Pecked to death by ducks (39 page)

Charioteering, in the ancient world, was a soldier's survival skill, and like many such skills, it became a sport in times of peace. The earliest description of a chariot race for sport can be found in Homer. These races were the most popular event in the ancient Olympic Games, and the chariots actually drew more people to the Roman Public Games than gladiators.

The Roman chariot race held at the Circus Maximus usually pitted four 2-horse teams against one another for a seven-lap race. Since the horses were bred for speed, and the chariots were constructed as lightly as possible, there were a lot of exciting wrecks at the races. Chariots flew into pieces at the slightest contact, and drivers, wrapped in their own reins, were often dragged to death in front of the cheering spectators.

Successful charioteers—the ones who always managed to keep the wheels under them as they ran the Circus—became some of the most well-known and popular men in Rome. In later years, there were four racing organizations—red, green, blue, white—

and since there were few opportunities for commercial endorsements back in the second century a.d., the teams backed and were associated with political and/or religious positions. The later greens, for instance, embraced Monophysitism, and were despised by the blues, who considered them heretics. It was a bad day for Monophysitism as a whole when the blues beat the greens.

There are a lot of theories about the decline of Rome, but I think that when a society comes to believe that Universal Meaning is to be derived from the results of a chariot race, then some important intellectual bulb has burned out. While the blues disputed the greens in some pretty fast theological races, the civilized world entered a dark age, and all its chariots, the fast and the philosophical, were piled up onto the scrap heap of history.

It was well over a thousand years before anyone ever thought to race chariots again, and when it happened, not a soul in miles figured it had anything at all to do with Monophysitism.

There's some controversy about exactly when and where the sport was revived. Some think Wyoming, some Idaho or Nevada. Most of today's racers know of chariot races that took place in the 1920s. As Hart Grover, who sometimes races for the Rexburg Idaho Upper Valley Chariot Racing Club, says, "it probably started when fellows brought their feed teams to town." Rocky Mountain winters can be rough on cattle, and when the snow gets too deep for them to find feed, the rancher is obligated to get hay out into the winter fields any way he can. A feed team usually consists of two big draft horses yoked up to a heavy wagon full of hay.

"Up in Driggs, Idaho," Grover said, "these fellows and their feed teams would meet on the way into town and just naturally fall to racing down Main Street. First organized race I ever saw, the two guys were having an awful lot of trouble getting started, and when they got to the finish line, they both bailed out and went to fighting. I always thought when I was a kid that the finish-line fight was a part of the race."

Cal Murdock, of the Rexburg club, agrees with Grover about

the sport's modern origin. "My dad used to race the big hayracks we brought to town. It got to be a regular thing in the winter carnival in Victor, Idaho. There'd be dogsled races and horse pulls. Carnival stuff: all in good fun. Thing of it is, the hayrack races starting getting a little more serious. Guys started breeding their draft horses down to quarterhorses and thoroughbreds. They'd bring a finer breed, a faster horse, to town. Then they stopped using hayracks and started using sleighs, cutters. Pretty soon guys were making their own sleighs, real light racing cutters, specially built for speed. Well, it generated a lot of interest, and soon enough there were clubs and associations."

Only a few teams run sleighs anymore. Chariot racing is still a winter sport, but conditions vary from bare frozen tracks to packed snow or glare ice, and most racers have found wheeled chariots the best compromise for all conditions.

Unlike the Roman event, modern two-horse chariot teams generally race one-on-one. The approved distance is a quarter of a mile, "because," Cal Murdock explains, "we have to run in some below-zero weather, and the vets say a horse won't freeze its lungs at a quarter of a mile or under."

These days there are chariot-racing clubs in eight western states, where the races are run on most winter weekends.

The first race of the 1988 season was held in Bozeman, Montana, not far from where I live. It was early for the chariots—November—and the track was greasy with a thick, cold, clinging mud. The horses threw big clots of semiliquid goo back onto the drivers, so that men finished the quarter-mile looking like failed mud wrestlers. Each race, the two chariots would come thundering up on the finish line, and you could sense that, with the glop streaming off their faces like something out of a horror film, these guys couldn't see much past the reins in their hands. Just past the finish, the drivers leaned back hard, pulling the horses into a somewhat slower gallop, and outriders—men mounted on fast saddle horses—helped some of the drivers to stop.

The finish line was where you cashed in on your bets, but the races was generally won or lost at the starting gate. It is the

starter's job to see that both teams—all four horses—are looking forward and have all their feet on the ground. The gun sounds, the gate slams open, and the horses break, hard. The driver is crouched down in the chariot, his elbows over a front rail built for the purpose. Drivers who don't hook their elbows over the chariot end up lying on their back just this side of the gate. On the first jump after the gun a chariot will actually be airborne for as much as forty feet.

The second move a driver makes is to transfer the reins from both hands to his driving hand. He takes the whip from his mouth with the other hand, and on the second jump, he should be whipping his slowest horse. A team that is mismatched in stride will not only be slow, it will careen all over the track. After that, the race is, as Cal Murdock says, not much more "than a controlled runaway."

I was thinking about Cal's words as I stood in the chariot behind two anxious horses. These particular animals were big fellows, old and not necessarily fast anymore, but big and strong and eager. These days, the horses whose back ends I contemplated are used to train younger, faster horses. Trainers yoke up one of these big, savvy old fellows to a promising but perhaps skittish colt they think might make the grade. The older horse will break from the chute when the gate snaps open. The younger horse, must, willy-nilly, floor it for maximum horsepower or be dragged into a humiliating stumble. Horses have their pride.

"You ready?" Therol Brown asked. I had my elbows over the top rail of the chariot, and I said, "Yeah." When the gates popped open, there was a sensation of speed beyond anything I've ever felt in any vehicle, beyond what you feel astride the fastest horse. The ground is right there, whipping by at thirty or forty miles an hour, and the chariot doesn't feel entirely stable. I tried to remember to keep the reins tight so that the horses wouldn't lower their heads and flounder. Still, you can't pull back too hard, otherwise the horses will throw their heads up, slow, and eventually stop. It's a fine line. Therol Brown's advice —"Most important, remember this, don't fall out"—boomed in my brain with biblical force.

It took about twenty-six seconds, all told. After it was over, Therol Brown said, "I was happy to give you a run, but I can't believe you drove five hours through a blizzard for twenty-six seconds. That's just crazy."

I remembered a story Cal Murdock told me: "I was just on a training walk, if you can believe this, trotting around. Well, there's a tongue that goes between the two horses and holds all the weight of the chariot, and it snapped. Dumped me right between the horses, and my arms were in the double trees, and my weight held me there. My head was right between their legs, and they were running scared, just kicking away at my head. I came to in front of the grandstand, bleeding pretty bad. Most of my teeth had been kicked out, and my lower lip was cut off. I was in the hospital I don't know how long, but I lost forty pounds there."

The doctors had to wait for the swelling to go down before they could do any reconstructive surgery, but Cal continued to race. He wore a rubber mask for a while, to keep the dirt from flying into the place where his lower lip had once been. That was the year Cal Murdock won the championship.

I thought about driving five hours through a blizzard to run a couple of horses for twenty-six seconds and decided that when a chariot racer says you're crazy, it's a high compliment.

"I've been buried alive." The thought began tugging at the edges of my mind, punching little holes in a dream I can't recall. It felt like morning, but the world was black and seamless, dark as death. I was still half-asleep, and it would be, oh, minutes until Panic Central kicked in. I fumbled around in what must have been my own sleeping bag and got a hand free. The black world was solid as rock and bitterly cold to the touch. Fascinating: not only buried alive but packed in ice to boot.

Panic Central attempted to activate the scream-and-gibber mechanism, but it was too early for anything as strenuous as full-bore hysteria. And then it occurred to me, in the midst of a yawn, that I had done this thing to myself. I had just spent my first full night in a snow cave. And survived. Comfortably.

The concepts of survival and comfort were on my mind because my projected three-day trip had turned grim. I had come out to the mountains to do some late-spring ski camping, and had driven to the trailhead confident of good weather. But the jet stream had confounded forecasters: It had unexpectedly looped down over southwestern Montana, bringing cold and snow and

wind in such abundance that I felt as if I were being crushed under a fast-moving glacier.

No matter. A man who ventures into the northern Rockies, even as late as April, had better be prepared regardless of the forecast. From the skin out I had worn four layers of chemical clothing, bundled up against what the tiny thermometer hanging from the zipper of my parka had said was an honest 20 below.

I had packed a good mountain tent along with a light, collapsible aluminum shovel. Having set up the tent as a backup, I began digging the cave. Every woodsy survival book you read about this process says it's a piece of cake. This is a lie. Three times I had attempted to build snow caves; three times I had failed.

On my third attempt I discovered that digging through the powder into a sloping drift is a good way to find snow amenable to shaping, and for the first time my cave did not collapse. But I was still both cold and wet. When I mentioned the problem to an acquaintance who had taken a military pilot's survival course in Antarctica, he asked how high I had made my sleeping ledge. "You have to build a ledge?" I asked.

The ledge, I was told, is what keeps a person warm and dry. Cold, dense air sinks to the bottom of the cave, where I had tried to sleep. There had also been an icy puddle there, on the floor of the shelter, because I had cooked dinner, and the camp stove had set the walls to sweating. The ceiling had dripped steadily—it was like living in Seattle—and I evacuated to my backup tent in the dead of night.

This time I had managed to put it all together. Even built a right-angle tunnel into the cave to keep out the wind. Now, my watch said it was 9:00 a.m., but there was no light at the end of the tunnel where the entrance should have been.

I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that blowing snow must have drifted over the mouth of the cave, and Panic Central went back on alert. I began to move for the entrance, hit the drift at a crawl that approached warp speed, and came bursting out in an explosion of powder.

The sky was a silvery sheen; the world was white and unmarked, and it hurt my eyes to look at it. Above, at about ten thousand feet, the wind was whipping sheets of powdery snow off cornices that hung cantilevered over the steepest slopes. I was in the lee of the range, sheltered from the high, blasting wind that was pushing the storm east across the valley and into the face of the mountains that rose beyond.

My camp offered an unobstructed view of the valley and the summits to the east. I dug a kind of futuristic snow chair into the slope, lined it with the foam pad that I use under my sleeping bag, and settled back to watch wind and weather in battle with the land. I found myself thinking about the snow cave as fact and the snow cave as fantasy; thinking, in other words, about survival.

My survival fantasies usually involve some unexpected but unavoidable catastrophe followed by heroic efforts on my part. Equipment is minimal, sometimes nonexistent, and I often have to outwit small, furry animals that become my dinner. In my fantasy everything works. Snow caves don't collapse. Bunnies blunder blindly into my traps. Trout leap into the waiting pan. I am seldom uncomfortable in these waking dreams.

Reality is less pleasant. On one memorable summer trip my brother and I actually wandered into the mountains for a weekend carrying only a bag of gorp, two knives, and a pair of space blankets. We failed to build a fish trap that would trap fish. The lean-to fell over. We froze to death and died, or at least felt as if we had.

What had gone wrong? Hadn't I spent days poring over the woodcraft manuals, imagining various clever scenarios? "Visualizing," the sports psychologists call it. Mentally rehearsing an activity, so the theory runs, is a form of preparation. What I discovered, shivering under the space blanket, is the difference between imagination and visualization. In fantasy the snow cave is a solution, cleverly conceived, and it sort of digs itself. In proper visualization you concentrate on the mechanics of excavation, a process that is impossible unless you have attempted to dig

at least one snow cave before. In other words, visualization without some small experience is mere fantasy.

And it is just this sort of fantasy I see being sold these days on television in the form of what I like to call the Amazing Survival Knife. The thing costs ten bucks, but if you order now, you also get: a needle and some thread (shot of a guy sewing up his tent), and a hook and line (shot of some fellow landing a three-pound fish at the edge of a lake), and a saw actually capable of cutting down small trees (shot of two guys using this saw, crosscut fashion, to topple a small tree). All of this gear fits into the hilt of the knife. Order within twenty-four hours and the distributor will add, absolutely free, a camouflage sheath for the Amazing Survival Knife.