The horses were still dying when my dad and I visited Santa Anita. It started in 2019, when thirty-seven horses died at the famed Southern California track in a single year. Most notably, the Breeder’s Cup champion Battle of Midway was euthanized after a severe break in his hind pastern, the area in the foot between the fetlock and the hoof. At the start of 2020, three geldings died in just three days, two after breaking their Coke-bottle thin ankles and a third after colliding with another horse on the dirt track. Seventeen more died before the year was up, including a two-year-old unraced filly named Seven Summers. 2021 proved an equally lethal year, ending with the controversial death of Kentucky Derby winner Medina Spirit. After sprinting five furlongs during a training session at Santa Anita, Medina Spirit staggered past the wire, laid down, and died, his lungs fatally swollen and his windpipe clogged with foam. Though no horses had yet died when my dad and I pulled into Santa Anita’s massive parking lot in February of 2022, the question seemed less a matter of if and more a matter of when. 

We arrived at the track on a Friday, when admission to the park is free. I’d anticipated long lines and clusters of protestors at the entrance holding up signs like the ones I’d seen online—“Welcome to the Death Track” or “Horse Racing Killing”—but we glided past the front gate without confrontation. To my slight dismay, I didn’t have to deploy any of my carefully rehearsed explanations about who had brought us to the track that Friday, and why. 

My dad and I had been planning the trip to Santa Anita ever since my grandma had died alone in her locked down acute care facility almost one year to the day before. My grandma grew up in the small town of Arcadia during the track’s heyday, and every other story she told about her girlhood there seemed to involve the track in some way. She was born in 1934, the same year that Hal Roach and Dr. Charles Stub reopened Santa Anita in the hopes of reviving horse racing in the state, or perhaps more accurately, reviving gambling, horse racing’s grimy companion. Years after she’d left Arcadia behind, she’d regale us with tales of cheering from the grandstand when War Knight won the 1946 Handicap, and of watching the stakes from her roof when her family couldn’t afford a ticket. She told us about the stars that once frequented the glamorous track—Bing Crosby, Marlene Dietrich—and how the thundering from hundreds of horse hooves would echo in her ears each night as she fell asleep. After a big race, she liked to haunt the backstretch with her sister Judy in the hopes that legends like Eddie Arcaro or Johnny Longden might ask to bum one of her freshly rolled cigarettes. 

“Those little jockeys sure loved Sandy,” Judy said at my grandma’s funeral, shooting me a suggestive wink. 

I immediately pictured my tiny, adolescent grandma pressed up against some even tinier jockey in the back of a horse stall, her signature Pepto-Bismol-pink-nailed hand reaching towards his pristine polyester breeches. For whatever reason, it is easier to picture my grandparents as sexual beings than it is my parents—something about the sepia tint of time, the way their younger selves transmogrify into different people entirely, like movie characters played by two different actors—and so I grasped onto this image of my grandma with a desperate kind of joy. I needed it as evidence of a life fully and exuberantly lived, especially after the bleak isolation of her final days. 

*

Once inside Santa Anita’s main gates, my dad and I stopped in front of a bronze statue of the track’s most famous resident: Seabiscuit. 

“Where’s Toby?” my dad asked. 

He was referring to Toby Maguire, the actor who played the half-blind jockey Red Pollard in the 2013 film adaptation of Lauren Hillenbrand’s bestselling book Seabiscuit: An American Legend. The males in my family have harbored a deep affection for Toby Maguire ever since the premier of the first Spiderman movie over twenty years ago, so much so that they now refer to him exclusively by his first name. Large chunks of Seabiscuit were indeed shot on location at Santa Anita, though the gleaming, crowd-filled racing mecca depicted in the movie couldn’t be a further cry from the place where my father and I were standing. 

Nestled at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains just fifteen minutes northeast of downtown Los Angeles, Santa Anita is a tantalizing architectural confection. Famed architect Gordon B. Kaufman, who also designed the Hoover Dam and the Los Angeles Times building, envisioned the track as an enticing fusion of Art Deco modernity and classical revival touches. He outfitted the massive structure with a vaguely nautical Persian green frontage and Clifton yellow colonial columns stretching up to cloudless California skies. There’s a distinctly Mediterranean feel to the place: bubbling fountains, striped awnings, lush topiaries, swaying palms. 

And yet—thanks to a combination of controversy, competition from other forms of gambling and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic—attendance at the track has been steadily dwindling for well over a decade. On the day my dad and I arrived, thirty or so people (mostly men) milled about the paddock or sat on benches reviewing the day’s books. Like us, they were dressed casually in jeans, t-shirts, and sandals—no feathered hats or dapper suits in sight. On the far side of the concourse, grooms readied the featured horses in the saddling area, watched intently by track regulars seizing up the day’s tranche before placing their bets. Behind the saddling area stretched the stables, row upon row of twelve by twelve rectangles that, during Santa Anita’s brief stint as a detention camp during World War II, once forcibly housed roughly 18,000 Japanese Americans. I remembered reading accounts from survivors of the camps who described the smell of manure that lingered thick in the air as they slept. 

The general atmosphere at the track that day wasn’t so much sinister as it was restrained: the seamy quietude of a place mired in scandal and death. It quickly became clear that the visitors, my father and I included, weren’t there simply to place a few bets and watch a once beloved American sport but to participate in the macabre marathon itself. The air pulsed with the kind of faintly ominous energy that reminds you, perhaps more so than in other times, that the sport was built on illegal wagering and the forced exertion of creatures that have no real choice in the matter but to run.  

*

My dad and I ventured inside the Main Line to the bank of burgundy electronic betting machines that lined the back walls. The machines were so staggeringly confusing that we had to enlist help from a bony woman in a hot pink sweatshirt and leather cowboy hat named Diane. At Santa Anita, you can place a bet for a race at any track in the country, and a good twenty people were huddled silently in front of a row of TVs waiting for the results to roll in from places like Kentucky and New York. Crumpled betting vouchers littered the candy-colored floor like fallen leaves. With assistance from Diane, my dad and I placed our $3 bets—I put my money on a 6-year-old bay mare named Zabava—and then ordered our $9 beers before heading out to the sunny apron. We easily found an open picnic table on the other side of the outer rail just as the opening bugle call ripped through the air.

The track was immaculate against the backdrop of lush mountain and blue sky, the turf a crisp green and the distant palms stoic and soaring. Behind us, the grandstand was nearly empty, a desolate shadow of the track’s golden days, when my grandma and tens of thousands of others packed into seats and filled the air with their deafening cheers. Seven horses, magnificent and gleaming, trotted out one by one, their precarious, muscle-bound bodies either a miracle of nature or a cruel mistake. So much heaving mass on such stalk-thin legs, I thought. Their jockeys led them into the starting gate and bobbed over their backs in a tight crouch, laser-focused and intense. 

The sound of twenty-eight horse hooves thundering against the dirt was stirring in a way I didn’t quite anticipate. It washed over me like a summer storm and my heart did an involuntary little leap. I could almost hear the nine-pound horse hearts beating furiously inside seven straining chests. All around us, small clusters of people were tepidly shouting things like, “Go Number 2! Number 2!” and “Come on 6!”. I experienced the type of rare and consuming presence most commonly associated with deep meditation or resplendent sex. My attention was on nothing and no one but those seven horses and their crouched riders making a single, quicksilver revolution around the track. An ambulance and a veterinary truck zoomed behind the racers, ready to swoop in if any jockey or horse was injured. 

In a flash, the mile-long race was over, with first place going to a chestnut mare named Mercy Mercy. A maintenance vehicle quickly made a lap, misting the track with a fresh layer of moisture. Neither my father nor I won any money. Zabava, in fact, came in dead last. I felt an odd sense of deflation, not that I lost my $3 or even that the race was over but that the charged embodiment of that minute and a half had passed. 

My eyes were left with nowhere to look but down at the faint ghosts of hoof-steps dotting the track’s notorious dirt. 

*

The dirt at Santa Anita has perhaps received more attention than any other stretch of dirt in the country. Though the cause of the equine deaths at Santa Anita remains elusive and likely manifold, many people blame it on the track’s rich russet loam. The make-up of racetrack dirt is a balanced art. The top layer, called “the cushion,” is a fine and granular mix meant to dampen the impact of the horses’ hooves as they run. Below that is the “pad,” which is harder and more compact, and then two more layers called the “hardpan” and the “base.” If this vital equilibrium is disrupted, either due to inclement weather or poor moisture management, deep and sometimes unnoticeable compaction can greatly increase the risk of untreatable fractures in Thoroughbreds. 

The fatal injuries at Santa Anita started ratcheting up when the track switched back to this usual mixture of dirt and sand after a brief experiment with a synthetic track. The switch back to dirt might have proved mostly benign if it weren’t for a particularly rainy season in California, in which the dirt was regularly described in reports as “muddy,” “runny,” or “off.” The horses were routinely raced despite these questionable conditions, thanks largely to heightened pressure from the track’s upper management. 

Santa Anita is owned by the Canada-based Stronach Group, whose President and Chairwoman, Belinda Stronach, has come under considerable fire for her handling of the track in recent years. Because of its attractive location at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, Santa Anita has long been a target for real estate and commercial development. To remain profitable, Stronach implemented a grueling racing schedule even during unusually cold or rainy weather. It also heightened pressure on owners to race their horses in these conditions by threatening to either reduce their number of stalls or kick them out of the Santa Anita barns altogether. Veterinarians were similarly discouraged from scratching horses they considered unfit to race. In a Succession-level story of family intrigue and betrayal, Belinda was sued by her own father, the automotive manufacturing magnate Frank Stronach, over alleged mismanagement of family assets, casting the tragedies at Santa Anita in a particular patina of capitalist myopia and greed. A series of reforms implemented by Stronach in response to the public outcry, including bans on race day doping and the use of the riding crop, did little to ease scrutiny.

A ban on race-day drugging is unlikely to remedy the larger problem of doping in the sport. Humans have been racing horses for close to 6,000 years, and likely drugging them for just as long. With drugs masking their injuries and dulling their pain, horses are often raced when they shouldn’t be. Performance enhancing drugs also make horses unnaturally fast and strong, placing extra stress on their already strained limbs. Common drugs like the diuretic furosemide, used to stop the airway hemorrhaging caused by exertion, and omeprazole, used to treat stomach ulcers, have been shown to weaken calcium absorption in the bones, leaving them prone to lethal fractures. Other common performance-enhancing drugs have been linked with heart attacks. These drugs are used flagrantly by even the most well-known trainers in the business. Medina Spirit’s notorious Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert is known for mixing a potentially dangerous cocktail of prescription drugs into the feed of every horse in his care. 

From a certain perspective, the horse deaths at Santa Anita are nothing new nor are they unique to Santa Anita. Horse deaths in California, home to four of the country’s top racing tracks, consistently remain higher than in other states. New York has also come under comparable scrutiny in recent years for the growing number of horse deaths happening on its tracks. According to the Jockey Club’s Equine Injury Database, an average of nearly ten horses a week died in the United States as a whole in 2018, almost two and half times the equine fatality rate in Europe. 

Santa Anita’s defenders point out that the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office conducted a criminal investigation in 2019 and found no evidence of animal cruelty or unlawful conduct at the track. The common refrain from the racing community is that horse owners, trainers, and riders know more about horse health and happiness than any smug outside activist or reporter ever will. One might also make the argument that Thoroughbreds are not only divinely designed to run but that they love it, and may even have a strong competitive drive. If placed on opposite sides of a fence, stallions are known to sprint up and down its lengths trying to outpace one another. 

But two stallions racing of their own accord is, of course, entirely different from forcing them to do so for the financial enhancement of the various humans involved. Katy Guillermo, PETA’s senior Vice President, said in response to the L.A District Attorney’s findings, “No sane person can find it acceptable for horses to suffer and die for sport.”

To people looking for something or someone to blame, the case of Santa Anita can feel maddeningly slippery. Blame it on the dirt. Blame it on the management. Blame it on California. Blame it on the industry. Blame it on humans and our twisted relationship to the non-human world. Whichever way you slice it, the blame seemed to expand in ever-evolving concentric circles that converged exactly where my dad and I were sitting near the outer rail at Santa Anita after the first post.

*

“That was fun!” my dad said, doing a little clap. I considered sharing some of my thoughts about the sport with him, but he looked so happy, sitting there in the warm California sun.

My father is a simple and good-hearted man who skips joyfully across the soft surface of life. At times, this has made him woefully ill-equipped to be my parent, bent as I am towards depression and self-righteous outrage, towards the darkness that lays clotted beneath the smooth top layers. My dad is the kind of man who farts loudly and freely no matter the company, who has never once not burst out into raucous laughter at the sight of a character in a movie getting hit in the balls. When our yellow Labrador Willie was neutered, my father asked the veterinarian if he could keep the puppy’s testicles to give to his friend as a joke. He then forgot about them, and the balls remained in a cabinet in our laundry room cupboard, suspended in a jar of yellowing formaldehyde, for close to twenty years. 

If I’m around my dad for too long, say, five or more hours, I revert back to an embarrassing version of my teenage self (“What are you reading?” he asked me that morning before we left for the track. “A book,” I responded.) Still, I’ve come to admire my father’s blithe contentment, his bright and relentless cheer. As I grow older, I find myself less and less willing to shatter it. And so I decided not to put a damper on our good time by mentioning unsavory things like animal rights or the forced detention of American citizens in the name of war. Instead, we ventured back inside the Main Line to order another round of drinks.

By 2:00 p.m., I’d imbibed three beers on an empty stomach and was playing a little game with myself generating racehorse names in my head. 

Panopticon. Sworn Affidavit. Take Me to the Pilot. U Up?  I silently listed. Mellow Indica. Forget Me Not. Justin Thorough. W.A.P.

We’d only been at the track for a couple of hours, but I could see how people got addicted to it. There was an intoxicating shape and rhythm to the day that swept me up despite my doubts. With thirty or so minutes between each race, you have just enough time to pee, place your bets, grab another drink, and return to the apron for that opening bugle call. It provides the kind of structure and propulsion that makes inveterate planners like my dad and I feel safe. There was also a cyclical tension to the air—with each race, the fraught edge of anticipation that something horrible might happen followed by a cascading wave of relief when it didn’t. And perhaps, beneath that, a tight, shameful knot of disappointment that a tragedy didn’t happen, that you weren’t there to witness it with your own two eyes. 

Though neither my father nor I had yet to win any money, we were feeling good as we made our way back to our picnic bench for the third post. I’d put $5 on a dark bay colt named Street Ruckus with 4/1 odds to place. I was just buzzed enough to feel a sense of investment, even pride, when the horse and his jockey, Juan J. Hernandez, trotted by us on the dirt. I watched with clenched fists as they took their place at the gate. 

A few seconds later, the horses were, as they say, off. 

Street Ruckus took the lead straight out of the gate. He stayed close to the rail, practically hugging it. His legs furled and unfurled like he was stretching toward something brilliant but just out of reach. His lead stayed strong through the first turn, where he gained even more momentum and broke from the pack, putting some much-needed distance between him and his second-place opponent, Swiss Swoo. 

But then, streaking into the backstretch, Cosmo, who’d been hanging out in the third or fourth from the outset, started thundering towards the front. I would’ve been worried if it weren’t for the fact that Street Ruckus was still gaining speed. He saw Cosmo coming his way and exploded forward, undeterred.

My hands gripped the rail. Street Ruckus, Cosmo, and Swiss Swoo held the top three spots into the final eight when Bender—an eight-to-one colt who had been trailing the entire race, several lengths behind the second to last horse—made a mad dash for it. He surged past the others, throwing all his momentum forward. 

“Fuck!” I heard myself say.

At the wire, Bender made a final charge, rocketing from last to first in a matter of seconds, kicking Street Ruckus into second place right at the finish line. 

The shouts for such an upset seemed like they should have been louder, but there were so few people at the track to witness it that all I heard was a sad smattering of diluted applause and disappointed sighs. The odd deflation returned. A mile and an eighth, all over in less than two minutes. Street Ruckus had been so close, dominating until the very last second, only to be vested by a longshot. Still, he survived, which felt close to winning. 

Since I’d only bet for Street Ruckus to place, I’d actually won some money. I told my dad, flashing him my betting voucher. He gave me a high five.

After the race, we went inside to collect my winnings. I waited in line behind a woman in tall leather boots explaining to her boyfriend how a box bet worked. Other people crowded around the open windows, ready to turn in their winning slips. When I reached the front, I handed the lady behind the counter my voucher and she handed me back $9.50.

“Not bad,” said my dad. “Nanie would be proud.” 

I wadded up the bill and clenched it in my fist as we wandered to the front to watch the winning horses make their way to the paddock. They ambled through a tunnel and down a narrow alleyway that stretched out to the main concourse. Hooves clacked against stone, tails swished in the gentle wind. 

Street Ruckus emerged from the shadows, his dark bay coat slicked in a rich lather. Juan Hernandez sat atop him, smiling as he talked with another jockey. Both horse and rider appeared outwardly unphased by the upset: another day at work, and no one dead. As Street Ruckus approached, I tried to catch his gleaming black eye. I wanted him to look at me, to give me some indication that he was okay, that all of this was okay, but of course, he didn’t. 

The money felt grimy, used, in my palm.  

*

We left after the next race. 

“Get out while you’re ahead,” my dad said, in reference to my $9.50. 

Our car was right where we left it in the vast and empty lot. I climbed inside, feeling sleepy from the beer. As we sat in bumper-to-bumper Southern California traffic, my dad at the wheel, I rested the back of my skull against the headrest and closed my eyes. 

I thought back to the last time I visited my grandma in November of 2019, just a handful of months before the pandemic fully hit. Her life, or at least the tail end of it, had brought her back to California, to a long-term acute care facility in Menlo Park funded by the V.A. After receiving news of her worsening heart condition, I flew down from Portland on a Wednesday afternoon. I planned to fly back the following morning, blaming my job for the short trip, though I probably could have stayed longer if I’d wanted to. 

In her papery blue hospital gown, my grandmother looked visibly thin and unwell. Still, she’d still taken care to paint her long nails her signature Pepto-Bismol pink. Her room was dimly lit and disconcertingly beige, with a window that looked out onto a parking lot. A football game played through static on the small box TV hanging from the wall. She was lucky enough to have a room to herself, but she told me that the man next door kept her up all night screaming about Vietnam. The thing that bugged her the most, however, was the hospital’s ban on smoking. If my grandma—a stubborn woman who had smoked a pack a day since she was 14—wanted to have a cigarette, she had to take her walker, wait to be buzzed out the back door, and then shuffle across the moss-laced parking lot to a little grassy median that was about 50 yards away and officially off hospital grounds.

I’d been in her room for about twenty minutes before she suggested we venture to the median for a smoke. I’m not a big smoker, but I followed her and sucked down three Marlboro Reds anyway, puffing and puffing until I felt like I was going to puke. With the soft, dwindling Northern Californian sun pouring over us, she talked about Santa Anita, telling the same stories I’d heard so many times before. 

“Those horses were so beautiful,” she said wistfully. “And their riders, they weren’t so bad either.”

She cocked her eyebrows suggestively and we bent over in laughter, giggling like two girls in the backstretch after a big race.

I stayed for another few hours after that, long enough to watch the rest of the football game. I visited her briefly the next morning before my flight home, and then I was gone. Four months later, her facility went into lock-down. By May of 2020, 2,075 people had died in nursing homes and acute care facilities throughout California. By the end of the year, that number reached 8,827. By February of 2021, the month she died, 12,803 had died of the virus in the state. Miraculously, it wasn’t COVID-19 that eventually killed my grandmother, but I suspect that the contaminant isolation and fear only hastened her decline. I don’t know what her room looked like during these months, or what sounds she heard at night, or where she went to smoke if she could. After a while, she stopped picking up when I called. 

The horses at her favorite track were dying too, the numbers ticking upward week by week. Their deaths, like the ones surrounding her, unfolded largely out of view, in the unpopulated shadows where so few people care to look. I wonder if she ever thought what I wondered that day at the track: Where does all this suffering and sadness go if there is no one there to witness it, to prove that it is real? 

*

When I opened my eyes again, our car had barely moved. There was a stillness to the evening, long lines of traffic lights blinking in the setting sun. It was silent in the car, no music or radio to break the quiet. I felt dozy and safe, like a napping child snug against their parent’s chest. 

My dad stared straight ahead at the rows of stalled cars before him. I don’t know what he was thinking. Maybe, like me, he was thinking about his mother. I looked at his hands on the steering wheel. It’s only recently that I’ve found myself looking at my father’s hands, at the way time has changed them. 

I closed my eyes again and decided not to think about death for a while.