noise."Chapter Notes: Destination Unknown Epilogue · 10:38am Mar 31st, 2022
For now, Sweetsong can fly along the coast; if she goes far enough south she’ll find another harbor that has rail lines, or she could go north all the way to Vancouver Island and find a train there. It won’t get her off the island, though. Or she could put aside the train-jumping for a while and become a beach bum . . . there are plenty of options open to her.
Special thanks to AlwaysDressesInStyle, penguincascadia, and TomRedlion for pre-reading and regional assistance!
We finally have reached the end of Sweetsong’s journey . . . her next destination is unknown.
I meant to post a video of an airplane landing at Bowerman Airport (the one that Sweetsong saw as she was flying out of Aberdeen), but I forgot. So here you go:
One resource I actually don’t make as much use of as I should is drone footage. For a pegasus-eye view, it’s wonderful. Here’s a video I found of a drone flying over Westport and the harbor entrance. You can see the observation tower, Little Richard’s House of Donuts, the row of identical cabins, the tower where Sweetsong ate her donuts, and get a general idea of the terrain.
Little Richard’s House of Donuts appears to be really popular with the locals. Some of the tourists don’t like that they sometimes sell out of their donuts early, but that’s what happens when a popular donutier makes them fresh every day.
As far as I could find out, they don’t have any online menu—I couldn’t find one. So I dove into the reviews. Several people loved the raspberry fritters, and others swore by the maple bars. One person said “I didn’t realize it was the size of my forearm,” which reminded me of the cinnamon rolls they sold (and probably still do) at Sweetwater Donut Mill in Kalamazoo . . . they’re the size of a dinner plate.
Are donuts the best food for the morning? Probably not, but a pony’s got to indulge now and then.
The Ocean Acres Horse Hotel Bed and Breakfast really does exist (across the street from cranberry bogs), although looking at their website, the horses have to say outside at horse camp. They do not say if the horses are provided breakfast.
Hunting for razor clams is legal on several Washington beaches, including all the beaches she’s been on (North of Ocean Shores is called Copalis Beach; south of Westport is Twin Harbors). You’re only allowed to dig between high tide and low tide, you need a license (which Sweetsong doesn’t have), and you must keep the first fifteen clams you dig up. You’re not allowed to harass the nesting snowy plovers.
I have heard that some shorebirds have learned that they can open various kinds of shellfish by dropping them on rocks or pavement. Sweetsong can just set them on a rock and smash them with a hoof, which is simpler (although she could fly them up and drop them, too.)
Razor clams burrow in the sand, and if you don’t dig fast enough or in the right place, they might burrow away from you.
For this week’s song, instead of picking something traditional I decided to go with a song from a TV show:
It’s from Monster Moves, and the episode is about a crew trying to get a 15F steam locomotive back from South Africa back to Glasgow, Scotland, where it was built. You can see it at the Riverside Museum.
The locomotive served in South Africa from 1945 until it was retired in 1988 . . . while in the US (and I assume most of Europe) mainline steam was nearly gone by the 60s, other countries kept it for much longer. Some years ago, Trains magazine had an article on China’s mainline steam locomotives, still hauling freight. [You may remember that one of the tourist railroads that Sweetsong noticed (but didn’t ride) had a Chinese steam locomotive.]
Bonus!
derpicdn.net/img/2014/11/28/773696/large.jpg
Source
Now Im confused as that wheel on that train car makes it look like its supposed to control the trainferry its going to be rolled onto.
5647493
That’s the brake wheel. Since it’s only a model, it’s oversized, but they really do look like that IRL (at least in America):
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/BN_caboose%2C_Eola_Yard%2C_1993.jpg
"Razor clams burrow in the sand, and if you don’t dig fast enough or in the right place, they might burrow away from you."
Huh; wow. I had not thought of clams as something one chased, that I recall.
Aaaand thank you for writing. :)
5647956
Apparently they’re quick burrowers, which I suppose is a good escape mechanism.
You’re welcome!
5648246
Aye.
...Though I'm still wondering how they're able to burrow at all...
:)
Sweetsong's retirement home, a couple miles outside Dodge Junction, but near the tracks.
i.ibb.co/KWtHNSj/huangyu.jpg
Everypony says she's an odd old mare. Still has a great singing voice, though.
5648424
Well, the good news is that I got curious and decided I’d see if there’s a video on YouTube of it.
If you want to see more of the process, you can look up “Clam digs into sand” on YouTube. I’m not going to post that one here ‘cause it’s questionable.
5649610
That would be a heck of a thing to have.
Honest question, though, could you see Sweetsong (or most pegasi) actually retiring and settling down, or would they just keep doing their thing until the end?
5650395
Fair point. I imagine there would be a non-zero amount of ponies killed each year by ancient old pegasi dropping out of the sky due to heart-attacks and strokes, and whatnot!
Hmn... do they lose their cloud-walking ability when they die? Must do. Cloudsdale retirement homes must be a interesting place to work. Oh gawd, and there wouldn't be any AEDs in the hospitals up there! They'd never get to use them...
Gives an extra meaning to the phrase, "He's crashing!"
5650401
I hadn’t considered how geriatric pegasi ‘crashing’ could be a hazard to those on the ground, now I’m half-tempted to write a fic about the plucky earth pony who lives under a pegasus old-folks home.
My headcanon for coastal pegasus funerals is that they send the departed off on a cloud over the ocean. Silver Glow mentioned it, and it was one of those things where I had no idea it was coming as I was writing, and it now firmly established headcanon. I’m sure you’ve had that happen before. Earth ponies plant their loved ones to give back to the land, and unicorns have fancy memorial statues and probably if a unicorn is famous enough, rich enough, or well-thought-of enough, some kind of preservation spell (nothing like paying tribute to the non-rotting corpse of Princess Platinum. . . ).
In all seriousness, though, I occasionally scribble out little musings that might make it into a blog post or a story, and one of them was ‘do pegasi die in their sleep?’ I think that a large number of them gravitate towards the kind of ‘greater good’ jobs that are risky AF, like fighting feral weather on the coast, and while one of the job perks might be retirement benefits, no pegasus yet has lived long enough to collect.
Hell, relating to another fic of mine that I’ve poked at every now and then for the last decade, the list of pegasi presumed to have died in the line of duty would contain a disproportionate number of entries ‘presumed lost at sea.’ Some days you get the cloud, some days the cloud gets you.
5650413
That all makes sense. And yes, I've often had characters run away with scenes.
Jeremy Bentham of University College, London, was (after his death) stuffed and fastened to a chair that could be wheeled out for faculty meetings and special events. So unicorns... yeah, there must be some scary storage rooms at Celestia's school.
Worldbuilding is a lot of fun.
5650423
Like, the first time it happened to me, my mind was blown, I had no idea how it had happened. Nowadays, sometimes if I don’t know how two characters will get along, I just write a scene with the two of them and see what they do. I’ve got a couple on Offprint titled “Experiment: ...” where I’m working on characters or worldbuilding and don’t have it all the way nailed down.
Silver Glow got away from me a lot, and I just let her.
If that’s the one I’m thinking of, I saw a video about him. Well, his preserved corpse, anyway.
Besides any unicorn spells that might be useful for preservation, there’s always the cockatrice option, too. And whatever allowed them to get the founders (?) . . . Rockhoof and Mistmane and that lot, I don’t think I watched the episode that explained it.
It’s the best! It’s one of the reasons I love HiE and PoE so much, ‘cause I can come up with the headcanon and sometimes it makes sense if a character just explains it. “Oh, you wonder why we still wear nailed-on horseshoes? Well, you see...”
5650626
That's absolutely the way to go, particularly with Slice o' Life stories!
The founders were stuck in the Phantom Zone—or its pony equivalent, anyway—and Twilight let them out. It's a fun episode if only for the way that Star Swirl is an absolute asshole to her.
The cocatrice option I've used myself in a couple of stories, as an emergency preservation technique to keep a badly injured pony alive (-ish?) until they can be gotten back to a hospital emergency room. I wonder if that sort of Equestrian magic would work on Earth? That might make for a fun story!
Huh... I went to look for those stories you mentioned, and I think Offprint is broken right now!
5650640
They just had a big update and I think you’ve got to clear cookies to make it work. Or else something else broke . . . I’ve been skimming the discord when I can and a few features malfunctioned when they did the major update. I think they’re running a different type of code, and not everything works like it’s supposed to.
5650825
That was it, thanks!
5650394
...
Huh.
Well.
That's apparently a thing, yeah.
Thanks.
"I’m not going to post that one here ‘cause it’s questionable."
...Um. How...so? Because I'm trying to think of how that might be questionable, and failing, which leaves me wondering if I actually want to look it up.
5651518
If you’re wondering, you probably don’t want to look it up. Sand and water goes in one end. . . .
5654902
...Ah. A sort of... jet propulsion, I'm guessing. Thanks; I think my curiosity on the matter has now been sufficiently satisfied, without having to look up more... details. :D
5655440
That would be a fair way to describe it.
5650423
¡The Birth of a Meme!:
5660822
Maybe one day I’ll get stuffed and put in a museum. As a warning to others.
5661228
Just do not expose your skin to the fumes of sulfuric acid —— ⸘why would anypony believe that sulfuric acid would do anything but destroy skin‽
5661231
I was half-listening to a NCIS episode (I think) and I swore that they were discussing the murderer disposing of evidence with . . . I don’t know what they actually said, but I heard hydrogen fluoride and I guess if you wanted to dissolve a body and possibly make a really cool explosion as well, that’d be a way to do it.
5661235
If you value your life, stay away from hydrogen fluoride and hydrofluoric acid.
5661256
There’s a reason that I know of it; I got curious when it was on every chemist’s list of things they won’t work with.
It’s sort of the equivalent of asking a mechanic what kind of car they’d never own/work on. If everyone agrees on a particular one, stay away from that one.
5661535
Fluorine is the most electronegative element, and the atoms are to small that the easily penetrate most materials.