August, 2021
With a blog post title like “guns and horses”, you might think this blog post is going to be about a western movie with old style shoot-em-up 45’s and hard-ridden and high-dancing horses. Nope. No western movie here. 🙂
We’ll do the guns first … then we’ll end with some wonderful horses.
This morning, my friends and I took a drive out to the end of Marrowstone Island (see map/image in the previous blog post). There’s a great state park on the northern end of Marrowstone Island with campsites right on the beach, right on the water’s edge of Puget Sound. That state park is Fort Flagler Historic State Park. Adjacent to the campground is an old USA military gun emplacement from pre-WWI (1897-1955). It was built as part of the “harbor defense of Puget Sound”, along with a number of other gun emplacements along the Strait of Juan de Fuca and along both sides of Puget Sound. This gun emplacement was active in WWI and WWII and the Korean war. The guns here face east, across Puget Sound to the mainland of Washington State. Other gun emplacements over there on the other side face west, across Puget Sound towards the Olympic Peninsula, so Puget Sound was protected from both sides from invasion by sea.
The battery we visited was Battery Wansboro.
It’s not that I like guns. In fact I hate guns. But, having lived in the Philippines as a child for more than five years in the 1950s, with my family having military privileges, we often visited military sites there, including Corregidor Island, many times. So these sorts of installations are familiar to me, and even a bit interesting, even though I detest the use of such weapons today.
Also interesting to me, when the Wansboro battery was finally closed, the two guns at Battery Wansboro here on the Olympic Peninsula were deemed obsolete, and so the two original 3″ M1903 guns were removed and destroyed. But when the state park system took over the property, they wanted two guns here to show how it looked “back in the day”. They found two, old, surplus 3″ M1903 guns (exactly the same type of guns). The two guns they found were at Fort Wint in the Philippines, and both of those guns were slated for destruction. Those two guns were brought here from the Philippines and installed here at Fort Flagler.
So it might just be that when I was a kid in the Philippines, I saw and touched these very same two guns that now appeared before me decades later at Fort Flagler. What goes around, comes around, eh?
If you want more info about Battery Wansboro, go HERE.
That might be interesting, but I really like what happened later in the day, back at the Escapees Evergreen Coho SKP RV Park where I was camped.
Shortly after my arrival here yesterday afternoon, and on into the evening, I sure thought I heard horses whinnying, not a great deal, but enough to get my attention. My friends said they heard nothing, so I wrote it off.
But this morning, I again heard whinnying, definitely. But we were in a campground with no horses, and there were solid trees/forest all around. How could I be hearing horses? And so off I went with my friends on that drive to Marrowstone Island and the campground there and the gun emplacement there. But the memory of whinnying horses kept nagging at me (nag pun intended) … all day.
We returned to the campground, and I again heard horses!!
By mid-late-afternoon, I gave up, grabbed my camera, and tromped off in through the trees and the forest in the direction that I thought I’d heard the horses.
After clambering through 20-30 feet of dense forest (the trees that surrounded the campground), this view opened up to me … horses! Yee haw! 🙂
The very moment I arrived here, a fellow was unloading the white horse (way back there) from a horse trailer. Evidently that white horse had been off-site yesterday and earlier today and at least one of the other three horses here had been whinnying and calling for the white horse to come home. But now all of them were here, all were home, and all was quiet and peaceful.
And indeed it was so peaceful here. Each of the horses (four of them) were quiet, simply munching away, having a pleasant early evening. At different times, three of them looked at me, and ignored me. I liked that.
What a sweet end to a great day.