Aiming to reconnect with the natural world and their native South, writer Logan Ward and his wife, Heather, bought an 1885 farmhouse and 40 acres in the rural outskirts of Staunton, Virginia, and for one year lived using only turn-of-the-20th-century technology, including a woodstove, an outhouse, oil lamps, and inkwells. Chapter 2, “Old Year’s Eve,” finds him mastering the transportation of the day.
Belle arrives on a bright June Sunday, one week before we plan to pull the plug on the twenty-first century. In seven days, our Taurus wagon, with its missing hubcap and 174,000 miles, will be gone. In its place will be Belle, a 2,000-pound Percheron―a draft breed descended from the Norman war-horses of William the Conqueror―towing an antique wooden wagon. The only thing I know about horses is that you never stand behind them, but then that becomes clear as soon as Marshall Cofer, Belle’s owner, leads her out of his long tan trailer. My God, I think. She’s no quarter horse. Only a fool or a blind man would loiter within striking distance of those meaty haunches.
