I know last newsletter I said I was going to write about my words for the year, Ambition and Appreciation. I haven’t written that newsletter yet; I got derailed by nostalgia this week so I decided to write about Scottsdale instead. But I’m not, perhaps, entirely off topic… fair warning, this newsletter contains waxing on about travel, and it may make you nostalgic, too.
Back before I had kids, and long before we had a pandemic, my favourite work opportunities were the ones that meant I got to travel to horse shows — the “big” horse shows. For me, that was Spruce Meadows in Calgary the first week of September, the U.S. Arabian Nationals in Albuquerque ( later Tulsa) in October, and, in February, Scottsdale.
Before I’d ever been to Arizona, I assumed I’d hate it — or at the very least, that I’d be ambivalent about it. Arizona was a thing that old people did when they couldn’t deal with real winter anymore, har har, you wimps. I dismissed it the way people dismiss the prairies; even though I, too, come from a flat arid region and know it is not without its charms, I dismissed the desert. Too hot, I thought. I hate the heat.
Then I went to Scottsdale, and I loved it. (In February, at least, I loved it. I freely admit I wouldn’t survive the summer.) The spring-like weather, the frosty chill at night, the light like a flat yellow knife, purple cactus, red dirt, the mountains. The simple freedom of walking out the door without first having to put on heavy boots and a parka and touque and gloves. I loved the food: crepes at the fairgrounds and scrambled-egg salsa breakfast burritos and salads made with fresh California plunder. I figured out the Canadian trick of asking for an Arnie Palmer so the iced tea wouldn’t be flat and tasteless. I loved the smooth black streets with their crisp white lines, lined with magical palm trees, unsullied by winter’s cracks and sludge. I even loved the six-lane freeways of Phoenix — they made me feel independent and capable and free when I was driving on them, like nothing else in my life. One of my favourite memories of Phoenix is driving on a blocked freeway for over an hour. Traffic had slowed to a crawl, with everyone moved over into two lanes, all slow and languid with the sun slowly going down. It was such a perfect, beautiful evening. I had my hand out the window just feeling the air and I could not imagine wanting anything more at that moment.
I went to Scottsdale for work. I told people that right off the bat, so they didn’t think I was one of those people who could just up and relocate to Phoenix for the winter, because I worried about stuff like that back then. (I don’t, now.) I was, I guess you could say, a specialty worker who got flown in for the horse show, which took place over two weeks mid- February, on the same grounds as the Barrett Jackson auctions. I didn’t go to work with horses, though. I went as a graphic designer and general grunt worker for a little magazine that traveled to shows on the Arabian circuit, a daily publication that printed the results from each of the previous day’s classes along with several metric tons of fancy horse advertising.
The show magazine really was quite an amazing little venture. Shortly after Christmas, Jim and Christy, who ran the outfit, would pack up all of their computers and the dogs, drive to Phoenix, and rent a house for a couple of months. A few days before the show, Lisa showed up to keep everyone sane. The day before the show, I flew into town to help set up the booth at the fairgrounds.
One year I drove from my house to the Saskatoon airport to fly to Scottsdale with just five dollars left in my bank account. I wasn’t exactly worried, because I knew I’d make it up over the next couple weeks — the job paid very well; it was basically twelve- or fourteen-hour days for nearly two weeks straight, all expenses covered, and Jim was extremely generous with his hourly rate. It is, however, kind of indicative of the state of my bank account at the time. I was deep into horses and anything but careful with my paycheque. It went from the bank to the barn, and I can’t say I regret a lot of it, only that I could have done it smarter in a lot of ways. (I mean, I had a credit card in case of emergency. I was pretty good about not using credit, except when it was an emergency, but I wasn’t smart enough to put anything aside for an emergency fund. Which is why I say I could have been smarter about it.) I’d planned on having a little more money for the trip down, but two days before I left, I’d asked a friend if my horse and I could tag along when they hauled in to a local arena for their weekly lesson. Saskatchewan in mid-February is about -20ºC and dark by suppertime, and if your horse wasn’t boarded at a stable with an indoor arena (mine lived in a pasture out back of a very nice couple’s acreage), hauling out to ride indoors once in a while was a nice little luxury. I expected to pay the $30 for arena time, but I didn’t expect my friend to ask another $30 for the trailer ride — and I didn’t begrudge it to her at all, I just wished I would have known up front, as it would have changed my cost calculations and I more than likely wouldn’t have gone. But that’s how I ended up at the airport with five dollars to my name and a ticket to Phoenix. I had enough to buy a Timmie’s and snack for the flight. Once I got to Phoenix, I didn’t have to pay for anything.
The way the magazine worked was this: the covers and the full-page, full-color ads were booked, designed, and printed ahead of time, as far as possible. These were printed on one side of the magazine flats and stored at the printers. Once the show started, Jim would head to the show booth at the end of the day (as late as 9 or 10pm if there were night classes), take the results home, type them up for the next day’s issue, and send it to the printers around 2am. The printers would print the results in black and white on the back of the color adverts, bind it into a twelve-ish page booklet, and Jim would show up at 6am to pick it up. We’d all hit the show grounds at 7am and start distributing. Each trainer’s barn had a fancy set up in front of their bank of stalls — lots of drapes, sometimes a full wooden porch, couches, a TV, and tucked farther back a fridge and a table and all the sorts of things you put in a barn when you more or less live there for two weeks. It was a real-life Potemkin village.
There were golf carts everywhere too, because that was what people used to get from one end of the massive show grounds to the other when they weren’t riding. We’d unload the boxes of magazines from the back of Jim’s truck into the golf cart, drive it up to the booth at the edge of the outdoor ring, and, from there, deliver a copy of the magazine to each trainer’s little Potemkin house setup. Delivery took about two hours. Toward the end of the show, we’d do this twice a day, with a morning and afternoon edition. When I got back to the house at night, I’d start putting together the black and white classified ads that ran in between the daily results. Crash into bed, and repeat for ten days.
Being temporarily dropped into the inner workings of the Arabian show world could be a bit of a strange experience. It was small enough that everyone seemed to know everyone else, but also, you might see the Dell kids warming their horses up for a class or have the heir to the UPS fortune drop by to talk about advertising his stallion. (I could be wrong about that – I never found out if he was an heir or an owner or what, but his money connection was, I’m pretty sure, from UPS. I also think I must remember him from Nationals in Albuquerque rather than the Scottsdale show, because I remember him parked outside the trade-show building in his golf cart, and at Scottsdale our booth was always ring-side.) He was always on his cell phone and looked sad and I remember hearing that he was selling his stallion but it probably wasn’t going well because this was right around 2008, and a lot of horses were being sold that year.
2008 wasn’t the first time the Arabian horse industry went through a bit of a bust because of rich folks ‘investing’ in horses — if you look up the infamous Arabian tax shelter cuts of the 1980’s, the industry never really recovered from them, if by ‘recovery’ you mean ‘went back to the way things were in the good old days.’ Many of today’s farms were built on the suddenly-cheap but still quality mares and stallions that were dispersed during those years, but also, I have to mention that a lot of those horses just got quietly dumped at auctions and many of those likely went for slaughter. (Horse slaughter is now illegal in the U.S., which seems good at first glance, but also pushes the problem further down the pipeline, and many horses who might have otherwise had a quick death got shipped in miserable conditions to Mexico. Or simply turned loose. A horse is a very big animal and people are not always as careful with them as they should be. Many owners, as you can imagine, have strong opinions on this. But I digress.)
2008 was also extremely hard on Phoenix. In mid-2006 a ginormous real-estate bubble burst all over the US, and by most accounts, Phoenix got the worst of it. Housing prices crashed by more than 50%. Malls were a ghost town and blocks of new builds stood empty. But the crash had one side-effect that benefited Canadians: our dollar was on par with the US, or even a bit above, and that meant traveling in the States was the cheapest it had been since the ‘70’s.
I worked for Jim and Christy for three or four years at the Scottsdale show, then things changed and they decided to bring in a different graphic designer from the California who was also familiar with the industry and not nearly as expensive to fly in. The next year I flew myself down and attended the show on a media pass, ostensibly to shoot photos of Canadians at the show for the magazine I put together up in Canada, but really I was just desperate to be at Scottsdale and trying to keep acting like I belonged. Much like going to the airport with only $5 in my pocket, I don’t regret it, exactly, but I feel now I could have done it smarter. I stayed at the hostel in downtown Phoenix for $25/night, with two bags’ worth of camera gear and a laptop that I hauled up to my top bunk bed in the women’s room and tucked under my blankets along with a boatload of anxiety. The gang cars that drove past outside played mariachi music instead of rap music, but the New Zealand lady who worked at the hostel said there hadn’t been any gun fights for the last few years because things had “settled down.” When I asked why the hostel was closed in the summer she gave me a pitying look and said, “Ain’t no one come here in the summer, honey, it’s too damn hot. City shuts down.”
I have a lot of other memories of the show which would sound like the worst kind of random name dropping were I to list them off to you. Suffice to say, even though people tend to over-hype absolutely anything that’s judged on a subjective basis, the horses were and still are incredible… even if times went on changing. The Canadian club whose magazine I used to produce folded and moved their registrations to the States. Jim and Christy are, as far as I know, still running their magazine.
The letdown of Scottsdale is in coming home. You’d had a taste of spring, you’d felt it in your bones, you’d baked in the sunshine for three weeks. Now you have to head back north, and although the sun follows you, because it’s traveling toward aphelion in June and the days are noticeably longer, it’s still winter at home. It’s still damn cold. Everything is still buried under two or three feet of snow; you can’t usually count on spring to fully unfurl until May.
But all this nostalgia for Scottsdale just shows how I’m getting old, and maybe those snowbirds were on to something after all.