'Poor Man’s Horse Racing'
Cultures mesh over a love for pigeons and an ancient sporT
To the soft sound of violin concertos, an elite team of long-distance racers relax after their recent race from Mesquite, Nevada to Bozeman—a 600-mile journey. Their lineage includes American war heroes and some of the best racers in Slovakia.The team is a 150-strong roost of pigeons, under the watchful leadership of Dušan Smetana.
“ It's just amazing how one pound of feathers, bones, and meat can find it’s home after 15 hours and 600 miles,” Dušan said.
Dušan has been racing pigeons in Bozeman for about 20 years, but has had a love for the birds since his childhood in Slovakia.
“If you as an immigrant, you leave your old home behind you, you leave lots of things. Your family, your friends, your hobbies, traditions, you know, cuisines, everything,” Dušan said. “And then you're trying to maybe find those things in your new home. And I guess pigeons are one of them.”
A CASE FOR RIVERS
In the summer of 2020, a man on a gurney was rushed through a hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. By the end of that night, the 23-year-old was pronounced dead from a fentanyl overdose.
He was a childhood friend of University of Montana student, Gage Griffen. Griffen was shook, and felt prompted to reevaluate his life. “I was on my way to work — I think it was a phone call or a text,” Griffen said. “I remember my boss saying, ‘You’re too young to have friends dying.’” Griffen, now 26, had just graduated from the University of Arizona.
“We did a lot of the same shit,” Griffen said about his friend as he walked down a gravel trail toward the Clark Fork River just outside Missoula. “It was a confrontation of, ‘Maybe I could die from doing something dumb.’ It made me think that this is real.”
His friend’s death, paired with a drug-related seizure his roommate at UA suffered two years earlier, motivated Griffen to rethink his life decisions and values. Shadowed by questions and guilt, he moved to Montana and found answers in its rivers.
ROLL FOR INSIGHT
Six adventurers trudged their way through churning sands. Amid sharp mountains sat a crumbling amphitheater where cheers once rang out across a great city. As the party approached the arena, hundreds of pained faces trapped in stone flanked the crew.
Lightning struck the amphitheater, sending hails of stone toward them. Cracks ran up the arena steps and the ground splintered beneath them. The air smelled metallic.
“Fools …”
Behind the booming voice, along with every other interaction, battle, setting and character, sat a quiet but commanding McKay Cheney — the Dungeon Master who pulled the strings for the group’s final session of their two-and-a-half-year-long Dungeons & Dragons campaign. He was surrounded by stacks of books, dice and sheets of numbers. All of the plans to bring his and his friends’ epic journey to a close hid behind a large plastic divider.
The party of adventurers, from completely different upbringings and moving toward different futures, have come together with Cheney to defeat their world’s greatest beasts. Through their adventures, they’ve attacked their insecurities and found a creative escape. That opportunity now seems more open than ever to the rest of the world.