The view from here
Spending a week in Virginia with friend Drew, pictured above. By my count this town is a two-thousand-mile-and-change journey from Zacatecas, where I spent last week. In a couple of days I’ll be back in Austin, working again, then back home to a grandmother that misses me dearly.
Drew took me to a Point-to-Point race on Saturday morning; one of the officials is pictured above. The first point to point race, run in Ireland the 1700s, was called a steeple chase; the start and end points were churches, and the riders jumped their horses over fences and stone walls, keeping the steeple in sight. I felt a sense of history at this race; but for the horses, the officials’ dress would have seemed more appropriate at a costume party than a brisk morning in March.
There are horses all around this place. They mill about outside the house where Drew lives; one morning I see one grazing in the front yard. The horses in this race —thoroughbreds with names like Westbound Road and Freddie’s Fortune — proclaim their lineage in the program. Inca Colony, son of Pleasant Colony and Inca Rose. They round the bend as names tumble from the announcer’s voice; he strains to see Native Mark and Hanko, neck and neck, bounding breathlessly toward a photo finish.
The names have changed, but the races still run. The horses still graze behind fences and stone walls on the roadside. The years still pass in Virginia.
Later that night we went to a mixed martial arts fight. I had never witnessed this sport before in person; although I had seen stills, nothing quite prepared me for the first punch. Sitting about 28 rows back, I could see the two fighters stepping into the battle cage, tight black gloves hugging clenched fists. The word was offered: “Fight.” The fighters took a step, then a step back.
Suddenly, the sound of skin impacting skin. Without speaker or amplifier attached, it raced down all 28 rows as though its primal urgency rejected even the speed of sound. The realization of motion: a punch to the face, and in that split second the punched man has shaken it off and begun reading his opponen anew with a step, careful, and another to the side.
These men and women are athletes. And while I enjoy watching sports for the sheer amazement at what these athletes push bodies to do, the thing that impresses me most is the degree of focus, the singularity of sight that makes sport even possible. For an hour on that field, for the seconds on that hundred-yard track there is nothing else. The fighters enter the cage and an attendant locks the door; the metaphor is like poetry, because inside that cage, for those nine minutes, there is nothing outside.
Shelley — the woman lifted up in the picture — had a legion of fans in the crowd, screaming her name. She and her opponent Mannie, on the left, fought through the full three rounds of this bout, landing punches and wrestling at points with faces pushed against the cage.
In the end, the points were tallied and the fight went to Mannie. But for Shelley, I like to think this moment must have seemed as brutal-honest-wonderful as that first punch.
That’s the view from here. I’ll be back in Austin soon.
- j