 |
| Bill nears the top. |
In last week’s column, Bill went searching for The Best Day Of His Life and presented a pair of candidates for the honor. Serious matters like this, however, require deep introspection. The Best Day is not The Best Hour or The Best Afternoon. The pomp and circumstance must stretch out over most of the big day’s waking hours, pumping the emotions, stirring the heart, rattling the senses. An all-expenses-paid meal at Roy’s House of Cheese does not qualify, nor does the day you fell off the roof and didn’t die. Bobbie Jo might have the best boobs in town but that quick peek you got on the hayride is slim pickin’s when it comes to Best Days.
Here for your edification and enlightenment are the three final contenders for Bill’s Best Day, after which the Grand Champion of Days will be selected. The Flying Pie asks you to search the depths of your wee little soul to discover your own Best Day. The hunt might reveal you’ve had more great days than you ever suspected. We’d like to hear about them. There might even be a teeny reward.
Half Dome Hijinks
“Up, up and away!”---Superman
If you never go to another national park in your life, visit Yosemite. This exotic wonderland near the California-Nevada border is 1200 square miles of beauty and bliss, chock full of grand waterfalls, deep valleys, heavenly meadows and giant sequoias. The park is presided over by its two world-famous rock stars, El Capitan and Half Dome. The former is a tall granite monolith, about 3000 feet from base to summit along its tallest face, a major shrine of international rock climbers, which means not you.
Half Dome, on the other hand, is more reasonable. Despite its summit elevation of 8839 feet, the 17-mile round trip from Yosemite Valley has an elevation gain of a mere 4800 feet and the rock itself is 400 feet high from bottom to top of its cable route. This means possibly you if you’re not afraid of heights. If you are, you’d be better off skiing down the Alps. The park rangers are called out hundreds of times a year to rescue climbers who freeze somewhere on the ascent, terrified to proceed either up or down. You will probably see a few of them yourself, clinging wild-eyed to the poles projecting from the rock. You’re not back in Kansas, chiquita, and the cavalry is miles away.
Siobhan and Bill visited Yosemite in 2001 after reading that the Half Dome trek via the Mist Trail was constantly voted the most popular day hike in the U.S. by folks experienced in the genre. The colorful route extends from Yosemite Valley up to and over roaring Vernal Falls, during which time you will get either slightly wet or soaked, depending on when you go. If it’s Spring, the snowmelt feeding the rollicking Merced River can get frisky, so keep a change of clothes in the backpack or drip dry, your choice.
Traffic along the trail from Vernal to Nevada Falls thins out as less ambitious hikers call it a day after one exceptional waterfall. The reward for continuing another forty minutes, however, is a larger and even more dramatic cascade. Happy little picnickers cavort around the many flat rocks dotting the Nevada Falls landscape, celebrating the day, but determined Half Dome hikers smile and trudge on, hewing to a schedule that will get them off the trail by dark.
Five-and-one-half hours from the start, we finally arrived at the base of Half Dome. I was on my own the rest of the way up. Siobhan, always the trooper, had made the hike in fine fettle despite little practice but she wouldn’t be climbing to the sky on any rocks today, thank you very much. She had plenty of company in the waiting room as the timid, the compromised, the disinclined and the acrophobic waved bye-bye to their more adventuresome friends and family members and sat by the comfy trees to read Walden.
Half Dome looks perfectly vertical from the bottom but slopes slightly, increasingly so nearer the summit. I had brought my own gloves but there was a large abandoned pile of them next to the cable route for anyone without. The poles to which the cables are attached are about five feet apart with worn pieces of wood extending from pole to pole and serving as steps. Each set of poles is about ten feet higher than the last. Basically, you pull yourself up from station to station until you reach the top. The pathway is narrow, so it’s challenging to climb while earlier summiters are descending and other horrified hikers are sitting on the trail clinging to the poles.
A young German girl whose party had chosen to stay at the bottom was right behind me. We started talking and she seemed to be wavering. I encouraged her to follow me from step to step and she perked up. A woman from the San Diego State track team asked if she could join the party. Sure, the more the merrier. Slowly, but surely, we edged upward. Near the top, the pathway leaned in a bit and made things easier. We picked up the pace and soon reached the pinnacle, dancing around, taking pictures and getting magnificent views of the valley below. My two girlfriends were positively giddy with their accomplishments, impatient to lord it over the non-starters below. I paused to enjoy the respite, taking some vain satisfaction from the fact that noone up there but me was over 35. In the Great Cosmic Scheme of Things, this means nothing, of course, but there’s a sign up top that says Half Dome summiters are allowed to be smug.
The Rest Of The Story
Life at the top is brief, as you may have heard. In this case, about a half-hour will do it. Nobody is interested in stumbling down the trail surrounded by blackness and the callow park rangers have not seen fit as yet to light the 8.5-mile walkway, so you’ll want to move along.
A mere hour into the descent, we ran out of water, alas, the only time on any of our trips we have made this unhappy mistake. Siobhan assured me that one teeny drink from the rampaging Merced might earn me a galloping case of salmonella, giardia, cryptosporidium or some other creepy disease people get from contaminated water and I could wind up being one of the 485,000 diarrhoeal deaths caused by the critters each year. Well, that seemed harsh, so I passed. Others didn’t. I resisted the urge to advise them their days might be numbered and if so, the death throes could be expected to be awful. After all, how can you despoil a time that might be the Best Day Of Their Lives?
The Groveland Hotel, an hour west of Yosemite, was our base camp. On the way, there was a pizza joint which closed at 9 p.m., and we happily pulled in to the parking lot at 8:50, starved for sustenance. Bad news, campers, the place decided to close early. Don’t you just despise these merchants who arbitrarily decide to change their hours and leave hungry diners in the lurch? There oughta be a law.
We slogged up the steps of the Groveland and past the registration desk to see what the vending machines offered. The hotel, itself, was one of those intimate 18-room (guaranteed to be haunted) inns where the manager sips free wine with willing guests in the lobby at 4 p.m. each afternoon. Very homey. When he saw us, he brightened. “How did you do with the hike?” he wanted to know. “Well, we made it, but we’re on the verge of collapse. And the pizza joint closed early.”
The manager was thrilled at our accomplishment and had a bunch of questions. He scurried to the kitchen, closed a half-hour ago, and bade the chef stay on. “What would you folks like to eat?” the two of them asked. I would have been happy with gruntburgers, but Siobhan asked for some odd ginger dish, which she actually got. We sat there in the closed dining room with the whole place to ourselves, enjoying a sumptuous meal made to order. It was a fitting conclusion to an exceptional day spent bathed in nature, a day that challenged one’s pluck and spirit and courage and stamina. We sat back in culinary splendor, hoisted a glass, smiled and told our stories to chefs and hoteliers and waitresses and kitchen cleaners and anyone who might want to listen. It might have been The Best Day Of Our Lives.
Get Me To The Church On Time
On February 14, 2015, prior to dining at the cozy Island Hotel in Cedar Key, I informed Siobhan that she had passed muster after her 30-year tryout. “How would you like to get married?” I asked.
”Sure,” she said. Siobhan doesn’t like to expend a lot of energy before eating.
After some serious reconnaissance, I chose the Little Chapel of the Flowers in the old section of Las Vegas. They know a little about weddings there. On summer Saturdays, they have one every half-hour in each of their three chapels. It’s like the Super Bowl of Marriage. The LCOTF also offers one-stop shopping. They have their own flower shop, photographers and concierge service, which will happily arrange the wedding dinner at any of a number of Vegas restaurants. Oh, and they’re on intimate terms with the Glam Squad, a group of creative women who will come up to your hotel room a few hours before the wedding and paint you a pretty picture. These girls are top of the mark and they’re not fooling around. In an hour, they can make Adolph Hitler look like Mary Poppins.
On June 25, 2016, the Glam Squad performed their ministrations on Siobhan. They looked questioningly at me but I told them I was beyond help, even for a troupe of their unquestioned talent. The Little Chapel limo came for Siobhan and niece Ashleigh, her “best girl.” I went to the valet parking window to retrieve our rental car since we would be gallivanting out to the Valley of Fire west of town for the post-wedding pictures. I’d given a lot of thought to picking the car up after the wedding but figured we’d be saving a good bit of time by taking it now. Alas, I didn’t reckon with the length of time it would take the valets to bring the thing around…an extraordinary 20 minutes. If I didn’t dance the full-tilt boogie, I was in danger of being the cliché boob late to his own wedding.
Zipping out onto Las Vegas Boulevard, I turned in the wrong direction and drove a couple of blocks before I realized my mistake. Now, some places this would be no big problem but it takes forever to get anywhere on LVB. The stoplights are set on “Eternity” and there are stoplights on every block. I called Siobhan to tell her there was no way I was going to make it. Unlike any woman ever, she told me not to worry about it, just get there when I could. I realized, however, that late probably meant no wedding since the chapel had one scheduled every 30 minutes.
They Guinness Book of Records probably doesn’t keep track of these things but I think I set the land speed record for crossing the city of Las Vegas without a traffic ticket, slaloming through traffic at velocities up to 80 mph, speeding up to beat red lights, careening through a couple and screeching into the chapel parking lot at exactly 1 p.m, wedding time. A superhero named Florian Schaub, husband of Ashleigh, was there to take the vehicle handoff as I ran into the church.
The wedding crew cued up Elvis’ “I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You” and Ashleigh and best man Jack Gordon led us into the arena. In a nice surprise, our friend and neighbor Richard Helms had flown his spiffy little jet in carrying another local pal, Greg Poe and also Siobhan’s brother Stuart and sister-in-law Mary. My sisters Alice and Kathy were smiling away in the pews, together with Kathy’s husband John and Jack’s wife Barbara. Where once we expected no guests, we now had nine. Thanks to the Christian charity of the Little Chapel and modern technology, the whole shebang was also videoed live back to our friends in Florida. Presumably, a good time was had by all.
After the nuptials, we headed off to the Valley of Fire for photos with Dawn Sims, a local wizard, who knew every inch of the area. The resulting pics were as spectacular as wedding pictures get, especially when the models are performing in 104-degree temperatures. And finally, to wrap up the day, we zipped back to town for the wedding dinner with the crew at Canaletto’s five-star restaurant in the Venetian Hotel.
It was a rare day, one that had everything. Romance, excitement, beauty, fraternity, terror, confusion, good food and even a scary car chase. Not to mention Elvis. Champagne corks were popped, vows were sworn and, at a telling interlude, Siobhan performed admirably where most brides would have been devastated. If Alice hadn’t gotten lost with our Valley of Fire refreshments in the wilds of Nevada, it might even have been The Best Day Of Our Lives.
Juggernaut
Mito’s Touch was a fast racemare, stakes-placed several times and always a threat at sprint distances. As a broodmare, she dawdled, coming up barren almost as often as she got in foal. In 1998, after two consecutive years of no production, we tried something different; we sent her to Lexington, Kentucky and bred her to a sprint stallion named Is It True. Naturally, she got in foal first time out. It must be the gentlemanly ways of those Kentucky stallions. We left her there to foal and be rebred in 1999.
When the Is It True offspring, a colt, was in the Autumn of his yearling season, he was shipped to Ocala to begin training. He was a stocky, confident fellow, not very tall, and a horse of independent mien. Like Garbo, he preferred to be left alone. After two previous tries to get the same name for earlier colts, the Jockey Club approved his name, Juggernaut. Maybe they knew something we didn’t know.
Juggernaut was agreeable enough on the racetrack and learned his lessons well. Despite his pedigree, he didn’t appear to be greased lightning, his works were good but unspectacular. We sent him to trainer Larry Pilotti at Calder and he progressed well enough for us to consider him an allowance horse. When it came time to enter him, however, there were no maiden allowance races in sight. “Let’s run him for $35,000,” Larry said. “He’s on the verge of a bucked shin and at least we can get a check before we lay him off. His works aren’t good enough for anybody to claim him.”
Juggernaut was a closing sprinter, a horse which didn’t jump out of the gate on top but improved his position as the race went on. By the eighth-pole, he was leading in his first start, then was bumped and knocked off stride. This sort of thing will discourage many horses and they’ll quit. It just pissed off Juggernaut. He charged back and got second, almost catching the bumper. “Just as well,” I said to Larry. “Now we can run in a maiden special and get the bigger purse.”
Juggernaut won easily his next time out and the shin held firm. The logical next step would be to run your horse in a non-winners of two race, but things were different early in the two-year-old racing season. There weren’t an abundance of winners available early and a winner had to wait, often for weeks, for a chance to run again. The other option was to run in a stakes race against the best horses on the grounds. I had done this before and got pasted. We looked at the other likely contenders, however, and were not awestruck. “He did as much as anybody but Pure Precision,” Larry evaluated. “It’s a $100,000 race. They pay $20,000 for second.”
In 2001, I had been in the racing business for 16 years without a stakes-winner. Some came very close. A few were stakes-placed (second or third), but no Jackpot. At the time, Juggernaut looked like a solid allowance horse but certainly not the second coming of Citation. Still, $20,000 was a nice shot in the arm. We entered the 5 1/2 furlong Criterium Stakes and lit some candles. As they say on the backstretch, you can’t win if you’re not in. Life’s pace was picking up. The Adrenaline Man began dropping off product.
Down The Stretch They Come!
Siobhan and I like to head for Miami the day before a race. That way you get to have a nice celebratory dinner before the contest begins, just in case you’re too disappointed to eat afterwards. We brought with us one Karen Brown, a research and development honcho from the Bayer company, which sells things other than aspirins. Siobhan and Karen were working to put together a licensing deal. Karen was not a stuffy business executive, she had the aura of a mildly reconstructed ex-biker chick who was faking respectability. Karen was fun, the kind of person who seamlessly fit into whatever element she found herself in. When we went by Larry’s barn on the morning of the race, she was right there checking out the action. She surveilled the passing horses, she listened keenly to the strategy sessions, she tried to make some sense of the cryptic Daily Racing Form. When someone asked her if she was having fun yet, she nodded “Yowser!”
It was not a bright, sunny afternoon the day of the Criterium Stakes. The skies were gray and an early rain had left the racetrack sloppy. Noone had any idea which horses would abhor the going and which would take to the wet surface, the small field having run almost exclusively on fast tracks, but we knew one thing. Juggernaut, near the rear, was going to get a lot of slop kicked in his face, perhaps enough to balk, throw up his hands and beg, “Pegasus, deliver me!”
When they broke from the gate, Juggernaut dropped back, as expected. In a short race like this one, most horses prefer to be close to the lead. He was probably ten lengths behind when the pack neared the far turn, but he was running. His jockey, Abel Castellano, unwilling to risk getting shut off on the inside, took the scenic route, widest of all. “He was really running and I didn’t want anybody getting in the way,” he told reporters after the race. Racing wide, however, means more strides than the competition, not always a good idea.
During a race, I’m off in the grandstand with my binoculars while Siobhan and the rest of the party is rooting away in clubhouse seats near the finish line, equipped with little TVs, the better to see the distant horses with, my dear. By now, I can almost hear Karen Brown screaming bloody murder as the field hits the home stretch with Juggernaut coming up fast on the outside. To the body and mind of an owner, a race like this is the equivalent of being tossed in a clothes drier for five minutes. It’s exciting, terrifying, wonderful, awful and hair-raising all at one. There is boundless hope, then the depths of despair and perhaps a little Lazarus syndrome, when your horse seems to be rising again from the dead.
I could see from my post that Pure Precision would easily win the race. None of the others were gaining at the eighth pole and he was running comfortably, the way you’d expect from an odds-on favorite. I was reluctant to get carried away but Juggernaut was gaining on the pack by leaps and bounds and had a shot to be second. Damn, I thought, I could really use that $20,000. Visions of paid-off creditors danced in my head.
In a flash, he was by them, a certain second with the sixteenth pole looming ahead. For the first time, I realized he might even catch the leader. I knew Pure Precision hadn’t been extended by the competition, however, and would have something left if he needed it. Made no difference. Juggernaut roared by him like the favorite was waiting for a bus, pulling away to win by 2 1/2 lengths. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t even think about the $60,000 winner’s purse, I was just so thrilled to finally win a big race. My body was shaking all over as I darted down the stairs to meet the gang at the winner’s circle. The victory was so incomprehensible I stopped to ask a punter who won the race. He looked at me like I was a lunatic, and he was correct.
In the circle, Karen Brown was whooping it up like a biker girl on meth. Reporters asked Larry a few questions and walked over to where Siobhan and I were standing. “I guess we won’t see this horse around here anymore,” one of them speculated, referring to the fact Juggernaut was ineligible for the Florida Stallion Stakes, not being a state-bred. I told him we’ be back for the Foolish Pleasure Stakes in September (Juggernaut won that one, too).
The winners of prominent races at Calder were treated to festivities in the Director’s Suite, where a lavish feast is spread out before the guests as the race is replayed on an endless loop. It might be the first time I ever saw Larry Pilotti in a sport coat. I’m almost sure he had to borrow it. Karen Brown, of course, acted like she’d been there before, hobnobbing with the big shots while they tried to figure out who the hell she was.
The ride home was jolly. On the way down, Siobhan had told Karen that people would call offering a quarter of a million for him if Juggernaut won the race. Also, that Bill would not take it. Karen was incredulous. “I guarantee you would,” she said. Five minutes out from Calder, the phone rang and Siobhan smiled while Karen held her breath. “No, I don’t think so,” I told the caller. “We’re having too much fun with him. But thanks for calling.”
Karen looked askance. “Quarter of a million?” she wondered. “Yeah,” I told her. But who’s going to sell the horse who gave him The Best Day Of His Life?
Happy Trails To You ‘Til We Meet Again
A few days ago, Siobhan and I returned from shopping to see Juggernaut, now 22, lying down in his paddock. He had never colicked, maybe he was just a little cold, perhaps his touchy feet hurt a bit. Just to be safe, she gave him a shot of banamine, which usually takes the edge off in twenty to thirty minutes. This time, it didn’t.
Throughout the day, we went back and forth, checking on him, trying different remedies, all to no avail. Long-term colics often arise from a twisted gut, but horses with that malady thrash around wildly, throwing themselves to the ground, getting up and crashing down again, looking for some way out of their predicament. Juggernaut was much quieter but still in serious discomfort.
Colic surgery was out of the question. The last thing a 22-year-old horse needs is to have his intestines spread out over an operating room table, usually to no avail. Even for a younger horse, the cure is often worse than the problem. Just before dark, Siobhan and I went out with the dreaded syringe to give the last rites. I patted him on the neck and told him I loved him and he was my favorite horse ever. “Thanks for the memories, pal.” I told him, walking away.
In the front of his paddock near the road, there is a small fenced-in area where Juggernaut is buried. Soon, there will be a gravestone installed, as all Best Horses deserve. It will lean back slightly, the easier to be read by passers-by. And, of course, it will be inscribed, first with his name, then his ancestry and after that his accomplishments. And at the end, there will be a final comment put there by his sad but grateful owners:
“He gave us the Best Day Of Our Lives.”
That’s all, folks….
bill.killeen094@gmail.com
