Monthly Archives: October 2011

And that was when the bride and groom engaged in fisticuffs…

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My new job is awesome. And when I say “awesome,” I am understating matters. For a couple of weeks now I’ve been driving a carriage in downtown Salt Lake City, and I’m having a singularly good time. Sure, I make basically nothing, I work on commission and tips (neither of which are currently abundant), and it is part of my job description to shovel manure and clean up horse pee, but when you’re a horse person, you actually list that sort of thing on the “pro” side of your list instead of the “con” side. Plus, you can’t beat the company, and by that I mean both the four-legged and the two-legged kind. The horses are great and the people are… well, you have to be a certain sort of person to be happy about all of the things I’ve just mentioned, which means they are truly My People.

The best thing about it, though, is seeing the city from another angle. I grew up in Salt Lake and though I’m familiar with many of the sights and attractions of the area, I can’t claim to have ever known the downtown area at all. I’d come down occasionally for the mall (which isn’t there anymore), but I’d never have dreamed of being on the streets down there at one o’clock in the morning. That sort of thing is generally reserved for people who have a social life.

We get a pretty nice view from our usual staging area at the south gate to Temple Square.

Since I started driving carriages though, I’ve been having a Salt Lake renaissance. (That’s a Sports Night reference, by the way. If you haven’t seen Sports Night, I feel sad for you. Please acquire it and enrich your life.) There’s so much going on downtown and so much to do that I hardly know where to begin. (I can’t really begin anyway, since as I mentioned I don’t really make much money, which means I have no money, which means I can’t actually patronize any of those fabulous restaurants I keep seeing.) And the city at night — which is mostly the state I see it in, since it gets dark pretty early now — is gorgeous. I really just enjoy everything about it. I enjoy meeting random people and taking them on carriage rides, sharing what I know about the various sights on our tours and the stories behind them. I enjoy watching the light shine through the yellow fall leaves outside of Temple Square and seeing the colors change in Memory Grove and watching the lights come on in the beautiful buildings downtown as night falls. I enjoy the fact that I’m not sitting behind a computer for a living, even if my brilliant alternative involves standing around outdoors freezing my bits off.

And sure, I don’t get to see much of that because mostly I stand around asking passersby if they’d like to take a carriage ride tonight, and mostly they say no, so my evenings are generally spent standing around dying of boredom, but maybe that’s part of why I’ve learned to appreciate the little things. Being a carriage driver gives you a fascinating glimpse into other people’s lives, like the guy who proposed to his girlfriend on my first-ever ride as a trainee, or the drunk guy who I spotted tonight pissing outside the entrance of an upscale restaurant in full view of dozens of passengers on the light rail train, not to mention everybody else on the street. It’s a seriously diverse slice of life out there.

My esteemed colleague Ace, on the other hand, does not care about human drama. He is busy having a nap. Please come take a ride with us and alleviate his boredom.

And sometimes, the unrelenting boredom is relieved temporarily by a good old-fashioned dash of drama. My fellow drivers have some completely insane stories, and while I’ve not been on the job long enough to have collected any interesting ones of my own yet, I did get to experience some soap opera-worthy drama second-hand by radio tonight.

Another of our drivers had gone to pick up a bride and groom from a reception hall and ferry them to their hotel. This is a pretty common sort of job for us and from what I’ve heard it usually goes pretty smoothly; the biggest problem is usually the bride and groom being late for their appointed pick-up time because they’re trying to escape from all of their relatives at the reception. This ride seemed to start out just fine; the driver radioed in to let the barn know that he’d picked up the bride and groom and was enroute to the hotel. Awhile later, he came on the radio again. It took a bit of back and forth before any of us really understood exactly what he was saying and what on earth was going on.

The bride and groom had both rather abruptly exited the carriage, and they weren’t anywhere near the hotel yet. She’d gone off in one direction, he’d gone off in another, and the carriage driver was sitting at the side of the road, absolutely bewildered and wondering what he should do. Apparently the couple had been bickering since the first moment, had already exited the carriage once and come back again, started fighting again, exchanged blows (she slapped him; he slapped her back), and finally both just jumped out of the carriage and left. (One or both parties were drunk; I’m not real clear on the particulars.) Another of our drivers was on the case before we knew it, tracking down the bride and making sure she was alright, hanging around to make sure she was safe until a car arrived to pick her up. Nobody knew where the groom had gone. It was like Days of Our Lives live and in person. Just hearing it all unfold over the radio was a truly marvelous and mind-boggling experience.

Carriage drivers see a lot of different relationships from our seat on the box. We’re often around for the big moments and celebrations — the proposal, the wedding, the anniversary, the birthday, whatever. Sometimes when a guy proposes, the girl says yes. Sometimes she doesn’t. Sometimes the bride and groom enjoy the best night of their lives. Sometimes they don’t. Hopefully, somewhere out there, this particular pair are patching things up right now, if it is right that they should do so. I hate to see a good honeymoon suite go to waste.

Featured Creature Friday: The Dapper Dresser Crab

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You can ask anyone who knows me, and they will tell you the truth: I know nothing about fashion. That’s why I’ve been looking to the experts for tips. No, I haven’t been watching a Project Runway marathon, and I still have no intention of taking my mom’s suggestion that I should go on What Not To Wear. (Thanks mom.) Instead, I’ve been reading up on dresser crabs.

I'm not really sure if the pearls are the right look for you, but they are a classic.

Don’t laugh. You don’t know a thing about accessorizing until you’ve seen a dresser crab (also known as a decorator crab) carefully select the right look for any occasion. But this isn’t just about fabulousness for them: it’s a matter of life and death. In order to defend themselves against predators, these crabs actually attach bits and bobs found on the ocean floor to the velcro-esque surfaces of their bodies, and then freeze to blend in with their surroundings when they feel there’s danger.

The crabs in the video, of course, are wearing the latest in crab fashion, but normally (when BBC camera crews and their obviously twisted senses of humor aren’t involved) dresser crabs use more common items found on the sea floor. After all, it’s the ocean, and they don’t have H&M or Abercrombie stores down there. (Yet.) They can’t just go pick up a nice frock or a pair of skinny jeans.

Their typical attire, however, is infinitely more bad-ass. Dresser crabs will stick anemones (which have stinging tentacles) or poisonous seawood to their backs. Then they’re not only sporting the latest fashion, but also a formidable defense against any animals foolish enough to tangle with them. I’m not sure why anybody would tangle with them, though. Dresser crab hangouts must be like the awesome drag reviews of the sea. And frankly, with all the jellyfish in there, I reckon the sea can use all the awesome it can get.

This old world is a new world and a bold world for me

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It could be fairly said that I’m kind of terrified of new things. I’ve always been willing to go out of my way to avoid having to go into a store I’ve never been in before, finding an address I haven’t visited, meeting new people, trying a new restaurant. It’s a fairly constant low-level anxiety, made worse by the fact that it feels so stupid. All I’m really afraid of is making some sort of remarkably minor misstep, the kind other people wouldn’t even notice: not knowing where to park, not remembering a new acquaintance’s name, not knowing where to find the condiments or whether to bus my own table.

Stupid, like I said. And the only way I’ve ever found to tackle the issue is with constant practice. The more new experiences you get under your belt, the less unfamiliar and frightening each new thing becomes; you might not have done this particular thing before, but when you’ve done something like it, it tends to lose its anxiety-inducing qualities. Which is probably why I’ve overcompensated for my little idiosyncrasy by becoming a change-aholic.

Though a few of my friends have been veritable globe-trotters, I don’t think any of them have picked up their entire lives and relocated quite as many times as I have. It’s a sort of low-budget form of wanderlust where instead of doing expensive things like backpacking across Europe or taking a vacation in Paris, I just relocate myself from one plot of rural America to the next in search of… well, the mission changes with time, but suffice it to say I’ve never found what I’ve been looking for. My family and friends are hard-pressed to keep up with which state I’m living in today, and with each new situation I’ve jumped feet-first into something and somewhere completely new. Most of the towns I’ve lived in are places that I never even visited before I moved there. Sometimes that’s worked out for me, sometimes it hasn’t, but I’ve never landed in that perfect place that I’d never want to leave again. And despite my craving for the familiar, I never thought I’d find myself moving back to any place I’d lived before. It was an unaccustomed sensation when I left Northern California and found myself feeling almost immediately homesick for the place.

So when I found myself contemplating moving back to Salt Lake City — my hometown — even I was taken by surprise. Each time I’ve returned to Utah to visit my mom, I’ve been able to take about a week of the place before I was more than ready to move on. I’ve always said that being around family after a long absence can turn a person into a lesser version of themselves, but maybe that’s just me and my personal issues. One of the reasons I’ve changed so many things over the years — where I live, what I do, what I call myself, who I am — is because I haven’t always liked myself very much. There are parts of my life that, though they’re not exactly shameful, are embarrassing enough that I’d just as soon forget them.

This time though, for some reason, coming home felt like the right thing to do. I’d been living in small towns for so long that I was already looking forward to the idea of going to a play, a museum, a planetarium, or a Starbucks whenever I wanted. Still, my first few days in town all I did was worry — there’s another of my vices — about whether I’d done the right thing, where I was going to house my horse (I had her boarded at an overnight facility but needed to find a permanent boarding situation sooner rather than later) and whether I’d made the worst mistake of my life. I felt I was constantly teetering on the verge of a panic attack. I’d moved into my mother’s tiny spare bedroom, which only months ago I would’ve sworn I’d never do. (I love my mom and we get on great, but there’s something about being thirty and living with one’s mother that the independent soul tends to rebel at.) I’d quit a perfectly good job. I’d uprooted myself again, and for what? I had felt burnt out on my own life, and I’d done something to change it, but surely you can only turn your existence on its head so many times before something goes horribly awry. I felt sure that, like every other time I’d visited, I’d be ready to get out of Utah within the week, only this time I was stuck, with no money and no plan and no particular place to go.

So I found a place to keep my horse (an insanely gorgeous place, incidentally, where she’s happy as a clam and I go to work with her and ride her most every day), and I set about finding work. And for once, since I had a roof over my head and no immediate worry about losing it, I had the luxury of really sitting down and thinking about what exactly I wanted to do for a job. I contemplated the idea of finding the work I wanted to do instead of the work I was able to do. I decided to look for part-time jobs with flexible hours so I could devote some time to my own projects (you’ll be seeing more of those soon!) and to think for once about how I was going to live the rest of my life instead of just doing what I had to do to keep on getting by.

On Monday, I start training to be a carriage driver. I probably won’t make much money, but I’m thrilled to death regardless; I’ve always loved draft horses and driving, and I’m overjoyed to get to do it on a regular basis. I’m looking for another part-time job where I’ll hopefully not to be stuck to a computer all day. I’m thinking about what I want to do with the rest of my life and I’m coming up with answers where I haven’t had any before. And I’m finding that coming back to where I started may be the only way to see how much I’ve changed in the years and the spaces between then and now. I was afraid that coming home would make all my old insecurities and memories and anxieties come rushing back, but instead I’ve discovered that I’m just not that person anymore, and that it’s more important to keep working on becoming the best version of myself instead of hiding from the selves I didn’t like so much. And I’m proud to say that I seem to have practiced so much that new things don’t really bother me anymore. I’ve learned to see the opportunities and adventures in everything that’s new… and to see the beauty in my hometown that I was blind to before.

“There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.” – Nelson Mandela