by Jim Harrison
But even the sport of horse pulling owns some cruelty. A few teamsters use electric cattle prods to encourage greater effort in training. While it is true that shock collars are an approved though unpleasant method of working with bird dogs, I have heard of an incident where a difficult horse was shocked into prone limpid exhaustion by a no volt application of discipline. Though these animals are instinctively docile—they were used as workers so long the ugly streaks were bred out—there is an occasional exception. These “outlaws” are often prized as their willfulness makes them good pullers. Usually the sound of the whip cracking is enough just as a rolled up newspaper works with a dog. The sound helps “wind them up,” convinces them that if they don't want to pull they have to pull. Unfortunately the inspiration of an amphetamine dose is also detected once in a great while.
I suspect that the sport of horse pulling will disappear with inevitable slowness, probably in my own lifetime. I don't mean that the breeding of draft horses will be discontinued. There is a large auction held several times a year in Waverly, Iowa for regular draft horses. There are still limited functions for the animals: the Amish refusal of tractors, the pulling in of seine nets on the Pacific Northwest coast, parade and general entertainment uses. Two local competitors, Larry Reed and Charles Van Borst, use their pulling horses in the winter to skid logs out of the woods in their lumber businesses. But few people of my own generation are even aware that draft horses exist other than the grand Budweiser Clydesdales they see on the television commercials. The Busch family will continue to breed them because they are beautiful, and, the best reason of all, they exist. But the sport, I'm sure, will suffer a natural degeneration as organic to our time as the death of jousting was to the Middle Ages. One might even assume in a framework of radical or visionary ecology that there won't be enough food in the year 2000 to feed such appetites. I don't know. Things change so strangely, catch us in errant surprise. My first innocent deer hunt fifteen years ago has been replaced with sampling at checkpoints by the Department of Natural Resources for DDT in the fatty tissues of the destroyed animal. There is no sentimentality here. Our own sport must finally assume the selectiveness and regimentation of Europe's. England had 1,000,000 draft horses in 1930 and in 1960 there were 70,000. Of course the war. . . . But the contests—how do we keep what we love when so few of us seem to love them?
Meanwhile back at the fair, the audience grows older and sparser. A casual survey of the grandstand, admission to which is free, makes it appear as though a retirement colony is having a holiday or a geriatrics ward was emptied for the afternoon. Horse pulling cannot compete with “Dan's Hell Roaring Devil Driving Car Smashers,” the feature attraction of this year's fair.
I am forced now to think of my grandfather, John Severin Wahlgren, who traveled from Sweden to Illinois in the 1890s. After a number of years of saving he bought a farm “up in Michigan.” When they moved northwards on a milk train that took two days to travel 300 miles my grandmother rode in a coach with the children, and John rode in a cattle car with a team of draft horses he had bought near Galesburg. They got off in the middle of the night at a railroad siding and a friend took Hulda and the children home for the night. But John walked the horses the seven miles to the farm. I think of it as a late April night with time left for plowing; the moon was in its third quarter, the pace was slow and the reins held tightly, the road narrow and perhaps a bit muddy with rain and there was a heavy scent of grass and weeds and the sound of frogs and crickets, the sound of horses’ hooves muffled but heavy with fetlocks rising above the ground mist.
I have an old photo of my father, dead now as is my grandfather, leaning on the plow handles looking very jaunty with the reins over his bare shoulder and an old gangster-type fedora cocked on his head. He always helped with the plowing during the Depression when he was unemployed. The harness is stored in the chicken coop, moulding beyond repair. But I've often thought that if I ever get past the “renter” stage and own a small farm I'll buy a Belgian yearling just to look at and let grow quietly lazy and old.
1973
Bar Pool
Manhattan cocktail lounges and bars are notable for their lack of anything for the customers to do. Except drink, of course. And a drink can cost you a buck and a half or three dollars if you drink doubles, long a habit of mine as I crave the substantial in life. So you sit there if you are unlucky enough to be alone and perhaps pretend to be someone interesting like a spy, a lesser celebrity, a solitary businessman concocting a deal that will make a lot of people truly sorry. To your untrained Midwestern eyes the bartender always looks like a criminal or at least a pimp. But there is finally no real reason to be in a bar in daytime except to booze and look out the window at the burnt and umbrous haze that is New York air.
Way up in Michigan, officially known as the “Winter-Water-Wonderland,” there are admittedly no French restaurants, very little theater, and the first-run movies are a few months late, but the bars serve as local clubhouses and there are games to be played. To be sure, it's not like Elaine's, where you can drop twenty bucks and pine away hours trying to exchange a single glance with a fritzee brunette in a transparent blouse. Hereabouts such costumes would cause a riot of bumpkinry. In most northern Michigan bars there is a shuffleboard, often a bowling machine, frequently a pinball machine, and always a pool table, bar-sized, usually about four by seven feet. And in many bars that table will be continually busy from late afternoon until closing time at two A.M. and kick-out time at two-thirty.
It is a game of infinite variables: after you break the rack the configuration of balls and the stratagems necessary to clear them never precisely repeat themselves. It is a game of inches and the calibration of stroke and English on a small table require even more patience than the larger table of the pool hall. True excellence is rare and vanities are punished. Gambling for a game of pool is illegal in Michigan but some sort of harmless “I'll play you for a drink” action goes on and in the downstate urban areas it gets a great deal more serious. With all those lovely auto factories they have more money to play with. It is a benign though demanding sport. You won't see the Johnson City big-time act with tuxedoed players owning the temperaments of concert pianists. A very few players like to surround pool with the aura of the badass; it's not unfair to portray their hokum in all of the shabby colors of nickel-dime evil right down to the cue case with a decal of a cobra stretched along its length.
I first came to bar pool as an unhappy graduate student who picked up his grocery money teaching English to foreign students in mixed lots, with as many as fifteen language backgrounds in a single class. My car trunk was stuffed with uncorrected papers. My heart was heavy. Each day was a fresh hemorrhoidectomy. The proctoscopic years. But in a half-dozen bars around East Lansing I began to learn to play pool, which quickly replaced bridge though the mania for both shares similarities. And with both learning is miserable. “You didn't finesse, you fool,” your partner says as you slump down in your chair like a sick turtle. Or in front of thirty people in a bar, some of them pretty girls, you scratch an easy eight ball shot and the subsequent giggles fill your ears with blood. You always lose when you're learning and as Woody Hayes would have it, only losers are good losers.
It is obvious to me now that the earlier one starts the better, especially if good coaching is available. You see people who have played a dozen years using an open rather than a closed bridge on the cue, affording much less control of the stick. Most bar pool is incredibly clumsy. There might be one or two local dudes who beat everyone else quite consistently but they would usually be utterly lost against an average player in a pool parlor. A good large-table player can easily adapt himself and a snooker expert is deadly on a bar table. A three-cushion billiard player can rarely get used to the soft stroke required.
It is easy to stay on the same plateau of skill for years, even drop one or two steps for periods of time. The belter players are able to shut out the world other than their immediate querencia, t
heir place of strength which is described by the circle of light cast by the lamp above the table. Those who lack this self-absorption and ability to concentrate never improve appreciably. You can usually connect very bad evenings to a cause, the most obvious of which is that you had too much to drink. You were playing with a good friend and neither money nor pride was at stake. One of those rare miniskirts was sitting at a stool humming. And a raft of other possibilities: general depression, excessive happiness, an argument, a tranquilizer that removed your aggressiveness. A dispute with a wife or friend can throw your grouse shooting totally out of whack and the damage on a pool table is even more direct. But sometimes as with so many other sports the faults are inexplicable: a few years ago I led the local tournament for eight weeks, only to blow up in the final two matches, dropping the contest and purple bowling trophy to a bluegrass banjoist from New Haven, Connecticut. A foreigner got the apples. I brooded darkly.
Though I had played for a long time I didn't begin to understand the subtleties of the game until I met Benny Boyd a few years ago. At the time he was a college instructor and one day I caught him unloading several cases of liquor out of the backseat of his car. An unlikely act for a college instructor. He said he had won five hundred bucks in a pool game at a local bar and was stocking up. That seemed like a lot of money then and still does now, especially for an afternoon in a bar where one might be spending the afternoon anyway. I found out that he had won the Michigan Pocket Billiards Championship in 1966 and when in college had taken second in a national tournament run by the NCAA. After that he played professionally for a while. When Benny lost his teaching job in the economic bite put on universities he moved north and got a job bartending. Watching him play I learned that the trip between good or average and excellent was an impossible one. You simply can't beat a good player like Benny when he's on “dead stroke” as they call it. You might pick up a game or two by accident but you simply haven't paid your dues and in this case the dues are literally thousands of hours of intelligent practice.
I've only really gambled at pool once and didn't like the sensation. I mean gambled so that my pocket hurt as the fivers vaporized. It is similar, say, to a time-limit poker game where you are perhaps playing for a dollar, three raises to a man. There's only a half hour left and you agree to temporarily raise the stakes. The winners agree because they feel arrogant and in control and the losers quite simply want some of their money back. There's an almost palpable ozone in the air, acrid and suspenseful. Now people can be hurt. The pots are mountainous and the feeling of safety is gone. A pleasant evening of cards has exploded into something else and when your flush loses to a full house you are sitting in a bathtub into which some masked man has just dropped a radio which he neglected to unplug. I'm not geared for that sort of excitement in either poker or pool and doubt I ever will be.
I was playing eight ball in a bar in Livingston, Montana last summer with country-rock, singer Jimmy Buffett, whose appearance is a bit bizarre for even the new west. He was leaning far over the table for a stretch shot when the witty bartender threw a firecracker at his feet. The blast was accompanied by a truly wonderful freak-out but it was hard for Buffett to get his stroke back so we watched the bartender toss some more firecrackers at two sleeping drunks at the end of the bar. Only one of them woke up, though the blast within the confined walls equaled a twelve-gauge magnum. We decided the other was dead but were afraid to check. Actually the bartender is a nice guy with an elfin sense of humor. He told us a story of how his Arabian stallion mated a mare over a picket fence and when she moved away the poor stallion was hung up over the fence and the fence had to be destroyed. “That's what can happen in love,” said Buffett, I thought not too appropriately.
I don't find it strange that bar pool is openly and stupidly male. Games of skill often are and bar pool is transparently so with its definite pecking order in any single location. You don't mind getting burned by Benny but if some cretinoid hod carrier beats you badly you want to hide out in your bedroom in a penance of Dagwood boredom. In a hotel outside of Salinas, Ecuador, down near the Peruvian border, there was a bar table. And for a week a photographer and I would spend the evenings playing eight ball. I had an edge on him and could salve my poor hands and spirit, blistered by fighting marlin. The photographer would right his marlin standing up while I required the strapped-in security of the chair. It was a very small thing to get back at his superb angling on the pool table with all of that warm, liquid equatorial air pouring in over the table through the open doors, the crash of surf in the background, and the moisture so heavy from the spray in the air that you would wipe your cue stick with your shirt after every shot. We played for drinks and unobtainable women and riches. It's fun to announce “This one's for Ava Gardner” and then swiftly win. “This one's for Annette Funicello” doesn't have the same Bogartian resonance.
Boston bars tend to resemble those in Manhattan. Once after moving my family into a new apartment I checked out the local tavern. No pool table. But there were several pay phones. Why all the pay phones? I even asked the bartender who looked at me as if I were Mortimer Snerd made flesh. Better to drop your change on pool than dialing a number for the horses across town, I thought. Telling the booky I wanted twenty on Marmalade in the seventh was a trifling pleasure compared to running seven stripes against that sea green felt.
And you see some funny things happen. Down in Key West one evening I watched a game in a freak bar only recently torn down. There was a large shaggy crowd of players evidently wired on downers, probably Seconal, and each game was a somnambulistic nightmare with all the shots requiring minutes of meditation and endless practice strokes with the cue. Then pensive reconsiderations. It was a hopeless, slow-motion game until a Cuban shrimper came up and ran successive racks with hyperthyroid speed. There was much mumbling and a general desertion of the table.
Huston Cradduck, who operates the grain elevator in Lake Leelanau, told me a story about a game that took place in Peach Orchard, Missouri. A hustler friend of Huston's daddy had spent a whole afternoon dropping games to the local sharpies, pretending to be very drunk and a total sucker. He dropped a number of hundred-dollar games, even fell against the table, cracking open his lip, until he drew in a high roller for five grand at which point he ran the table. He left with his money in a hurry to save his life. I thought that must be a record for a bar game but Benny said that a few years back he had watched a two-day match downstate where thirty-five grand changed hands in a bar mostly in one direction: toward a nationally famous player and his backer.
Violence in bar pool is a rare thing. The issues are settled on the table. I have had the 600-pound table moved during a game by some people having a friendly argument over a euchre game. After a lot of bluish epithets the older man, a plumber, called the younger a “college student.” And the younger man called the plumber a “charlatan” which puzzled the spectators. While the plumber began to thrash the young man I looked in despair at how they had jostled my perfect setup on the pool table.
1973
Guiding Light in the Keys
Say that you have been driving south for two days and despite road exhaustion you are delighted to escape the flinty April cold of Michigan. Just outside of Miami you make a jog on the Palmetto Expressway, then another jog through the truck farms and you are past Homestead. Closer now. In the immenseness of its greenery the flat swampy terrain resembles nothing so much as a giant snake farm, but you know that not far on the left is the Atlantic and on the right, out beyond the miles of mangrove and saw grass, is the Gulf of Mexico.
Route 1 is slacked with trailers; from the air it would appear that you are trapped in a slow crawling trailer caravan, an imitation freight train hauling the weary to the sun for an Easter weekend rest. But you don't want to rest. You want to fish for a month, every day all day, way past the point of boredom or exhaustion or possible sunstroke or disgust. At Key Largo and on down to Big Pine you keep noticing there's a steady breeze
out of the southeast, maybe twenty knots, and it has roiled the water and you hate it, but even this doesn't matter. You itch to be out there, to be staked on the edge of a flat in a skiff looking for tarpon or permit or bonefish or perhaps the waving-flag tail of a mutton snapper.
A flight down from Miami is even more dramatic. Following the Keys south, then west, at 5,000 feet you imagine that you can see the great sweep of the tide shifting from the Atlantic to the Gulf and back again. And the passing of the tidal thrust through so many configurations of land masses and small mangrove keys creates rivers. It occurs to you that you are not fishing a series of mangrove islands and their adjoining flats at all but twenty or so rivers whose courses may be seen only from the air.
Rivers or flats, the Keys are a wilderness of water, and a stranger could fish for a long time without even seeing any of the vaunted species that make angling here such a quantum experience. There is simply too much water: close to 750 square miles between Bahia Honda down through Key West with a slight crook southwesterly out to Boca Grande and the Marquesas beyond.
The stranger will waste his time blundering around from flat to channel with his nose in a series of imprecise charts and an inscrutable tide book. He will get lost, or at least run his boat aground. So the only sensible thing to do in order to save time and grief and raw nerves, stove-in hulls and gouged bottoms—and ultimately to catch fish—is to book a guide. In this vast stretch of country there are perhaps a dozen good ones, not to be confused with the backwoods handyman retards he might have encountered on other sporting ventures.
The skiff floats far out on the Gulf side of Jack Bank; it is still very early but there is a good tide. The light is bad, however, with thunderheads piling up, pushed by a fifteen-knot wind out of the south. The thunderheads reflect the sun and form a sheen on the water that is almost impossible to penetrate; though the water is only three feet deep, a 100-pound tarpon can pass by unnoticed. These are scarcely good conditions for the neophyte but he realizes he needs them to excuse his ineptitudes.