Tryin’ to catch me ridin’ birdies. Pt. 2 of now 3, because I didn’t realize this would get so long

Continued from part one:

So I head up to Chandler in good old trusty Prius on a mission for some ostrich ridin’. It’s a bit of a drive, but fortunately Neal Stephenson’s Reamde audiobook is 1726 CDs long, so I didn’t have any problem passing the time.

I had planned to get to the fair around 2:30, since the first races were at 4, so that way I would have two opportunities. I figured there would probably be a lot of people who wanted to take their chances with the ostriches, and I didn’t know what kind of line or sign-up sheet or vetting process might be involved, but surely ninety minutes early would be enough time, I figured, or at least enough that I could be first in line for the second race of the day.

Except that when I get there, there are already 1,000,000 people waiting to get into the Ostrich Festival. In the middle of a work day. I did not count on this. So first it was a looooong wait to park my car, then it was a looooong wait standing in line to buy my tickets. I was in line right behind some fifty-ish mustachioed guy with a polo shirt on with embroidery over the breast that said, “Asa Houle for Republican State Candidate.” Or something. I admit the “R” word causes my brain to seize up a little. Since I was standing immediately behind him for about 20 minutes, though, I had kind of no choice but to hear the conversation he was having with the guy next to him, both of whom had obviously just met while standing in line:

Guy: Well, if you’re a vendor, you shouldn’t have to stand in line. Go up to the front and tell them you’re a vendor and they’ll let you through.
A. Houle: Well, that’s just what I was told. That I’d have to stand in line. I don’t get it, though. Don’t seem right.
Guy: But you said you’re a vendor? That means you don’t have to pay admission because you’ve already paid for your booth. Just go tell them.
A. Houle: Nah, I was told I’d have to wait in line. Guess they’ve got to make a buck offa ever little thing. Seems kind of a rip-off, though.
Guy: Just. Go. Tell. Them.
A. Houle: Yup, eeeeeehverbody’s got a make a nickel off the little guy.
Guy: I’m going to face the other direction now.
A. Houle: Don’t seem right, though. I’m a vendor.

I refuse to comment on any irony surrounding the facts that a) a Republican was bitching about someone making a profit on something, and b) simultaneously being too cowardly to confront any perceived authority figure, no matter how minor. I am not that petty an independent voter.

When I got in, I looked at the map I was given:

Fun fer tha hole fambly.

But it made no damn sense to me, what with my directional disability. So I asked confidently at the information booth for Steve Bolger, which was the name of the ostrich owner, as though I’d be on the VIP list or something. I thought it was extremely well-organized of the festival to put all the information booth staff in bright blue polos and khakis, polos seeming to be a theme up in Chandler, until I realized that they were all actually Intel employees who had obviously fucked something up bad enough to be called into the Human Resources manager’s office and be given a choice of either working the Ostrich Festival or being fired and having charges brought against them. They had no idea who Steve was, but pointed me over to the ostrich pens anyway.

And that’s where I kind of stalled out. I mean, I found the paddock. It was kind of hard to mistake for anything else:

Or maybe this is the Tilt-o-Whirl? I just can't tell.

But there was no obvious place to go to sign up or check in or anything. I stood around awkwardly for a while looking at the birds and the semi-trucks they came in. On the side of the trucks it clearly said that these birds came all the way in from Steve’s ranch in Arkansas. Not sure where that woman got California from. After a lot of standing around, I was just starting to think I should try another strategy when I saw a guy about my age who was very obviously not from Arkansas (I could just tell, and so could you have, I bet) trekking across the field wearing a giant backpack. This, I figured, had to be somebody who knows something. No one goes up the the Ostrich Festival just to camp. So I went over and introduced myself and asked what all he was doing there.

“I’m Pasha,” he said. “I came in from California so I could ride the ostriches.”

Total. SCORE.

I mean, what are the odds? Except of course that if you were looking to meet someone who wanted to ride an ostrich, hanging around by the ostrich pens is really a pretty good bet. We started chatting and it turns out he’s a videographer who had done some video of the ostriches the year before. Steve saw them and asked Pasha to come out again this year so he could do some filming and ride in a couple races.

Because they don’t just ride the birds. That would be boring. They run races two or three times each day. They get three birds and load them into three gated slots, each with a rider: red, white, and blue. (Sorry, I’m getting a little choked up here.) Then everyone in the bleachers cheers as these poor suckers try to make it all the way around the track once. This is much, much harder than it looks.

Pasha told me that even though he had already been there several hours, he had not yet been able to get a hold of Steve, who seemed extraordinarily busy, probably because the company had just arrived that day, and now it was the first race of the festival. Luckily just then Steve came by, and Pasha flagged him down and asked about riding. Steve is the weathered, hard-bitten, no-nonsense type, and suggested Pasha try another more mutually convenient time, saying, “I don’t have fuckin time to deal with this fuckin shit right now. I am too goddamn busy. Come back later.” I figured if the guy who got a personalized invitation wasn’t able to nail down a race, my odds solo were extraordinarily slim. So we just went and watched the 4 p.m. race from the bleachers. It was a dirt track, not too long around, but long enough that you could see just what it takes to ride a bird.

Verdict: It looked hard. Fun, too, but hard. Based on their body language during the race, I could say pretty confidently that ostriches do not like to be ridden. Two of the riders ate dirt, one right out of the gate. The only one who stayed on all the way around was the blue rider, who rode that bird like some kind of weird Avatar mount.

We waited a while after the first race to go talk to Steve again. He told us curtly he’d have to go get the waivers from the front office before we could ride, and he wouldn’t have time to do that until Saturday morning, so come back later. Which meant no ride that day at all.

I was feeling really cranky and discouraged by this point. It seemed pretty clear that obviously there was no organized system like I thought there was, the nice lady on the phone had been blowing sunshine up my ass, as was Steve doing currently, and this was just not going to happen. All I had to show for my trouble was a long sad drive back home and no ostrich. I was so angry about the failed mission that I decided to have an ostrich burger for dinner. It was not very tasty, even with a shitload of ketchup.

But Pasha convinced me to stick around until the fair closed, which was when Steve would finally be free of responsibility and therefore able (and hopefully willing) to talk. That meant we had a few hours to kill, so we just hung out at the fair for a while. During which time, incidentally, Pasha said he doesn’t care if I use his real name here, which I’m really happy about because I’ve never met anyone named Pasha before and it’s fun to type. Pasha Pasha Pasha.

As we talked, I found out that he reads auras. I’ve never had my aura read and don’t know anything about what’s involved, but I’ve always been curious what the deal is. So while I can’t pretend like I was exactly afraid of having my aura read, I was certainly apprehensive to ask if he would do it for me. I mean, is that like meeting a doctor and immediately asking her to take a look at the rash on your back? But I decided being afraid to ask counted for the list anyway, so I asked, and he seemed happy to oblige.

We found a picnic table in a quiet-ish area away from most of the fair. It was dark by that point with not much lighting, artificial or celestial. We held hands. He took a few moments to center himself and asked me to do the same. I wasn’t sure how to do that, so I settled for breathing slowly and looking very solemn.

“Now,” he said, “Say your full given name three times aloud.”

I wanted to ask if I did, would Bloody Mary appear, but he was setting a tone here and I didn’t want to be a jerk.

I want to make clear at this point that I do believe that reading an aura is some work of some kind. A skill that I do not have. From the outside, though, it doesn’t look like much. I guess it’s hard to see someone picking up on your psychic vibrations.

Apparently, according to Pasha, my energy is mostly purple and orange, with a kind of maroon on the third level near the belly. He didn’t explain what that means, but I’m just going to go ahead and assume those are the most awesome and feminine colors to have.

He said it seems like I’m very outwardly focused, and have constructed a lot of my opinions about life based on what others have told me I should think, and specifically other women. I tried not to think about the ketchup post too much while he was saying that.

Then he asked if I had any specific questions. I wasn’t really sure what you could ask an aura. Is it like tarot where you can ask any damn thing you please? Like, which of these three men should I marry? Or, should I order the tuna salad next Tuesday at the cafeteria, or should I go with the roast beef instead? I just wasn’t clear on the parameters of auras.

But what I asked was: what can I expect in regards to a romantic relationship in the future, and am I doing the right things to help me find what I’m looking for?

He thought for a long while, not saying much or moving a lot. Finally, he said, “You actually don’t want a relationship at the moment; you’re figuring out what you want right now. You’re looking for a man who is generous, kind, and nonjudgmental. Someone who challenges you, and who is accepting of all parts of you, even the secretmost ones.” Indeed. Then he said it didn’t seem like I was comfortable in the desert, and that if I improve my connection to the earth, the earth will point me in the direction I should be going and lead me to what I’m looking for. Whoa.

Pasha can do past lives, too, but we didn’t get to that because just then Steve came around and we went to go talk to him. He had a bit of an entourage now, as the crew was coming off their shift and were hanging around looking for something interesting to talk about. There were a few minutes of subtle chit-chatty negotiation as the menfolk established their mutual respect for one another. Pasha introduced me, and I’m pretty sure everyone assumed I was his girlfriend, which normally would offend me, because people shouldn’t assume that men are doers and women are cheerleaders, but in this particular case was just fine, since Pasha was my in.

And although Steve came off as kind of an ass on first impression, really I think he was just busy and stressed, because after work he was, while not exactly gentlemanly per se, still very nice and extremely direct with me in a no-bullshit kind of way, which I deeply appreciated.

After it was established that Pasha would ride the next day, Steve turned to me and asked me what the hell was in my head that I wanted to ride an ostrich. That’s actually a quote. I probably should have put it in quotes or otherwise set it off in order to emphasize that. Let’s try again:

Steve: So what the hell is in your head that you want to ride an ostrich?
Me: [smiling coyly] Well, I’m doing this thing this year where—
Steve: A bucket list! We got ourselves a bucket list! Hey Hank! Irma Jean! Come lookit. This girl has ‘ride an ostrich’ on her bucket list.

Everyone came out and looked at me, like I was suddenly a fascinating, meaning stupid, thing to look at.

Steve laughed a big hearty country laugh, put his hand on my shoulder, looked me dead in the eye and said, “You’re out of your fucking mind.”

That’s when I decided I really liked Steve.

He looked at me then, sizing me up. He asked if I was athletic. I said “decent,” since I’m pretty sure having played Ultimate Frisbee twice in four months does not count to people who throw bales of hay at one another for fun. “I hike,” I tried. Of course, this is an endurance activity and not…well, whatever ostrich riding is. There was a growing silence, and I felt pressure to improve my story. That’s when I told my first lie: “I grew up riding horses.” When it is actually more accurate to say I grew up watching my mom ride horses from the window while I hid in my darkened bedroom cursing my pony, like some weird pony-centric remake of Rear Window. Still, they all nodded and I felt the approval I was so desperately seeking. “S’all bout balance,” said one guy. “How’s your balance?” I almost told them I do yoga and how good my tree pose is. Thank god I caught myself in time, since say “yoga” to this crowd and I might as well tattoo a communist star on my forehead. Instead I just said, “I’ll be fine on that.”

I seemed to pass whatever test I was undergoing, since out of seemingly nowhere Steve said, “Well, you come on back tomorrow for the noon race and you’ll ride. Get here by 11, though, so there’s time to sign the waiver and all.”

Fucking kick ASS. I’m going to ride a muthfuckin OSTRICH.

I tried to be cool about it, but I totally failed. I told him how VERY VERY EXCITED I was, and he just said, “Wait’ll you actually see them birds before you say so.” We all talked for a while after that; just chitchat. Some discussion of technique. (“Just hold on to their wings.”) Then I asked if there was anything I needed to know. One of the crew guys who had just then floated into the conversation, a 40ish guy with red hair, with whom I had never exchanged so much as a single word before this moment, and apropos of absolutely nothing I want to stress, volunteered this answer: “Well, if you’re a real redhead, you’re gonna have to prove it.”

There was an intensely uncomfortable silence as everyone waited to see how I would react. I just chuckled and groaned, so everyone else chuckled and groaned and nobody had to get weird about gender expectations, or launch any discussions of how to treat women, or examine whether it is more feminist to accept crude sexual humor as the natural tension between the sexes and an expression of, curiously, respect, for him to believe I am an emotionally resilient enough individual to not crack under his advances, but instead expect me to parry them, accepting the banter as the price of my more naturally powerful and ironically dominant state as a sexually desirable woman, and bounce the vulgarity back to him to show him that while I accept his need to desire me, I utterly deny his attempt to assert control over my sexuality and therefore in this context my personhood; or if it would be more feminist to simply tell him to go fuck himself.

I’d just like to take a moment to say here that I had another answer, one that was WAY more hilarious and also vulgar, an answer that was so crude that I actually could not bring myself to utter it in front of Pasha, but that was such a snappy comeback that if I had said it, those boys would be telling that story for the next fiddy-sum years. I will not say it here, because people I work with read this, but trust me: it was HILARIOUS.

In an effort to change the subject, I volunteered that I thought the birds might be more responsive to me because I was a woman. I was only half-joking. Let’s face it: if you were an ostrich, wouldn’t you rather be ridden by a woman? Steve pulled me into a sidelong hug and said, “Darlin’, if that’s the story you’re telling, you can tell it.”

By then it was pretty late, so Pasha walked me to the front gate. “So see you tomorrow, then,” he said.

“Yup,” I said. “I will be back bright and early.”

“You excited?”

“Hell yeah! Aren’t you?”

“Sure,” he said. “A little nervous, I guess. It’s not as easy as it looks. But that one guy, the blue rider, he’s really good. I even heard that there might be some pros up from South Africa to see him ride.”

I stopped and stared at him. “Ostrich scouts? There will be ostrich scouts at the races tomorrow?”

“Yeah, I guess so. That’s what I heard, anyway.”

I considered this. “So you mean if I ride well enough, I might get scouted? To be an ostrich jockey?”

He laughed. “Maybe so. Probably aren’t a lot of women riders, even in South Africa.”

“Wow. I could be the Danica Patrick of ostriches!”

Pasha smiled, and so did I. “I am so there,” I said. “First thing tomorrow.”

Coming up next in part three: I boss a camel around, tackle performance anxiety in an extremely ridiculous way, and meet the mysterious Blue Rider. Plus the veliciraptor feet from Act 1 finally go off in Act 3.

---