Holidays in Heck by P. J. O’Rourke Read Free Book Online

black holes in space. Thank you, Quail Hollow, for the parboil-temperature swimming pool, which makes a petty good whirlpool bath if you put your lower back against the filtration outlet.
    Poppet’s best winter sport is making snow angels. She does it intentionally if you take off her skis, and I promptly did. Muffin competed in her first ski race. She place third in her age group. I place about 281st in mine, the Cleveland Ski Club having 280 members. Poppet made friends with some like-minded little girls and proceeded from intermediate to advanced snow angels. Everybody was looking after everybody’s children, so Mrs. O. could go off with Paris Ferrante and other moms. The last I saw of my wife, as she plunged into the gorge, was a pair of skis that had been smartly brought together and the cute little hip thrust she made when she carved her turn. Our babysitter discovered that Ohio chili is spiced to a degree that’s alarming even bythe standards of her native land. Buster crawled happily into the fireplace. I had a beer. And another.
    Go ahead and go to Park City if you’re taking a ski vacation. But if you’re taking a
family
ski vacation . . . Plus, if Cleveland becomes a winter travel destination, think what an improvement on Sundance its film festival will be. You won’t have to sit through any solemn bumout documentaries or pretentious handheld indie productions or incomprehensible art films—because Drew Carey will be picking all the movies.

4
R IDING TO THE H OUNDS VERSUS G OING TO THE D OGS
    Britain after the Hunting Ban, March 2005

    A stag flanked by two female red deer, or “hinds,” trotted down a steep moorland pasture toward a wood. Two mounted hunters were behind them, and staghounds were in between. The deer’s trot was faster than the hunters’ canter and as fast as the all-out run of the hounds. A horn was blown. We were off—over a soaked, slippery sheep meadow, between the stone posts of a narrow gate, down a muddy track perilous with ruts, into a country lane of barely an arm’s breadth, through the tiny streets of an old village with tourists hopping out of our way, then making a hairpin turn onto a paved road, speeding uphill around blind curves, and narrowly avoiding several head-on collisions with trucks. It was a thrilling ride, even if it was in a Suzuki SUV drivenby a retired grocer, an enthusiast of stag hunting who had volunteered to show me the hunt on Exmoor in England’s West Country.
    We arrived at a hilltop opposite the steep pasture and above the woods. From here I could look across a valley at . . . not much. On the crest of the far slope several dozen members of the hunt were sitting on their horses. They watched two dogs sniffing the underbrush below. Two men in scarlet coats were with the dogs, more closely watching them sniff.
    The idea of a stag hunt evokes chivalry—knights in jerkins and hose, ladies on sidesaddles with wimples and billowing dresses, a white stag symbolizing something or other, and Robin Hood getting in the way. An actual stag hunt is more like a horseback meeting of a county planning commission. The equestrian committee is responding to deer-population-growth issues and deer-herd rural sprawl. Red deer are noble animals—big, anyway. They are half again the size of American whitetails. In the fall a mature stag has antlers that could hang the hats of a small town in Texas. But red deer are also pests. England is intensely cultivated. A farmer may find 100 red deer in his pasture, each eating as much grass as three sheep. The deer’s zoning permits are revoked by a process too deeply imbued with tradition to be called bureaucratic, but which is a reminder that one of civilization’s oldest traditions is bureaucracy. Stag hunts cull the weaker hinds from November through February, the less promising young stags in hunts such as this one in March, and the stags whose days of promise are behind