Stock holders vs Stake holders

Well, I finally made it up to the Canyons this week after hearing outrageous stories of long lines an limited terrain. It is true, it is a corporate cluster up there.  With all the snow we have had, half the mountain is still closed with very little evidence of efforts to make snow, groom trails or open existing slopes.  Clearly Vail has put profits ahead of people and their product, with impunity.  They don’t care.  They sold 2 million discount Epic passes and have a billion dollars in the bank.  Now they are cutting corners at our expense.  It is the shareholders and stockholders vs the stakeholders and skiers.   Guess who is winning.

They say it is Covid, which should not be a big surprise to them after 2 years.  They say it is an employee problem, but it is more of a wage problem.  They pay less than $15 an hour for ski patrol and for all other workers who commute for hours a day in the dark, from Heber, Kamas or SLC, thru inclement weather and horrendous traffic.  Surprise, no one wants to work a crappy job for a non-living wage anymore, at every end of the economic scale.  Blame it on Unions, Covid or Biden but that is the way of the world now with over 20 million Americans quitting their jobs since this summer.  It would cost Vail 1-3% of their operating budget to offer all employees $20 and hour and they would fill all those empty spots in a heartbeat, but corporate greed triumphs over generosity, stock holders triumph over stake holders.

It has been ten years since PCMR forgot to renew their sweet land lease with UPMC followed by the hostile corporate takeover by Vail and the death of good resort skiing in North America.  We made our Faustian deal with the devil for their cheap season ski passes and found that everyone in town has one, not to mention everyone in Salt Lake City, Colorado, LA, New York, Chicago, Japan and Europe.  We don’t blame Blaise Carrig, Chip Carey, Bill Rock or Mike Gore, who are all good guys and know how to manage a ski resort, but they got their marching orders from the long management table at Vail Corporation.   They don’t want to talk to us about backcountry gates, avalanche fences, parking lots or traffic.  Vail’s gifts to our community are threatened greater development densities, crowded slopes and roads, and a ‘Je ne sais quoi’ attitude towards our local thoughts and opinions. 

We don’t want our money back, we want our mountains back.  We want our town name as well as it’s reputation for low key powder skiing.  Skiing has now become prosaic and pedantic instead of being world class like they advertise.  Weekend and holidays are off limits and powder days are now a crowded joke where if you can get on the mountain by 1100 it is all skied out by those who have better credentials.  There is no good public access to the local backcountry or our public lands and the overall skiing product has deteriorated to the point where it feels like a bait-and-switch or a breach-of-contract and public trust.

Is this the beginning of the end of this house of cards.  Does the quality of the product get so bad that people refuse to renew passes or frequent Vail resorts?  Do the employment conditions get so deplorable that no one will work there?  Would they try to raise the pass price and sell less of them to improve the product?  I doubt it.  We will all be expected to accept the current conditions as the new norm that they will blame on Covid, Climate Change or Economics.  They will take the money and run and we will be left holding the bag, again.

YOU ARE WHAT YOU READ

              Sequestered

For the quarantine I have been re-reading Walden.  Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 masterpiece manual of romantic transcendentalism, satire, and self-reliance.  Why not, what else is more appropriate now than sequestered nature-worship.  He self-quarantined in 1845, in his 10x15 cabin on the pond for a year or two.  Simplify he said.  Actually, he was only a mile from Concord, and he went home on weekends to have his mother do his laundry, but it felt like the wilderness of western Massachusetts, and it probably was.   

The first chapter of Walden is called Economics, not Adam Smith economics but personal microeconomics.  Henry talks about all the things he has but does not need, like houses and farms, animals and imported food.  How the farmer is a slave to his farm, as the shoemaker is slave to his shop, for generations.  How we are all slaves to our own sustainability, sustenance, maintenance, and entertainment.  How most of our concerns are about stuff and not people, how eventually the possessions possess the possessor. 

We have all read this story in high school and loved the idea, for about ten minutes, but then went back to over-complicate our lives with college and jobs, friends and family, houses, and toys.  We have not come that far.  But now we are all forced into our own little Walden, our own little 100 x150 foot cabins in the woods, with this self-imposed semi-isolation, where we can contemplate and experience the simple life.  All the distractions have been stripped away and we have been forced to honestly look at our lives and ourselves, who we are. 

              Simplify

I had a similar Walden notion to remove myself from the hurly-burly of the real world and simplify my life.  I thought of escaping to a cabin in the woods, or on a lake in the mountains or in a cave in the desert or on a lonely and anonymous park bench in a big city where no one would bug me and I would bug no one.  But that was too much effort and counter-intuitive to my desire to simplify.  So, I walked out my back door into the Snyderville Meadow and sat on a shady low bench besides Willow Creek and swore not to return to reality until I was good and ready.  Simple ain’t easy.

You do not need to go to the ends of the earth to entertain or remove yourself or give you things to do.  We spend all our time in self stimulation, constantly entertaining and occupying ourselves.  Or travelling the world, searching for someplace different but are only happy when we find a place just like home.    Wherever we go, there we are.  The constant is us. 

Simple is more of a state of mind.  Simple ain’t easy but it is more than just a desire to streamline or uncomplicate.  It is an effort to clear the mind and the schedule and to prioritize the real things we want to do and think and get rid of the clutter of modern times like; phones, schedules, deadlines, commitments, relationships, what to leave in and what to leave out and where you have to be at noon.  It is also a liberation from the constant burden of self-entertainment, stimulation, travel and adventure seeking.  It is the desire and ability to recognize and focus on the people that are really important to us, family and friends, partners and lovers, cohorts and comrades, and to serve and satisfy those people the best we can. You can only maintain 5-10 friends at once.  Life is too short for fast food and bad friends.

             

Self-confinement

We are loving it, my wife and me.  We have been retired for ten years so we have had some practice.  Waking up when we want or when it is warm, with no list or agenda, opening one eye at first light or at full sunrise to gage the day for what it might become.  Then enjoying a leisurely breakfast with correspondence and conversation, avoiding any contact with the real world for that is too depressing.  Self-disciplining to coffee, juice, Zinc and an occasional breakfast chocolate, eggs only every other day and bacon only once a week, no TV or drinking until 5 but anything else goes, all day. 

After my morning douche and yoga practice on the east facing bedroom deck while singing with my dog Eva, I take my patient companion out for her morning interval Frisbee session.  Then I look around and let the day come to me.  If it is cold, cloudy, or snowing, I’ll turn the heat up a notch or start a fire and hunker down in the house for a while, reading, writing, dabbling or fixing and improving stuff.  If it is sunny and warm, I will wander around the backyard or garage to see what calls out to me.  Sometimes I will trick myself with a small, predetermined chore to get me started.  I usually quickly find several other things to do and start mutli-tasking until a natural priority develops and the less important or non-fun chores fall off until tomorrow or next week or never.

Today it was removing half a tree encroaching on the backyard, by hand.  My wife Tracey and I started yesterday with a hand saw on a two foot diameter branch.  We took turns sawing the day before, 100 strokes at a time each and then jagging off in between, talking to friends in the field and playing with the dog.  By lunch we were exhausted and by dinner we were halfway thru.  So yesterday we continued with little headway in the moist dense core of the tree.  The spring buds were emerging so the juices were flowing and we thought of quitting and letting it leaf out on the branches on the far end of the moment arm, or let it fill with heavy spring snow to bring that big bad branch down. 

But we got impatient so we threw a rope up and over the far end of the branch and Tracey and I yarded rhythmically on it, up and down, until it cracked and we ran screaming while it came down with a fantastic crash, exactly where we wanted it to fall.  Then we took the ax to the downfall, chopping up the big logs and trimming the small branches off and stacking them next to the fence to build a more natural branch fence.  It was exhausting so I took a nap and then went for a long ride on my bike.   Live deliberately.  Then go for a bike ride.

              Hank and Ralphie

Henry David would be proud of us because the first thing he did out at Walden was chop some trees to clear some land.  Ralph Waldo Emerson owned the land, but it was too expensive for Henry to purchase at eight dollars an acre ($300 today) so he was a squatter, with permission.  Thoreau paid him back by cutting his lawn and trimming his flowers, but they had a classic haves/have not relationship.  When Ralph visited Henry in jail for civil disobedience (not paying taxes) he asked him ‘what are you doing in there’ to which Henry replied, ‘what are you doing out there’.

Henry cleared off 2.5 acres near Walden and planted the first year, but he was too busy farming the first year and had to sell much of his food for only 15 dollars ($50).  The next year he planted less than a half-acre that he could farm just ”with his left hand, at odd hours”.  Then he built his house mostly with stuff that he found lying around for $28 ($1000) and he was all set.  No oxen, nor horses, no cows, no sheep, no fertilizer, no tractors, no bankers, no contractors, no Home Depot. 

Ralph said, ‘Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond itself, a world’.  Henry David probably said, ‘yeah/no, maybe not’.  Ralphie, the thinker and innovator, wrote his classics “Nature” and “Self-Reliance” a few years before and Thoreau, the doer, decided to give his social experiment a try.  Hank was a more approachable voice for the nature movement than Ralph, less grand-eloquent, so he went to the woods to write his first book.  Henry was set up in his cabin for life, but he only made it two years before moving on to something else.  He had TADD, Transcendentalist Attention Deficit Disorder, and he got a little bored. 

              Evaloution

Today the day came on a little different for us when the morning warmed quickly under the hot April sun (equivalent to an August sun).   We took our dog Eva for a long walk in the meadow with the Sand Hill Cranes, eagles and hawks, the gophers, and the ducks.  She left the Cranes alone on our command but sneaked up and pounced on the gophers repeatedly despite knowing that no dog has ever caught a gopher in this manner.  She was invigorated by the walk, as were we and we went about our chores content that we had gotten some warm-up exercise early.  We found a dead juvenile hawk caught under a willow wicker chair in the back yard and marveled at the intricacies and varieties of all its feathers.  Eva licked it.  Evolution is an amazing thing. 

I took Eve out for her frisbee workout with some friends and they were amazed at how she could burst out after the thrown disk, picking its flight up quickly over her head and calculating instinctively its trajectory, complete with a Fibonacci compound curved decay as well as spin, force and wind effects while keeping an eye on the terrain and any obstacles she should avoid.  She has closing speed to match Ronnie Lott’s and the peripheral vision of Wayne Gretzky (her eyes are slightly wider set and on the side of her head, in defense of Wayne). 

Breaking quickly to where the disk is going to be, she sprints at first, with a quick first step to match Karl Malone, but lays off as she approaches the interception point if she is early, or powers thru like Michael Jordan to finish strong.  Instead of jogging out under the descending Frisbee and catching it as it settles to the ground like most dogs, she leaps in slow motion 4 – 5 feet in the air and snatches the disk at the apex, styling nonchalantly with her slightly curled legs, before sticking the landing and jogging away proud and triumphant. 

On the beach Eva can run super-fast in the dry or wet sand, with the dry sand being much more tiring so she prefers to land in the water after the catch.  She is self-aware and loves to style in the air and prances as she come back to me for another throw.  There are no bad catches, only bad throws.  I threw one too close to a fence one day and she adjusted and picked the disk off the top of the fence like Freddy Lynn pulling a ball off the Green Monster.  Eve has never seen baseball, Fred Lynn or the Green Monster, she just made it up as she went along.

If she were a pro athlete, she would make $30 million a year and make everyone else look silly.  My friends were suitably impressed and howled and laughed with appreciation. Eva was not unaware. As many people have said ‘that dog has skills’.  And she knows it. 

The point is that Eva is always ready for whatever comes at her.  Always ready for frisbee, never sore or tired, and she always performs at a high level.  Always ready for a hike or ski tour, even if the snow is ten feet deep and it is well below zero and we are out all day.  Her coat is both warm and cool, her heat radiation efficient even though it is only thru her mouth and tongue and I have never seen her hot, cold, tired, or hurt.  Eve never really needs to eat or drink much, just 25 cents of good dog food a day and a bowl of water.  We have taught her to ‘camel up’ and drink more before long hikes.  She is perfectly designed for whatever comes and is always game.  She is a cattle dog by nature and a Frisbee dog by training, with a mutt pedigree, so she has energy and athleticism and she demands a job, something to do, a reason to be, every day.  Frisbee is her job, no, her avocation and she loves it to obsession.  She ignores people and dogs, gophers and food, even bathroom breaks, when she is playing Frisbee.  Her raison d'être. 

Efficiency

How cool would it be if we were that efficient, with no wants or needs except a purpose and bare sustenance.  We could spend all our time just being, like Eve does, being a dog.  Thoreau tried to show us that it does not take much to be happy, that less is more.  I picture him in modern days, a Rastafarian street person living under the viaduct, or a bearded curmudgeon living in a desert cave in New Mexico or cabin in Montana.  But he was well educated, at Harvard, ambitious, thoughtful, and outspoken, and might be like us, living in the material world but fighting the good fight to simplify while keeping up with the Joneses. 

Our collective sequestration would appeal to Henry, as It appeals to me.  I am lucky to be safe and healthy, wealthy, and wise, or at least three out of four, so I can enjoy my plethora of free time.  They say that free time is the blessing and curse of the upper and lower class but for a while it is forced on the shrinking middle class.  Some can embrace it, some resist.  Some struggle, being only one paycheck or health emergency away from the poor house.  Some scream irresponsibly, to return to normal and continue our mindless consumption and pursuit of self-entertainment and something to do, to fire up the economic engine that trickles up and down and drives everything.  

If only we could be like Hank and Ralphie and Eva and be content to, as they say to; let game come to us, let the day come to us.  This is an opportunity to reinvent ourselves and the world as we know it.  We could all be more content with ourselves and each other and simplify the world around us.  It is an opportunity to let our problems solve themselves, as they often do, with or without us, and just sit back and let the mystery be.