How To Make A Big-Ass Horse

We went to the Rose Festival parade this year, which is weird. Parade-watching doesn't work out that well for Dave and me. We start out curbside, but Dave suffers from being as considerate as he is tall, and as people worm their way in front of him to see, he keeps stepping back and stepping back until eventually we discover we're all the way back home again. But this time we found a spare spot right downtown and parked our butts in the front row.

Turns out it really matters to be up close. That's how you find out how truly large those Budweiser Clydesdales are. I mean, we've all seen them on TV, but it's an entirely different thing to have one clop by and put the other side of the street in total eclipse. Holy shit. You could put the whole family on one of those: the kids on their bellies in the middle with a Monopoly board between them, and Mom and Dad reclined on a blanket with a bottle of wine and the Sunday paper.  They could get up and stroll over to the withers and back for exercise. A couple of those skinny houses could go up alongside the hocks and no one would even notice right away.

They are big-ass horses. Regular horses are big enough, but they're little green houses on Baltic Avenue compared to the Clydesdale's hotel on Park Place. They have feet like kettledrums with a big fur bustle. Plus, they prance. No one laughs at you if you prance while large.

They're named after Clydesdale, a place in Scotland, which is named after the River Clyde, which is probably named after some guy named Clyde, which just goes to show you never know where your name is going to end up, even without the internet.

It took almost no time at all to make a horse this

Note Clydesdale Snot on butt.

big. Three hundred years ago someone drug in some stout Flemish stallions from Flemland and got the ball rolling. They started out strong, but they weren't all that tall, as those things go. They were exported all over the place to do work such as hauling coal and building Australia, and it wasn't until the 1940s that someone decided they could be taller. That way they would look cooler in advertisements in case the Super Bowl ever got invented. So essentially we're talking just a few generations to polish up a modern Clydesdale.

It's something to think about if you're dubious about evolution. Take eyes: we find the first fossil eyes in 540-million-year-old strata and it's estimated it might take only 400,000 years to go from a dab of light-sensitive cells to a complex eyeball. The dab of light-sensitive cells couldn't do much but let you know when it's bedtime. Once the cells had organized themselves into a cup shape, they were able to tell how strong light was and where it was coming from. After that it was just a matter of refinement, and all kinds of critters did it. Octupi made eyeballs by sinking pits into their heads and, independently, vertebrates made them out of a part of their brains they weren't using for anything else, but both operate much the same way.

We're all basically organized dust, which is pretty terrific, if you ask me; but if you ask some people, they're rather offended by the idea. They're not buying the eyeball thing. They might not even believe the modern horse emerged out of a skittering critter the size of a fox in only fifty million years, even though entire Clydesdales were assembled right in front of our complex eyeballs in no time at all. And that's nothing:

We went from Grey Wolves to Barking Purse Hamsters in a few thousand years.

The Key To Hoppiness

I didn't even like beer until I lived in London. Then I liked the bejeezus out of it. It was purely a quality issue. As a post-adolescent with serious anxiety and maturity issues, I was perfectly willing to submit to an alcoholic oblivion. I just didn't care for beer. But in London, lovely people everywhere served up pints of medicinal Guinness, with a head of fine froth you could finger your initials into, and still read them when the head hit the bottom of the glass. The servers grew ever lovelier by the pint.

When I came back to the states I was horrified to discover that the beer here was every bit as hideous as I had remembered it. The worst of all came from a company with a large number of Clydesdales on staff and they probably produced the product personally. The rest wasn't much better. So I began to make my own beer.

When you make beer, not using an extract but with real grain and real hops, you get some interesting odors. Like that of many cheeses, it only smells good because you know what's coming. One of the steps in making beer is called "sparging the wort," and that was reason enough to do it right there--you could always tell people you needed to get home and sparge your wort. Generally they'd let that comment, and you, go without speculation.

I made several decent batches of beer and bottled them up, but soon after I'd gotten started in the venture, someone in town finally started making decent beer to sell. So I bought it. I put my pot, carboy and bottle-capper away. Then more people made more good beer. My little burg began to be known nationwide as "Beervana."

Which brings us to our annual beer festival here in downtown Portland. That's only six miles away, so we walked there. It seemed prudent. They sell you a little plastic mug and a bunch of tokens, each token good for a "taste"--four would get you the whole glass. We discovered early on that almost all the servers gave you a nice generous taste, certainly more than a quarter mug. Initially, that seemed like a good thing.

Periodically the whole frothing crowd would erupt in spontaneous whooing. All it took was one fellow with a good set of pipes to raise his mug and go "whoooo" and the whole crowd took it over. It was quite the demonstration of democracy in action, like a ballot initiative with everyone signing on. It was sort of inspiring and sort of frightening at the same time. Depending on my mood, it sounded like the song of a summer wind or the malignant battle cry of a sour Confederacy. I feel the same way about ballot initiatives.

Craft beer tends towards colorful names. I peered about the festival, finally focusing on a tap that said something like "Toad Suck Amber." The fact that that sounded pretty good to me should probably have set off an alarm. But by the first dozen "tastes" I had had about the equivalent of five particularly alcoholic beers, and had begun to tilt. Beer is a healthy, natural food, I reasoned, and I rationalized the next dozen tastes with the same logic a dieter uses to load up on salad, saturated in bleu cheese dressing and avocados and crusted over with bacon. I knew I had started with twenty-five tokens, and I tried to approach my condition logically, to do the math, which had become fuzzy. Twenty-five quarter-mugs, let's see. After concentrating for about fifteen minutes, the only thing that was clear to me was that I'd need three more tokens to come up with a whole number. Having a genuine integer to work with seemed important to the calculation.

We walked home, I assume. I have pictures on my camera of things on the way back I don't remember seeing, and can't recognize, but we must have walked home. Because here we are.