One day we were clipping along through rural Maryland and passed a gentleman in full colonial dress leading a horse along the side of the road. A little ways back was pickup truck festooned with flags, pulling a horse trailer. As we drove past, we saw that it sported a banner that said "Bee Line March." We speculated that this man was reenacting the heroic Bee Line March of the revolutionary war, in which a contingent of volunteers from Virginia (in what would later become West Virginia) marched overland to Boston to answer George Washington's call for "Virginia Volunteer Riflemen." They covered 600 miles in 24 days, making better time than most modern Amtrak trains.

The next day we were driving back along the same road, about ten miles past our Bee Line encounter, when an oncoming driver flashed his lights at us. Where I come from, this is a familiar code to alert other drivers that there's a speed trap ahead of them. I gave a conspiratorial wave and immediately slowed down to within the speed limit. Moments later a horse galloped by, going at full tilt past the car in the opposite direction, its saddle flopping off to the side. We watched it go by with the curious acceptance that often greets the first few moments of an encounter with the unusual, before the brain kicks in and starts demanding an explanation. I watched the horse in the rear view mirror as it continued up the white line at the edge of the road, cresting a hill back towards a small town we'd just passed.

My first thought was that I began to understand the danger of the "runaway stagecoach" scenario that was so popular among movie Westerns (and to be continued episodes of Happy Days). The horse was a brute force of nature, a furious heart of panic wrapped in several hundred pounds of dense muscle. In Senegal I'd that damage caused by horses kicking people, but this was a vision of thundering death itself.

A hundred yards or so up the road, the Bee Line man was picking his way out of a field where he'd been thrown by his mount, brushing off bits of grass and burrs of his colonial attire, while his truck support team was hurriedly unhooking the trailer in an attempt to speed off after the wayward horse. I pulled over to the side of the road and got out of the car as the Bee Line man emerged from the field.

"Are you hurt at all?" I asked him.

"Nope. That's the second time he done threw me, and I saw it coming this time," he said calmly. He opened up a fringed leather satchel that hung next to his powder horn and pulled out a pack of Marlboros. "He got spooked by something in the grass, and he went this way, and I saw I was going to go that way, and that's the way I went."

I noticed he had a little abrasion on his forehead, and asked if he was sure he hadn't been hurt in the fall. He assured me he was fine. Just then, another car pulled up beside us. A woman leaned across the passenger seat and to yell out the open window. "Is that your horse?"

"Yep," the Bee Line man said, without a trace of wry amusement at the painful obviousness of her question.

"He's in town," the woman said in a vaguely accusatory tone, the way you might talk to someone whose ten year-old was found wandering the streets after midnight. I hoped the horse had calmed down to the point where he was not imperiling life or limb. I half expected her to say "and he's smashed through a plate glass window and stomped a troop of girl scouts to death" but there was no more information forthcoming.

"Thanks," said the Bee Line man. His crew continued to work on the trailer, apparently having some difficulty separating it from the truck. They did not seem overly concerned about the runaway mount, but their slow pace could easily have been marker of weary resignation. I estimated that the Bee Line man had covered about the first twenty miles of the historic march he was reenacting, and clearly things were off to a shaky start. With several hundred miles still ahead, everyone involved in the endeavor might now be having some second thoughts about what they'd gotten themselves into.

We asked the man if he could use any help, but he declined. So we continued on our way.