Readers Up #38: My Suffolk Downs

 

 

Is all racing writing elegiac?

More and more the distance from the track is wearing on me. Sure, Belmont is open, but despite what every decision-maker above me wants to believe, there's actually still a pandemic going on. My lone outing to Saratoga this summer was overwhelming. Disease numbers downstate remain high; the dance between the forced exposures of work and the elective possibilities of play is, for someone as privileged as me, mostly a moral one. And despite horse racing being designed for remote attention, I'm not the audience for TVG. My experiences at the area OTBs have been at best weird, at worst creepy. As a non-gambler, the sport's joys are best--maybe solely--experienced in person, at the track. So ledes like the following land in my mind bearing ominous weight:

I don't know if there's a segment of the sport, other than the barns named, who greeted this news with much more than consternation. Is participation in this fandom of ours death by a thousand tiny cuts?

An elegy is a lament for something dead. My Suffolk Downs, its poetry and photography composed by Melissa Shook, memorializes without monumentalizing. The book is all of my favorite things about memoir, creative nonfiction, and history rolled up into one: intensely regional, personal, surveyed with an eye both sharp and generous. As discussed here previously, poetry and racing are natural allies. Each of Shook's brief fragments is as self-contained as a horse race, as all-encompassing as the backside world it depicts. Names dead and forgotten abound, those of horses and horse people both, and a few that will endure.

All that flesh and speed and color and training. It could be any race, at any track. 

So crisp the lights on airplane wingtips blink. It could be Aqueduct. 

I am surprised since only guys who would talk to a doorknob talk to me. It's Suffolk Downs.

Shook's photography is black and white, deceptively simple, painting vistas I've seen from angles at which I've stood. There are few aches like those springing from the desire to return to a place that no longer exists. Longtime racetrackers pine for Rockingham and Portland Meadows; for the chestnut coat with whom they fell in love at age nine; for a mislaid winning ticket, a shattered partnership, one golden perfect day. There's little pining on the parts of historical preservation committees, chambers of commerce, city planners--usually only pining for the dollars that come when racetracks are sold and demolition begins. Racing, it seems, has been long divorced from progress.

Shook's dialogue is often phonetic and grammatically incorrect, capturing West Indian and Boston-local accents alike; it dances like a toesy filly en route to the paddock. After all, you can't recount or sum up Suffolk by the book. You would never want to be told of Suffolk's history, its undulating concrete and most decorated children, by someone who sounds like a UMass Cambridge trustee.

There are no photos or tales of the wire, the winners' circle. The life of the track lies elsewhere. Its corpus is composed of small intimacies, private jokes, threadworn stories.

This newsletter edition was intended to go out in September, but was waylaid by the Great Common Cold of 2021 (keep your masks on, pals). It's more fitting to October in any case: October the gateway to winter, the threshold of living and dying, everyone's proclaimed favorite season--whether for eerie atmosphere or wholesome apple-centric activities. My Suffolk Downs is a ghost story. My own space within the realm of Thoroughbreds is increasingly that of a ghost; my interest turns in a grooved record-track, my theorizing occupies a monocropped landscape. It's hard to believe that anything green and spacious will come of fallow earth. It's hard to square my love of bleak winter racetracks with the long winter of our pandemic world.

Thank you to Jessica Chapel for sending me a beautiful signed copy of Melissa's book. You might have some trouble finding your own copy, but that's what libraries are for. For a related trip through racing's ghostly hoofprints, check out Jonathan Silverman on Green Mountain Racetrack.

Dolorously yours,
Diana