The falconer walks through the empty castle, which is dim aside from the neon blue and green of the frozen drink machines behind the bar. At a small room near the entryway, he punches in a security code, and when he opens the door, the silence is punctured by robust squawking, like dogs barking when their owner comes home. The falconer speaks in a calm, gentle voice. “That’s right, pumpkin,” he says.
It’s noon on a Friday, and the falconer is taking one of the two birds, Iris and Ava, for a practice flight inside the arena. He stands in the center of the sand pit and launches Iris skyward. She makes figure eights, swooping down at the center for the lure he swings just beyond her reach. It’s three minutes he wishes were longer, him and the bird in sync.
Medieval Times, the campy dinner theater chain, is known for over-the-top revelry and clashing swords. It’s a place where people expect to be called “milord” or “milady” and gobble down rotisserie chicken without utensils. It’s not a place where people expect to find their purpose in life.
That’s the story of Rick Grimes, though, who’s worked at the Medieval Times in Dallas for more than 30 years. Once a young man who struggled to find his way, the 59-year-old Grimes found direction at the castle, especially as a caretaker and handler of the falcons.
“I get to experience a connection with these birds that most people don’t,” says Grimes, a reminder that even inside novelty entertainment, you can find something profound.
Taking flight
Grimes was 10 when he first saw a falcon. His grandfather took him on an afternoon trip, and though he can’t remember much about it, he remembers the bird. He was captivated by the natural world. When adults asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said Jacques Cousteau, the famous oceanographer whose TV show he loved.
Adulthood turned out different. He graduated from Irving High School in 1983, spent four years in the military, then worked a series of odd jobs. Maintenance work, Guitar Center. Like a lot of young men, he found himself drifting. His father and grandfather worried about him. Aimlessness was like a current he kept stepping back into.
When the Medieval Times opened off Stemmons Freeway in 1992, Grimes was curious. The concept originated in Spain, where a restaurateur with noble ties created a Medieval-themed dining and entertainment venue in Majorca and Benidorm before heading to the U.S. market. The first castle opened in Florida in 1983 near Disney World and began franchising a few years later. Grimes applied to be a knight. The knights are the stars of the show, galloping around the arena, performing tricks of derring-do. They’re athletes in the vein of stunt men or professional wrestlers. Grimes was hired as the sound-and-light guy instead.
Medieval Times proved quite popular, becoming such a pop-culture touchstone that, in 1996, it was spoofed in The Cable Guy, where Ben Stiller steps from the audience for a duel with his nemesis played by Jim Carrey. The bit was so memorable that nearly 30 years later, the Dallas castle still gets calls asking if spectators can do this. (They cannot.)
In 1997, the chain’s California and Florida franchises ran afoul of the IRS and filed for bankruptcy. It would not have been too surprising if the kitschy spectacle had been left in the late 20th century, along with Beanie Babies and Blockbuster Video. Instead, Medieval Times regrouped and moved its headquarters from Anaheim to Irving, where it has proven quite resilient. There are 10 castles in North America, and the Dallas location is the second-most popular, behind California’s.
Grimes worked sound and lights for 25 years. From the beginning, though, he was drawn to the falconer, who started teaching him some of the necessary skills. That guy was great with birds, but prickly with guests, and eventually had to be cut loose. One morning, the general manager asked Grimes, “Can you fly the falcon tonight?”
He still feels a bit bad, stepping in when the guy who helped him got axed, but it was thrilling to begin his transition to another side of the company. He kept running sound and lights for years, flying the falcon only on occasion, but around the time COVID hit, the castle lost another head falconer, and Grimes stepped in full time.
‘Let’s go fly a falcon’
Falconry emerged in a world before guns, when hunters trained raptors to pluck a bird from the sky. Ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia and China used falcons, though the golden era is the Middle Ages, when nobility posed with their hawks and falcons like politicians might pose with a Labradoodle today. Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II was so passionate about his raptors that he wrote the treatise, On the Art of Hunting with Birds.
“To say that people were fond of hawking is far too mild a way of expressing their feelings,” write translators Casey A. Wood and F. Marjorie Fyre in a 1943 introduction to Frederick’s treatise. People in the Middle Ages, they explain, “valued their hawks more than anything they possessed.”
These days, falconry is still a hunting practice, though it can also refer to the lure-flying demonstrations done at festivals and fairs to bring the wonders of the wild to city dwellers who can’t tell a Harris hawk from a kestrel. Grimes’ work with the castle’s two peregrinefalcons falls into the latter category.
Falconers tend to be lone-wolf types, and Grimes is no exception. He spends most of his day with the birds, who are also not social creatures. A peregrine falcon is an apex predator, with eyes that can spot prey from at least a mile away. Every once in a while, Grimes gets the impulse to love on them — cuddle them, stroke them — but that’s not who they are. He shows affection by the consistency of his care.
In a small work room off the patio, he weighs the birds before each flight. He built a perch of PVC piping with an astroturf mat, good for their feet, that he slides over a digital scale to make this easier. Before he preps the food, he gently hoods the falcon, a tiny leather helmet like blinders on a horse, to keep her calm. He pulls a thawed quail carcass from a mini-fridge and cuts it with scissors, careful to remove bones that might get stuck in her throat. He fastens bells to her leather anklets, an old-fashioned tracking device, and she shakes her right leg, a little jingle.
“Let’s go fly a falcon,” he says.
The solo flight in the arena is one of the best moments of his day. Peregrine falcons are the fastest animal on earth, faster than the cheetah, and to watch one dive is like watching mother nature’s missile.
Grimes likes to pop in an earbud and play music. Van Halen’s “Dance the Night Away” is a good song to fly a falcon, though his favorite is a guitar instrumental by Dave Weiner, because the delay pedal creates a rhythmic effect that syncs perfectly with the bird’s flapping wings. Iris whooshes in her figure eights until he throws the lure, and her talons seize it as she lands in the sand. Only when he’s alone with the bird will he indulge his rock-dude side, throwing up devil horns.
For the rest of the afternoon, from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., Grimes sits with the falcons on the patio so they can get fresh air and sun. He sets up perches, fills a large terracotta-colored dish with water so they can drink and bathe.
When he thinks back on the drift of his earlier years, he’s struck by how grounded he feels now. He wishes his father and grandfather were alive to see this.
“They knew how aimless I was,” he says. “This is the absolute opposite.”
‘I’ve got the birds’
Inside the arena, the knights are practicing their tumbles and jousts, but Grimes is content to sit with the falcons, talking with them on occasion. “See that?” he says, pointing to the sky as a Southwest jet passes, and Ava tilts her head. “It’s a plane.”
His wife likes to tease him, “You’re the loneliest man in the world.” He tells her, “No, I’ve got the birds.”
Grimes was in his 50s when he married for the first time. He does not have children, though his wife has two kids. “Maybe there’s a little regret there,” he says about fatherhood. He has instead devoted himself to learning about falconry. He got his falconer license a few years ago, one of about 400 people in Texas to have one. At home, he has a red-tailed hawk he flies and will release in a year or two. As many as 80 percent of young hawks die in their first year, and the capture-and-release program is part of the state’s conservation efforts.
Grimes wonders sometimes about the role he plays in the birds’ captivity. Ava and Iris were born into this, it would be illegal to release them, but he has mixed feelings. How can you be close to a wild animal and not want it to soar? Master falconers tell him when the birds are fed, they’re happy. Each evening, when he leaves the castle, he asks himself: Have I done everything I can to take care of the birds? The answer is usually yes.
