Chuck Wagon Racing

Few people outside Calgary know this, but as I write we're in the seventh day of the Calgary Stampede; I grew up in Calgary and I've had my fill of the event, so every year I avoid it like the plague ... but just for a change, I'll write about the part I liked most when I was a kid.  The chuck wagon races.

It's one of those things on this earth that's hard to grasp in its full capacity without seeing it in reality ... and truth be told, the closer someone is to the track, the more frightening the event is.  I went around looking for some video; there's plenty of it from nowadays, with high resolution and proper camera work, but the race has been changed quite a bit from what it was when I would see it live.  I wanted some video from the past, when there were more outriders, when the barrel that sat in the wagon was loose and could bounce onto the track, when safety regulations amounted to, "Don't be stupid."  That was the race I first watched when I was four or five.

Here is a Canadian National Film Board documentary from the year of my birth, 1964.  I apologize for the schlocky bad writing ... but if you'll jump forward to 04:30 in the video, it will help give a sense of the mayhem.

Feel free to compare that with races from Friday, July 6th.  You can see clearly the riders are sitting on a bench, there's no belt holding them on the wagon, there's no stirrup for their feet and they stand up occasionally while riding.  There are a lot of horses out there moving at the same time (there were more when I was a kid) and deaths were common.  Horses still die; a horse that suffered an injury Wednesday night was put down.  Every year now, the race fights a steady battle not to be put down itself.

There are a lot of stories that make their way around about how the chuck wagon races got started ... but the most consistent is also my favorite.  The story goes that in 1919, during the Rodeo and Stampede (which began in Calgary in 1912), there were two cooks who served barbecue in front of their chuck wagons, the early 20th century version of food trucks.  At the end of the day, the two cooks would race: first to get their equipment into their wagons, and then to get their wagons across the fairground, where they could stable their horses and store their goods.  The loser paid for the drinks that night.

As the two competed over the 10 day course of the Show, bystanders started to take notice and the cooks began to attract a crowd.  Eventually they attracted the attention of "Wildhorse" Jack Morton, who brought it up to Guy Weadick, the creator of the Stampede.  Chuck wagon racing became an official event of the Stampede in 1923.

As can be seen on the 1964 film, there used to be a big cage that hung out the back of the chuck wagon.  At the start of the race, a small barrel was thrown into it; it was called a "stove," and represented the cook's gear that had to be stored in the wagons before the real race began.  During a race, the stove was free to jump around ... and would occasionally bounce onto the track, amid the feet of all those horses.

As the race started, the stove had to be loaded before the wagon completed the top barrel turn (talking about the big barrels on the ground); you can see from the video that the wagons all make a proper figure 8 pattern before running onto the track.  Not getting the stove loaded was a time penalty.  Not having the stove in the wagon was a severe time penalty, not to mention a terrific danger to horses and riders.

That danger was stopped with that big rack was gotten rid of.  For a time the stove sat in a cage on the back of the wagon (couldn't find an image), so that if it "feel," it dropped to the bottom of the cage and did not actually fall on the ground.  Looking at the newest videos, I can't see a stove at all, though the rules still indicate that there is one.  That particular danger, however, has been legislated out of the race.

Chuck wagon racing was once very dangerous.  Rod Glass, who was a member of the Glass family of racers, going back generations all the way to the beginning, was killed as an outrider in 1971; I seem to remember being there, but I was seven and maybe I just heard tell of it.  George Normand was killed in 1994 while chuck wagon racing at the Ponoka Rodeo (Ponoka is a tiny town in central Alberta).  According to Wikipedia, there have been five human deaths related directly to the Calgary Stampede; the link on Wikipedia, from the CBC, July 4, 2005, is broken.  The last was 1999.

Has the sport been ruined.  Probably, yes.  It's not what it was.  Still, watching any horseflesh flying at breakneck speed has always been enough to grip my attention.  Horses are beautiful animals, particularly when they run.

But as a dark little cloud who wants to ruin things for everyone, this is how it had to be.  Like the embedded video says, the horses of 1923 were not the thoroughbreds of 1964.  The original concept for the race was already gone after the first forty years; the race was growing more competitive, more expensive and faster ... and the potential for a some truly horrific accident was inevitable.  So steps were taken, year by year, to keep adrenaline junkies from offing themselves in large numbers in front of an audience that included children, for everyone's own good.

There's only chuck wagon racing now because the money behind it is in the hands of old ranchers and owners who, like me, remember the glory days of the 1960s and don't want to let go of it, no matter how many horses die.  But those voices will be removed from the equation actuarially.  And the race will quietly, mercifully, disappear.

This, then, Dear Readers, is how to write a blog post about something that we did not create ourselves.  Write what you know.  Give enough information to explain it to people who know nothing about it. Show film and then comment on that film.  Provide background.  Discuss the key issues.  At the end, give your own opinion about what you think matters, and back that opinion up with your personal morality.  Take your time and write everything you can think to write, that might matter to someone reading this.  Get people interested enough that they will go and investigate some things on their own. ADD something to the discussion.

Don't phone it in.

But Sadly, Can't Be Fixed

Zooggy and I are chattering back and forth on this post about internal party railroading - which I continue to contend needs another name, but I'll let Zooggy define it in part:

"... When I talk about railroading, I'm talking about forced decision making, not necessarily specifying the subsequent events. From that, it should be easy to conceive of a party railroading a player. (As an example, another highly touted DM technique, illusionism, i.e. the art of putting the prepped encounter under the party's feet, regardless of what they decide to do, as if it had always been there, is also a form of forced decision making. The only difference is that illusionism is covert, whereas railroading is overt)"

There is more comment, and more writing in general on the subject, so I recommend reading all that Zooggy has to write on the subject.

One thing about situations like the above, and the whole range of what Zooggy calls railroading, "illusionism" and "Nurembergism," is that while we like to talk about these things, and refer to bad examples we've encountered, at some point the conversation begins to boil down to something like, "Hey, did you know there are bad people in the world?"

Just now I'm writing a section of my advanced role-play book about the importance of having authority at the table in order to properly run a game in which setting limits on the players will often make players unhappy. And the temptation is to put down a whole section which would amount to nothing more than, "Hey, stop being a dick."

The problem is, people are. And they're not likely to stop when asked. The case above, of the one fellow at the table who is everyone's bitch boy, including the DM's I presume, is a case in point. Here we clearly have a situation where one individual is lacking in self-respect, and a host of other individuals are lacking in personal responsibility. No matter what the game is, the only resolution is going to be the one individual taking steps to stop being exploited, and a series of bad events happening to the others that cause them to re-evaluate their moral compass.

The only question I feel needs to be answered here is this - is such behavior individualistic, or is it systemic? Is there something inherent about roleplaying games that offers entitlement to people who just want to be dicks?

Allow me an example. Not all that long ago, I was playing a regular game of ball hockey in a local gymnasium with about a dozen friends (plus a few joiners who would show up inconsistently). These were friendly games, with no fixed teams, with talented girls and untalented guys that played along together with the reverse. There was no strong sense of competition or counting of points (which would have run something like 45 to 40 for most of the games we played. There were some incidents, including some involving me, as I tend to get too aggressive when my blood is up, but apologies were made and on the whole, these were good games.

One fellow was clearly a far better player that the rest of us. He was in his late twenties, had played in some decent amateur leagues at the peak of his youth and had spectacular puck/ball handling skills. He was the sort of fellow who, when I used to play defense in hockey, I would have knocked off his ass because there was little chance of taking the puck from him. But we were meaning to play with light contact, so his play was undeniably devastating - coupled with deadly aim when firing at the net. It wasn't until my son-in-law began playing (he plays competitive hockey too) that a balance was established; my son-in-law is a goalie.

Now this fellow - we'll call him Dave - could play in a friendly, easy going manner, or he could be a dick, depending on the night. When he was a dick, he would deliberately 'play' with others, handling the ball and doing nothing with it except to show off, until it took three or four people to take it away from him nicely. (Like I say, there's a way to deal with that sort of shit unnicely). It was an unfortunate thing, particularly as Dave liked to be smug about it, and slip into that old jock patter like, "Oh, you want this? Come and get it then. Whoops! Wow, you don't want this very much, do you?" And so on.

In sports, there are children who quickly recognize they're better at the game than others, and who use that to press their 'superiority.' It's only natural, and within reason it's not that hard to overlook. And Dave was a decent fellow most of the time, so we took it goodnaturedly.

Dave had friends, however, who were also of the 'jock' variety. And as things always do, the ball hockey nights began to change as more and more of Dave's friends began to show up to games. Certain things were noticed. Suddenly the girls were frozen out - Dave's friends ignored them, refused to pass to them, or ganged up and shoved the girls off the floor. And naturally I, in my forties, wasn't exactly embraced by these twenty-something guys ... hell, I just can't keep up any more. That's a fact. It wasn't long before there were twenty people coming around to ball hockey nights, with a court not big enough to let us all play all the time, and a lot of us who had been there from the beginning were watching the game and not playing it.

Okay.

So, is being a dick systemic in sports, or not? On the one hand, it's really easy to argue that it IS. Virtually everyone who isn't a star athelete can recall experiences like the one above, where a good game was ruined by an assorted group of guys (I've never seen this with women, but presumedly it happens) who are just assholes, plain and simple. At the same time, though, virtually everyone can remember playing sports where that doesn't happen. Everyone is mature, no one is particularly better than everyone else, the reason for people being there seems to be less competitive and so on. It's possible to play sports without dicks. On that basis, its fair to argue that dickishness is NOT inherent in sports play. It's just really, really common.

No, the situation is really not helped by high school football coaches, or patterns of behavior supported in university competition, or the money involved in national sports that encourages parents to freak out at games when their four-year-old is tripped by another four-year-old. It is really easy to see how the climate surrounding sports, in which children grow up, does absolutely nothing towards encouraging decent, respectful play. There is a meaningful number of dicks who do not play, but radically influence the game. And not only in this culture. The condition is so pervasive among virtually all peoples in the world that again we have to ask, what is it about sport that produces dicks?

Then again, people just are.

The whole dick thing is not limited to sport. It exists in business, art, parental abuse of children ... heck, even in the realm of paleontological science. People are fucking nasty. There's no getting away from it.

Are people who play D&D worthy of being hit - and soon - by a truck? Oh yes. Many would point to me where this is concerned, yes? Of course yes. There's nothing wrong with the role-play game, or the game structure, and there is only a passing usefulness in recording the number of instances where this shit goes on. I shout on this blog to stop it; to boot players who participate in it; and to recognize that it goes on, and that fingers should be pointed when it is seen. But I don't think that any of the actual assholes who read this blog are going to change their behavior. The best we can do is isolate them. Isolate them, tag and bag them, and try and help the next generation to see what the shit they did that they shouldn't have done.

It's the only strategy we have.


P.S. Are you following the combat on the other blog?