The Horse Parade

For the first time since Will was born, I think, we went back to the Dowdy Christmas Parade. We discovered it early after moving to Rolling Hills and went faithfully every year until my mother-in-law starting having her Christmas celebrations the weekend before Christmas. She changed her plans this year, so we made it back for William’s first real Southern parade.

We went to the Rolling Hills Holiday Parade, which I suppose is fairly Southern in itself, now that I think of it, particularly this year with the theme of a colonial Christmas. Three or four floats featured women dressed in long dresses and presumably hoop skirts, but most of them were the usual odd mixture of the mayor and the city council members and the occasional House or Senate candidate or representative riding along in somebody’s convertible, a freezing beauty queen in her sleeveless gown enthroned on a homemade floats, the many church-sponsored nativity reenactments, and what about those fire trucks! And the oompa loompa guys with the fezzes and the tiny cars! Or are they the Rotary Club? My husband’s favorite are the steel drum Hawaiian shirt guys. Not to mention the floats of just ordinary people, as far as anybody can tell, just taking a ride in their trailer, wearing a Santa hat, maybe, sitting in a rocking chair or on a bale of hay. The more I describe this, the odder (and consequently) more Southern it seems. Maybe the Dowdy parade is Will’s first country Southern parade.

I just can’t imagine something like this taking place anywhere but the South. Dowdy is about fifteen minutes south of Rolling Hills, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the town proper, as the only times we’ve ever been are for the parade. If I have, it has one building, the community center. The drive there is all cow country, huge expanses of hillside, a stand of long-leaf pines far back from the road lining the fields, a run-down old barn, and many many brown cows, as Will describes them. We have cows of other colors, too, naturally, but the brown cows are his favorites. We’ll be driving along on this back road, with maybe three cars in front of us—quite a lot of traffic for the area—and then suddenly there’s a police car blocking off the road, the officer directing traffic. You just park where you are, get out and start walking.

As far as we’ve ever gone up the parade route, it’s still just a country road, only now with dozens of cars and horse trailers parked alongside it. The only way you know you’ve gotten to the parade route proper is that instead of people milling around riding horses or walking along with one eye on the road, trying not to step in manure, suddenly people will be interspersed between the cars, sitting on those portable camp chairs, or sometimes actually just sitting in the car keeping warm while they wait. The parade route goes into town, I think, although as I say, I’ve never seen it. We always sneak up on the end of the parade, where the horses and tractors are lining up, one row on the road and another alongside it on the wide strip of grass in front of a field. Every year we walk past the entire parade before it ever starts. We usually end up right at the starting point, where somebody official looking, maybe the parade marshal, directs the merging of these two lines into one very long procession of John Deere and Ford and Kubota tractors of all shapes and sizes, riders on horses, horses pulling carriages and wagons, and all manner of old farm equipment that I couldn’t name if my life depended on it, but particularly a lot things for hauling hay. Only now they carry bundled up kids and Labrador retrievers and even the occasional red-ribboned calf.

Dowdy’s population was 203 last year, but it feels like twice that number ride in the parade. Other out-of-towners like us both participate and watch the parade, but still, it’s hard to see how a town this small can turn out these numbers. Maybe that’s counting the horses. The local rodeo has a quite a showing in the parade, as do the Methodist churches and Four-H clubs and the area tractor and horse supply businesses. The obligatory Republican government representative rode in a while horse-drawn carriage, the wheels covered in—well, not to put too fine a point on it, horse shit. But this parade also has quite a showing of independent spirits, just somebody who has a horse and wants to ride in the parade. Sometimes a whole family will ride out, all wearing blue jeans and white shirts, their horses’ manes braided with matching ribbons and jingle bells and even candy canes. We saw quite a lot of elves riding this year, including one woman who looked as if she’d modeled her costume after one of the Elven queens from Lord of the Rings—only incongruously in red velvet. Often it’s just an ordinary person, riding an undecorated horse. Sometimes the horses haven’t even been bathed, which with white horses in our red clay landscape is pretty easy to tell.

For Laura and Will, it’s hard to tell what the real attraction of the parade is The miniature horses pulling the five-year old in her equally tiny wagon? Deciding which horse is more beautiful? (The brown ones.) The little black and white dog with the reindeer antlers and Christmas sweater, or maybe the lab riding with his owner high above the ground in the bucket of a front end loader? All those, of course, but the clear winner is the candy. Probably half the riders in the parade throw candy to the spectators, which I understand is traditional many places, but is certainly something I never saw until we started attending the Dowdy parade. And what a profusion, Smarties and peppermints and candy canes and bubble gum and tootsie rolls, flying everywhere. One farm, with its float adorned with Got Milk? banners—the only commercial ad I’ve ever seen in this parade that wasn’t local—actually threw cartons of chocolate milk. The first year we attended the parade with Laura, we wound up in our odd spot by accident, but we come in from behind by design now; this year we were the nearly the first spectators, and those kids who’ve been cooped up waiting for the parade to start are pitching candy out of those floats by the handfuls. It’s not so much that our kids want or need candy, especially since they still have Halloween treats left over, but they love gathering it up.

The real trick is picking up the candy before another horse steps on it, timing your trip out between floats, but especially keeping the littlest kids from picking up anything that might have just a touch of manure. Generally even the babies won’t pick up the pieces that fall full in a big pile of horse poop. Aside from the unfortunate candy-manure juxtaposition, the candy tossing actually brings out the most unusual aspect of this parade, to my way of thinking—how social an event it is. Every one of those 203 residents seem to be there, along with all their friends. Because the parade progresses slowly, with an occasional pause while somebody wrestles with a saddle strap or a wayward horse, you have plenty of time to have a conversation with the person tossing candy. There you both sit, in broad daylight, just a couple of feet apart with nothing better to do, after all. We have only ever recognized a handful of people we actually know, but we still chat with a lot of people, especially Chris, who tends to like to stand up throughout the parade and who is most likely to recognize a former student. Not talking would be just rude. Our most popular conversational topic this year centered on the huge pile of candy Laura and Will amassed over the course of the hour-long parade; by the end, we were offering, only half-jokingly, to give some candy to the riders to pass out later—because they surely must’ve run out farther down the line. When I carried it wrapped up in our big blanket back to the car, it started to get so heavy I actually weighed it when we got home later: almost three pounds of candy, plenty for decorating any gingerbread house if even half the pieces survived the toss intact.

The Horse Parade is so odd and, at the same time, so charming about, a fascinating “celebration of our rural agricultural heritage,” as our local paper noted this morning under the caption of the obligatory tractor photo. Being Southern has always been a mixed feeling for me, a sheer enjoyment of the oddities of my home—which I see more clearly having lived out the South briefly for a couple of years—and also a sort of bewildered feeling of being both outside and a part of these rituals, standing on the sidelines and participating at the same time. Watching the one band of Confederate reenactors riding past, it’s hard for me to feel any less a part of the parade, at the same time that I know full well I had my own Confederate ancestors and, while my family weren’t really farming people, I can still remember as a child being fascinated by my great-grandparents’ chickens and outhouse—because even then they seemed so foreign. I come from here, but somehow I’m not from here anymore. Every year I can, though, my husband and I bundle up our kids and head out for the parade again. Hoards of people, horses, candy, everybody in a good mood. You really can’t ask for much more, especially if you’re just watching—scoot in, see the show, and then head home for hot chocolate to warm up, because you sure can’t get any Starbucks after the Horse Parade.