Jingle Bells: Birchwood’s Nauman and his Percherons bring a touch of old-fashioned magic

Bells adorned leather harnesses slung across a wooden beam at the Carriage Wheel Ranch. Spades of frost encrusted the grain silo in front of the barn. Frigid blue water bubbled over ice shelves at Peters Creek, where it runs along next to the house.

On a frosty Saturday morning, Jon Nauman showed off a horse sleigh in the barn.

Canadian made, wrought-iron runners, it calls to mind the lines from that well-known Christmas tune: Dashing through the snow, on a one-horse open sleigh. O’er the fields we go, laughing all the way. Bells on bobs…

Actually, that’s not quite right, Nauman said. He showed me the stationary runners under the one-horse sleigh. Then brought me over to a multi-passenger affair, with short, steerable runners called bobs.

“Now that’s a bob sled,” he said.

“So, wait. ‘Jingle Bells’ is a lie? Sleighs don’t have bobs?”

“Nope. A sleigh has runners. They’re not bobs at all.”

Dashed.

I google it later, and it turns out the “bob” is relation to the “bobbed tail” of a draft horse.

Nauman’s favorite horse, Jack, has just such a tail.

Thank Christmas. I couldn’t stand it if “Jingle Bells” wasn’t real.

And everything at the Carriage Wheel Ranch is as idyllic as a real-life version of the old song. This is where Nauman and his drivers take guests out on winter rides through Birchwood -- in yes, a one-horse open sleigh. But also in bobsleds and carriages, including one that’s still working after 120 years in service.

Nauman’s business, Horse Drawn Carriage company, provides the short urban Anchorage rides to tourists that many are more familiar with. But it also offers the longer jaunts from his base at Carriage Wheel Ranch that end with bonfires and hot chocolates.

In his home, Nauman opened up a box of well-organized papers, and pulled out the typed leaves of a homework assignment that he did while attending Church of the Brethren College.

“I was 20 years old in that picture,” he said, indicating a square black-and-white photograph of him carefully affixed to one of the pages.

In the photo he stands, slender and light-haired, with picturesque grass, trees and lake behind him, proudly holding up a bass.

The photo was taken on the 40-acre farm where he grew up.

In another photo, a small creek runs alongside the farmhouse, crossed by a wooden rail-less footbridge.

“We could go out there in half an hour,” he said, “catch five gallons of blue gill bass, some as long as a foot long.”

The college research paper, he said, was on the lake itself.

Nauman would later go on to become an oceanographer for the U.S. Geological Survey. He and his wife Myra, a schoolteacher, had two young daughters, age three and nine months, when the USGS made him two offers of a lifetime: either to go to John Hopkins University for graduate school, or go to Alaska to work on baseline water quality studies for the pipeline.

“I talked to a bunch of people. They said, ‘Jon, that’s a no-brainer. Come to Alaska.’ Best decision I ever made. But I had to convince my wife that we weren’t going to be living in an igloo.”

The family moved to Alaska in 1970, and out to Birchwood in 1973. After the pipeline was built, Nauman worked as an oceanographer for Minerals Manager Services, and Myra worked as a schoolteacher at Birchwood ABC and Chugiak Elementary.

When Nauman was in highschool, he’d had a horse named “Champ,” and he decided to buy his daughters horses when they were around the same age.

“Then they got interested in boys, and swimming on the swim team,” he said. “I liked having horses around, and they had to do something. It just got out of hand.”

Bear, Dan, Mike, Jack, Bob, Ben, and Bo are Nauman’s seven black Percherons. It’s a hardworking draft horse breed originally from France, of Arabian descent, he said. They’re smarter than most horses, he said, as a rule, but not as smart as dogs.

“I think if you’re a Chevy person, you’re always gonna be a Chevy person. Or a Ford person. I think it’s probably the same thing with horses. I’ve had a Clydesdale. He was a lazy son-of-a-gun.”

Since the Horse Carriage Company opened in 1983, he’s had 26 horses, all Percherons or Percheron-Belgian mixes.

Nauman sounds like he likes horses the same way he best likes people: good, and hard-working.

That’s been true for the most of the horses he’s had, he said, but still, each horse is different and has a distinct personality, just like people do.

The Percheron breed is a match for Nauman, who proves his fitness competing in the Lavaman Waikoloa Triathalon in Hawaii each year, something he’s done since the year before his wife died in 2012.

An accident in April of last year during a solo ride left him unconscious in the middle of the road with injuries, however, including from an apparent wagon wheel or horse hoof to the chest.

He said he was in bad shape and couldn’t be operated on for 12 days, doesn’t recall the accident itself or the month following it.

Hardly put a dent in him.

Keeping at his physical therapy for about a year brought him back up to good working condition, he said.

“I’m almost 100 percent to my shoulders, but my arm doesn’t have any strength when I reach up there.”

Later, while I watched him harness Jack for a quick stroll and photo shoot, the horse waited patiently while Nauman struggled a bit with reaching up to slip the harness over Jack’s right ear.

It’s difficult to find hard workers that can stand physical labor these days, he told me, recalling his first job as a kid packing hay bales for 25 cents an hour.

Nauman’s can-do attitude is a reminder, that old-fashioned magic comes from old-fashioned hard work.

The sleigh and carriage ride business itself relies on an older set of American crafts. He gets the requisite agricultural products for his horses from Pioneer Equipment, near the Reindeer Farm. The horses are shod with shoes crafted by farrier and blacksmith March Couch in the Butte. Most of the carriages, carriage parts and harness equipment is made in Amish communities in the lower-48.

Nauman himself grew up in a simpler time, he said, in a Peace Church that was conservative -- similar to other Peace Churches such as the Mennonites or Amish, although they didn’t abjure the use of technology. Clothing was plain and modest. He and his siblings attended Church of the Brethren services where their grandfather was a minister, in the same church his mother Miriam had attended. His father, who went by C.B., worked as a carpenter, and insisted his sons learn a trade as well.

Today, Nauman stays fit by riding around Birchwood on his fat bike, when he’s not caring for his horses. He said he can’t remember how many customers he and his Percherons serve at the Carriage Wheel Ranch in a year, but right about now, it’s almost daily, with the longer winter rides in high demand during the holidays.

Nauman is in his late 70s, but he said he isn’t slowing down anytime soon. “I’m not getting older,” he said. “I’m just getting more experienced.”

The Horse Drawn Carriage Company will provide rides to the public for free at the Winter Wonderland and Christmas Tree Lighting at Eagle River Town Center on Business Boulevard Friday, Dec. 2, which starts at 5:30 p.m. and runs until 8 p.m. This free event includes performances by elementary school choirs, a visit from Santa, torchlight procession, and free cookies, hot chocolate and cider. For more information on the Horse Drawn Carriage Company, including how to book a ride, call 907-688-6005, or email horsedrawncarriagecompany@gmail, also online at horsedrawncarriagealaska.com.