Horses

Horses make sustained travel possible for the Travelling Symphony after gasoline-powered transport has ceased to function. They pull the troupe’s converted pickup trucks, graze while the performers rest or gather feed, and must be harnessed again whenever the journey resumes. Their role is practical, but the narrative also gives them individual presence: Bernstein, Dieter’s favorite horse, remains beside Kirsten Raymonde when Dieter is lost. In this altered landscape, travel depends not on speed or machinery but on animals, care, and the daily work of moving together.

From engines to animal power

The caravans began as pickup trucks, but the end of gasoline rendered their engines and fuel systems useless. Those components were stripped away, and teams of horses took over the work of pulling the vehicles. The conversion marks a broad change in mobility: the machinery of the old world remains recognizable, but it no longer supplies its own motion. Human ingenuity repurposes the trucks, while animal power carries them onward.

The wider setting makes this transition more striking. Airplanes still stand on runways and in hangars, but flight has ended; aircraft have become seasonal storage places for food rather than working transport. Roads receive no maintenance, and the old assumption that journeys can be supported by functioning infrastructure has vanished. Horses therefore do not simply replace one kind of vehicle. They belong to a form of movement that can continue when fuel, public services, and the systems of rapid travel are no longer available.

The caravans and the work of travel

The trucks’ working parts were removed, but their cabs were largely retained. Each had a bench above the cab for a driver, while the cab doors and difficult-to-break automobile glass offered a relatively safe place for children when the Symphony crossed dangerous territory. The main caravan structures occupied the pickup beds, with frames covered by tarps. All three tarps were painted gunmetal grey and marked with the troupe’s name in white. The horses thus pulled vehicles that preserved some protection and familiarity from their former lives as cars, even as their means of propulsion had changed completely.

Travel required repeated coordination between the animals and the people. On the road, the horses grazed at the roadside while the Symphony rested. At another stop, the troupe let them feed on an old baseball field, then cut grass to carry onward in case the route ahead offered nothing for them to eat. When it was time to continue, the horses were harnessed again and the caravans creaked into motion. The account gives no mechanical timetable or fixed distance: the journey proceeds according to the animals’ needs and the work of preparing the group to move.

Bernstein and the troupe

Bernstein is identified as Dieter’s favorite horse. Dieter walks a little ahead of the other actors, murmuring to Bernstein as he goes. The horse is missing half his tail; a member of the Symphony’s first cello section had used some of it to restring a bow. This detail places the animals inside the troupe’s ordinary material life: even a horse’s tail can become part of the improvised equipment on which performance depends. Bernstein is not presented only as transport, but as an animal known by name and attached to a particular person.

After Dieter and Sayid disappear in the forest, Kirsten stands by Bernstein and presses her hand against his side. The gesture is a quiet point of contact amid the Symphony’s unsuccessful search and its decision to leave rather than risk the remaining members. Bernstein’s place in the scene links the practical journey to the relationships formed along it: he is still there, while Dieter is not. The horse does not explain or resolve the loss, but his presence gives Kirsten a familiar companion at the moment when the troupe must face separation.

A changed measure of movement

The horses establish a different pace from the vanished world of flights and motor traffic. The Symphony stops to rest, lets the animals graze, gathers feed, and sets out again. After leaving St. Deborah by the Water, its members travel on through heat and forest, sometimes walking beside the caravans. This movement is neither effortless nor guaranteed: it depends on maintaining the animals and finding routes and forage that permit the journey to continue.

The novel’s images of abandoned transport sharpen the contrast. Aircraft sit dormant, collecting snow or storing fruit; elsewhere, abandoned cars block roads so completely that people must continue on foot. Against these stranded machines, the horse-drawn caravans represent a working adaptation rather than a recovery of the old infrastructure. Their usefulness is inseparable from the landscape they cross and the care their movement demands. Through the horses, travel becomes visible as shared labor between people, animals, and vehicles, rather than as a service supplied invisibly by a functioning technological world.