Friday, September 03, 2004

In which we report on our neighbour to the north

 
I know, I know . . . I went to Canada almost a full month ago, and not a word about it has been posted to my blog. With another trial looming this weekend (Fosterfields, my only local New Jersey trial), I’m getting into the now-or-never phase of updating. So here it is, at long last. The short version: Canada was fun; we did respectably; I’d definitely return to all of these three trials next year.

The Canadian border is about six hours or so from me, the same amount of time that it takes me to drive to Virginia. Crossing the border into Canada is similar to what I imagine it would be like to die if there were an afterlife: all of a sudden it’s difficult and expensive to contact friends (those damn cellular roaming charges!), it’s hard to tell how much anything costs, and distance (measured in kilometers rather than in miles) ceases to have any meaning. Being in Canada is very much like falling into one of those counterfactual science fiction stories, the ones where a small change to the past by time travelers yields major historical changes by the time they return to the present. (Invariably, whatever the time travelers do ultimately causes Hitler to win World War II. For an enjoyable non-Hitlerian romp with counterfactual science fiction, check out The Eyre Affair.) In the case of Canada, the time travelers caused a British victory in the American Revolution, leading to an interesting blend of both British and French culture by 2004. But disorientation aside, there’s a lot good about Canada:

• Canada has “interchanges” off the highway rather than “exits”--it’s a much less definitive, more process-oriented way of looking at things.
  
  
• Canada’s Space channel blows our SciFi channel out of the water; it’s a *much* better lineup of shows.
  
  
• Red ribbons are for first place in Canada, and blue ribbons are for second. Not that I had any direct contact with either, of course, but red really does seem to be a more triumphant color than blue.
  
  
• Oeuf McMuffins. You gotta love them!
  
  
• Land, land, land . . . everywhere you look, there are wide open spaces. Phyl’s outrun would be wonderful if we lived in Canada!
  
  
• British spelling is much more glamourous than American spelling.
  
  
• Colored Canadian money is much prettier than American money, as well as much easier to keep organized in one’s wallet. (You all, I assume, insist on keeping your money sorted at all times in order of magnitude of denomination, with the twenties, tens, fives, and ones all in perfect groups, with all the president’s heads facing exactly the same way? And you keep the bills sub-ordered within those categories from the crispest to the most wrinkled, so that the most wrinkled can be cast out of your wallets as soon as possible. No? It’s just me, then.)
  

The trials themselves were all interesting, and all very different from one another. First up was Werner Reitboeck’s Nation Valley trial. I had heard that Werner’s trial featured a large, flat outrun, so I was a little nervous: Phyl’s outruns have been nice lately, but she also hasn’t been pushed with really challenging ones. I’m not sure how big this outrun really was in the end--probably not bigger than 300 yards or so, so it wasn’t huge--but Phyl did a great job with it both days. It was absolutely pouring during our run on the first day; it rained so hard that I could barely see, but I was lucky that the distant thunder was more muted than it was for the person who ran directly after we did. So our run wasn’t any great shakes, but Phyl did everything I asked and I was very pleased with her. Things went better for us the second day, but (as usually happens) they also were better for everyone. I believe we were somewhere in a respectable middle of a competitive bunch of handlers, which (coupled with Phyl’s good outruns) were more than enough to satisfy me.

The next trial in the series was Jim and Joanne Murphy’s Ewesful Acres Sheepdog Trial. This was the Murphy’s first trial, and everything about it was smooth and professional: they gave all the handlers complimentary breakfasts (and not the usual donuts and bagels--we had eggs!), the field was pleasant and challenging, and the sheep (Katahdins) were well cared for and behaved nicely. Phyl and I ended up somewhere around the middle of the pack on the first day, and slightly better than that on the second: not good enough to place, but definitely good enough to feel that we had a right to be sucking up air on the field with the real handlers.

Enjoyable as Nation Valley and Ewesful Acres were--and I plan to return to both of them next year--the cornerstone of the week was Amanda Milliken’s Grass Creek Park. First of all, Grass Creek Park is one of the most beautiful trials I’ve ever attended: the park is on the banks of the St. Lawrence River, so you can turn one way to view a beautiful trial field and another to see sailboats floating lazily along the sparkling water. There were vendors galore, and all sorts of interesting exhibitions, including (among others) a sheep shearing demonstration, a craft fair, and a birds of prey exhibit. The sheep were shipped in from a flock of 1500 on Waupoos Island, in Prince Edward County. They were almost entirely undogged; as a result, they were very, very difficult to move on the first day, got progressively easier on the second day, and by the third day they were light and hard to slow down. It’s always a pleasure to get to try to handle unusual sheep; that alone would have made the long drive worthwhile, even if Grass Creek Park hadn’t been such a spectacularly pretty place.

The trial field isn’t just beautiful; it’s also challenging. The outrun isn’t particularly long, but it’s wavy and can certainly confuse. (Phyl handled it well, making us three for three as far as outruns on this circuit went.) The pressure on the field toward the exhaust, particularly at the turn around the post, quickly became a major handling issue. Kate Broadbent solemnly told me that the area just behind the post in front of the exhaust is known as “heartbreak ridge.” (“Many an ambitious handler has come to grief on heartbreak ridge, forced into the walk of shame to collect her off-course dog.”) Really precise runs were practically non-existent; it was all most people could do to keep their sheep on the field, at least in the early part of the three-day trial.

The one down side to the trial was an idiosyncratic quirk of T. W. Japp, the judge: rather than taking substantial points off for major mistakes, he instead chose to “retire” people with curt “thank you.” (In effect, he imposed a standard without being asked to do so.) This judging style was discouraging to people like me, who had driven a long way to try to gain experience on these sheep under these conditions, and it was infuriating to the competitive handlers who worried that the two-day double-lift cumulative would become less and less meaningful as good dogs were prematurely “retired.” Japp’s little pamphlet Thoughts on Judging Sheepdog Trials lists the following reasons for “retiring” a dog and handler:

• not positioning a dog properly at the start of the outrun
  
• delaying sending a dog on an outrun for too long
  
• crossing over on an outrun without the handler’s attempting to get the dog to the proper side
  
• circling the sheep at the top of an outrun, or while fetching or driving
  
• allowing sheep to run back up the field to the setout point
  
• not completing the turn around the post with the sheep passing behind the handler
  
• dog not following the sheep around the post at the turn
  
• missing panels low and thus cutting the course in what the judge deems as “excessive reduction of the length of the drive.”
  
• having a poor enough drive to warrant more than the thirty points the drive is actually worth being deducted
  

It’s an intimidatingly long list of reasons to be kicked off the field, and in the end more than half of the Open class succumbed. (I realize that there’s a cultural difference between trials in the UK--Japp is from Wales--and trials in the U.S., but I have to say that I find this style of judging rather lazy: it’s a lot easier to remove the mediocre runs than to figure out how to score them.) At any rate, Phyl and I were among the unhappy masses on both days. On the first day, Phyl did a good outrun and what looked to be a nice fetch, but the sheep ran to the wrong side of post and before I could get them back around, I was thanked and had to trudge down Heartbreak Ridge to the exhaust. *Sigh*. We got a little further on the second day: I was determined not to let the sheep escape at the turn around the post, and we managed to start our drive. But the sheep were really jiggered, and I didn’t get Phyl moving slowly enough. We missed our drive panels low, had a decent crossdrive line but just missed those panels, and at that point we were asked to retire. Double *sigh*. It would have been fun to try penning, since the sheep were quite a challenge there. But even though I wish I’d had more time on the trial field, Grass Creek makes it to my list of trials that I definitely don’t want to miss.. (And, of course, a wonderful dinner at Casa Bella’s didn’t hurt--if you’re ever there, I highly recommend the fois gras and the caribou.)

I promise--really, truly--to update the blog after Fosterfields this weekend. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I had something exciting to report? Think good thoughts for me!

posted by Heather Nadelman