Holidays in Heck

by P. J. O'Rourke

  Ohio’s skiers do a lot of their sitting down on the slopes. The Boston Mills ski area is southeast of Cleveland and very similar to Alpine Valley in size, bargain value, solicitousness, and pleasant company. A sunny forty-degree day had brought out large numbers of that pleasant company. Their skiing explained how Ohio has produced seven presidents and no Bode Millers. The problem is one that’s not addressed by instruction books, instruction videos, or instructors. Ohioans, with no point of reference for skiing except what they do in the summer at the lake, are trying to water-ski. They carefully distribute their weight on both skis and hunch to compensate for the pulling power of gravity, which they picture as a metaphorical 100-horsepower Evinrude. A special form of Ohio ski teaching is needed. Most Ohioans know how to ice-skate. A video called “Playing Hockey with Planks on Your Feet” would be invaluable, although this might cause Ohioans to start high-sticking with their poles and thereby spoil the atmosphere at Boston Mills.

  Alternatively, Ohioans could spell our babysitter and watch Buster toddle. He does fine as long as he’s shifting from foot to foot and maintaining forward progress. But when he tries to plant himself firmly on two feet, he sits down.

  Boston Mills’ marketing manager Kim Laubenthal helped us sit Buster down with our babysitter in the clean, cheerful cafeteria. Even the undersides of the tables were clean, our babysitter remarked, having seen all of them while chasing Buster. We foisted off Poppet on an amiable certified kids’ instructor, Herta Schwaiger. Mrs. O. went to ski somewhere out of the range of advice from me. Or she said she did. (Several malls are nearby.) And I took Muffin on the Boson Mills expert run.

  This turned out to be an expert run. Or sixty yards of it was. A landfill ramp had been bulldozed out from the modest natural slope of the hill. Beyond the lip of this ramp was the closest thing Ohio has to a headwall. Muffin went right over the edge. My heart pumped, but not as fast as her knees. She went down in half a dozen perfect little parallels with daylight beneath her skis on every one. She did this another fifteen times. It is impossible for a child to be bored by anything that scares a parent.

  Alongside the headwall run was a genuine, if abbreviated, mogul field. Here Daddy messed up. I swear I can turn once as well as anyone. It’s just that before I can turn again, I—to judge by my mogul performance—need to sit down. Muffin skied the bumps with the special grace of a seven-year-old girl, part ballerina and part frog. The head-wall and mogul field shared a chairlift with the snowboard park. The teenage snowboarders were much better than the adult skiers. Summers on a skateboard give you moves you don’t get being dragged behind a Correct Craft. Plus, no Alps or Rockies are needed for snowboarding. You can just neglect to shovel wheelchair access ramps and slide the railings. But these were Ohio snowboarders, with no tattoos. As for piercing, only the high school girls’ giggles were that. They were all wearing the requisite bag-it-came-in clothing, but the snowboarder attitude eluded Ohio youngsters. They fussed over Muffin. It will be a shock to the sport when the Greater Cleveland Style hits snowboarding at the X-treme Yes Ma’am No Ma’am games with Hilary Duff blasting from the speakers during the half-pipe competition.

  I lured Muffin back to the cafeteria with a promise that she could try snowboarding just as soon as the College of Orthopedic Surgeons and her mom say it is OK. Herta Schwaiger gave an upbeat assessment of Poppet’s skiing progress.

  “She’s very sweet, and she can do almost everything now.”

  “Everything but stop,” said Poppet.

  “Well, yes,” Herta said, “her stopping needs some work.”

  “I stopped for hot chocolate,” Poppet said.

  Mrs. O. returned from skiing suspiciously un-snow-encrusted. Buster was retrieved from under a table. And we all went back to our superluxury spa resort off Interstate 90 in Concord, Ohio.

  If you don’t think there’s a superluxury spa resort off Interstate 90 in Concord, Ohio, it’s because you don’t travel with three small children and don’t know the meaning of superluxury. It means connecting rooms with doors that can be opened only from the parents’ side; PBS Kids and no Jerry Springer on the cable TV; speedy room service specializing in shocking-colored, fudge-flavored breakfast cereals and chicken fingers; patient, forgiving housekeepers who can erect a portable crib and are handy with a mop; and a really shallow indoor pool where air and water temperatures are slightly too high for humans and thus perfect for Muffin, Poppet, and Buster. Of such is the luxury at Renaissance Quail Hollow Resort, which also has a steak house worthy of a state full of cows (serving chicken fingers, too) with patient, forgiving waitresses who are handy with a mop. As for the spa part, a cigar bar serves single-malt Scotch as old as I felt when the kids got their second wind and began doing cordless bungee jumps on the king-size bed.

  “Honey,” I said to my wife, “I need to go check my e-mail.”

  “There’s no Internet access in the cigar bar,” said Mrs. O.

  “Whatever.”

  Ohio provided other, less expected, luxuries. Peter and Paris Ferrante, members of the Cleveland Ski Club, took us to dinner at Ferrante Winery and Ristorante, owned by Peter’s family. Ohio has better ethnic food than New York City, for a simple reason. The more enterprising immigrants to America—even the O’Rourkes—realized that Ohio was a better deal than the slums of Manhattan. And one of the first enterprises of the more enterprising immigrants was to fix dinner. There’s Cincinnati schnitzel, Cleveland kielbasa, Toledo falafel. Ferrante’s food was best of all. The veal dishes would challenge the sincerity of the most rigorous food ethicist. The squid could send Neapolitan fisherman to cast their nets in the Great Lakes. But it was the wine that amazed. Ohio has wine but it’s mostly from Concord grapes, the grapes used to make a PB&J. Cork up some of those jelly jars with the Flintstones on them, store these in your basement for a few years, and you’ve got Ohio wine. The Ferrante family, however, has been working for seventy years to grow grapes for adults on the shores of Lake Erie. The result is that splendid wine you get at a bistro in Italy, the wine that comes to the table in an unmarked carafe, and when you ask what it is, the waiter offers only Mediterranean shrugs and evasions—because it’s imported from Ohio.

  But does Ohio have skiing that’s equally great? Actually, in a way, it does. The Cleveland Ski Club was organized in 1937 and is one of the few ski clubs in America that owns its own hill. Most Ohio skiers are Ohioans stuck on skis. Cleveland Ski Club members are skiers stuck in Ohio. When they can’t get to Jackson Hole or Stowe they go thirty miles east of Cleveland to Big Creek. They found the property by looking at topo maps and asking the state highway department where it had the most trouble plowing roads. Big Creek isn’t really a hill. The slope goes down, not up, into a 175-foot-deep, heavily wooded gorge. The club hired a timber company to clear four ski trails. Each is a version, in miniature, of a perfect run. A broad, arcing sweeper is smooth enough for childrens’ lessons but fast enough to race on, and it provides three minutes of micro-cruising. A wider, precipitous, mildly bumped descent flutters the tummy. Or you can gut-wrench yourself on a more precipitous, ungroomed version where you swallow all 175 feet in one gulp. Then there’s a nightmare of a glade, or, if not quite long enough to be a nightmare, a nightmare’s coming-attractions reel.

  Big Creek is open to the public but seems to be skied usually by club devotees, some of them third-generation members. The club does most of the maintenance and grooming itself. On the lip of the gorge there’s a small Swiss-style chalet full of kids, prized chili recipes in potluck dishes, and parents keeping babies from crawling into the fireplace. Outside, the snowbanks are stuck full of cold beers.

  Big Creek has two T-bars. Mastering these up the side of the gorge is a better test of skiing skills than conquering the Colorado backcountry. Muffin had a last-moment flinch that sent the T-bar into Dad’s kidney. Ski Club kids Poppet’s age were unfazed. They made my skiing look like Poppet’s.

  Lest Poppet end up skiing like me forever, I tried to give
her a lesson. I held her under her arms, plopped her into the ample wedge made by my old-fashioned skis, and headed down the sweeper. Apparently Poppet has been studying the techniques of nonviolent protest and passive resistance (perhaps in the works of Gandhi—she attends a progressive preschool). She went completely limp, converting her thirty-five pounds into the stuff at the center of black holes in space. Thank you, Quail Hollow, for the parboil-temperature swimming pool, which makes a petty good whirlpool bath if you put your lower back against the filtration outlet.

  Poppet’s best winter sport is making snow angels. She does it intentionally if you take off her skis, and I promptly did. Muffin competed in her first ski race. She place third in her age group. I place about 281st in mine, the Cleveland Ski Club having 280 members. Poppet made friends with some like-minded little girls and proceeded from intermediate to advanced snow angels. Everybody was looking after everybody’s children, so Mrs. O. could go off with Paris Ferrante and other moms. The last I saw of my wife, as she plunged into the gorge, was a pair of skis that had been smartly brought together and the cute little hip thrust she made when she carved her turn. Our babysitter discovered that Ohio chili is spiced to a degree that’s alarming even by the standards of her native land. Buster crawled happily into the fireplace. I had a beer. And another.

  Go ahead and go to Park City if you’re taking a ski vacation. But if you’re taking a family ski vacation . . . Plus, if Cleveland becomes a winter travel destination, think what an improvement on Sundance its film festival will be. You won’t have to sit through any solemn bumout documentaries or pretentious handheld indie productions or incomprehensible art films—because Drew Carey will be picking all the movies.

  4

  RIDING TO THE HOUNDS VERSUS GOING TO THE DOGS

  Britain after the Hunting Ban, March 2005

  A stag flanked by two female red deer, or “hinds,” trotted down a steep moorland pasture toward a wood. Two mounted hunters were behind them, and staghounds were in between. The deer’s trot was faster than the hunters’ canter and as fast as the all-out run of the hounds. A horn was blown. We were off—over a soaked, slippery sheep meadow, between the stone posts of a narrow gate, down a muddy track perilous with ruts, into a country lane of barely an arm’s breadth, through the tiny streets of an old village with tourists hopping out of our way, then making a hairpin turn onto a paved road, speeding uphill around blind curves, and narrowly avoiding several head-on collisions with trucks. It was a thrilling ride, even if it was in a Suzuki SUV driven by a retired grocer, an enthusiast of stag hunting who had volunteered to show me the hunt on Exmoor in England’s West Country.

  We arrived at a hilltop opposite the steep pasture and above the woods. From here I could look across a valley at . . . not much. On the crest of the far slope several dozen members of the hunt were sitting on their horses. They watched two dogs sniffing the underbrush below. Two men in scarlet coats were with the dogs, more closely watching them sniff.

  The idea of a stag hunt evokes chivalry—knights in jerkins and hose, ladies on sidesaddles with wimples and billowing dresses, a white stag symbolizing something or other, and Robin Hood getting in the way. An actual stag hunt is more like a horseback meeting of a county planning commission. The equestrian committee is responding to deer-population-growth issues and deer-herd rural sprawl. Red deer are noble animals—big, anyway. They are half again the size of American whitetails. In the fall a mature stag has antlers that could hang the hats of a small town in Texas. But red deer are also pests. England is intensely cultivated. A farmer may find 100 red deer in his pasture, each eating as much grass as three sheep. The deer’s zoning permits are revoked by a process too deeply imbued with tradition to be called bureaucratic, but which is a reminder that one of civilization’s oldest traditions is bureaucracy. Stag hunts cull the weaker hinds from November through February, the less promising young stags in hunts such as this one in March, and the stags whose days of promise are behind them during late summer and fall.

  Each hunt has a “harbourer,” a specialist whose job is to watch the herds and select a specific stag. Only this one is to be hunted. (When hunting hinds, which are effectively indistinguishable, the selection is made by the hounds on Darwinian principles. Thus there is an intellectual connection between the British ban on hunting with dogs and the American call for teaching creationism in schools.)

  A chivalrous aspect to stag hunting, remains, however. The three hunts in the Exmoor region maintain, with noblesse oblige, a twenty-four-hour emergency service for sick or injured deer. Mostly these are deer that have been hit by cars and have crawled off into the bushes—as many as 100 of them a year. Members of the hunts will come out in the middle of the night with horses and dogs, to track these suffering creatures. In some years the hunters do as much euthanizing as they do hunting.

  For a proper hunt, or “meet,” in which Rovers and BMWs do not initiate the pursuit, the harbourer spends the previous day and night making sure of the stag’s location. On the morning of the hunt he reports to his chief, the huntsman. The huntsman brings in older, experienced hounds, called “tufters,” to separate the stag from the herd. It was this singling-out that I was watching in the steep moorland pasture. But it hadn’t been working perfectly. As unpromising as that young stag may have been from the harbourer’s point of view, the two hinds thought he was worth running away with. Once the stag is solitary, the huntsman’s assistant, the “whipper-in,” is supposed to bring up the full pack, and the hunt’s members and guests fall in behind the hounds. Miles and miles of furiously galloping cross-country endeavor at achievement of ecological balance in the Exmoor deer herds ensues. Unless it doesn’t. As it seemed not to be doing from my vantage point across the valley. When the chase does happen, the usual outcome is that the stag, at last, turns and “stands at bay,” facing the hounds. Then (rather disappointingly for those whose imaginations run to tenderhearted indignation or to bloodlust) the hounds do not tear the stag to shreds. They bark.

  There’s probably not much else they could do with an irked and antler-waving stag. Staghounds are not giant Scottish deerhounds or hulking, red-eyed mastiffs. They’re just foxhounds, happy and hound-doggy and friendly if you aren’t prey. “You can set your baby down in the middle of a pack,” a hunter told me, “and they’ll lick him silly.” What happens to the stag is that the huntsman walks over to it and prosaically shoots it in the head with a special, short-barreled, folding-stock shotgun. This is an illegal weapon in Great Britain. But on stag hunts it’s legally required.

  Speaking of Britain’s laws, killing wild mammals with the aid of dogs, as the Exmoor hunt was trying to do, is forbidden. Except when—as I understand the parliamentary Hunting Act of 2004—it is mandatory. The act contains certain conditions for “exempt hunting” that allow the killing of wild mammals with the aid of dogs if “as soon as possible after being found or flushed out the wild mammal is shot dead by a competent person.” No letting it go, even if it’s Bambi’s mother. Furthermore only two dogs may be used at a time. And no letting the dogs kill the wild mammals, the way foxhunters always have done. The stain must be upon you, not your pet. “Out, damned spot,” indeed.

  The Hunting Act came into effect on February 18, 2005, a few weeks before this Exmoor meet. I got in touch with Adrian Dangar, the hunting correspondent for The Field. Adrian said that I shouldn’t write about foxhunting. It’s all that anybody was writing about. And it’s such a social occasion. He said that the stag hunters were a much more doughty and resolute lot, and stag hunting was more of a way of life.

  I went to Exmoor with Adrian. We stayed with the chairman of the stag hunt. I’ll call him Michael Thompson. He was doughty and resolute, the owner of a family sheep farm of centuries’ standing. I went to the meet expecting a scene of American seething, full of the half-suppressed violence that Americans thwarted in their beliefs or their hobbies half-suppress so well. What I found was a cheerful, natty crowd on horseback, booted
and spurred and listening to a talk from the hunt secretary about strict adherence to the Hunt Act, especially in the matter of using just two dogs. The whole staghound pack was there, but the hounds had been split into pairs, with each twosome in the back of a different vehicle. The hunt secretary gave her opinion that hunting the pairs serially was in accord with the letter and spirit of the law.

  Having just two dogs in the field was exactly the problem. So I was told by the retired grocer and other hunt followers gathered on the hilltop vantage point, watching the lack of action through binoculars. Two hounds were not enough to break the stag away from the hinds. Or two hounds were not enough to bring the stag to bay. Two hounds were certainly not enough to make what I was told was the music of a pack in full cry.

  The followers were local farmers and farm wives, mostly past middle age. Many had ridden with the hunt years before. The men wore tweed jackets and neckties. The women wore tweed skirts and twinsets. Everyone wore a waxed cotton Barbour jacket. The hunt members were dressed in black and brown riding coats, buff whipcord breeches, and hunting bowlers. They wore elaborately tied and gold-pinned white stocks at their throats. All the clothes were seasoned and washed to a perfect Ralph Lauren degree. If hunting dies out, from where will Ralph draw outdoorsy English inspiration? Will suburban Americans be wearing the undershirts, rolled trousers, and hankies-on-the-head of English sunbathers?

  The hunt was moving. Horses were trotting over the far hill. The two hounds did their best in the music department. There was a spate of elderly, excited driving as hunt followers hurried to find a better view. We parked by a tributary of the River Exe. The stag either did or didn’t go into a strip of woods along the bank. The hounds weren’t sure. The followers weren’t sure. Possibly the stag came out of the woods. Possibly he didn’t. The hunters went into the woods and came out. This sounds as interesting as cricket. And to the onlookers it was. The crowd had grown to forty or more and now included children in small tweeds and small Barbour coats and a man selling tea and sandwiches from a van. They all watched intently, the tea vendor included. There was a tense murmuring, as from a golf gallery.