When Elissa was just a little girl, Santa brought her a hand-made wooden rocking horse. It had a painted face, mane and bridle with leather ears. The horse lived happily at our house in Anchorage and was ridden and enjoyed for many years. When we moved to Oregon in 1989, Elissa, then 12, and Gregor, age 7, had long outgrown the horse, so we left it behind.
The horse lived at Gramma ‘Del’s house for nearly two decades where he had a long history of riders: Susan’s two youngest: Catherine and Moira; plus her grandchildren Shanleigh and Collin, and all of her son Conor’s kids when they came to visit. The horse lived for a while at Park Place, Susan’s condo, and went to Fairbanks when Susan moved there and then back to Gramma’Del’s. Tim’s daughter Shanleigh named him. When asked what she called him and she replied “nussin'” meaning ‘nothing’ but Susan, Timmy and Terrill thought she said “Nelson”, and so Nelson he was. And here she is riding “Nelson”.
After years of hard riding, Nelson became very wobbly; almost falling apart. Susan took him to the veterans’ workshop, and they completely rehabbed him, making him more more sturdy. The Vets also re-varnished him and smoothed out many scratches.
But with Conor’s family visits being few and far between and all the other grandchildren having outgrown the Horse, he needed to come back to us. But how?
Every time I visited Anchorage I thought about bringing the horse to Oregon, but despite the best of intentions, I never seemed to be able to find the time during those fleeting trips. When I came to Anchorage for Catherine and Andrew’s wedding the summer of 2016 and saw the horse taking up space in Susan’s living room, I knew two things: it was in the way at her condo and it was time to bring him home.
Although light weight, the horse is bulky. He’s 43″ long; 29″ tall and 23″ wide and the logistics of shipping him proved daunting. The package would have to be so big that the USPS, UPS and Fed Ex wouldn’t take it; they didn’t even have a box big enough. When I learned that shipping him to Oregon as freight would cost as much $500, that was out, too. (Don’t get me wrong, I love Nelson; I just don’t love him $500 worth.)
But we weren’t going to give up easily. As it happened, Susan’s daughter, Moira, famously transported a hope chest – a package the size 0f a refrigerator – from Washington DC to Anchorage for little to no money. She was the one to ask. Her advice: check it as over-sized luggage on my flight home! Following the “easier to get forgiveness than permission” axiom, we set about building a box in which to pack Nelson.
We started with two large boxes and, using a generous supply of tape, we affixed them
together making the top and bottom of the box measuring 4 feet long, 3 feet high and more than 2 feet wide. We covered the horse in bubble wrap, filled the box with a generous supply of packing peanuts, taped the top and bottom boxes together, loaded it on Catherine’s truck and headed to the airport.
The first counter agent cast a skeptical eye on the large box, but scanned her computer to find out if it would fit on the small prop planes that fly between Seattle, Portland and Eugene. She said that although the cargo hold was large, the door into the storage area was small; probably too small for my box, but was unable to find any specific information.
She directed me to another agent who escorted me and the box to the “oversize baggage” counter. As we walked across the floor, she said, “Just eyeballing it, it’s too big.” I asked, “How much too big?” and was shocked when she said it would have to be repackaged to half the size. “Impossible”, I thought, since the rockers alone were 43″ long. This was a devastating let down. We had worked so hard to build the box and pack the horse, and there was just no other affordable way to get it to Eugene. And what on Earth would Susan do with it? Feeling discouraged, I nevertheless spoke with a third agent at the Oversize Baggage counter.
I was happy to see that rather than just “eyeballing” it, he took out a measuring tape to get the precise size and wrote down the measurements. He disappeared into the back offices of the airline for a few minutes and when he returned he said simply, “It will fit.”
I wanted to jump for joy. He affixed the baggage ticket and instructed me to take the box to TSA security where the guard there said grumpily, “You know I’ll have to open it up.” So much for our secure “Frederick Magnier/Gramma ‘Del” packaging job that took tree rolls of tape and covered nearly every inch of the box. But hey, the horse was getting on board! To save the TSA guy some headache, I told him the packing peanuts were loose in the bottom of the box; but they were in bags in the top of the box.
When I passed the TSA station an hour later, it was a little disconcerting that the box was still there and appeared to be untouched. I boarded my plane with the nagging feeling that I would be getting a phone call telling me the box was still in Anchorage or stuck in Seattle, unable to be loaded onto the small Horizon Airline plane.
You can appreciate my delight, then, when I boarded my plane in Portland and saw the box being loaded onto my plane, easily fitting through the cargo door. I wanted to shout out, “That’s my horse! He made it!” But I just took a picture to share on Facebook.
There was just one more hurdle for Nelson. Would the box fit in the back of my SUV? Well, kind of. Armen and I could not get the package entirely into the back of the SUV, but we shoved the box as far in as we could; enough to get it good and “stuck” and drove home with tailgate open and the package hanging halfway out. It worked, and we got Nelson home safely.
And this week, he took the next generation of kids for a ride.
Meekins Family Stories 