A Pony Pilgrimage

  Children and the young at heart trace an equine hero to a tiny Eastern Shore Island  “She kind of named herself,” Paul answered. “When I was in the woods there on Assateague, I couldn’t tell if I was seeing white mist with the sun on it, or a live colt. The minute I knew ‘twas a live colt, I kept calling her Misty in my mind.”  “Misty!” said Maureen softly. “Misty,” she repeated as they jogged along. “She came up out of the sea.”From Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry.  The story of Misty was published 54 years ago. It won praise, fame and the hearts of little girls worldwide. “Misty of Chincoteague” still draws thousands of people each year to a tiny island on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.  They come to find a pony dead these 29 years, on a once-remote island now crowded with herds of townhouses and trailers and sandwich shops. They do not care.

 The book is today required reading in many fourth-grade classes, and it was ranked this year as the second most popular horse story ever written, just slightly behind “Black Beauty.” It’s a tale of shipwrecked Spanish ponies swimming ashore to freedom and two young children who yearn to own one of these free spirits has incredible staying power.  So the pilgrims come. In minivans and SUVs they follow the causeway to Chincoteague and gaze eastward at Assateague Island, where the wild ponies roam. They come for the stuff of legend. They come in search of Misty.  The first shrine is easy. At the causeway’s end on Main Street is the Island Roxy Theater, a small-town cinema that last week touted “The Fast and the Furious.” Nothing on the island is fast or furious – the speed limit is 25 mph – but even at that pace the theater’s main sidewalk attraction is invisible. Just park across the street and walk over.  In a square of concrete are the prints of two small horseshoes. The name Misty is stroked in cursive right above them, written by legendary author Marguerite Henry. Written, as it were, in stone.  Misty was here, in 1962, attending the premiere of her very own motion picture. The Psychotronic Video and Gift Shop displays the movie poster and its hype: “ From the warm, wonderful book… a kind of love story – an especially great kind!… of a strange, little island called Chincoteague… of Misty the rebel colt… and of the two devoted orphans who’d do anything to have her for their own!”

 Mostly it’s families who make the Misty pilgrimage these days, whose 10-year-old girls have masterminded their dream vacation. Three-generation Misty pilgrims make the trip. International travelers undertake the search.  But she is elusive, even on an island just seven miles long. Misty of Chincoteague actually spent about half her life in Illinois with author Henry. In the late 1950s, Henry returned the pony to the island to bred.  What remains of Misty on Main Street are the two tiny hoof prints in concrete and the occasional book for sale in the door-to-door gift shops. The stores offer purple plush ponies and tasteful T-shirts of generic ponies in the surf and little booklets about the Ghost Pony, a short story penned by an island native. “Everybody comes down here thinking they’re coming to Misty land and there’s nothing,” said one clerk.  Ah, well, she just hasn’t looked far enough.  Maddox Boulevard turns off to the right a few blocks down from the Roxy, and runs a gauntlet of boogie boards, tropical beach towels and service-station marts. In the canter of a traffic island, in the center of the boulevard, sits the Chamber of Commerce. Office Manager Beth Hanback loves the Misty pilgrims; she was one herself.

 “I stand sometimes and get teary-eyed over those hoof prints,” she said.  This is Pony Penning Week on Chincoteague, the biggest event in the island’s year. Nearly 50,000 tourists from across the world will jam the beaches and streets on Wednesday, trying to see the famed pony swim. At slack tide, sometime between 6 and 8a.m., the wild herds on Assateague will be rounded up and swum across the narrow channel between islands to be auctioned off.  About 80 foals are sold every year by the local fire department, which owns the herd of between 150 and 200 ponies. Prices have escalated since the first auction in 1925: last year brought a record bid of $7,500 for one pony.  It’s a far cry from the book, in which Paul and Maureen Beebe saved $102 to buy Misty’s mother, a black-and-white mare named the Phantom. A businessman from Norfolk bought her first, but they did, in the happy  ending, get Misty.  Misty isn’t here. But stories just like hers are written every Pony Penning Day.

Hanback’s daughter, Laura, scraped and earned and saved $500 to bid on her own Misty in 1995, when she was 11 years old. She told the firemen what she was after, and as the ponies went for higher and higher prices, and tears began to run down her face, strangers began stuffing money into her pockets. With only two ponies left, the auctioneer pointed to one and said, “Nine hundred dollars, she’s yours,” and gaveled the bidding closed before anyone else could speak.  Now, Laura Hanback donates money every year to other children with a Misty dream of their own.  “The Misty story is pretty much still alive and well,” her mother said. “The events that transpire, the special children that get their ponies every year because of the Misty story, it just recreates itself again and again.”  Back down Maddox and left on Chicken City Road is the Chincoteague Pony Centre, where four ponies lazed in a paddock. It is the only place on either island that tourists are guaranteed to see a Chincoteague pony. The wild herd seldom leaves the camouflaging thickets of Assateague.

 But at the Pony Centre, which opened last year, pilgrims can take a pony ride and see a nightly show that features Misty’s descendants.  “The great-grandfoals are the closest you can get to Misty now,” Kendy Allen said. “We have five of them.”
 Allen is a school librarian from Pennsylvania, who made the Misty pilgrimage herself as a child, and later brought her 4-H riding members to see wild ponies. “The kids would always say, ‘What happened to Misty?’ and I would say, ‘I have absolutely no idea’.”  In 1987, on a Chincoteague vacation, she found Misty II, a gold-and-white spitting image of the original, up for sale, and took her home to Lancaster County. Misty II died last year at the age of 26, exactly the same age as her grandmother, but her offspring continue the bloodline. The latest addition is a 9-week-old filly named Misty’s Morning Glory, who bears the Phantom’s black-and-white coloring.

 Misty’s descendants are pilgrims themselves, visiting Chincoteague during the summer, but spending most of their year in Pennsylvania. “Misty is a very important piece of children’s literature,” Allen said. “Down her, Misty isn’t that big to the natives. But worldwide, she’s famous.”  Marguerite Henry’s books have been translated into 12 languages, some of which are on display among Allen’s collection of Misty memorabilia at the Pony Centre. The gift shop sells Misty family trading cards, Breyer Misty models (still one of the company’s best sellers) and a wide, wide selection of plush ponies.  Melanie Sparks, about six years shy of the optimum Misty-loving age, knew exactly what she wanted:  “I really want Misty! Misty! Misty!”

 “Let’s go pick one out,” suggested her cousin. “Here, let’s see what Stormy looks like. Do you want to get Stormy?”  “No, I want Misty!”  “Here’s a black one.”  “No!”  “This one looks more like Misty.”  “I want a real Misty that IS Misty!”  Allen hears that all the time. “The world just needs to know that Misty and Chincoteague are real,” she said. “They really are.”  Chicken City Road turns into Ridge Road, which crosses Beebe Road and ends with a whimper in a mobile home park on the south end of Chincoteague. Just before that, between the townhouses and single-family vinyls, is a bronze statue of a foal at play.

 It is Misty, placed there in 1997 by the Misty of Chincoteague Foundation, a nonprofit organization based not on the island but in Charlottesville. Its goal, since its founding in 1990, has been to buy what remains of the ranch where Misty lived, and to open a museum/visitor center. It has, so far, placed the statue on a parcel 100 by 150 feet square, and purchased another patch 100 by 200 feet.  Even the most devoted Misty pilgrims cannot spend much time there. The marble marker, studied in detail, revels that the real Misty died in 1972. She is not buried there. What did finally happen to the world’s most famous pony?

 Bonnie Beebe has the answer. Bonnie is married to Billy King Beebe, a cousin of Paul and Maureen. Billy, at the age of 6, had a small role in the Misty movie. (He played Tommy.)  Bonnie is a court reporter in Chesapeake, and Billy works for the Newport News Shipyard, but this summer they have chosen to spend a lot of their off time on Chincoteague. They’re reopening the stable and small white house that were part of the real Misty story after more than two decades of being off the trail.  Here is the kitchen where a pregnant Misty was sheltered for three days during the infamous Ash Wednesday storm of 1962, when most of the island was under water and half the wild ponies drowned. Her foal was named Stormy, which became the title and the subject of Marguerite Henry’s next book.

 Here are the stalls of Misty and Stormy, albeit in pretty poor shape. Here are the original name placards, Grandpa Beebe’s branding iron and many, many Misty photographs. And here, too, at the end of the pilgrimage, is Misty herself, back in the house again.  Billy Beebe decided last summer that the stuffed remains of Misty should come out of storage so the legend could go on. The Beebes are working now to get what’s left of the family property into shape, while still accommodating the pilgrims who want a real Misty who IS Misty.  “Something just really needed to be started with it,” Bonnie said, and told about a woman who made the pilgrimage last summer. After the ’62 storm, children across the country collected Pennies for Ponies to buy back Chincoteague ponies auctioned to mainland dwellers, so the wild herds could be re-established. The woman, a youngster then, had sent her pennies and received a thank-you letter inviting her to visit Chincoteague someday. She had the letter with her, preserved in a plastic bag, when she arrived 38 years later.  “She was thrilled to death just to be here,” Bonnie said. “Some people know every little miniscule detail about Misty. We’ve been really surprised.”

Six pilgrims trooped into the house just then. Bonnie gave them the tour.  “There’s Misty and there’s Stormy,” she said, taking them into the side room.  “Holy cow! Is that their real bodies?”  They examined the famous map of the United States, marked in white across the pony’s golden flanks. They gazed and gazed and gazed, here at the end of the road.  Maureen lowered the bars of the gate for them, then put them back in place.  With one accord the old man and the boy and the girl went to the Phantom’s stall. It was not empty. Misty’s quizzical little face with its funny blaze was peering around at them.

 It was as if she had said, “Why is everyone so quiet? I’m here. Me! Misty!”