We were running out of time and the only thing that could keep us in the game was finding a bejeweled royal mistress and a dwarf with psoriasis. Since our day had already involved levitating sheep, the world’s shortest marathon, fictitious political candidates, and Julie Andrews singing on an endless loop, this didn’t seem far-fetched in the least. This was Herald Hunt 2008 in beautiful downtown Miami, and my fourth time competing. They say the third time’s a charm, so the fourth was Ed McMahon at the door with a million-dollar check. We couldn’t help but win with a three-person team of graduates from The University of Miami’s Music Engineering program, especially if Sigma-Delta modulation or the Nyquist Theorem were involved.
Maybe it was because of the threat of rain, but the turnout seemed poor this year as we made our way to the portable stage that had been set up on the grass at Bicentennial Park. Dave Barry had already taken the microphone when we got there, and appeared to be welcoming us to another Herald Hunt, though the PA was not loud enough for us to make out his words at first. We moved closer and I started to dig out my portable recorder for the purpose of getting some of his quips from the opening ceremony on tape. It was a new recorder that I was still learning how to use, and I was so busy watching the levels that I didn’t notice it was still in record-ready mode and I wasn’t actually rolling. So that’s what the blinking red light means.
Dave thanked some sponsors, told us the rules, and gave us the last half of the map coordinates to the puzzle sites. We took a few minutes to note things down on this year’s colorful Otis Sweat-drawn Hunt map which featured elephants, donkeys, and a bevy of bikini-clad cartoon ladies. Again this year, there seemed to be a puzzle at the main stage. We decided to go to the furthest one first and work our way back, as the huge crowd in front of the stage last year ended up blocking a key part of the puzzle and sending us in the wrong direction.
We happened upon our first puzzle location at the entrance to American Airlines Arena. A sign told us that this was the “ING Marathon Finish Line”, and soon enough an official blew his whistle to signal the start of the race. About 10 feet away, three runners each wearing signs with letters on them took off and 15 seconds later, the runner wearing “K” took first place, “BL” was in second, and “FL” limped in for third.
Since this was the ING finish line it seem likely that ING should be added to the winner to get our answer. We couldn’t find a king on the map or in the surrounding area, nor could we force a punned number out of it. We stuck around to find out that the non-winners were always in the same order, so results were invariably King Bling Fling. Our next course of reasoning was that we were supposed to finish the line, probably from a nursery rhyme or popular song. Nothing came to mind that made sense, though we wondered what Old King Cole was smoking and whether he’d been sharing it with Dave and Tom. Remembering that K is the symbol for potassium, I wondered if a more elementary solution was in order, but as there weren’t any Hunt volunteers handing out periodic tables, that seemed a tad unlikely. The one other possible lead we came up with was a spot on the map with a building shaped like the letter K. This seemed like a classic red herring, but we decided to give it a look the next time we were in the area.
The entrance to Bicentennial Park was our next stop, And we only needed to follow a trail of thoroughly confused hunters holding plastic back scratchers to find the source. We are given some of our own – two in red, one in blue – each with a note that said “See also D-4.5”. The back scratchers were roughly in the shape of a hand with some sort of pattern on the side, possibly Chinese hieroglyphs. Very strange, but we were pretty sure this was only part of the full puzzle assuming that those were coordinates in the handout and not an Algebra problem.
We headed back to the stage for our third site and found that several political banners and signs had been put up, and several people were throwing a rally. The topic was about the Unity Party, and the three speakers seem to harp on the follies of partisan politics. A banner above had the legend “The Unity Party. Extremes caused strife and confusion. The solution is in the middle,” and to either side of the candidates were signs with the following text.
The moment of truth is———–Eventually we will see
at hand, and each of————-our efforts rewarded, for
us must stand firm ————- in us are the seeds of
in support of our nation. ———Inevitable victory
After listening to a few more minutes of rhetoric, I notice my teammates pointing at the stage, jotting something down, and then getting up to leave once they confirm their suspicion in the clue list. As we walked to the next location, they clued me in: if you looked at the letters across the aisle from one sign to the other, a word problem emerged.
is|Eventually
of|our
firm|in us
nation|Inevitable
or 74-9, which gave us the answer 65.
North of the stage was a field with twelve signs and a sound system that played a thirty second loop from everyone’s favorite World War II musical: “Doe a deer, a female deer…” All but one of the signs had pictures or writing on them, and seven of them had things that could be attributed to the song’s lyrics including a needle and thread for So, a marathon runner for Fa, a picture of Ray Charles, and so on. The ones that did not fit were a flamingo (first row, first column), a porpoise (second row, second column), a Star of David (fourth row, first column), a blank square (fourth row, second column), and finally a 4×4 grid of the word “oz.” (fourth row, third column).
Sixteen ounces make a pound, and together with the star it seemed that we were looking at a telephone matrix. We soon figured out that the order of the signs as they appear in the song would give us a seven digit phone number, and there’s usually a puzzle like this every year to the point that a cell phone is mandatory to compete. When we dialed the number, there was a recorded message from J. Andrew’s Travel Agency telling us that our prize redemption code was 927.
We were pretty confident that we had bested our second puzzle until it turned out that 927 was not in the Hunt guide’s clue list, and therefore not a valid solution. While looking in the paper, we happened on a fake ad from that travel agency, though we could not find anything about a prize redemption code or even that number anywhere on it. Our next idea was to try and spell the answer using the letters on the keypad. After a few minutes of phone anagram hell, it hit us that the keys could be translated back into the solfège syllables La, Fa, and Re. Looking back to the travel agency ad, the price of a flight to Los Angeles, or the LA fare, was $385, and also our second answer.
Our next stop was the location from the back scratcher handout, which turned out to be at the Arsht Center. It was finally starting to rain as we followed the line of people filing into the eastern half of the two building complex. The timing was serendipitous, not to mention the fact that the place was air-conditioned. This puzzle seemed to be inside the spacious concert hall and we found a stool at the middle of the stage. Shortly after taking our seats, an MC came out with a microphone and got a lukewarm reaction from the crowd. He told us we could do better than that, went back to the side and entered again to get the desired effect. For the next five minutes, he hyped as all into a frenzy of clapping, stomping, and yelling if he were getting us ready for a main act that never materialized.
We were stumped. Throughout his performance, he emphasized the phrase “round of applause”. Combined with the back scratcher, I wondered if we needed to spell something in reverse, possibly a spherical object, to get the correct answer. The other possibility was the number of times that he asked us to applaud. We decided to stay for another performance. Afterwards, it seemed obvious that he was not going by a script.
When we arrived, we had seen crowds of people crossing the outdoor walkway to the other hall of the Arsht Center, so we decided to try there next; we didn’t even need to check if it was on the map. This was the Opera House and it looked like we were going to see a performance from the Greater Miami Symphonic Band. After starting with the Sousa march, the band stopped abruptly and a saxophone played a solo the tune of which I vaguely remembered but couldn’t name. The band resumed the march for another thirty seconds and then another instrument would take a solo from a popular song. When the group finished playing, a giant sheep was suddenly flown over their heads and we heard a bleating sound play twice through the loudspeakers. A woman dressed as Little Bo Peep came out, presumably looking for said sheep, and someone called out “Run Claire, run” as a man came after her with a butterfly net. The players took a bow after she was netted.
We decided to stay for another performance to make sure we had all the songs correctly identified. In playing order, they were as follows: a saxophone solo of 16 Tons; a tuba duet to Three Blind Mice; Eight Days a Week blown on a trumpet; a jazzy clarinet rendition of When I’m 64; and finally, to the chagrin of many veteran hunters: 76 trombones played by only one of them. I initially thought the first song was the Erie Canal and wrote down the number 16 from a misremembered lyric in the refrain. The audience hummed along to the Beatles tunes quite loudly the second time around; some even ended up singing along including a kindred spirit who shouted “When I’m 45” as the chorus to the clarinet piece. At the second finale, the sheep paused in the center of the stage and gave us two baahs, and again the shepherdess Claire was in a net. This told us that the tuba and the clarinet pieces were significant, and we got an answer of 364.
We had three of the five puzzles solved, and about an hour left to work before he had to go back to the stage. We were only a couple of blocks away from the giant K on the map, so we decided to check it just in case. At that location, we found a memorial statue with a bunch of names on plaques but no obvious signs of Hunt tomfoolery. In the attempt to start a stupidity vortex, I voted that we conspicuously take notice of one of the plaques and yell out things to be overheard by passersby, in the hopes that we could make the competition more confused than ourselves. Unfortunately, it seemed like we were the only ones that had fallen for the map trap in the first place, so there was no one to fool but us.
We returned to the site of the marathon and found a different trio of racers and the same end result: King Bling Fling. We went over all the possible meanings, looking for poker hands or chess problems, finally coming to the conclusion that we needed to find someone throwing a crown, or perhaps a Royal mistress with lots of jewelry. Equally brain-stumping to us was the back scratcher problem. Maybe a rotund, itchy dwarf was somehow the solution. Since we couldn’t find either on the map we decided to head back to the stage and find a good place to sit.
Though I had been underwhelmed by the turnout in the morning, when we came back at 2:30, the park was completely packed with people that looked as confused as we did. Soon enough, the DJ was in full birthday-party annoyance mode, trying to get people up and dancing that were too tired to properly flip him off. A shadow of dread had been growing in me as I sat in front of the stage, hoping that a certain incident from last year might not be repeated.
“Who wants to do the slide?” asked Captain Irritant. About 10 or 11 people jumped up in anticipation and my stomach began to fall. He started the music, but it was a different song. An impostor named the Cha-Cha Slide Part Two: Electric Torment, or something like that. The original is a fucking Mahler symphony compared to this tripe, the lyrics of which are the dance steps spoken like a step-aerobics teacher moonlighting as a square dance caller. Luckily, 95% of the audience was immune to this particular hell, though The Great Agitator tried his damnedest to get everyone cha-cha-ing “real smooth”.
What seem like three hours of the song passed before Dave took the stage and tell us the final clue. Headache Maestro flashed us a CD, placed it in his player, and we heard the sound of a toilet flushing. Since we were missing two clues, our efforts at this point were halfhearted at best. Flush could mean the poker hand so we looked at the map or clubs hard spades or diamonds. Nada. The other interpretation involved the phrase “looking flushed”, though we couldn’t remember if that meant being pale or reddish.
We sat around for a while trying to troubleshoot the other two puzzles. Some time had gone by since the first teams made any motion away from the stage, but Dave hadn’t given us any word that any team had solved the notorious endgame phase of the Hunt yet. Dave gave us a hint after 20 minutes or so had gone by: “Count every U”. We were still winnerless for some time afterwards and he took the microphone again.
“How many people think that this year’s hunt was harder than usual?” Dave asked, to a deafening chorus of booing. Since nobody had solved the endgame yet and a majority of people hadn’t even left the stage area, he made a break with tradition and started to read the solutions until a team could figure it out.
The answer to the ING marathon puzzle could have been found if we had looked more closely at the J. Andrew’s travel ad, as the attraction to visit Great Britain was the Celebration of the Crown Jewels that was taking place December 8th, for an answer of 128. The back scratcher we were given was supposed to be a little hand, and the guy on the stage was trying to elicit from us a big hand, in not so many words, mind you. If you marked their locations on the map, you could find the roman numeral III on one side and the IX on the other. The big hand would then be at 12 and the little hand at 6, which other people have assured me is six o’clock on a non-digital timepiece.
Going from the earlier hint, I started counting all the times that the letter ‘u’ appeared in all of our answer clues. I didn’t know why this might be important, as we still didn’t know what the flush was supposed to tell us. There was another unspecified period of furrowed brows and another team or two rushed off towards the arena.
The last clue that Dave would give us is that a flush is five with the same suit. Looking back to the map, there just happened to be five girls wearing the same type of bathing suit. The coordinates of the girls were H2, W1, A3, E5, and L4, and when put into numerical order it spelled WHALE. Way the hell on the other side of town, was a drawing of a whale that turned out to be an the middle of Bayfront Park.
I was having trouble with my hip at this point, and my teammates didn’t look like they were in favor of running to the whale, as about a third of the crowd was on their way to that very spot. About halfway on the hike, a group of people coming from the opposite direction told us that three teams had already solved the Hunt. I was parked a few blocks further and didn’t feel up for the any extra walking that day, so I parted with my team and they returned to the stage to boo Dave and Tom.
Since the whale site was on the way, I decided to drop by and found two volunteers handing out pamphlets that read “we need you in our battle to save the whales. Every ‘YOU’ counts!” This was the hint that Dave had given us earlier, and I was glad that I had tabulated that particular vowel. It look like the number of U’s in the clue guide answers could be used to construct a seven digit phone number, though wasn’t entirely sure that I had them in the right order. It was late and I was tired, sore and on the verge of being too brain-dead to find my car if I exercised any more lateral thinking that day, so I decided to call it quits.
Later on, I found that the phone number was made from the order that the original site coordinates were given out. Those that dialed got an answering machine message telling them what to write down, and to find who to give it to, they would have to go “back to square one, figuratively speaking”. Back to the phone grid puzzle, square one was a flamingo. On the Hunt map there was a coordinate marked by a flamingo, and the winning team handed their paper to the Hunt volunteer wearing a flamingo T-shirt.
We did pretty good for a three-person team considering that this year’s puzzles had stumped even the most salty Hunt veterans. There didn’t seem to be as much to see and do compared to the locations in previous years, but it was very nice to see inside the opera and concert halls of the Arsht Center. I’m glad the weather complied for the most part, and that the locals helped make it the first murder-free month in Miami in over 40 years. Obligatory ending about how that next year we would be victorious, etc.