COLUMN: Fantastical fun on the farm

It sounds like a children’s book come to life.

Or a zookeeper’s twisted dream.

“You take the gator into the water, to the island, to another corner,” the smiling man with the heavy Scottish accent says.

“It should be four strides to the dinosaur but some will take it three,” he explains.

“Got to be in control to steer before the dinosaur.

“You run up the bank on an angle and jump that moose,” he notes, nodding to the landmarks along the way.

As you keep looking around, it only gets more surreal.

There’s a giant carrot over here, a bald eagle over there, buckets of dog bones and a freshly planted vegetable garden, too.

There are trucks, fish and teepees, and splashes of color from across the palate. There’s even a resplendent old Western town, complete with a woman who has tied her wagon to the bars of the town jail vainly hoping, the Scottish man says, “to bust out her man.”

It does not take long to realize the Scotsman, Ian Stark, is in his element. His element, despite the eclectic landscape, is not Wonderland. Nor is it Disnleyland, which is how two of his colleagues will later describe the menagerie by which he is surrounded.

Stark, neither Hatter nor cartoonist, is the world-renowned designer of the cross-country courses at Rebecca Farm, which will be the highlight of the so-called equestrian triathlon that began Thursday. The cross-country phase in most divisions is scheduled to take place on Saturday.

Essentially, the cross-country is an obstacle course for horses and riders, with ditches, jumps, tight corners, wide-open straightaways and splashes through standing water.

At Rebecca Farm, where fun carries more weight than you would expect from a sport that on the surface screams proper etiquette and pinkies in the air, there is nothing ordinary about the obstacles.

The wooden alligator Stark described is sunning himself on top of a log, guarding the entrance to Bayou Teche, a moat of water surrounding an island near the end of the highest level (CCI3*) course. This entire portion of the course is named after the area where farm namesake Rebecca Broussard grew up in Louisiana.

The dinosaur is one of many prehistoric creatures in what organizer Sarah Broussard, Rebecca’s daughter, calls “Jurassic Park,” and the old Western town is modeled after actual photographs housed in the Museum at Central School.

There is no reason for any of the obstacles to be anything other than just the fences and logs that they are mimicking. The horses, for the most part, don’t seem to care that the hurdle they’re conquering is shaped like, say, a giant duck.

“I think back when I competed 20-odd years ago and it was very monotonous,” Sarah Broussard said. “Now in the sport, we’re really championing having spectators, and to watch a horse jump over a log is ‘ok, a horse jumps a log, big whoop’ but to watch a horse jump a gator or a shrimp cocktail or a cowboy hat, it just adds another dimension to it.”

Stark summed it up more succinctly while leading a tour of the course on Wednesday.

“I’m not a big fan of 50 shades of brown,” he quipped. “Attention to detail makes such a difference.”

That detail, too, is incredible. It, most of all, is what really separates Rebecca Farm.

Each obstacle is itself a work of art. The mallard duck that serves as the seventh fence on the 40-jump CCI3* course looks like something you’d find in a gallery, with a velvet rope around it and a four-figure price tag, at least, around its neck.

Instead, this duck rests in the middle of a field, praying a parade of horses cleanly make the leap over its back without ruffling a single feather.

The craftsman who created these dozens of art pieces, and the man who studied at the Central School years ago to build his Western town, is a former competitor himself, just like Stark and Broussard. Bert Wood, a carpenter who framed houses and built decks in California before finding his way to this current line of work, has been carving and building, along with a very small team of colleagues, all of Rebecca Farm’s obstacles during the entire 15-year history of The Event.

“We were competitors and a show went under in Del Mar (California) where we live and we got a group of us together and kind of just got it going again,” he said. “I was the only one who knew how to build anything. Didn’t know how to build courses, just built (stuff) and had a knack for it and people started hiring me.”

Wood and Stark collaborate on ideas, with Stark sometimes presenting a shape and letting Wood use his creativity to imagine it another way.

“(Stark) says ‘I want a log shape here’ so we make a moose,” he said.

Other times, Stark brings the fully formed idea and Wood takes a chainsaw to a log to bring the design to life.

Wood’s newest creation resides in the bayou and is affectionately called gator bait.

“I don’t know if you saw the duck out there,” he begins. “That’s what (gator bait) used to be and the head fell off and rotted.

“I was starting to build and I was going to turn it into a goose and it just popped into my head ‘I could make a chicken out of this pretty easy.’”

Gator bait is a log carved to look like a rotisserie chicken, sitting in the bayou, with a hook attached to catch the hungry predator if he ever decides to leave his log.

“That fits better than a goose, doesn’t it?”

It does, of course, and a little light-hearted fun fits just fine at Rebecca Farm, too.

Andy Viano is a sports reporter, columnist and, for one week a least, horsey person at the Daily Inter Lake. He can be reached at (406) 758-4446 or aviano@dailyinterlake.com.