Gold Cup 

I have my first discretionary day in a couple weeks this morning, which is to say that it is full but subject to change. It is Mother’s Day, after all.

I got in Friday, late, having arisen that morning in Oakland , looking across the Bay at the fabulous towers of Baghdad-by-the-Golden Gate.

The hotel bill had been slipped under my door sometime in the night, and it seemed correct, though the Marriott may have erred in giving me a free twenty-four hours of broadband access. I was still a little dazed from the visit with the Nobel Laureate. Not that he was a demi-god, since he was a slim Asian American with a dry wit and an ironic appreciation of what the award had done for him.

Freed him, really, since he now was a member of a club so exclusive that its cachet allows him to stride above the rest of the Physicists for the rest of his days. Freed him to do anything and hold any view, as Linus Pauling was permitted to shine the reflected glory of his pioneering work in molecular Chemistry onto his opposition to the Hydrogen Bomb and win the Nobel for Peace, and dedicate the remainder of his career into the proposition that massive doses of vitamin C were the panacea for all manner of common ills.

It is a little like Jimmy Carter’s Laureate, which was earned, as best I can tell, for having a good heart and not being George W. Bush.

I fail on only one of those counts.

Anyhow, the thoughts of free carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were some of the things that cascaded through my brain as I added a couple of tablets of melatonin to my regimen of daily vitamins, hoping that the change to my brain chemistry would enable me to sleep through some of the five and a half hours in the air coming back.

The talk with the Nobel Laureate the day before continued to echo in my thoughts. He was concerned not with the ability of the market to adjust to consumer demand, nor of its ability to naturally allocate resources through market pressure. He views that on the tactical or operational planes. He is interested in the strategic consequences of the next century, and the impact of making LA a wetland, and Oregon a desert.

He is thinking that transferring sunlight into stored energy might suffice to enable us to declare independence from oil, but gradually, weaning ourselves from it, perhaps without the messy necessity of a series of armed interventions.

I see that coming in Venezuela , with the pipsqueak former paratrooper, Senor Chavez, and not far off. But no matter.

The West Coast was behind me and the dusk was settling over the Chesapeake when I got back. It had been two weeks of circling the Bays. Massachusetts Bay, of course, starting in Boston, and then Grand and Little Traverse Bays in Michigan, and then finally an actual circumnavigation of San Francisco Bay, hurtling south from SFO to Santa Clara, and then north and West to Oakland, and finally across the Bay Bridge and through the city to return once more at SFO from the northern approaches. Ring around the Bay.

One last task. I had obtained a pass for my vehicle to enter Gate Nine at Great Meadow for the legendary Gold Cup meet out in the horse country of Loudoun County . 

I was only mildly disoriented on the way out. Traffic on I-66 was flowing nicely in Arlington , the sun bright and the sky the bluest of blue. Then the number of cars increased as I crossed over into Fairfax County . Even on Saturday, the road was filled with construction trucks, busily dividing up the farmland on the western marches to the county, and there was a solid jam of traffic where the four lane abruptly reduces to two, signifying, in the old days, where the limits of growth occurred.

They are pushing new lanes of cement out past Manassas , now, and beyond. In the next few years the city will have pushed right out to the foothills of the Blue Ridge, not that it isn’t lapping at it now, but this will be the ticky-tacky townhouse developments to the edge of Fairfax , and the McMansions in Loudoun and Fauquier Counties .

The first gap in the mountains holds the railway, and the shell of a mighty mill from colonial times. In my memory, the mill was shuttered but intact, huge beams hewn from the native trees connecting the solid rock walls that tower five stories tall.

They say it was teenagers with too much time and too many cars that began to use the place for the things that they do, and it burned to the stone shell just a few years ago. But climbing out along the tracks and the running stream, suddenly you are actually in the country. It feels that you have rolled across a great natural divide. Not much further along is the exit for The Plains, and the Old Tavern.

There were a ton of cops there, and heavily regimented traffic patterns. Most of the State Patrol of Northern Virginia was out, manning check points and directing traffic. The Gold Cup is a big deal, a rite of Spring here.

Having navigated into a space in a neat row on the Meadow, I was taken by the fact that this farm had been slated to become 550 neat homes a decade ago, and only entrenched old money had denied the developers the right to pave it over, and retain it as a steeplechase for those who could afford the horses.

The Gold Cup is theoretically about horses, but that has migrated over the years into being a place to see and be seen. Which is to say, it is about hats and dresses, or put more plainly, as a friend leaned over and told me, to say it is about boobs .

The men were there in straw boaters, as if it were the Henley Regatta, or seersucker suits and florid bow ties. But the men were really only there as a backdrop. Everywhere there were women in J. Crew Spring dresses, mostly young, the frocks in pastel and conservatively cut for the most part, but almost all emphasizing the uplifted and upthrust bosom.

This is not the exposure of the midriff in suburban mall fashion. This was the delicate flowering of an older sort of feminine fashion. Practical, too, since the meadow was awash in wine and beer. I saw two elegantly dressed women disappear between the cars, eschewing the green porta-johns for something more natural and straightforward.

I was wandering across the gravel lane from the Gate Nine parking area to take a place by the rail for the first race. The Leap Frogs parachute demonstration team from the Navy had floated down quite dramatically from above, trailing the Flag and trying to drum up interest in enlistment.

I figured I had done my bit as I heard someone yell my name.

It was an old service buddy, dressed to the nines in her hat and chiffony dress. She was at the wheel of an imposing SUV. Her husband’s father had taken a wild hair after several years of attending the great party on the great meadow and reserved one of the rail-side tents in the exclusivity of Area 3.

The tents go for $2,500 apiece for the day, not as expensive as the tents on Members Hill, but still pretty nice. There were hams and chicken and ribs piled high on serving trays and coolers of beer and wine. And a twenty-foot section of rail to watch the ponies thunder by in the seven races, brief respites during the day for people to take their eyes off one another and cease the fashion promenade for a moment.

The real horse people say the running of the Fall cup is the one to come to. It is more authentic, and there are fewer poseurs and fashion plates. But I think the Spring meet for the Gold Cup of Virginia is the one to see, since I am not a horseman, nor a fashion plate. But I certainly like to look at the people when they dress up, and the return of the Spring Frock coupled with the thundering of the hooves is something special indeed.

My most memorable moment came in the second race. The drunken Air Force Captain from Hawaii on the rail next to me had organized an impromptu betting pool. We were shouting for our picks as the horses came by, and watched as some of the horses refused the fences, and some riders went down.

One of the horses shed her rider, and continued in the race on her own. The excess weight removed from her back, she ran smooth and fluid, taking the fences and hedges in smooth stride. The Captain- he works at the National Reconnaissance Office when not intoxicated and hanging over a rail at Great Meadow- asked me if it was possible for the horse to win the race on its own.

He seemed to think my name was Kevin, and I began to try it on, as a young woman might try on a new frock for Spring.

I told him that I thought the rider had to make it to the finish line at the same time. Particularly since it was not the horse I bet on.

The Captain laughed, and slapped my back.

“Now that’s a good one, Kevin! Who do you like in the next race?”

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.VicSocotra.Com

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