Racing to a Dream That Leaped Up from a Fall
Brian Otto
Stretch one. The sand.
I saw everything in this story, actually and in mind. The oldest thing in it is the sand. Ten thousand years ago the ice was leaving Minnesota. Melt water ran out from under the glacier and dropped the sand it carried. Sand laid down that way is called outwash. It spread wide and flat, and the flat it made has a name, the Anoka Sand Plain. Columbus sits on it. You betcha. The wind pushed the young sand into dunes, and the dunes are still there, low and grown over, holding still under the grass. Dry prairie took the high ground. Oak savanna took some too. A savanna is open grass with oaks standing apart, each tree keeping room around it. Water settled into the low spots and stayed, and the sandhill cranes come for that water. They still come. Everything later in this story stands on this sand. The trout ponds were dug in it. The horses run on it. It is a page ten thousand years deep, and nobody in the story ever looks down.
Stretch two. The two peoples.
Before the ponds and the track, this ground was a borderland. A borderland is where two peoples meet, and here the two were the Dakota and the Ojibwe. The county’s name carries both of their languages at once. In Dakota it says on both sides, for the waters standing on both sides where the rivers meet. In Ojibwe it is part of a phrase that means to work the water. Two peoples share the one name, and water lives inside both meanings. Then the horse came to them. It was a person so new it could only be named by joining the familiar companion to something supreme. In Dakota the horse is šuŋkawakaŋ, the dog, the familiar companion, joined to something supreme. The telling holds that the horse came as a gift, with thunder in the sound of its coming. All these standardbreds belong to that knowledge, and the knowledge is theirs, held here only to honor. In Ojibwe the horse is bebezhigooganzhii, the mammal with one hoof on each foot. Named by pure observation. One name looks up. One name looks down. Both are true. Eight of them parade under the lights every race night, and nobody at the rail calls them by either of their oldest names.
Stretch three. Trout-Air.
In 1968 a family started a business on this sand and called it Trout-Air. They dug more than twenty ponds into it and filled them with water and trout. The ponds were man-made, which means every one was a hole a person chose to dig. The business was catch-your-own. People came out, dropped a line, and pulled up a trout. Heaven is that down to earth high. In 1974 the family added a restaurant and called it the Trout Haus. Haus is house, spelled the German way. For thirty years the place ran on that plain trade, a fish for an afternoon. The fish were put in the water before anybody came, and nobody ever called that luck.
Stretch four. The concerts on the grass.
In the 1980s and the 90s the same ground turned into a concert place. The middle of it was a grassy amphitheater. An amphitheater is a bowl of ground where people gather facing one stage. This one had no fixed seating, only the grass. The names that come down from those summers include the Allman Brothers, the Marshall Tucker Band, Ted Nugent, Heart, the Stray Cats, George Thorogood, Tesla, Megadeth, and Korn. Do you remember that song? In 1985 the Charlie Daniels Band drew around eighteen thousand people onto that grass. Out past the crowd the ponds lay quiet, and nobody at the shows remembered the fish.
Stretch five. The closing.
Between 1998 and 1999 Trout-Air closed. Two plain things ended it. Somebody offered the family a good price for the ground. And the rules over the business were changing. We heard a rumor that came from the Tower of Marginal Power. Regulation means the rules a government sets on a business, and the changing rules had made the old way of running the place too hard to keep. So the family took the price. The music stopped. The lines came out of the water. The ground sat quiet for nearly ten years. In the end the ground was the catch, and nobody weighed it.
Stretch six. The track opens, and the fall.
In 2008 a harness track opened on the old ground and called itself Running Aces. Harness racing means the horse carries no rider. It pulls a light two-wheeled cart with the driver seated in it. The track is an oval five eighths of a mile around. A group named the North Metro Harness Initiative built it, and the name is the plan said plainly, harness racing north of the cities. The first races ran. Oh no, oh no, oh no, yes, yes, yes, Yay! Yeah!! Then the fall began. The track lost about four million dollars in its first year. By 2010 it faced foreclosure. Foreclosure is when the lender moves to take the ground back because the loans are not being paid. In 2013 the state took back the track’s license, its permission to hold the races, and the track owed the horsemen a purse shortfall. The purse is the prize money a track pays its racers, and a shortfall means it came up short and had to repay it. In 2015 the place stopped calling itself a racetrack and called itself an entertainment center. The ground had already outlived one business, and nobody said that part out loud.
Stretch seven. The water called back.
In 2016 Running Aces opened a trout fishing pond on its grounds. The pond was made on purpose to bring back the memory of Trout-Air, the first business on this sand. Today the complex also runs a tavern called the Trout Air Tavern. So the water was called back, and the fish were resurrected into it. Resurrected means raised from the dead. Fish broil ashes to funky lanky. Whatever dream this place is, the water is its oldest memory. People drop a line at a racetrack now and pull up a trout, the same plain trade as 1968. And the old name came back short its hyphen, the small dash that once tied Trout to Air, and nobody noticed the one mark that stayed dead.
Stretch eight. The visit day, Tora, and the wall.
On the last day of August in 2026 I went out to Running Aces with my wife. We went as family, because my daughter is going to marry Tora’s son, and Tora is the man who runs the place. He gave us the grand tour himself. Tora is a warm man without airs, a casino developer, the chief manager of the track, and a collector of art. The walls of his complex already carry works by local artists, hung where people actually walk. He had seen one of my drawings, the kind made of marks that look like writing but are not words. He liked it. So he walked us to the end of a hallway, high and wide, and offered me a portion of that wall. The brief he gave me was almost no brief at all. He wants a heavenly dream, and he is leaving the dreaming to me. He floated one practical thing, light behind the work, and I told him what I could see already: a surface you can look into instead of at. Human’s best friend. That’s what we say. A horse gave two families a track to meet on, and a wedding gave an artist a wall, and nobody at the tour called either one a gift.
Stretch nine. The two works, The Wish and The Dream.
The wall will hold two works, side by side. The sport itself gave me that shape. Harness racing runs on two gaits, and a gait is the pattern a horse’s legs keep. The trot moves the legs in diagonal pairs, front left with back right. The pace moves them in lateral pairs, both legs on one side together. The two gaits race separately and are never mixed. So one work trots and one work paces. The first work is The Wish, and it is the still one. It holds one steady glow that never changes, like a fixed star, or the one lamp left on in a barn at night. On it stands a single figure drawn in strokes, a horse, the light cart it pulls, and the driver seated low, all made of my hand’s marks. Big Dark Eyes is fortunately stuck with the most valuable standardbred. This is the horse at rest and at touch, calm, well muscled, even tempered, the kind you can lay a hand on. The second work is The Dream, and it is the fast one. It carries no figure at all, because in this one the writing itself is the animal. A field of hand-drawn strides gathers out of emptiness, and a stride is the mark one step leaves. The strides thicken until real sentences surface and can be read, the water called back, the ruin, the fall and the rise, and then the words loosen and dissolve back into pure stride. Behind both works, light will change slower than a race, at the speed of breathing, gathering into fullness and thinning back toward white, the way the track fills with horses and then stands empty until they come around again. Stillness and speed, side by side, each one finishing what the other starts. And every night the two will hang there glowing, one holding and one running, and nobody standing before them will know they are watching the same horse.
Stretch ten. The heartbeat and the sand writing.
This sport owns a sound no other racing has. A gallop, the run most horses fall into, is four beats tumbling over each other, rolling thunder. But the trot and the pace are two-beat gaits. Two legs strike together, then the other two. Lub-dub. That is the sound a heart makes. Harness racing is the only racing on earth whose sound is a heartbeat, and a field of eight horses is a chest full of heartbeats, held at full speed and forbidden to break rhythm. Breaking means falling into the gallop, and a horse that breaks is punished under the rules, so the whole race is speed held inside restraint. Number six named Hope Your Lucky is trotting slower than usual, and wandering off the side sand grooves a little. The driver lies back in the cart and holds the horse through two lines of leather, reading its mouth by tension the way a fisherman reads a trout through a taut line. Hand, line, pull. And all race long the hooves and the wheel rims are writing in the sand. They leave marks no one can read, laid down by bodies under rhythm at thirty miles an hour. Between races a machine called a harrow drags the track and erases every mark, and the next race writes the page again. Written, erased, rewritten, every night. The Dream on the wall will do the same act in light, gathering and dissolving, and nobody watching the harrow ever mourns what it wipes away.
Stretch eleven. The still ones, the breath, and the ring of light.
There is a thing a trout does in a river that has a name. Rheotaxis. It means the fish turns its nose into the current and holds its place, swimming exactly as hard as the water pushes, steering by its eyes, its balance, and a line of sense along its side. The fish looks perfectly still, and the stillness is all effort and all grace at once. A trotter at full speed runs the same discipline, form held against the urge to break. The fish holds against water. The horse holds against its own legs. Stay clean, let the music follow you to the bleachers bench. And Minnesota gives this track one gift no warm place owns: cold-night racing. On those nights every horse’s breath comes out as cloud, the effort made visible, spirit you can see leave the body and rise. The floodlit oval stands then as a ring of light in the darkness, one bright shape burning in the black, and the people gather to its edge to watch. This state has an old habit of that. A darkhouse is a small shack dragged onto lake ice, kept dark inside, with a hole cut in the floor, and the water below glows like a lit window while the fisherman watches down into it. A glowing window in the dark, watched in stillness. The backlit wall works will be that same old window, stood upright indoors. Light in a box, watched by people holding still, and nobody in the warm hallway will know they are ice fishing.
Stretch twelve. The picture-horse and the wish.
In Japan there is a small wooden plaque called an ema. People buy one at a shrine, write a wish on it, and hang it on a rack among hundreds of others. The word ema means picture-horse. Long ago people gave living horses to the shrines, because a horse was the finest carrier anyone owned, and a prayer needs carrying. A living horse was a heavy gift, so a picture of a horse came to stand in for the animal, and the picture kept the job. That is the oldest work a horse picture has. It carries a wish. A grandstand is a room full of people wishing on horses, and the bet slip is the modern plaque, a small card with a hope written on it, held in a fist at the rail. He got no money, she got no hair, go make your bet. But luck’s house takes as well as gives, and some of the people walking that hallway will be carrying losses. So the two works will offer the older form of the impulse, the wish without the wager, a hope with no money riding on it. That is why the still one is named The Wish. Their marks stay drawn by hand, and a hand always trembles a little, and the tremble stays in on purpose, the way an old potter left the seam showing on a jar, the line where the two halves were joined. Two horse pictures will hang side by side at the end of a hallway in a house full of horses, doing the first job their kind was ever given. Every wish in the building will walk past them on its way to the betting window, and nobody will know the pictures are the horses.
Draft note: the Dakota and Ojibwe language in stretch two rides in draft only until it has been reviewed with tribal representation.
