Traveling Light

by Bill Barich

  Late in April, I went out to Cascine for the one-hundred-and-fifty-fifth running of the Corsa dell’Arno, Italy’s oldest race for thoroughbreds. The race, over a mile and an eighth, is a fair test of speed and stamina. The winner earns thirty million lire, or about twenty-three thousand dollars—an enormous purse in Tuscany. This year’s Arno was especially exciting, because Jorge Velasquez, billed in the local papers as “il famoso jockey americano was flying in to ride a horse called Beggar’s Bridge, and to compete in a sfida, or challenge, against a young Irish jockey, Walter Swinburn. The jockeys were to be awarded points on the basis of how their mounts finished in the last four races on the card; the winner would receive an impressive trophy. Swinburn was not as well known as Velasquez, but he’d made a name for himself in 1981 by taking both the English Derby and the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot aboard the ill-fated Shergar, who was later kidnapped from the Aga Khan’s stables.

  The weather was unpropitious on the day of the Arno. A howling wind blew through Cascine; dust off the footpaths rose in clouds, and the branches on the trees along the central boulevard rustled constantly. Hookers who were looking for early action seemed to lean against the claw-footed street lamps more for support than for advertisement. But a big crowd had turned out for the race anyway—maybe five thousand people, among them more hard-core racing fans than I’d ever seen at Cascine before. Guys who looked like Dean Martin and Al Martino were smoking slow cigarettes and giving the eye to anything in skirts. There were toupees in evidence, and also neck chains, exploded noses, stubby cigars, and hives of teased blond hair. I couldn’t figure out where all these high rollers had come from. Ordinarily, Florentines are rather elegant and conservative, dressed in somber colors that reflect the monochromatic stones of the city, but these characters were done up in Vegas neon.

  The crowd continued to grow, and I had to wait for a few minutes before I got a stool at the horseshoe-shaped counter of the tavola calda, or hot table, that serves as the hippodrome’s restaurant. The tavola calda is a delight, compared with American racetrack cuisine. There is no menu. A harried waitress tells you what kinds of pasta are available as a first course, and you make your selection and help yourself to the bottles of wine and mineral water on the counter. For entertainment, you read Galoppo e Trotto or watch the open kitchen, where cooks in T-shirts and abused aprons labor in a matrix of grease and steam. The cooks shout at each other; they throw their hands into the air. After the pasta, the waitress usually offers you roast veal or pork, or maybe bistecca alla fiorentina—a thick steak grilled over a wood fire, then dabbed with olive oil and salt. The third course is fruit and pecorino, although if you are brave you can have a pastry instead. The tab for the meal at the tavola calda comes to seven or eight dollars. The only drawback is that the meal gives you a false feeling of security; losing bets don’t seem so awful on a full stomach.

  I walked up to the top level of the grandstand to watch the first race from a glassed-in area behind the last row of seats. I had to peer over the shoulders of some miltant grandmas who’d borrowed folding chairs from somewhere and arranged them in a phalanx in front of the windows. The race turned into a horror show when Uncle Table broke down in the stretch. His rider, Signorina Villa, took a spill. Meanwhile, Uncle Table got up on his three good legs and tried to hobble home. He had that frustrated, panicky look you often notice in horses right after they’ve broken down; it makes you think they have no cushioning image of catastrophe in their brains, nothing to soften the blow. After a while, two grooms stopped him. They grabbed his reins and led him across the infield, moving aside temporary fences so that he could get back to the stable by the most direct route. The horse was in such pain that he couldn’t make much progress. He’d hobble for a few steps; then he’d quit and toss his head around. Finally, some other men, who seemed to have positions of authority, intercepted the grooms. The men held a lengthy consultation while Uncle Table hobbled and tossed his head. Nobody gave him a shot to kill the pain. He just kept hobbling while the men talked. One of them signaled for a worker across the infield to bring over a tractor that had a green cart behind it, but the cart was much too rickety to support Uncle Table’s weight. Next, somebody called for a VW van, but it was clear even from the stands that no horse would fit inside. The dumbness of it all would have been comic if Uncle Table hadn’t been hurting so badly. Almost a half hour passed before a horse van requisitioned from a distant parking lot arrived. Uncle Table was shoved up its gangplank and driven away, headed, perhaps, for the Tuscan version of the glue factory.

  The sfida was not supposed to begin until the fifth race, but Velasquez had a mount, Foden Warrior, in the fourth, and I went down to watch him in the paddock. The press crew was watching him, too, with cameras at the ready. He came blinking out of the jockeys’ room into the sun, looking a little puzzled and ill at ease, as though he’d gone to sleep in a familiar bed and awakened in a land where everything was the same but different. He fiddled with the waistband of his breeches and stared solemnly into the middle distance. Velasquez is usually pretty cocky before a race, but I guess Italy had shaken him up some. I thought he had a slight case of nerves. The shirt he wore had a big star on the chest, and I’m sure he was anxious about living up to it. The pressure was on him to perform. The hippodrome was strictly a bush-league track for him, and he really had nothing to gain by riding there, no matter how much money he might be paid for his appearance—he was already a wealthy man. If he rode well, he would only confirm what everybody had known in advance—that he was a world-class jockey. But if he had a sorry afternoon he would tarnish his reputation; for decades afterward Florentines would talk about how Tuscan riders had outshone il famoso americano. So I respected Velasquez for taking a risk that most jockeys of his caliber would have been happy to avoid.

  Once Velasquez was in the saddle, he seemed much less nervous. The kind of calm that sailors get when they step on board ship crept over him. The horse was his fulcrum; it lent him a sense of stability in the midst of surrounding strangeness. He reached down and patted Foden Warrior on the neck, and then he took the reins in hand. When he glided by the photographers, his face broke into an unexpectedly brilliant smile. It was a smile he’d mastered in countless paddocks and winner’s circles over the years, but it still had a touch of unalloyed pleasure in it, because Velasquez was up there on horseback, alive in every cell of his body, while the rest of us had our feet planted on the ground.

  Foden Warrior was a nice little horse, quite well behaved, with a healthy sheen to his coat, but he was only the third favorite in the betting. The crowd was going to make Velasquez prove his skill before they’d give him any edge. I didn’t think Velasquez’ agent would have let him travel to Europe unless he’d got some assurance that Jorge’s mounts would be primed to win, so I put my lire on Foden Warrior. Velasquez gave the horse a perfect ride, urging him to join the leaders at the head of the stretch, and then turning him loose on the long run-in. Foden Warrior had plenty to spare and won much more easily that his form would have indicated.

  Before the fifth race, Walter Swinburn joined Velasquez in the paddock. He is twenty-one, but he could pass for sixteen; his altar-boy potential is still intact. He has pale, unscarred skin, and he projects the humility of spirit that all successful young jockeys seem to share. It’s the losers who snarl and get rank. Swinburn’s father, Wally, is also a jockey, and he happened to be in Italy, too—down in Rome, where he was riding in a big stakes race. The trip was on the order of a family holiday for the Swinburns, but I had a feeling that Velasquez was going to spoil Walter’s part of it. The victory on Foden Warrior had pumped him up, and now he was strutting around the paddock with a strong proprietary air. He chatted with grooms and trainers, and when he got on Sandaletto, his mount for the race, he looked so confident that he sent people dashing for the pari-mutuel windows. He booted Sandaletto home without much bother, although Starscki (“Starsky and Hutch” is a popular series on Italian
TV) made a run at him near the wire. Swinburn, on Lord Quinto Romano, finished third.

  Velasquez’ hot hand didn’t last through the Corsa dell’Arno, though. The horse he’d been assigned to ride, Beggar’s Bridge, was rumored to be a course specialist, who’d won often at Cascine in the past, but I’d seen him race once and he’d looked sick. Choco Air, a handsome bay colt out of a Never Bend mare, had whipped him soundly. Beggar’s Bridge had dragged past the stands in a heavy lather; he’d seemed out of shape, in need of serious conditioning. At seven, he was the oldest horse entered in the Arno (Choco Air was entered in it, too), and he was conceding over twenty pounds to some of his younger rivals. In the paddock, he shambled around, as though a premonition of defeat had infected him; he had no perkiness, no brightness. Swinburn’s mount, Baldog, looked much better, but Baldog had been out only once all year, and he probably wasn’t fit enough yet to pose a threat.

  Weight was an important factor in the Arno. The winner, II Taischan, carried only one hundred pounds, compared with a hundred and twenty-four for Beggar’s Bridge and a hundred and thirty-one for Choco Air. He was kept in reserve until the stretch, while other horses, including Choco Air, made the pace. Immediately after the final turn, he accelerated. Several others—Efidanville, Mistan, My Sea—joined him, but he was able to pull away and cross the wire first, much to the disappointment of the crowd, who’d let him go off at fairly generous odds. II Taischan was bred at Ballinagall Stud, in Ireland; he is a solid, long-striding horse with talent to bank against the future. As for Beggar’s Bridge, he waddled in eighth with the sweat pouring off him, a prime candidate for a vacation.

  Velasquez didn’t win either of the last two races, but the sfida trophy was his anyway, because Swinburn’s mounts were such stiffs. The only horse Swinburn had who really figured—Riden, in the seventh—finished a miserable fourth. No doubt Swinburn was happy to strip off his Italian silks, climb back into his street clothes, and head for Great Britain, where he would soon be riding a filly called Circus Ring, in the illustrious Coronation Stakes at Ascot. For Velasquez, the trip to Cascine had been more rewarding. In five races, he’d had two firsts and a second, so he could wing home to the States with his reputation enhanced, knowing that he’d lent a bit of international luster to the Arno and made some new friends in the bargain.

  The last time I went to Cascine, in mid-May, the hippodrome was already showing the effects of the oppressive heat that begins to grip the city toward the end of every spring. The track had always been a lazy sort of place, conducive to meditative driftiness, but now an outright torpor had set in. The grass on the racing strip hadn’t been mowed for weeks. It was at least six inches long, brown in patches, and sprouting weeds. Only four horses could be recruited to run in the first race, and they were pretty tired. Two of them—Babusch and my old pal Fontaineriant—had been rested for just three days, while another, Assio, had been rested for just two. The four horses in the second race had all run against each other eleven days earlier. Apparently, there was a critical shortage of thoroughbreds in Tuscany. Throughout the afternoon, I saw so many familiar faces at the paddock that I felt bad for not bringing along any carrots or lumps of sugar to offer up on my palm.

  In spite of the mediocre racing, I enjoyed myself, because Cascine was one of the few spots where I could be sure to escape the tourists. They had been descending on the city in a steady stream since Easter, filling the hotels and pensioni, and traveling everywhere in packs, like the walking dead. When they went to a museum, they did so in groups of twenty or thirty, trailing vacantly behind guides who had terrific repertoires of platitudes. The museums made no move to control the groups, so it was virtually impossible to visit the Uffizi or the Pitti Palace without having to stand on tiptoe to catch a glimpse of the paintings. In addition, the guards at the Uffizi were always going out on lightning strikes, often for two or three days straight; the museum was closed so often that a small band of irate tourists actually staged a demonstration to protest. The splendor of the Renaissance was slowly disappearing beneath an ooze of boosterism and failed bureaucracy.

  In some ways, the great soul of Florence was easier to touch at the hippodrome than it was at more highly touted places. Nobody tried to sell you cameos or overpriced leather goods or distorted little statues of David. The prosciutto sandwiches came on real Tuscan bread, and the chianti was rough, with a peasant edge to it. If you were willing to spend a while down at the rail, staring at the city, you learned to experience Brunelleschi’s dome the way Florentines have been experiencing it for centuries—not merely as a work of art but as a constant presence in your life, reminding you of what human beings, in their better moments, can accomplish.

  THREE

  CALIFORNIA AGAIN

  Whether we live by the seaside,

  or by the lakes and rivers, or

  on the prairie, it concerns us

  to attend to the nature of fishes,

  since they are not phenomena

  confined to certain localities only,

  but forms and phases of the life

  in nature universally dispersed.

  —H. D. Thoreau, A Week on the

  Concord and Merrimack Rivers

  Hat Creek and the McCloud

  Every autumn, I try to make a trip into the mountains of northern California to do some trout-fishing, and this past year was no exception. I was more eager than ever, in fact, because I hadn’t done any fishing for a while, and I felt an acute biological need for open spaces. On our return from Europe, we’d settled in San Francisco, and the honk and nonsense of the city was already getting to me. I suppose the noise wasn’t really any worse than the noise of London or Florence, but it had an echo of permanence about it. Gone were the days of carefree wandering. Anyway, I got out of bed one morning and stared through my apartment window at the tree on my block and noticed that six or seven of its pauperish leaves had turned red. That was my signal—a mere urban reflection of what would be going on in the Trinity Alps or the Cascade Range.

  In my closet, I had a shoebox file of fishing maps, and I pulled it out to help me decide which river to fish. I chose Hat Creek, a famous California stream in Siskiyou County I’d never hit before. Hat Creek flows south through the granite and lava of the Cascades until it dead-ends in Lassen Volcanic National Park. In its lower reaches, it is among the richest trout streams in the United States, on a par with the Firehole River, in Wyoming, and the Letort Spring Run, in Pennsylvania. It is capable of producing enough food to support as many as three thousand two hundred trout over five miles of water. All the trout in lower Hat Creek are wild, not hatchery-reared, and they can grow to considerable size. This section of the stream is elegant and challenging. It attracts anglers from all over the world. Fishing pressure is often intense, especially during the legendary insect hatches that explode in clockwork fashion in the summer months—little yellow stone flies in June, pale morning duns in July, tricorythodes spinners in August. In order to preserve the quality of lower Hat Creek, the California Department of Fish and Game has instituted a stringent set of regulations. Only artificial flies and lures with single barbless hooks may be used, so that fish can be released with as little damage to them as possible. (A study done at Hat Creek in 1973 revealed that anglers let go sixty-three per cent of the fish they’d hooked.) The daily creel limit is two trout. The trout must be at least eighteen inches long—big fish, that is, the kind that set your heart to pumping.

  Hat Creek is so productive because it’s a spring creek, pure and translucent, fed primarily by underground springs rather than rain or snowmelt. Like most spring creeks, it has a high concentration of bound carbon dioxide—sixty to eighty parts per million, as compared to ten or twenty for an average stream. As the creek percolates up through the volcanic subsoil of the region, the carbon dioxide in it dissolves deposits of marl and lime that have formed around the fossilized skeletons of crustaceans, snails, shellfish, and plants. This makes the creek very alkaline. It has l
arge quantities of calcium and magnesium carbonates. Alkalinity encourages an abundance of insect life—particularly of those species most favored by trout. It also promotes weed growth (weeds provide cover for fish and oxygenate a stream through photosynthesis) and, in general, helps to create excellent habitat for German browns and rainbows. The trout of Hat Creek are stocky, brilliantly colored, and difficult to catch even in autumn, after the tourists have all gone home.

  I spent the evening before I left sorting through my tackle. I wanted to get rid of the worthless stuff, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw out anything. Nostalgia seems to infuse every aspect of fishing, including the gear. When I came across a handful of streamer flies tied for steelhead, I started thinking about my friend Paul Deeds, who taught me almost everything I know about those ungovernable fish. I hadn’t seen Deeds for more than a year. I’d sent him some postcards, but I knew even as I mailed them that they were destined to wind up in the flyblown cellar of his house. Deeds never answers his mail. He doesn’t have much affection for the telephone, either—he regards it as an instrument of torture. I’d called him a couple of times since I’d been back, just to say hello, but I’d felt as though I were talking to a doorjamb. What we’d shared could not in any way be counted as conversations. I thought I’d give him one more try, though, because I missed him and I was in the mood for company on Hat Creek.