It Only Took 20 Years

The year was 1999.  The model horse hobby was starting to get organized on-line, but it was still early days.  Breyer did not have its own website.  Facebook had not yet been born.  Model horse fanciers mainly met through the "Haynet" mailing list, which I subscribed to in digest form.  I did more lurking than conversing as I timidly paddled around in the shallow end of the Internet.  I was still working on a Macintosh Classic with a dial-up connection.

Suddenly, there was a stirring in the ordinarily placid Haynet pool.  Peter Stone's new model horse business, Stone Horses, had only recently come into being and already it was sending big ripples through the Internet.  Stone Horses were hard to come by.  The Ideal Stock Horse (ISH), sculpted by the multi-talented hobby artist Carol Williams (premiere sculptor, painter, and tack maker), was available in four different versions, and everyone wanted one of each.  Stone was already producing smallish special runs of horses, mostly for larger distributors like State Line Tack.

And then there was Coho -- a long mane, long tail ISH painted by hobby artist Laurie Jo Jensen in a silvery grulla appaloosa inspired by the colours of the adult Pacific salmon, produced for a model horse distributor I'd never heard of before: Eagle Nest Tack.

From the instant this special run was announced, a feeding frenzy such as I'd never beheld before gripped the Haynet.  Everyone, it seemed, wanted a Coho.  But how to come by one?  Some people, lucky enough to live near the distributor, were able to pick theirs out in person, but for most folks a phone call to the dealer placing an order was the only way they were going to be able to get one.  And as the Haynet kept filling up with people happily exclaiming "I got a Coho!" I sat squirming between the Scylla of discretion and Charybdis of desire, wanting a Coho but afraid to put myself out there in order to get one.

You see, at that time going out on a limb like that, making a long distance call to some unknown distributor and placing an order in a foreign currency for a horse to be shipped to Canada (if they even did that) required more effort than any other hobby project I'd ever undertaken.  Yes, I did have a credit card -- I knew that would help.  But still, did I really want to be one of the crazies besieging this distributor on this day?  I imagined them to be a small rural tack shop who had no idea what had happened to them.  Would the person who answered the phone even know what a "Coho" was?

I hesitated.  I was late to the party anyway, since the Haynet digest was only compiled after every hundred posts or so, and not sent out in real time to digest subscribers.  Finally, however, I couldn't stand the FOMO (fear of missing out -- a term that hadn't even been coined back then) any longer.  I gathered my nerve, found the phone number, and dialled.

I don't even remember the conversation, but I know it was remarkably brief.  By the time I actually got through to somebody, all the Cohos were sold out -- I was told so, and that was it.  Coho was my "one that got away."

I resigned myself to my loss, but I still really loved the idea of Coho.  I thought the trick of painting a model horse in a colour that would work on both fish and horses was too clever for words.  I loved appaloosas and I loved the work of Laurie Jo Jensen.  I wished I had a Coho.  But I'd done all I could do to get one, and still it had slipped away.

As the years passed and the model horse hobby presence on the Internet expanded, I did start to see Cohos come up for sale from time to time.  But just as it took me a while to get used to a mailing list like Haynet, so I was a latecomer to eBay, a latecomer to the Model Horse $ales Pages, and later a latecomer to Facebook.  I continue to be a latecomer today with regards to the whole social media scene -- something must be pretty well established as essential before I get into it.  I'm always working with last year's technology -- that was why I was still using a Mac Classic in 1999.

Fast-forward to the current year.  One of many major collector's estates being sold by online auction is Carole Christian's Collection, a treasure trove of model horses, both clinky and plastic.  I'd already acquired a couple of her clinkies from previous sales, and had just started to check out the plastic pony sales.  I looked, and suddenly, there was Coho, beckoning me to me again.  I bit, and bid, but was outbid by the time the auction ended.  So close, and yet so far.

A few weeks later -- and there he was again!  Carole must have had at least two Cohos in her collection.  This time my bid was the final one and just this week, Coho came home to me.

He's everything I hoped he would be, and though I never thought I would want to add another ISH to my collection (I have acquired 3 since the great Coho feeding frenzy) I'm so glad I finally have a Coho of my very own.

And it only took 20 years.  Thank you, Carole -- I'm forever in your debt!