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Triple-Crowned

A genuine horse, in Roosevelt State park
Sometimes I feel like a dolt let loose in the real world.

All my life, I have loved the sight of horses running.  It has seemed to me that if there were a god, he would have allowed the evolution of a magnificent beast, more interested in a good, grassy meadow than in seeing a rabbit or a goat as a meal.  Oh, my god, how beautiful is a horse running just for the sheer wonderful hell of it!

Once I had an uncle whose life and language was more pretense than performance, who came to an end in Bend, Oregon--I think it was--in a road accident.  He is the uncle who thought to teach me to play chess, not because I had talent for it, but because I did not.  The last game of chess we ever played, after much pretending, was the game I finally won:  the first game I had ever won.

He lived a short walk away, in a Western Washington that was more trees than civilization, which later struck me as a kind of transplanted Appalachian outpost, with dead cars and runaway grass.

Once, under circumstances I cannot recall, he arranged a horse race on a neighbor's field south of his house, between about five of us who fancied ourselves as Western Washington cowboys without horses or cattle.  I do not know, and could not improvise an explanation of how it came to be that there were five of us and five horses, but there we were, bareback on horses, with only bridles, and we had agreed to trot south across the neighbors field, and on a gunshot signal, to race back to where the concept of racing began, near Kenny's house.

We did.

I do not remember whether or not there was a winner.  I assume there was;  Man-o-War, perhaps, or Sally, or Mule-head.  What I do remember was what it was like to sit on the back of--not one of those fancy thoroughbreds, but on an ordinary light utility horse--
with only my bow legs to hold me in place, while several hundred pounds of incredible muscle said, "Oh, no you don't", to four other horses headed north, just for fun.  It was not a time for strategy, or tactics:  it was survival.  I did the only thing I could do:  I gave the horse his head, because all I could do was to try to stay on top.  All I could think of was how hard and heavy a horse's hoof was.

Ever since, I have loved to watch horses run.

I have loved watching horses run, even after I learned that horse racing was not about horses, or horses running, but that it was gambling, and that gambling did not give a damn about horses unless they won.  I still have tortured feelings about horses that have been bred with leg bones so fragile that they are likely to break trying to do what the gamblers ask them to do, and learning that "destroying" a horse means killing it for trying hard.

So I both hate and love the Kentucky Derby, where I have never visited.  I love and hate what it means for a horse to be able to run the Derby, and the Preakness, and the Belmont, and like Secretariat to win by 31 lengths.  Thirty-one lengths!  God could not win by 31 lengths!

I have cheered for California Chrome, not just because he won the first two races of the Triple Crown, and even though he lost the Belmont, but because he was--while not exactly a mustang--a horse without a Wall-Street pedigree.  In a nation in which we are all-too-quickly being sorted into Have-Too-Much and Not-Have-Enoughs, we had a chance to cheer for a Commoner.

I ignored the betting lines, and payoffs.  I don't give a damn about that.  I was glad just to remember that I did not fall off.  Lucky not to have fallen off.

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