this way, are there?”

“Not really. You’re not the first I’ve seen, if you were wondering. In the old fishyards in Manehattan there’s even a woman who works at a knick-knack shop. I think that’s the first human I saw up close.

“Some ponies are intimidated by how tall humans are, but I didn’t get that impression. Of course, she was working with a minotaur, so she was a lot smaller by comparison.”

“I’ll have to see if I can find her,” I said. “Be interesting to talk to somebody else who’s been in Equestria for a while. See what her experiences have been.”

•••

Our side of the bridge had a basin where barge traffic could wait, and Flash Lock affirmed that the other side did, as well. It was only large enough for barges to pass in one direction, and like the tunnel there was a bridge authority who guided bridge traffic.

It reminded me of roadwork, of people flagging temporary one-way traffic, something unwanted and unexpected for modern-day travellers, but not enough of a bother for the ponies to design something bigger.

Admittedly, there was a lot on the canals I’d seen so far that could have been improved upon but for competition from the railroad. It was both faster and easier to construct, so even while the canal still seemed to serve a viable commercial service, it had probably peaked in terms of traffic.

Mersey stopped the barge just astern of a packet boat, and Flash Lock tied up. Judging by the number of barges waiting in the basin, we wouldn’t be moving all that soon.

Each side of the bridge had a restaurant, and Flash Lock told me that they were both owned by the same mare. There was no reason not to get a meal while waiting for passage to open, after all.

Between the normal restaurants, the thermopoliums, and the food carts ambitious ponies set up, I thought I’d seen it all, but I clearly hadn’t. Ponies might not want to get off their barges and lose their spot in the queue, so the restaurant came to us—a food truck that floated.

Their boat had some sort of an engine, and shortly after we made fast to the shore, it nosed up alongside. They had everything from hayburgers to casseroles, from soups and stews to pasture grass mixes. They even had a catch of the day which they claimed was caught from the canal or a nearby feeder river, and which could be had cooked or raw.

I decided on a canal fish. Flash Lock ordered a hayburger for herself, an oat porridge for Mersey, and a pasture grass salad for Swanky Brook. She told me that he usually got up after they’d crossed the bridge and was always grumpy and hungry before he had something to eat.

If the waitresses had been in dinghies, that would have been the complete experience, but they weren’t. They did have a pegasus food-runner for the tow ponies, which was thoughtful of them. Some came aboard their barges, while others stayed on shore and gossipped with their friends.

My meal came in a grease-stained sack. Back on Earth, food trucks ran the gamut, and it was hardly surprising that the same was true in Equestria. They’d boned it, breaded it, and fried it, and while it wasn’t gourmet, it was filling. I traded my summer greens side salad with Flash Lock for some of her potato wedges, and both of us thought we’d gotten the better part of that deal.

Mersey had unhitched to use the public bathrooms, and after she’d finished there she came aboard the boat to eat her porridge. She occasionally looked in my direction—I couldn’t figure out if she was checking me out and trying to be subtle about it, or if she thought I might try and sneak up on her and steal her lunch.

Swanky Brook must have been restless—he emerged from the cabin bleary-eyed, his mane completely tangled. Mersey nuzzled him and went down into the cabin for a brush, running it through his mane despite his insincere protests.

Once everyone had finished eating, Mersey hopped off the boat with everyone trash and deposited it in a waste basket, then hitched herself back up to the towrope and sat down on the path, waiting for traffic to start moving.

•••

About a dozen barges passed through the basin before it was our side’s turn to cross the bridge. Just as with auto traffic, the queue moved individually, although with more separation. I thought it strange that Mersey didn't start moving as soon as the barge in front of us, although I figured she knew what she was doing.

When she did start moving it was at a very fast walk, until she’d pulled the slack out of the rope. As it pulled taut, she stopped, letting the rebound of the stretched rope do some fo the work to get the barge moving, then dug in her hooves and went to work.

Flash Lock helped her with a barge pole, and then used it to fend off the bank until the boat got up enough speed for the tiller to work.

I’d expected to see a gradual narrowing of the canal as it approached the bridge, an expectation from a lifetime of experience of roads doing that. Instead, there were just stone walls jutting out to make a narrower channel.

Flash Lock angled the boat to the center of the canal well in advance of the obstacle. Mersey kept looking back to see where we were, and I figured out later than I should have that if Flash Lock didn’t line up properly, it was going to be a sudden stop that would pull Mersey off her hooves. I had an idea that she’d done this long enough that she knew where the boat should be, and was verifying that it was moving into position correctly.

As soon as the bow of the barge had nosed into the narrower canal, Mersey picked up speed, then she slowed enough to put some slack in the tow rope and crossed over the canal on a sort-of gate with a wide walkway atop.

I’d thought she was going to open them—there was some sort of mechanism with a pulley and chain alongside the gate—instead, she resumed her normal pace.

I thought they might be spring-loaded, and push aside as the bow of the boat bumped them. I’d seen that arrangement before on amusement park rides.

Instead, the boat bumped into a trip-roller under the water, the chain on the roller advanced a link, and the gate swung open.

Flash Lock noticed where I was looking. “Clever, isn’t it? Used to have to stop and open it by hoof.

“There’s two rollers under the water, one on each side of the gate, a clockwork mechanism, and some hydraulics that run on canal water to open and close the gate.”

“All because there’s only one towpath on the bridge?” I was assuming, but it made sense.

“Yeah—back when it was built, it was the highest bridge on the canal, and they thought that ponies wouldn’t like to walk on the towpath, so there were stallions who would take the barge across. You could even hire a tillermare if you were too scared to navigate yourself.”

“It was probably cheaper to not put a towpath on both sides, too.”

“I’m sure that was a consideration.”

“If they’d had more money, they could have built it as two channels, with a towpath down the middle.” I mused. “I suppose ponies would have had to cross over at both ends, then, but with those clockwork gates it wouldn't’ have been a problem.”

“When they built it, they wanted to prioritize ponies bound for Manehattan,” she said. “That’s why the towpath is on the right side. Well, for us.”

I’d only just realized, but the canal boats ran on opposite sides of the canal as road traffic did. I was about to ask Flash Lock if she knew why, when the boat crossed onto the bridge.

I’d never been on a bridge on a boat before, so I didn’t know what to expect and fell back on my experience with road bridges.

Road bridges had guardrails. The towpath also had one, presumably to keep an inattentive pony from falling off the edge, but there weren’t any on the other side. With the height of the boat’s deck above the water, I couldn’t even see the stones that made up the channel unless I craned my neck over to the side, so from my view in the stern it looked like we were languidly flying through the treetops.

Then the trees stopped, and I got a view down another canal—it was too straight to be anything else—and then a set of railroad tracks.

“On the north side, the tracks curve around to Fens Junction; this is where Reuben’s train would have come from,” Flanking Lock told me. “And the canal used to connect at Fens Junction, as well, with several sets of locks north of town, but they’re not used any more. Now it’s faster to ship things on that route by train, that’s why. You can’t tell from here, but a couple of the downstream locks have been fixed open except if they’re needed for flood control, so there’s a lot of places where it’s too shallow to run a barge anyway.”

“So there are already routes where you’ve been outcompeted by trains.”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “When I was a filly, we’d sometimes barge down that canal, the Manehattan Wey, then they got a little locomotive which could tow two heavy barges at a time, or a string of railcars behind it, whatever was needed. A lot of the bargees scoffed at it, and the towponies didn’t like the narrow tracks it ran on, ‘cause they took up the entire towpath on that side. Plus, it ran both ways on that path, so you had to stop and untie to get around it when it was coming at you.

“Then they got a bigger locomotive and that was more reliable and it could tow up to ten barges or twenty railcars. They had to winch the railcars up at the locks, ‘cause the towpath was too steep for the train to tow them, until they came up with a cog gear on the axles and it could climb that way, and after that it was only a matter of time before ponies stopped shipping anything by barge on the Manehattan Wey.

“Since there was hardly any barge traffic any more, they knocked the slope out of the towpaths, so the trains could get up easier, and that made it even less convenient for ponies. It does get used some, but they only use the east side towpath and the rule is barges headed away from Fens Junction have to give way to the ones going towards it, ‘cause the barges bound for Fens are usually loaded and the ones going away usually aren’t.

“There are a few recreational boats on that canal, and sometimes they get in fights with the working ponies, ‘cause they don’t know the rule. Mostly rich ponies from Manehattan who buy a packet boat and fancy it up.”

We left the valley behind and I turned my attention forward as Mersey crossed back to the proper side over another gate-bridge which obligingly opened as the prow of the barge neared it.

I looked over the stern as we crossed back onto solid land. It wasn’t the biggest or most impressive bridge I’d seen, but it impressed me in its audacity. Surely before, barges had locked down to cross the valley and then back up the other side, and some pony had looked at the lay of the land and decided that building a bridge instead so the barges could get through faster was the obvious solution. It probably saved a day of travel.

Canal Boat: Oakton and Lock Lake

Oakton and Lock Lake
Admiral Biscuit

After passing through more forests and fields and two more locks—one up and one down—we arrived in Oakton.

For most of our journey, we hadn’t had to contend with barges waiting at the edge of the canal, interfering with the towpath. Oakton was a minor trading hub, and barges were tied up to both shores, loading and unloading cargoes.

Flash Lock was standing bipedal to get a clear view over the cabins, making minor tiller adjustments with her hind hoof. It was only a matter of time before our line risked snagging on another boat.

I watched as the line got closer and closer to a small packet boat, wondering if there was some way it might slide up and over the cabin, even though logic said it wouldn’t.

“Hoy, Mersey, drop the line.”

Mersey stopped in her tracks and turned back, tugging at a fastener on her harness; a moment later, the rope dropped off the singletree. She stood where she was until the line snaked into the water, then started walking again, sans barge.

Flash Lock used the momentum we had for as long as she could, but it wasn’t enough to get us to our destination.

“So what now?” I was sure that Flash Lock had a plan, but I was curious what it was.

“We get towed in. Mersey’s probably already at the company docks.” Flash Lock pointed a hoof over the water, where a little puffing tugboat was pushing a barge along. “That’s one way, and if you’re close enough to your destination, you can use a rope and capstan.”

“I see.” I wasn’t sure which the second was. “Which are we using?”

“Rope and capstan. Don’t like the tugboat, it’s like a locomotive that floats. We gotta use it to get back out, though, unless you want to pole.”

“I can,” I said. “Just push off the bottom, right?”

“Trust me, it’s not as fun as it sounds. You don’t know what you’re doing, you wind up falling off and landing in the canal.

“With Mersey and Swanky working together, we could rope out, but that’s a lot of work for both of them, and it takes a while.” She took her hoof off the tiller—the boat wasn’t going anywhere—and headed for the bow. “Gotta coil the rope before the rope pony gets here. You keep an eye on the stern, shout at me if any barge is coming to run us over.”

“Can do.” I thought of taking position right by the tiller, but that didn’t feel right—that was Flash Lock’s place—so I instead leaned against the cabin wall and watched.

On the other side of the canal, a pair of towponies who didn’t believe in shelling out a few bits for a tugboat were getting their barge down the canal by leapfrogging from boat to boat. If the barges were tied up close enough, they jumped from one to the next; if not, the one closest to the shore unhooked his rope and draped it over his partner’s back, then went ashore and got on the next boat down the line.

When the single towpony reached the end of his barge, he’d unhook both ropes and let them trail in the water, and the tillermare let the boat drift until it was close enough for the other pony to fetch the ropes out of the water and hook them to himself.

It looked like an overly complicated way to make progress, and I could see how it would wear out the towing crew and might upset ponies who had their barges tied to the dock.

A second tugboat came puffing out of a dock, and headed in the direction of Manehattan. It had made fast to the barge which had been trailing us, and I was so distracted watching it, I didn’t notice right away that we were moving again.

When I turned my attention forward, I saw that we had a new rope tied to the bow, leading to a bollard alongside a vacant dock. Off to the side of our barge, a filly pedalled a small paddleboat back to the dock; I assumed she was the one who’d brought that rope out.

After it bent around the bollard, it went further inland, where it was attached to a pony-powered capstan.

Rather than being designed to attach to a harness, the swing-arm had a sort of padded plate on the front, and the mare operating the captain was just pushing into it.

Swanky Brook came out of the cabin again, and made his way to the cleat on the stern of the boat. When we were close enough, a pony ashore tossed him a rope, and he looped it around the cleat and used it to both brake the boat, and then pull it against the dock.

Flash Lock hopped off the bow once the barge was secure, and left Swanky Brook in charge of the barge.

He quickly organized the unloading crew, letting them know what to take and what to leave behind.

They’d made a rather large dent in the cargo before a second gangway got lowered down, and ponies started carrying in new cargo, eventually filling in much of the empty space left by the offload.

“Flash Lock’s always good at getting extra loads and backhauls,” Swanky Brook explained. “Lots of extra bits and not a lot of extra work.”

I wasn’t sure Mersey would agree with him; she’d spent over half the day tugging the barge behind her with very few opportunities to rest while he’d spent that time asleep in the cabin.

And as soon as the gangplanks were drawn away, he went back to the cabin, leaving me alone to guard the barge.

What did most ponies who bought a trip on the barge do? Stay confined in the bow cabin? Watch the scenery go by from safely inside? Or did they only use it for sleeping and relaxing? Were there poets and authors who traveled the canals, getting inspiration from the passing scenery, or ponies who were more interested in the destination than the journey, and just booked passage on a barge because it was cheaper than a train and faster than going on hoof?

It was probably a mix, and I wondered if Flash Lock had counted on becoming an impromptu tour guide for passengers who were interested. Maybe she would have preferred if I’d stayed in my cabin and let her navigate the canal in peace.

Swanky Brook interrupted my musings when he came back out of the cabin, this time dressed in a harness identical to his sister’s. Apparently his job did involve more than just napping in the cabin.

•••

Flash Lock didn’t return until just before the tugboat arrived. She hopped aboard the bow and handled the lines from the tugboat. Swanky Brook untied the stern and then went ashore; Mersey was nowhere to be seen.

Once the tug started pulling, Flash Lock untied the bow from the dock, then made her way back to the tiller. There was no need to push off; the tug handled the weight of the barge easily, and towed us to the middle of the channel.

We made our way past the rest of the barges and the dockyard, past a small fleeting area, a loading dock for the railroad—complete with three box cars and a flat car—and then we were at the end of Oakton.

Mersey and Swanky Brook were both waiting for our arrival. The tug slowed down until we bumped into their stern, and then one of the deckhands untied their boat and helpfully tossed our towrope ashore. Mersey retrieved it and attached it to Swanky Brook, keeping herself on the shoreside.

With a bellow of smoke and a froth of water at the stern, the towboat sped ahead and as soon as it was clear, turned to head back to town for the next job. Flash Lock gave them more clearance, angling towards the bank.

Mersey jumped aboard as we passed. I hadn’t noticed when she was on shore, but her harness was mostly unfastened, and it only took her a moment in the cabin to strip it off.

I’d expected her to stay there, but she had other ideas; she came back out of the cabin with a rough wool blanket across her back which she spread out on the canal-side gunnel.

She stretched out on her belly, dipped a forehoof into the water, and watched the water splash off it for a while, then settled her head down on her makeshift bed and promptly fell asleep.

•••

Most of the time, I was constantly on the watch for things that made Equestria pony. Buildings, businesses, factories, mines, ponies—all of those things had their own unique spin in Equestria, but there was also something to be learned from what they did in their leisure time. True, Flash Lock was running a business and presumably making a profit, but when I unfocused to just the boat plodding along the lock and Mersey snoozing in the sunshine with one hoof still trailing in the water; when I watched the trees and forest slowly move past, I could have been on a pleasure cruise.

On Earth, people generally fell into the categories of boating for pleasure, fishing from a boat, and boating because it was their job. Why shouldn’t they be in more than one category, though? Sure, this was a way to earn a living, but it was also something that they enjoyed. There were other jobs in the city they could have had, and those jobs might have been more financially lucrative, but here we were in the middle of a beautiful forest, with only the unnaturally straight walls of the canal breaking the immersion of nature. Swanky Brook’s hoofsteps and Mersey’s snores were the only unnatural sounds; even the gentle splash of the bow wave could have just been the sound of water passing a rock.

As soon as I looked back down the canal, the illusion was broken; another canal boat was following behind.

I thought about asking Flash Lock about that, but based on her far-away look, I thought she already knew.

There was nothing more to learn on this part of the journey, so I leaned back and watched the forest go by.

•••

Flash Lock had mentioned Lock Lake, which I’d been expecting would be a lake with locks at the ends so barges could go through it, or a lake that was next to a set of locks.

I hadn’t really worked out in my head where the towpath would go—even after the better part of a day so far on the canal, I kept thinking from a human design perspective. Locks so that a variable lake depth wouldn’t be a problem, and then just motor across the lake.

The ponies had thought about how barges were going to get across the lake, and they’d built causeways straight across, effectively making us a canal through a lake. Since the lake level was high, we were currently below the level of water in Lock Lake—as weird as looking over the side of the barge on the bridge had been, it was even weirder to be running through a canal with a higher lake on either side of us.

Surely when Moses parted the Red Sea, this would have been what he saw as he looked to the side, that he was crossing in a trench, the water on either side above him. And while there was no need for a miraculous explanation for our passage, it didn’t feel any less strange to be standing on the deck and looking over the levee at water several feet above the deck of the boat.

As engineering challenges went, it was likely simpler than a canal bridge, but to see it, it didn’t feel simpler. It had the same audacious feeling as the Lucien cutoff, as if a surveyor had stood upon the shore of the lake and thought he could go around, but across would be shorter.

The surrounding terrain didn’t really preclude it; there weren’t any hills or other obstacles I could see that would make a bypass a major project, but this was shorter and I suppose in the days before the railroad, that made the project worth doing.

“We’ll be stopping in the basin to unload some more cargo,” Flash Lock said. “Then straight through to Stroudwater. In case you want to step off the boat.”

“You won’t leave without me?”

“As long as I don’t have to wait too long—I got a schedule to keep.”

“I wasn’t suggesting I’d get myself lost.”

“Some ponies do.” She snorted. “Isn’t much to see in the basin anyway; a few small food stands on the bank, the locks into the lake, and a couple of small warehouses. Maybe a packet boat if you’re lucky, although this late in the day, they’re usually long gone. Fishing boats, might be back already, if their catch was good.”

•••

I did decide to step off the barge. We tied up parallel to the canal, next to what looked from the back like a fairly normal general store. They had a wooden ramp that ran down the canal wall and a short dock, barely one pony wide—there wasn’t enough room for anything else.

Swanky Brook unhooked as soon as we tied up, and came down the ramp to oversee unloading. As soon as he’d passed, I headed up to the canal wall just to take in the sights.

The general store was actually a boat, and it was clearly intended to be moved. Some places in the US had floating casinos, because state law allowed casinos on boats—but those weren’t meant to go anywhere.

Further beyond it, there were a few other businesses on docks and boats, including a fish market.

There were also plenty of smaller houseboats and recreational boats tied to piers or anchored off the canal. It was an entire small village built in the middle of the lake which sounded absurd, but then the Southern Pacific had put a train station in the middle of the Great Salt Lake.

Over on the other side, there was a small floating restaurant, and I watched as a pair of towpony slowed long enough to give a food order, which was made, bagged, and delivered by the time the coal barge passed the restaurant. A pegasus soared into the canal with two sacks in her mouth, traded one for some bits, and then flew up to the towpony and offered them the second bag.

The one furthest from the canal unhooked the rope from his harness and looped it over his partner’s, then sat down and ate his meal.

They hadn’t made it all that far before he was finished, and he trotted down the path to give the other pony a chance to eat.

•••

I hadn’t recognized that the structures I’d seen further along the canal were locks—I’d seen my fair share of them so far, but never built in a lake. In hindsight, they made sense; obviously, the canal and the lake weren’t always at the same water level, and it would make sense to be able to transfer a boat from the lake to the canal or vice versa.

Swanky Brook started climbing the ramp leading up to the walkway over the lock doors, and stopped partway up. “Boat coming out,” he shouted back, then promptly turned around, stepped across the towline, and made his way back down the grade.

“Darn it,” Flash Lock muttered. “I was hoping we’d get by before they locked through. Oh well.”

“How’s he going to get out?” The gates were perpendicular to the canal. “It’s too narrow for a boat your size. Or even half your size.”

“Half our size fits with ponies pulling on the towpaths,” she said. “Barely. They can pivot it around the piling and bend it into the canal. That’s why we gotta be back a little ways, to give them room to maneuver. Swanky’s gonna pull us back and in against the bank, just back to that set of bollards we passed.”

Swanky looped the towrope over the bow cleat, leaving some slack between it and its normal fastening point on the cabin roof.

He brought it down the length of the boat—there were no handrails to interfere—and hooked it around a stern cleat as well, looking back as he walked so he could brace himself as the line tightened.

It still pulled him back a few inches.

Once the barge had stopped, he backed off the tension and kicked dirt back in the ruts he’d made, then started pulling us backwards down the canal. Flash Lock took the minute he was fixing the towpath to remove the rudder and carry it to the other end of the boat.

It hadn’t occurred to me until just then that the symmetry of the boat obviously meant it could be towed from either end, but that having a second rudder in the bow would be in the way and drag in the water. Just having one and affixing it to whichever end was the effective stern was the obvious solution.

Once we were abeam of the bollards, Flash Lock and Swanky Brook looped the towline around them to hold us in place, and then there was nothing to do but watch the barge make the turn out of the lock.

They’d opened the gates while we were backing, and started to nose the barge out into the canal. A pony in harness was standing on the bow, and I couldn’t tell how it was moving. She obviously wasn’t pulling it.

The water in the canal barely flowed, although there was a minimal outrush as they opened the gates. Not enough to move a barge, I would have thought.

It wasn’t until another pony came into view that I figured out how they were doing it. She had a short rope attached to the stern, in a similar manner to how Swanky Brook had braked our boat.

The tillermare drove the boat straight across the canal, until the bow bumped into the bank, and the mare in front hopped off onto the towpath.

I’d expected her to start pulling, but instead she made her way to the stern of the boat and stood in position until her companion had repositioned her rope, which had been attached to the forward cabin all along, but cleated down.

The two of them worked together, slowly turning the boat in our direction. The mare at the stern didn’t have much room to work—she needed to pull the boat directly towards her, and the towpath wasn’t all that wide. She’d cross the path, then carefully back up and wait until the tillermare shortened the towrope, then she’d get another few feet of pull and repeat the process.

If they’d had to turn it a full ninety degrees in that manner, it would have taken forever; luckily, they didn’t. Once they had it at an angle, they started using the piling as a pivot point, the mare on our side walking against the normal flow of traffic.

The one on the other bank didn’t have to pull straight anymore; she kept tension on her line to keep the boat from rubbing too hard against the piling, moving back as the line came around.

The momentum of the boat carried the stern all the way to the far bank, giving her an opportunity to hop back aboard. As the barge straightened, she unhooked her rope from the aft end and carried it forward to the bow.

When she had her line established and had gotten back on the towpath, the mare on our bank disconnected her towrope from her harness.

She trotted back down the path to close the gate, then came back our way. Flash Lock and Swanky Brook had already unmoored our barge and had just gotten it moving.

“Can I cross?”

Flash Lock nodded, and the mare hopped aboard midships and crossed over to the canalside gunnel, close to the still-snoozing Mersey. There wasn’t more than a foot of space between our barge and hers as we passed, an easy distance to cross for a pony who had surely done it countless times before.

Canal Boat: Stroudwater

Stroudwater
Admiral BIscuit

“I get that going across the lake is shorter than going around,” I said, “but why build a canal causeway when you could just put locks at either end?”

“Coupla reasons. It’s faster for traffic going to and from Manehattan if they don’t have to lock in and out. As long as they don’t have the bad luck to arrive right as somepony is locking in, anyway.”

“Okay, yeah.”

“It used to be that way, though, before they built the causeway. ‘Cause it was easier, even if you had to stop and wait for a boat to ferry you across.”

“Right.” I’d forgotten that the barges didn’t move unless there was a pony to pull them. “But they could have put a single wide causeway and had traffic reverse sides.”

“Which they did. Sometimes fights broke out at the ends, ‘cause somepony had to unhook to get their line around somepony else, and they built mooring platforms and that helped, but most of us don’t like stopping if we don’t have to.

“For a while, there were designated towponies, and you had to stop at either end and let them tow you across the lake. That way everypony was inconvenienced the same. But nopony liked that.

“Plus, you still had to lock into the lake sometimes. If the water was deeper than normal, it wasn’t a problem, but if it was shallow, it’d make the water in the canals too shallow as well, and since they’d already built one towpath across the lake, building a second wasn't that much more work.

“They were halfway done when the railroad came through, and for some canals that was it, that was when nopony wanted to spend much money anymore building things, but Manehattan was growing and the railroad didn’t go west yet, so there were lots of bulk cargoes that still needed to be hauled by barge for at least some of their journey, and it was obvious to everypony that finishing this project would save hours and hours of travel, which really added up when there were shortages in Manehattan and everypony was trying to lock through as many barges as fast as they could.

“Most of the construction was cheap, since they’d already figured out what the bottom was like when they built the first side—the former central causeway—and they saved money by re-using all the lock mechanisms at the central locks. They just had to build the foundations and walls, but it’s easier to put in stones and dirt than to take it out.

“Also, now that the causeway’s complete, it’s easier to maintain water levels as long as the lake’s higher than the canal—which it usually is—and so we can carry more on each barge and not worry about scraping bottom. You wouldn’t have noticed the bit of current as we went by the locks, but as long as the lake level’s high, they always leave the paddle gates partway open.”

•••

We returned to forest after leaving Lock Lake behind. I could see one boat about a mile in front of us, also going west. I hadn’t seen any going the other way since we’d left Lock Lake, and asked Flash Lock about that.

“Traffic drops off in the afternoon,” she said. “A lot of the barges don’t run at night, not unless they have to. The empty coal barges usually do; they’ve got extra crews to take them back from Manehattan to the loading docks; they’ll usually tie two or three of them together and tow them that way. They like to travel in clusters; it’s safer for everypony, and they save time ‘cause they can fit four of them at a time in most locks.

“Usually we get passed by at least one fleet of coal barges in Oakton, but I didn’t see any.”

“Neither did I,” I said. “Most of them don’t have deckhouses, so where does the other crew sleep?”

“Depends on the company. Hucknall has enough towponies that they alternate with some of their crews. They’ll tow a loaded barge in, spend that night and the next day in a company bunkhouse, and then tow empties back. Silverwood switches crews at Oakton; they get a lunch break there and then take a barge back the way they came. That’s good for ponies who have a regular house in Manehattan or Stroudwater. And Dalton Main has their own packet boat with sleeping accommodations, so the crews ride back and forth on the packet boat.

“There’s a couple small operators who do have cabins on their coal boats, and one crew actually built a little raft that gets towed behind for their extra crew to sleep in. They’re a whole family of bargees that all work and live together; I don’t think it would work with a bunch of strangers. You put too many stallions in a crowded space and fights happen.”

“You said that you grew up on a canal boat, right?”

“Yeah, I was born and raised on the water. Some of my siblings decided they wanted firm ground underhoof, but not me.”

“What about Mersey and Swanky Brook? What’s their story? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“Both of ‘em came from a farm around Fens Junction, and they’re both strong and reliable which is more than I can say for some ponies I’ve hired. I was only gonna hire one, but neither of them would work without the other, and I don’t regret my choice. It was tight a couple years as we were getting new contracts and I was learning who to talk to to get a load when I needed one, but after we showed how reliable we were, we didn’t have any trouble getting work. Even now that there’s less to ship on the canal than there used to be.

“When I bought that warehouse, it was ready to fall down. Swanky Brook said he could get it fixed up cheap, as long as I was willing to wait for the winter. Sure enough, his entire family showed up and rebuilt it in a week, and all it cost me was some materials and food for everypony.”

“I’d heard of farmers back on Earth helping each other out like that, but to all show up and help an employer?”

“Families gotta stick together,” she said, “and when I hired the two of them, I became part of the family, I guess. Some things have changed as Equestria modernizes, but the important things stay the same.

•••

The canal narrowed as it got to an arched stone railroad bridge. Since the canal was straight on both sides, we didn't have to slow as we approached; it was clear that there was no oncoming traffic.

“The railroad didn’t spend any bits they didn’t have to,” Flash Lock explained. “The bridge had to be wide enough for barges to pass, and one barge fits through without much room to spare. The intent of the contract was that two barges could pass each other under the bridge, but the railroad didn’t see it that way, and there was a big fight about it and it’s pretty obvious who won.

“Traffic to Manehattan gets the right-of-way, but this time of evening we rarely have to wait. Ponies who are doing short runs from Oakton to Stroudwater get tied up here all the time, though.”

Not only was the canal narrow, but the towpaths were as well; while they technically kept the same width as outside the bridge, the curved bottom of the arched bridge only left part of the path useful. Swanky Brook had to lower his head and walk at the very edge to fit.

“Stroudwater’s ahead,” Flash Lock said. “Those are the tracks from Fens Junction; they kind of loop around to the south of town and then back again, ‘cause nopony wanted to give up any of her farmland for a train track.

Indeed, on the other side of the railroad right-of-way was farmland. Fields of flowers spread along the north bank, all in bloom. To the south, ponies were working a hayfield.

I”d seen round balers and rectangle balers at work back on Earth; the ponies weren’t using either. They had a hay wagon with all the hay piled up in a mound. An angled conveyor with crab-like legs was feeding the hay up from windrows on the ground, and a pair of ponies on top of the haypile were pitchforking it into place.

I’d seen hay bales in Equestria, so I knew that ponies could make them. Maybe they took the loose hay to the bailer, rather than taking the bailer to the fields.

It was fascinating to watch it work. They’d gotten as much of a pile on the wagon as they could by the time we passed, and had turned off the row they were working to haul the wagon back to the barn. I noticed that the ponies on top of the pile didn’t try to climb down—maybe when they got to wherever they were unloading, they’d need to be on top and it was easier to stay there.

•••

Beyond the fields was the town of Stroudwater. It had a traditional pony town feel, with stone buildings and half-timbered houses with thatched roofs, flowerboxes and gardens.

Some of the houses close to the canal had dinghies in their yards, and a few had their own slip. To keep the canal clear for passing traffic, the slips were dug through the bank. They were mostly angled, to make it easier to get the boat in and out of the canal.

The mouths of these slips were all spanned by a moveable wooden bridge along the towpath. Some of them were hinged like drawbridges, some were built atop a gate, and a few slid along on rollers.

Our destination was down a side canal, the canal equivalent of a business loop. That also had an automatic gateway, although it was towpony-operated rather than by some underwater mechanism: as Swanky Brook walked by, he pushed a lever that extended across the towpath.

As soon as it was perpendicular to the path, the gates started to open. The lever also kept moving, turning until it had returned to its original position.

Flash Lock had swung out into the center of the canal, then cut the boat back in across the canal, neatly entering the side channel. As the stern passed the control lever, she reached out of the boat and pushed it. I heard a click from the mechanism and it started winding around again; a moment later, the gates started closing behind us.

“You think that’s clever,” Flash Lock said, “you would have loved the automatic towrope.”

“Automatic towrope?”

“It ran down the opposite side of the canal on towers, a long continuous rope with lines hanging off it, and the idea was that you would attach the barge to the rope and get automatically pulled along to where you wanted to go.

“Used to be that this canal was for one-way traffic only—eastbound—and if you came up from the east, you’d just go to the other end of the canal and be towed along to get where you were going.

“But it got old and worn out and needed a lot of bits to fix it, and there wasn’t as much barge traffic any more, so first the rope got taken down and then a couple of the towers and then all the rest ‘cause they were in the way of the towpath on the other side of the canal, and it was really inconvenient to have to go around them.”

Mersey yawned and got back to her hooves. She stretched out on the deck for a minute, then went down into the rear cabin and put her harness back on.

“There’s no traffic coming our way,” Flash Lock said. “So I’ll have her pull from the other side of the river. That way, when we get to the docks, Swanky Brook doesn’t have to maneuver around a bunch of tied-up barges.”

•••

Once Mersey was in position on the bow, Swanky Brook dropped his line, and she pulled it in and hooked it to her harness. Flash Lock cut across the canal, almost bumping up against the opposite bank. Mersey jumped out and started walking down the path, pulling the slack out of the line as Flash Lock steered more towards the center of the canal.

She didn’t go all the way over to our side. As we got close to the business district, there were a number of barges tied up on the south bank, some of them being loaded or unloaded while others were tied up for the night.

There were a few smaller boats, too. I hadn’t asked, but it seemed likely that for some ponies, the canal was as good as a road and they probably used their boats like wagons. If the hay distributor was in Stroudwater, for example, the ponies I’d seen harvesting hay would probably deliver it by barge, especially since they had canal access. Or if there was a railroad transfer dock—which there probably was; I’d already seen two of them—they could ship it anywhere in Equestria with just a short trip down the canal.

•••

Flash Lock had a warehouse building in Stroudwater, too. It had a solid stone ground floor and a half-timbered second floor. A lifting beam extended over the water, although the tackle was hooked back on the side of the building.

Swanky Brook had beaten us to the dock, and he helped tie the barge in place and lowered the gangplank. Mersey unhooked her towrope and let it fall in the water; Flash Lock pulled it aboard the barge.

I’d expected that Mersey would go down the towpath to the closest bridge, but instead she looked left and right, then jumped into the canal and ponypaddled across.

She went around the corner of the building to shake herself off, then unhooked her harness and hung it up in the warehouse to dry, then helped unload the barge. Flash Lock left the two of them to unload, while she went around the barge and inspected it, making sure everything was still in good order.

After I got my rucksack out of the forward cabin, I went inside the warehouse, just to get a quick look. It really wasn’t much to see—instead of the good being in shrink-wrapped boxes on pallets, it was all crates and barrels, but other than that, it was a typical warehouse.

They were stacking the cargo they’d removed on one side, and the other side had about a barge’s worth of crates and barrels already in place. Down the center, two wagons were parked, both labeled Aire & Calder Navigation Co.

Flash Lock came in beside me, ropes from the barge draped across her back. “I hire a couple local livery ponies to do deliveries and pickups for me. I get a discount, ‘cause they can work outside regular hours, so long as the cargo’s here by the time I arrive.”

“Livery ponies?”

“Yeah, most towns have a livery where you can rent a team or wagons or harnesses or whatever you need. Stroudwater’s also does farrier work and dental work. I got their harnesses used from the livery; they’re a little out of date but really durable.”

“Huh.” I shifted my rucksack, then a thought occurred to me. “Is there an inn?”

“Yeah, just down the main street. You can’t miss it. It’s not the best place, ‘cause it mostly appeals to towponies. They have good filling food and their beds are decent and cheap.”

“I ought to head down there.”

“Alright.” Flash Lock held out a hoof, and I made a fist and bumped it. “Thanks for the ride.”

She smiled. “When you want a trip back to Manehattan, I’ll be glad to take you.”

•••

I should have said goodbye to Swanky Brook and Mersey, but I hadn’t wanted to get in the way of their work, and by the time I was a block away, it would have been weird to go back.

Stroudwater reminded me of a cross between an English village and a Dutch village—there were side-canals. I hadn’t really paid attention to them as we went through town, but there was no mistaking them as I crossed over the second bridge on my way to the inn.

The first was too narrow for a boat the size of Flash Lock’s to fit down; the second was wide enough although it would have been one-way traffic only. There wasn’t an actual towpath, but there was a street that ran parallel, and that would have worked.

Since it was only one street, the towpony would have had to move against traffic. Or maybe they had some other system in place—a towrope strung down the canal, or some kind of tugboat to push or pull. It would have been inconvenient to have to unhook the rope at every bridge that crossed the canal.

I hadn’t meant to look for the livery, but I found it just the same. It was behind the inn, and it caught my eye because right up by the road was an open lot full of wagons, and I thought it was a used wagon lot. I hadn’t seen anything like that before, but it made sense that the ponies would have such a thing—their wagons didn’t just appear out of nowhere, and while surely some of them were home-built, others would have been bought from a wagon factory. And a pony looking to upgrade or downsize her fleet might not want to deal with trying to sell it herself; Flash Lock had said that she’d bought the harnesses used and that was something I hadn’t considered there being a used market for.

And it turned out that I wasn’t entirely wrong; three of the wagons were for sale. Just like U-Haul, once a wagon had passed its prime, the livery sold it.

I stood across the street, watching as a team of ponies hooked up to a flatbed wagon in the back of the yard and trotted off down the street with it, then resumed my trek to the inn.

•••

I couldn’t get a room. The only one available slept eight, and was out of my comfortable price range. I could, however, get a bed. There were plenty of those available; in fact, the entire attic was given over to two giant rooms and while it would be part of the Equestrian experience I wasn’t ready to commit yet. True, I’d shared a room with the coal mining mares after Assay had offered it, but that felt different—I’d spent time with them and gotten to know them. Here, I’d be rooming with a bunch of strangers.

Admittedly, I didn’t have a lot of other options. The only other one I could currently think of was find a secluded park bench large enough to fit a human. Maybe after I ate dinner, I could think more clearly of other possible options.

Their food service was cafeteria style. One bit to enter the dining room, and I could pick what I wanted to eat.

They didn’t go for the excess of a Golden Corral, but there was a decently good selection of food. Three different soups, plenty of fruits and vegetables and flowers, several different kinds of pasture grasses, loaves of bread, two different casseroles, fish, cakes, and pies. I took the safe options, fruits and vegetables I knew I could eat, bread, a small sliver of casserole, and a wedge of apple pie.

Instead of a soda fountain, they had beer taps.

They’d extended the cafeteria theme to the seating; long benches and communal tables. We’d gotten in late, so there weren’t all that many ponies currently eating. Those that were were all clustered into groups, most likely all the members of a barge crew.

I felt more comfortable in the bar approaching random strangers, and I still wanted to turn over my sleeping arrangements in my head, so I chose to sit at the far end of a table, away from everypony else.

I’d just started on my casserole when a familiar yellow pony set a tray down beside me. “I see you found the inn.”

“You were right, I couldn’t miss it,” I said. “Is it just you?”

She shook her head, and a moment later we were joined by Swanky Brook and Mersey, who took the spot across the table.

Canal Boat: Leaving Stroudwater

Leaving Stroudwater
Admiral Biscuit

I don’t know why it particularly caught my attention, but while Mersey had only chosen oats for her dinner, she’d occasionally lean over and eat some greens off Swanky Brook’s plate. He didn’t try to stop her or ask her why she hadn’t gotten greens of her own.

It wasn’t my place to question their eating habits, so I didn’t.

“So what are your plans, Joe? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“I was going to hike out in the countryside tomorrow,” I said, “and then take the train back to Manehattan. Just kind of explore the scenery some. Get a feel for what’s out here, and maybe plan for a longer trip later. It’s not as easy to plan a trip as it was back on Earth; you don’t have internet.”

“I’ve heard of that,” she said. “Somehuman was showing it off in a documentary movie I watched. I don’t think I’d like it, it all seems really complicated.”

“It can be,” I admitted. “But there’s a lot of convenience to it, as well.”

“You need a computer and a wifi and a internet subscription, they said. Books are better; you can borrow them for free from the library.”

“I can’t disagree with that. It can get expensive. Most Earth libraries have computers and wifi you can use for free, so if you don’t want to invest . . . maybe one day you’ll be able to get loads for your boat on the ponynet.”

“I don’t think it would be worth the trouble. I can get plenty of loads by just asking my regulars if they’ve got anything for me. Plus, I have a bunch of contracts, easily enough to get by if I wasn’t paying a mortgage on my building in Manehattan. Still, it’s worth it; if I can grow the business a little more, I can buy a second boat and hire a crew for it.”

“You’ve got a good way of thinking.” I raised my glass and clinked it against hers, only remembering after I’d done it that maybe that wasn’t a thing that ponies did. Fortunately, it was.

•••

We’d just finished our dinner when Flash Lock asked me if I’d gotten a bed for the night.

“I—well, I was expecting individual rooms,” I said. “Not a bunkhouse arrangement.”

“You don’t like sleeping with strangers?”

I almost choked on the last of my beer when she said that. I didn’t think that there was any innuendo in her statement, but it was hard to be sure. “Not really. It’s a human thing. I really ought to just get a bed and not be a wimp about it.”

“If you want, you can sleep in the cabin on the barge,” Flash Lock offered. “Long as you don’t mind that we’ll start loading it early.”

“Well, I suppose that would motivate me to get off to an early start. But I don’t want to inconvenience you.”

“It’s no inconvenience. As far as I’m concerned, your ticket stays good until our next voyage starts.”

“Well. . . .”

“That’s not an offer she’d make just anypony,” Swanky Brook said.

Flash Lock nodded her head. “I had to kick a stallion off at Oakton once. He was a jerk. I told him he’d have to come to the company offices to request a refund, but he never did. Probably afraid Mersey would be there.”

It wasn’t my business, but I had to know.

“What did she do?”

“She bit him.”

I looked over at Mersey, who was still placidly chewing her oats.

•••

It would be easy to complain about the cabin. The bed wasn’t really long enough for me. Admittedly, the ones at the inn probably wouldn’t have been, either, but then they wouldn’t have had walls at either end.

If it had been slightly wider, I could have slept crosswise in it.

On the plus side, there was a gentle breeze through the cabin, and the boat rocked ever so gently on the water. There was hardly any current in the canal, but it was just enough to stretch the lines that held it to the dock, then they’d recoil slightly, and the motion repeated like clockwork. To add to that was the gentle creak of various fittings on the boat, the soft slap of wavelets against the hull, and the occasional splash of an aquatic denizen.

I got woken up in the middle of the night as a barge passed close by. The two ponies hauling it were singing, too loudly for the middle of the night. They both had really good voices, though, and I was honestly sorry when they finally moved out of earshot.

•••

Flash Lock wasn’t lying when she said that they’d be loading the barge early. The sun was up, but only just. Hoofsteps on the decks and more considerable rocking as they rolled in barrels were more than sufficient to serve as an alarm clock.

I couldn’t leave them as abruptly as I almost had the night before, so after I put on clean clothes in the little privacy the cabin offered, I went out on deck and said proper goodbyes to the three of them. Flash Lock hugged me, Swanky Brook gave me a hoofbump, and Mersey nudged my hip with her nose.

On the way through their warehouse, I had to wait for a pair of stallions loading up one of the wagons with the cargo we’d brought yesterday. Apparently all the ponies around the canal were early risers.

I stopped at the inn for breakfast. They’d replaced the soups with oatmeal, and they had both scrambled eggs and an egg casserole as well. In deference to the early hour, they only had one kind of beer, and they also had hot coffee and hot tea.

While I didn’t have GPS, I did have a folding map of the area, and my route seemed simple enough. All I had to do was follow the main road out of Stroudwater.

•••

On the outskirts of town, the road crossed the canal on a wooden drawbridge. I stood in the middle and gazed down the canal. The dock behind Aire and Calder Navigation was empty; when I looked further down the water, I could see the barge, Flash Lock at the helm and Mersey on the towrope.

I waved, even though I knew they wouldn’t see me, and then continued my journey.

Author's Note

We have now reached the end of Joe’s journey on the canals of Equestria.

A blog post will be along in a few days, with lots of facts about canal boats and canal boating. :heart:

--admiral biscuit

Cropduster

Cropduster
Admiral Biscuit

I looked over at the pony who'd nosed up to the bar next to me. She was a pegasus with a light green coat and a brownish mane and tail.

It always felt a bit impolite to look down at a pony's flank to see their cutie mark, but that was just my human upbringing. The ponies didn't mind; they did it to each other all the time. Sometimes I'd even see them turn so that the other pony could get a clearer look.

Just the same, I waited until she was distracted before glancing down. Like a lot of pegasi, she had a cloud-themed cutie mark, which didn't really tell me much of anything.

I waited until she'd had a few drinks of her beer before speaking. Maybe I didn't have to, but I thought she looked kind of tense when she sat next to me, and I thought I'd give her a little bit of time to look me over.

Once she wiggled her rump a little bit on the seat and slouched forward just slightly, I thought she was probably as relaxed as she was going to get, and it was time to introduce myself.

“I'm Joe,” I said, sticking my fist out.

“Cropduster.” She bumped my fist politely and then took another sip of her drink.

“Cropduster, huh?” I had an image in my mind of her gliding low over fields, dispensing fertilizer or some kind of insect poison from jars tied around her barrel, and I took a quick look but I didn't see any markings on her fur. Back on Earth, you could tell the horses who wore harnesses a lot.

I mentally slapped my forehead. For all I knew, she carried sacks in her hooves or something like that. Or maybe pony harnesses were designed with more care than the ones we put on Earth horses. “Do you fertilize?”

“Do I what?”

I took a moment to consider what I'd said, and decided that I probably could have found a worse way to ask if I'd really thought about it. “Crops. Like, back on Earth, there are airplanes that fly low over fields and put down fertilizer or insect poison.”

“Poison?” She narrowed her eyes. “You humans poison your crops?”

“Ah, well.” I took a drink of my beer to give me a second to think. “We put things on them that the insects won't eat. Things that make the crops taste bad.”

“Oh.” She scratched her chin with a hoof. “No, that's not it.” She shifted on her seat and turned her rump towards me. “Pull my tail.”

And like a fool, I did.