Megan McKenna - Snyderville Address

Two score and several years ago Megan McKenna came to Summit County, conceived in liberty and the proposition that all men are created equal.  We knew Megan McKenna from the days when she was a bony kneed young girl riding her oversized bicycle around Silver Springs.  She is from a solid blue-collar family who bought a home here when it was possible  Unlike so many new interlopers, Megan is actually from here, skiing our hills, riding our trails and educated in our schools.  Many successful businessmen come here and run for office after living here only 5 years, thinking their money-making skills will make up for their lack of history and experience with our rural and agricultural county.  It doesn’t.  This is our home, a diverse Municipal County, not a business, dedicated to making people flourish, not filthy rich.  Megan envisions a sustainable, affordable County, with responsible growth and regional collaboration, so that this County, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. 

Next, we saw Megan burst into the good-old-boys-club and serve on the ski patrol at The Canyons. When she wasn’t throwing avalanche bombs or evacuating yet another torn ACL she was fighting for worker’s rights and employee contracts.  After that long and loyal stint she started a local’s petition for backcountry access to our public lands and received thousands of signatures of local support.  The stakeholders agreed to meet with her annually until this problem was hammered out.  Then Megan moved to educating our students in science at PC High School.  Her students recognized and respected her, as they do all good teachers, and she invited guest speakers from our scientific community to give her students a wider perspective.  She loved the work but could not make ends meet after 11 years. Finally, she found her new passion fighting for the Mountainlands Housing Resource Cener for moderate income families as she fought for her own affordable housing on the slave wages we pay our essential employees. We need to elect Megan to the Summit County Council because it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do so.

I favor Megan for the Summit County Council because she is from here, she is one of us.  She understands our history and our diversity, our experience and our ambitions.  She is empathetic to the diversity of the east and west County alike and understands their respective positions and perspectives as a team player and critical thinker.  She understands the nuanced and complex problems facing the county and can break them down into smaller, logical pieces she can solve simply and communicate affectively to her constituents.  Megan Mckenna will ensure that government of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from this County.

 

Matthew Lindon, PE   ‘79

Snyderville Utah

Graciously

 We saw Peter Frampton the other night in Salt Lake City, and he was great. We go way back together.   I felt like I was hanging from a tree in Central Park watching his free concert in ‘75 or dancing in my dorm room playing my lacrosse stick, before he came Alive.   This was the ‘Never say Never’ tour and it was bittersweet, but I like my friend Terry’s tour title of ‘Frampton is Still Alive’.  Frampton covered Georgia on my Mind early with no words and finished with While my Guitar Gently Weeps that was a great sentiment but it was ultimately not Prince, who now owns that song. In between he played his schtick songs as the structure for some great jams.  Even the mouthpiece stuff was unabashedly good.   ‘Lines on my Face’ was my favorite, whether it is about grief, age or cocaine, I still love the practical line, ‘I still got a house I got’ta heat’.   His big hit ‘Show me the Way’ surprisingly felt like Peters rendition of a wanderers Ripple by The Dead.  When he sang the line from ‘Shine On’ -  ‘Find it hard to see you in the darkness, I looked around, you were besides me’, I turned to my wife Tracey, smiling next to me.

Salt Lake was great with easy travel and parking and a dinner at a nice old speakeasy cat-house on Franklin Street in the Tenderloin.   It is a good size city now with critical mass and there is finally some there, there. The Eccles theatre is a modern version of Carnegie Hall that I didn’t even know was there. There are high rises going up even taller than The Church, and large apartment buildings employing structural architectural gymnastics just for post-modern style.  We arrived in Salt Lake in the 70’s when the Central Business District was vacated by an exodus of business to the suburbs and the malls.  We fled to the hills and small town Park City.  There were less than a million people in Utah at the time and Frampton was an unknown outside of NYC.  Since then SLC has enjoyed a resurgence spurred by the 2002 Winter Olympics when ‘The World Was Welcomed Here’ and they stayed.  Throw in a successful conservative State Economy, the marketing moniker of ‘The Silicone Slopes’, the diverse beauty of the state with the heavily promoted ‘Mighty Five National Parks’ and 80% of the state being federal land, as well as the acceptance of the quirky but friendly Mormons and you have one of the most successful cities in the country.  They announced recently that we will get an NHL hockey team, and possibly a MLB baseball team and the 2034 Winer Olympics.  The sky is the limit for ‘This is the Place' and with its rebuilt International Airport, and growing cultural diversity, Salt Lake City, as well as Park City and Peter Frampton, grew up with us.

The all-star band was on stage right that night, admiringly facing Frampton on stage left. They were good but it was his show.  There was a video screen behind the band showing Monte Python type clips like ‘Frampton Comes Alive’ on a rocket blasting off into space. The band was rocking, and Peter’s fingers were dancing dexterously with upbeat tempos and solos.  He still has it. He was very gregarious and personable. Sounding Happy. Lively. Fun and funny. Frampton is the rock sound and attitude that I grew up with and brought here, and thereby compare it to all other rock.  Peter is sick and dying and came onstage with a cane while I had brought my Sciatic cane for walking in the big city.  I held it high during the encore and he acknowledged.   There are no coincidences.  Peter and I, Salt Lake and Park City had come a long way and successfully grown older graciously, together.  Frampton left extorting the crowd to consider that we are all struggling with something in this life, and to try not to be judgmental of others, not knowing their trials and tribulations.  Like the Grateful Dead ask in 'Uncle John’s Band', Peter asked us, "Are you kind." 

Special

 It struck me as funny, the day of the eclipse, watching Totality race across the country on TV and looking up at the sliver of Partiality in my own backyard, and I thought how special we must be.  Days before I saw the perfect crescent moon rising before dawn, racing unknowingly to its new-moon rendezvous with the sun in a few days, unaware of its effect on the scurrying humanity below.  All of us looking for a higher universal perspective, human bonding experiences, or something else to do.  This random, light bending confluence seemed inevitable by now, and I was amazed that science could predict its conjugation to within a second, years ahead of time. Two, seemingly independent, celestial objects on their gravitational orbital dance with destiny.  It was special.

Is it a coincidence that the sun is 400 times as big as the moon, but 400 times further away, giving us the perfect eclipse geometry?  I think not. There are no coincidences in nature’s design of the universe. It all has a mathematically balanced plan. There are, in fact, several moons, around dozens of planets, around millions of stars, in billions of galaxies, and that is just in the universe that we know of today. There are, realistically, millions of eclipses going on in the universe at any given moment. In the trillions of places to live out there, the probability that there is Not life on one of them is almost zero. If there is an eclipse happening out there, and there is no one to see it, is it really that special?

We are separated from each other, in this vast universe, by the current Einsteinian limitation that nothing goes faster than the speed of light.  He said that if you stood on a train going the speed of light and shined your flashlight ahead, the light beam would only go the speed of light.   So, we are separated from the rest of the universe by great distances and the speed-limit of light, which is 186,000 miles a second, or 700 million miles an hour, or 6 trillion miles a year.  Wicked fast.

In Star Trek their Warp Speed number is cubed and multiplied by the speed of light to get their actual speed.  So, Warp speed 2 would be 8 times the speed of light or 6 billion miles an hour.  Peak Warp Speed 9.6 is 1900 times the speed of light and that is 12 quadrillion miles per year.   That is tremendously fast but that is science fiction.  We still do not believe that Warp Speed is possible without a theoretical Warp Drive, Worm Hole or Quantum Tunnel taking short cuts through the space-time continuum.    

 According to our current physics, if you stood on the closest star today and looked back at the earth, you would see the light from the Insurrection at the Capital 4 years ago.  If you were on one of our closest galaxies and looked back at the earth, you would see the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.  Light is really fast, but the universe is really big.  And getting bigger.

Even if there is life out there, it could not get here if it wanted to. They are protected from us by our own isolation and the speed-limit of light. Which is good since we would probably beat them up, because they were different from us, or start a war with them because they want our stuff.  Either there is a lot of life out there in the universe that just cannot get here from there, or we are really really really special.  The Garden of Eden. As special as The Dark Side of the Moon or a Total Eclipse of the Sun

Duct Tape Dream

According to my mentor Tom Clyde, there is a universal symbol of someone who identifies as an old time, old school  local.  Duct Tape.  It can be found on the nicest CMH powder suit and the lowliest old Park West Patrol coat, untimely plucked from the nearest dumpster.  It is usually worn with honor and pride, as a silver badge of courage, longevity and frugality.  It screams a practical philosophy of ‘waste not want not’.  It begs the universal question of ‘if it is not broken, why toss it’.  It echoes Ira Sac’s sentiment to ‘Be More, Appear Less’.  It supports the superstition to never change clothes during a powder cycle or even a good power year.  It honors the fashion leadership of 50-year local John Haney who skis every day, dressed in Duct Tape while eating carrots and sweet potatoes on the lift.  He wears it proudly because, ‘it costs money to lose money’.  And it does.

Duct Tape, not Duck Tape,* is usually utilitarian silver, the kind used by HVAC guys, electricians, plumbers and anybody who has something to fix.   It can by any color, like a blend of black to surreptitiously patch your big-ass,- blown out ski pants like mine worn proudly, or day-glow for safety and style on the slopes.  I have never been hit or run over in my orange jacket with the pink Duct Tape.  It makes it easier for your friends to spot you but it does make it hard to hide from the ski patrol in the woods when you are peeing or poaching.   It can be used on skis to stop delamination of the tips, or boots to stop leaks, or poles to make them effectively adjustable - with a thick bump-out rap, one hand width below the handle, or gloves - for that one finger that wears out first as well as goggles, glasses, gators, hats, face lips, scars, cars, motorcycles, bikes, boards and virtually anything you want to make look cooler. I have a dream.  We should not be judged by the content of our character, but rather by the condition of our clothing.  The only credential we locals, or any of our clothes need in this town for true acceptability is, ‘They rip’.  And we do.

As a personal addendum to this great idea, all locals should include the year they came to town after their name and signature so we all will know the proper amount of reverence and respect to bestow on them.  It is like a Water Right - Priority Date that indicates when you filed your Water Right, where you are in line to get your full amount of water before anyone after your date gets any.  ‘First in Line, First in Right,’ the water guys say, but they also say ‘Use it or Lose it’, which works here as well.   Your Locals Right is similarly tied to your residency here and for the ‘Best Beneficial Use’’ of all.  That is defined as 'The Basis, the Limit and the Measure’ of your Right so that also works for your value and seniority in town.  This is not tied to your place of origin, ownership, age, race, identity, money, education, appearance, attitude, altitude or aspect, just to your Locals Right Date.  This will establish a transparent hierarchy of accountability and authority for anyone who has any longevity around here and skin in the game. It is only right.

You might even want to write your Date on your coat with Duct Tape to see who gets first shots on a powder day, the best parking spaces, the first seat on the bus, the best tables at restaurants, the right of way on trails, and perhaps good Sundance tickets.  Maybe they can build a special lane on 224 and 248 or a special line on the chairlifts for those with the better priority dates.  Then John Haney, Tom Clyde and I would always be fashionably first.   As it should be.  

 

Mathew Lindon ’79, Snyderville

No Regrets

 Regrets, I’ve had a few, like not sleeping with more women when I could, but then again, too few to mention.  I did what I had to do, like not taking better care of my body, and saw it through without exemption.  I could have been a better father, friend, brother, son and husband, but I did it my way.  What is a man, what has he got, if he didn’t look back and didn’t think how he could do it better.   It is human nature, and the engineers, shoulda-woulda-coulda, curse to optimize, to be efficient and to make the best with what we have.  So looking back, what would I change about our little town?  If we did it my way.

If I were King I would, for example, not let the Coalition Building accidentally, suspiciously and conveniently burn to the ground in one dramatic night.  This building was an icon, our icon, the symbol of the resort and the town.  It was a ten story master of architecture and art, form and function, with huge timbers of great mass and girth.  It was a supremely functional anchor of the tram that took ore off the mountain and deposited it in two train tracks in its belly, by gravity alone.  Sure, the Town lift and ski bridge are nice, connecting the mountain with Main Street, but we lost our monument, our symbol, our Eiffle Tower.

Would we, in fact, drain all the water under our town out to Jordenelle, Salt Lake and towards Ogden in over 500 miles of drain mine tunnels.  Park City used to be lush, verdant, with surface streams flowing everywhere.  Now we must pump our ancient water from way down deep or from Smith-Morehouse, Rockport and the Weber River.  That is like pumping the Great Salt Lake into the west desert in the ‘80’s to evaporate, then complain today when the lake dries up.  Where is the foresight for sustainability.

Next, I would not build a road the size of an airport runway into town.  I you build it they will come.  If you don’t, will they stay away?  The road serves as a fire hose that shrinks to a lawn sprinkler in town.  It can’t handle the flow and pressure of our large attractive demand and the endless supply volume of people who want to get here.  There is a disparity between the desired level of service on the highway and the comfortable carrying capacity of our local roads, resorts, runs and restaurants.  If the road was smaller, would less people brave the traffic, or would they park at the junction and take the bus?   We can build a tunnel and a flyway, but where would they go.  They would just kick the can down the hill.  We continue to expand that fire hose road into town and complain that the outcome never changes. Repeating the same mistake and expecting different results, that’s insanity.

I would have started by preserving open space before we started building developments, when it was cheaper, and the choices were better.  I would bury the concrete water tank on Masonic hill.  At least paint it sage and juniper green.  Ridgetop development is unsightly and forbidden in most places, especially for public works structures.  I would respect the existing wetlands in Park Meadows, Snyderville, Snow Park (Frog Valley) and Silver Lake (Lake Flat).  These wetlands were the lush mountain ‘parks’ that this city was named for and were developed before proper Clean Water Act enforcement or George Bush’s declaration of ‘no net loss’ of wetlands. 

I would not let them cut down the nice Conifer trees in front of the defunct Holiday Village cinema so we could see the sign that says ‘visit our web site’.  I would not chase the Kimball Art Center off Main Street, because of architectural differences, to an Art District that we still don’t know what it looks like or how we can afford it.  I would not create two separate bus systems when all our planning should be regional and foster support and cooperation.  I would run free buses to Heber, Kamas and Salt Lake and encourage workers to use park-and-ride lots by paying them from the time they parked.  I would require that every second home over 5000 square feet have a caretaker’s quarters for someone to live and take care of the grounds while working other service jobs. This would solve our housing crisis in a town where 60% of the homes sit empty most of the time. I would not encourage people to flip houses so quickly, turning our homes into tax free commodities and driving up the prices. But I'm not King.

All in all, we have done well with what we have. Mistakes were made that we cannot take back, but it is still a pretty, great place.  We did some great things with open space at Swanner and Octothorpes, Round Valley and Bonanza, 500 miles of trails and great recreation centers, affordable housing and free busses, Art and Balloon Festivals, Sundance and Silly Market, historic preservation and the Special Ability Center.   Development worked better when it went slow and thoughtfully, allowing public input of different opinions and ideas, minimizing individual greed and fear.  Government worked better when we elected and hired the best and the brightest, and we listened to them.  We should continue to plan each chartered course, each careful step along the byway.  And more, much more than this, we do it our way.   Apologies to Frank.

Matthew Lindon ’79 - Snyderville

March Madness 2024

The tourists are gone, and we have survived another year of March Madness.  No, not NCAA hoops, Magic vs Bird or Catlin Clark.  I’m talking about that spring break time of year when friends and relatives choose to come out to visit.  It is the Goldilocks time of year when it is not too warm and sunny but not too cold and cloudy, when the snowpack is thick and the weather is nice, ‘just right’ for some spring skiing.  They don’t realize that the sun, birds and the Sand Hill Cranes have just come back and we are just emerging from our hovels from our winter hibernation. They don’t see the months of darkness we enjoy, the cold and unrelenting blizzards that build our snowpack and the crowds of Christmas and Sundance that help us pay our bills and keep the buses free. 

I discovered this place on my own frat boy spring break, when we came out west and slept on the uneven floor in the little red house on Park Avenue.  The skiing was fast and the weather was warm and we burnt our neophyte faces off in the high altitude sun and our tenderfoot tongues on the hot new Mexican food.  The beer flowed like wine.  We quickly moved out here and never looked back.  Since that time we are deluged with guests every year, mostly in the spring.  If we lived in Des Moines, I’m thinking we wouldn’t have this opportunity.  Friends came out early and stayed late and slept on our floor and in our guest beds when we built houses.  That lasted until we got significant others who kicked them to the curb and told them to get their own accommodation.  This is our life, not just your vacation. 

So they come with family and friends, and eventually wives and children, packing an ungodly amount of equipment and spending an unimaginable amount of money, spurring our economy and making our town successful.  They stock up on enough food and alcohol to last a year, thankfully depositing the leftovers at our house on their way out of town.  They store their equipment in our garages and basements, where I now have several pairs of phantom, skis with no apparent owners.  They temper the normally frantic ski tempo down with their needs and necessities, Zoom calls and work deadlines, as they do their own thing at their own pace. We enthusiastically meet them on the mountain when they are ready, willing and able and they adhere to our request to simply not make us wait or go shopping.  We graciously ski a few runs with them until they get hungry, hurt or tired and we go our separate ways, to meet again later for beers and dinner or just to tell tall tales and lies.  After all, if it wasn’t for tourists we would all be miners. 

I give them tons of credit; it is very tough to come from far away with all that stuff and get everyone up to go skiing.  It’s a challenging thing to do if you’re not used to it, prepared, experienced or in good shape.  Taking kids is even harder and these parents should be commended for their efforts to introduce their kin to the ski culture that has changed all our lives for the better.  They all promise to move out here, but eventually most go home, returning to what they really want to do.  It’s a nice place to visit but they wouldn’t want to live here.  These visits do serve as a continuity link to where we are from and other lives we have lived.  It is hectic, making room for others in our homes, our town and the slopes, but I wouldn’t change It for the world.  I realize that although they come to ski they also come to see me.  It is a great opportunity to catch up with old friends and new family and they remind us constantly what an incredible place this is, when we lose perspective.   I wonder what it would be like if we lived in Des Moines.

Matthew Lindon, ’79 - Snyderville

Thank You.

 I pulled into the glacial moonscape parking lot.  They gave up plowing weeks ago.  The three attendants weren’t paying much attention, so it was chaos.  People were walking and parking all over.  I did my best to park orderly but the guy parking next to me almost took my door off and left his car running to power his head-banging stereo.  Why is people’s taste in music inversely proportional to the volume of their stereo. ' Have another Red Bull', I said.  I put my boots on and then the attendant came by and asked me to pull my car up 13 inches.  I said it was too late and would be dangerous for me to drive in my ski boots.  He shrugged, in Portuguese. I’m an A-hole, I admitted in broken English. Obrigado.

Getting on the lift, the ticket taker blithely pointed her Japanese scanner at my chest as I pointed to my leg pocket.  She asked if I was ‘Joe Blow from Kokomo’ and I said ‘no I’m Joe Schmidt, the rag man’ so she asked to see my pass.  I begrudgingly dug it out of my pants and she scanned it.  This charade was repeated on every run, with lots of bowing. Arigatou.

 Then on another lap, people were piled up at the entrance to the self-regulating, magic diamond maze so I was forced to enter the ski patrol line.  The Swiss checker warned me against this, and I explained with a smile that I was on the ski patrol in another life, and I thought I was grandfathered in.  He humorlessly persisted and warned I might get yelled at. This discussion was now in the spirit of a friendly negotiation of our Season Pass contract.   After all, being the customer, I am always right, like Nordstrom's in the 1980s.   I said OK but hinted they might want to have a sign out front to say ‘don’t congregate at the Maze entrance’, which everyone does.  Especially people from South America, it’s a cultural thing (like Brazilians who like to wait for their friends while standing on the loading bar up front).  He indicated that no one would heed the Maze sign since they ignore the No Phone Zone signs and besides that, this enforcement was above his pay grade. So I said ‘OK then stop telling me what to do’.  ‘A-hole’, he smiled in German.  Danke Schone, I squinted back.

It was like the ski-school teacher who chased me into the woods one day and told me there were bathrooms at the lodge, even though they smelled like New York City in July. Misplaced or distended authority.  Ya got a problem wit dat.  What’s next, French-Canadian volunteers in yellow telling me to slow down?  I am an A-hole.  Merci Beaucoup.

On my way out I tried to ski to the gondola to go home but it was clogged up with a ski school circus tent and the magic carpet ride.  I took off my skis and walked the extra hundred yards around the ski school on their nice new heated patio, past the walled in Docs Bar and the fenced in Umbrella Bar.  I got on the Cabriolet and went home wondering who was thinking about circulation and marketing here.  I’ve seen more inviting après ski bars on Temple Square.  But then again, they didn't ask me.  I’m an A-hole. Ya betcha, fer sure.

The moral of the story is: don’t be an A-hole like me, no matter how long you’ve lived here or how well you remember how it used to be.  The local and immigrant working folks out there are doing the best they can.  Maybe they need more training and money or better management and corporate support.  They are here for us to enjoy our indulgent lifestyle and pampered pursuits.  Focus your attention rather on the extractive ski industry that is sucking the money and life out our little ski towns, to distribute to shareholders far away, paying low wages and throwing us a bone but leaving us holding the bag for traffic, housing, wages and overcrowding.  I hear they even bought A-Basin just for guys like me.  Because I’m the A-hole? Muchos Gracias.

Saving Money with Living Wages

 

We drove over to the Canyons on a magnificent Tuesday and although the traffic wasn’t too bad, the parking lot was an absolute glacier skating rink with hummocks and seracs because during the last storm they didn’t plow it. This was their Entry Statement?  Parking was a free-for-all for pedestrians and cars, in the mud with only three uninterested parking attendants available.  They needed ten, I thought, but I guess they were saving money. 

We got on the mountain, and it was glorious.  It was a bluebird day and the grooming was magnificent.  The only thing was that there was not enough of it.  Only one or two runs were groomed off every lift and they got skied off quickly from the focus.  I thought they might be saving the snow from overworking it but we were in the middle of another great storm cycle so I concluded that they must be saving money.  

There used to be a variety of groomed runs to choose from on each lift, as recently as last year, when they recovered nicely from the 2020 Covid year debacle of minimum wage and supply chain limitations that closed slopes, lifts and restaurants.  I was told that they can’t find enough snow groomers and I wondered how that could be when grooming is one of the coolest jobs on the mountain, besides throwing bombs, if you can make enough money to eat.  Then I realized that with near zero unemployment, it’s not an employee problem, it’s a wage issue.  No one wants live in the parking lot in their VW van or drive from Nephi to work at night for $20 an hour.  If they paid a living-wage there would be a line of drivers all the way to Heber to help them groom. 

A living wage might be classified as enough money where you wouldn’t need essential worker assisted housing to survive, which is defined at about $80,000 a year in Park City, or about $40 an hour.  Hiring roughly 500 groomers companywide at that rate would cost them less than 1% of their Season Pass income.  A small price to pay for excellence.  Their flagship mountains in Colorado have plenty of groomers, plows, parking lot attendants and lift operators.   What are we, the red headed stepchild, the poor little bastard?  

Deidra and our local mountain management team have done well with what they get but we are clearly not a corporate priority. Then I realized that the company and shareholders don’t care about the ‘product’ once they get our money in September.  It’s like size-flation where you get a smaller box of cereal each year for the same price.  It made me wonder what the product was that we agreed upon and contracted for in September.  Was it the outstanding 2022 ski season or the horrid 2020?  Snow helps but there is a big difference.  You never know, they never say.  Or is it OK for our mountain to be demoted again from Top 10 to Top 50 in the USA rankings.  That affects everyone.   

So, I went in to get a cup of coffee to think about this and I gave the cashier a twenty.  He said we don’t take cash, only credit cards or your Mountain Charge Account, whatever that is.  I looked at him and he looked at me.  I finally stuffed the twenty in his shirt pocket saying ‘trickle-down, stick it to the man’ and we both laughed.  On the way out of the parking lot that day I was swallowed up by a bone crushing, Moon size crater that has been there for 9 years.  Nice Exit statement, I thought, I guess they are saving money.

Olympic Double Edge Sword

 

Well, the Olympics are probably coming to town again.  2034.  Ten years.  The IOC is already booking rooms.  Here comes another big pivot-point in our existence.  It could be a great opportunity to celebrate who we are and assess what we want to be, or it could be a disaster of unbridled growth and greed.  With the Olympics comes the spotlight and along with that people and money.  We thought, last time, that we would bring Utah to the world, but we brought the world to Utah. Well, when God wants to punish you, he answers your prayers. 

Mitt Romney did a good job in 2002, as he helped us beat the bribing scandal and Fight the Liar Within so we could successfully Light the Fire Within.  We wound up with a legacy fund to support the Olympic venues in perpetuity.  Well now that money is running out and we should shoot for that kind of goal again and make PC a permanent Olympic town in the future rotation. The Olympics told us what our town would be like, every day, in 10-20 years, so we need good planning again, and a long-term view for the future. 

With money comes power, interest and influence.  Last time certain Olympic venue construction got Congressional reprieve from some Federal regulations, like the Clean Water Act.  Recently, the billion-dollar MIDAS military project at East Deer Valley got approval and tax breaks.   Lately the Legislature has stepped in to force approval of projects in the area.  We need to stop the Fed and State legislatures from making planning decisions for us.  We must forge our own destiny.

Last time we got a zillion dollars in Federal money to improve infrastructure, so we rebuilt I-15 and half of I-80.  This time we could use the money to rebuild 224 underground, with bridges and service roads, or four lanes on 248, or the Heber City truck bypass on 40.  But new roads bring new people so what do we want to do with them, short term and long term.  Stop them at the Junctions or dump them at the High School and the Blue Roof for parking?   If you build it, they will drive.  We have worked with the classic planning mantra that ‘if you keep the roads small, people won’t use them.’   Well, they do.

This would be a great time for some holistic, sustainable and connectable, future regional thought.  Maybe tunnels or gondolas all over or even a train but we should not just be thinking about 2034.  We should be thinking about 2050 and 2100.  For the last Olympics we built a raised flower garden in the middle of 248 and told UDOT that we were not fly-over people going from 224 to I-80 West.  Well, we are now. 

What about snow.  With the average minimum morning temperatures going up 1- 2 degrees every 10 years here, the jet streams shifting atmospheric rivers and the Great Salt drying up, there is the possibility that we won’t have snow.  I suppose they will make what they can and ship in the rest because we don’t want to be known as the first snowless Olympics.  It looks bad on TV.  Or what if Park City gets so crowded that no one comes here anymore.  Be careful what you wish for PC.  This is another great turning point for us, as big as the openings of the original Park City and Deer Valley mountains, the last Olympics and the Vail take over. It is a great time to determine our own destiny.  Decide what to be and go be it. 

CLA$$IC WESTERN WATER ENGINEERING, ECONOMICS AND ENVIRONMENTAL BOOKS

Some books are like the Bible, the first and the last word on the subject.  Some books are so well written, so well done, so complete, that they defy emulation, though so many others try.  The following books are, in my opinion, the classics, the best and the brightest of the western water world, and metaphorically of our natural resources economics and environment.  I catalog them here for the old and the young, so that we may remember, and they will not forget. 

 

Cadillac Desert - Marc Reisner - 1986.

This book is unequivocally the best story of water in the west and has been the topic of countless lectures, conferences and college courses.  From the settlement caveats of the west where, ‘Water follows the plough’ and ‘Whiskey is for dinking and water is for fighting’ to Mulholland’s draining of the Owens Valley for Los Angelos, this book covers it all.  From the building of Hoover Dam to control the Colorado River, to the plywood in the spillways of Glen Canyon Dam in 1983 when that control was surrendered, this book addresses the hubris.

The battles between the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers are recounted as government dam builders fight for political dominance while the environment takes a back seat.  Huge water projects are subsidized by ‘Cash Register Dams’ until the price and the worth of water becomes secondary to rights, priorities and corrupt contracts.  This book is still relevant today as drought and climate-change magnify the value of water and the precariousness of our priorities.  Despite it all, this is a fun read and a rollicking good time. 

 

The Emerald Mile - Kevin Fedarko – 2013.

Some would call this book Cadilac Desert Lite or Western Water - 101, but this is an enjoyable lark for the masses.  Kevin Fedarko’s book was first published in the summer of 2013 and became an instant hit with river rats and water geeks alike.  It is basically the story of the spring of 1983 when the winter snowpack continued to build unexpectedly in the Rocky Mountains until Memorial Day weekend when it started to melt all at once.  This snow melt runoff caused unprecedented flooding along the Colorado River systems that stressed the Bureau of Reclamation on-stream dams, their engineers and their operators.  The Colorado river is the poster boy of western rivers, and this is a summation of the problems associated with the river and the region.

From this adversity came an opportunity for a select, almost mythical, group of river runners and guides.  They seized the moment in 83, as well as the high water, and attempted to break the fastest rowing record through the Grand Canyon.  These stories are seamlessly woven together in this book to provide an enlightening and entertaining story of the various, often competing, special interest groups, and stakeholders of the rivers and the water in the west.  The Colorado River is the model for the exploitation of the waters and the resources of the American West, and this book is a revelation of the complex consequences that arise when you mess with mother nature, for thrills or for profit.

 

Beyond the 100^th Meridian – Wallace Stegner – 1954.

From the Dean of Western writers, Pulitzer Prize winning Wallace Stegner accurately recounts the trial and tribulations of the first descent of the Green and Colorado Rivers in 1869 in leaky rowboats, by the one-armed civil war veteran John Wesley Powell and his rag-tag crew.  From Green River Wyoming to the Virgin - Colorado river’s confluence, Powell led his man thru munity and mayhem in the countless rapids, harsh climate and variable geology of the canyons.  After the trip Powell predicted the economic exploitation of the west with water being the limiting factor in this vast dry region.  He recommended forming state boundaries along sustainable drainage basins instead of the unwieldly box states that promote competition and conflict in the distribution of water.  The second part of the book prosaically details Powell’s formation of the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution and his term as the second director of the U.S. Geologic Survey.  Powell unsuccessfully fought Washington politics and bad water policy before having the Colorado’s largest lake ignominiously named after him in 1963.

Wallace Stegner is the king-pin of western writers, linking Emmerson and Thoreau through Robert Frost at Harvard to modern writers such as Bernard DeVoto, Vardis Fischer at the University of Utah.  He taught the likes of Edward Abbey, Ken Kesey, Wendell Berry, Thomas McGuane, C.L.Rawlins  and Sandra Day O’Conner at Stanford.  His other great non-fiction classic is “The Sounds of Mountain Water” – 1969 a description of the west in the 1930-60s with tales of running the soft rocks and smooth water of Glen Canyon before the dam was built. Again, the second part of this book drifts into an account on how to become a western writer but can easily be skipped if you are uninterested.

 

Desert Solitaire – Edward Abbey – 1968.

Even though Abbeys popular fictious work “The Monkey Wrench Gang”, ribaldly details an audacious plan by several desert rats to blow up Glen Canyon Dam and was the inspiration for the formation of Earth First, “Desert Solitaire” is his best, non-fiction effort at environmental writing and the dangers of ecotourism.  Abbey details his term as a Park Ranger living in a dilapidated trailer in Arches National Monument near Moab Utah in 1956-57.  This desert landscape, near the confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers, was an empty wilderness at the time.  This was after the post-war Uranium miners left and before Arches and Canyonlands National parks were created and the place became a Disneyland for boaters, bikers, Jeeps and ATVs. 

He talks of rustling cattle out to Dead Horse Point and harassing station wagons full of tourist hell bent on civilized family adventure.   His tone is humorous and familiar, inciteful and more than a little irreverent.   It is a similar voice as the outdoor curmudgeon of our time, Jim Harrison, with his manly prose and a zinger on every page.  Abbey harkens back to simpler times in a canyon country formed originally by God with wind and water and, more recently, by the hand of man with good intentions and a bulldozer.   “Down the River” is another notable nonfiction work by Abbey that describes floating down Glen Canyon in an inner tube and a twelve pack of beer in the 1960’s.  Reality is sometimes stranger than fiction.

 

Sand County Almanac – Aldo Leopold – 1949.

Like the father of glaciation John Muir surmised, Aldo Leopold, the father of wildlife ecology believed in the interconnections between all things in the natural world, including humans. He fostered a development of a land ethic that included a conservationist conscience and personal responsibility.  Broken into three main sections written over twelve years, this book’s first section is divided into twelve segments representing each month on his played out southwest Wisconsin farm. His great discovery occurs when he watches the fierce green light fade from the eyes of a mother wolf he has just shot and the implications on the nearby grazing deer and the over grazed landscape of his farm.  Dying a year before publication, when putting out a fire on a neighbor’s farm, Leopold started the modern environmental movement without even knowing it.  While not exactly water centric, this book was a turning point in environmental writing and thinking. 

 

Silent Spring - Rachel Carson – 1962.

Given this book to read for high school in 1971 I did not know what to think of it.  It was over my head for sure, but I had participated in the first Earth Day the year before and had a germinating environmental ethic before it was unfashionable.  Rachel Carson, the mother of environmental regulation, continued the tome that we, like all living things, are part of the vast ecosystem of earth and sparked a national debate on the indiscriminate use of chemical pesticides, the responsibility of science and the limitations and costs of technological progress.  During the heyday of open air nuclear testing, Napalm bombing in Vietnam and ‘Better Living Through Chemistry’ textbooks Carson started a movement that resulted in the ban of DDT and alerted us to the slow poisoning of the earth and ourselves.  Chemical corruption affects us all, for we too are permeable.  She introduced us to the perils of the unintended consequences of our technological advancement.  Dying also only a year after its publication, Carson never saw the results of her work leading up to the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act of the 1970’s.  Peter Matthiessen rated her for Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People of the Century.  Carson continued to advance the advocacy of the environment by suggesting we regulate our scientific advancement and technological arrogance to protect our natural resources. 

 

Sky’s Witness - C. L. Rawlins – 1993. 

This one is a personal guilty pleasure.   Rawlins is a back-country skiing hydrologist, traversing the Wind River Mountains in all seasons and storms, measuring snow-pack and water quality for air pollution affects from hundreds of miles away.  Thoreau claimed that he was a "self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms," but now there is Chip Rawlins from Utah State University. The writing has the prose quality of Steinbeck or McPhee, balancing powder skiing with scientific observation and introspection with natural history.  Sometimes it is not so much what you say, but how you say it. 

 

Others – Optional

 

The Secret Knowledge of Water - Craig Childs - 2000.     The personality of water becomes fully animated in this remarkable book.  Also: This House of Rain - 2008 amalgamates scientific facts and historical conjecture about the Anasazi culture of the Southwest.  This is a human story of drought, war and migration. 

Rising From the Plains – John McPhee – 1986.    The third of four McPhee geology books, this tome entwines the geology of Wyoming and the story of its primary USGS mapper, David Love, and his pioneering family history.  McPhee takes billions of years of geology and a complicated family history and seamlessly translates it for the layman and the reluctant enthusiast.  That is his skill.

The Great Aridness - William DuBuys – 2011.    DuBuys offers an unflinching yet poetic look at the dramatic effects of climate change occurring right now in our own backyards and around the world.

Where the Water Goes - David Owens – 2017.   Owens writes about the Colorado River as the best example for limited water, archaic water rights, byzantine agreements, outdated infrastructure and the future of the west.

 

More

Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Muir, Frost, Harrison, Lindon.   These go without saying.  Happy Reading.  

The Boys on the Bus and That Championship Season

 

This Championship Wrestling team started in an innocuous moment in September 1971 when State Champ Senior wrestlers Ricky Licari and Damian Kovary, recruited Billy Joyce, Steve Schneider and me to wrestle and work out with them one fall afternoon.  I had known Licari and Schneider from an Amityville swim club and Billy from homeroom.  We were smart and strong and learned quickly, but more importantly we were still small, and Ricky said we had great potential for the challenging lower weight classes.  I wanted to swim or play hockey, but they weren’t sponsored sports yet, and we were too small for football or hoops.  So, we followed our new mentors.  These would be our people, our tribe.  I wrestled with them for four years until I broke an ankle senior year.  Then I went skiing and they went on to win the Championship.  Some times the fringe element tends to be marginalized and I was not much of a wrestler, but I was a team player.  I never missed a match.  I stuck with these guys and we are still friends today.  This is our story.  

Wrestling started in November under Coach Jefferies, but we didn’t start practice in the Small Gym until 600 PM when the Freshman Basketball Team finished.  Wrestling was a secondary sport at the time with used mats, hand-me-down singlets and a $800 annual budget.  We filled the time after school studying and giving Mrs. Agnes Hickman fits in the library.  It is no accident that these wrestlers were all good student athletes with high GPAs that would propel them to good colleges to become Doctors and Lawyers, Engineers and Entrepreneurs, Writers and Businessmen.

We turned up the heat in the Small Gym and put on plastic sweat suits to lose weight and practiced hard until 800 PM, learning the moves and getting in great shape.  The room smelt of sweat and Lysol and tasted like salt.  There is nothing as aerobic as wrestling except, perhaps, a 2-minute shift playing hockey.  But in wrestling we did 3 consecutive 2-minute shifts in a match, with overtime if necessary.  It was always anaerobic after the first period and if you didn’t have a miraculous second and third wind, you were toast.  In addition, most of us were losing 10% of our body weight in sweat and blood every week to wrestle in a lower weight class.  This might explain our eating insecurities later in life but that is another story.  Pound for pound these were the best athletes around and the sport demanded total commitment of body, soul and mind.

That year was a blur of pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow stuffed in the back of Licari’s frozen pick-up truck listening to “American Pie” and “Mississippi Queen” going home hungry at 9 PM or famishly eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches after Saturday matches.  We wrestled some good catholic schools and great public schools that year, including Hempstead in their new gym that looked like Madison Square Garden.  We were exhausted after just the handshakes and terrified after Paul Callahan got his eye ripped out, but the JV team won 57 – 3 portending greatness to come.  We didn’t travel far since we used the old retired CHS school bus that had no heat and one windshield wiper and could only go 45 mph on the LIE.  These ‘Boys on the Bus’ went undefeated and won the 1972 League Championship while Licari and Kovary won individual State Championships again that year while the rest of us watched and learned how to win.

The next year was different with Coach Rotondi when our pre-Nike motto was to just ‘Do It’ meaning - throw a half-nelson from anywhere and everywhere.  There were several more of us from the class of 75 including Joe Sampson, Massoni and Corsello.  Dugan, Dachille and Jimmy Finn joined us as well as the infamous Conway brothers. Terry Rogers won the 1973 States, and we got a better bus so we could go out to Syosset and Suffolk County and wrestle some new schools. Kevin Sampson led the way and started the Sampson family wrestling legacy at CHS.  

We were introduced into the 'team' concept that has since been appropriated by corporate America for higher productivity through binding interpersonal relationships.  Employees don't work hard now because they love Goldman Sacs or General Motors, they work hard because they don't want to let their teammates down.  Kind of a manipulation of human nature.  By 1974 our team began to grow wings.  Many of the frustrated football and soccer players and other good athletes began to join the team. There was Westerman and Souzzi, Reardon and Jack LeRoland, Casey, Squillace and Frank Nataro, Nuzzolese, Hess and Colin Carol, Quartararo, Derdak and Kim Uniack.  Puberty came and we all grew bigger and stronger.  Wrestling was cool and fun again and people began to come out and watch us. 

The biggest change was that George Dlugolonski became the coach.  He also coached soccer and was a relentless taskmaster with attention to detail.  He was barely six years older than us, and he was full of life and new ideas, a sense of humor and a fair disciplinarian.  I car-pooled daily with ‘Dugo’ to Massapequa, and he had a heater, quad-stereo and a fake mobile phone in his car and he felt like a big brother. He used to date my babysitter years before, but now had a serious partner Susan, who came to all our matches.  Dugo would ask me how practice was, and I would recommend fewer neck bridges and more fancy head lock moves, and he would listen.  We were peers and we had buy-in.  I was the worst wrestler because I was slow, lazy and didn't care who won but coach would spend as much time with me as the champs.  It is easy to coach champs but he spent as much time coaching the chumps about things other than wrestling.   It’s a funny thing that we began to believe in ourselves, and we started winning.  We were no back-room secondary sport, we were bona-fide athletes now and no longer invisible at the sock-hops.  Joyce, Schneider, Massoni and Finn led the way that year, but we all contributed, and we were finally Flyers.

Senior year rolled out as expected.  We won four out of five of our first matches against good public schools and that steeled us for the regular schedule.  We were 5-1 against our Catholic league opponents losing by only 2 points to our arch-rivals St John the Baptist.  Dugo kept us scheduled against more tough public schools and even his Alma Mater – Plainedge, and we won our last 5 matches against lesser opponents. We got our revenge against St Johns by winning the 1975 League Championship meet by 13.5 points with Joyce, Derdak and Massoni wining League Championships while Sampson, Schneider, Finn and Dugan contributed.

In the1975 State Championships, Joyce, Schneider and Derdak won handily. Joyce was the soul of the team, Schneider was the heart and Derdak was the tenacious grit.  Bill Joyce set the early example and pinned his undefeated nemesis in the first period of the finals, with a screaming figure four - split scissors, and everyone else followed suit by contributing mightily to the Carthaginian victory.   Joyce unanimously won Tournament MVP, then proudly dropped the microphone on his wrestling career.   It was his moment in time, and the teams as well.  This was Chaminade’s, and Coach Dugo’s, first of many State Championships that would follow in the next 40 years.  A winning culture was launched, and a dynasty was born.   We went home and ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches together to celebrate.  Lots of them. 

But trophies did not define this team, solidarity and camaraderie, loyalty and brotherhood, character and discipline did.  We had our special moments, but it was the day-to-day grind that made these guys heroes.  The way we developed from the fledgling, back-room wrestling program with an old bus and a new coach was heroic, and the way we trained hard with each other every day so that our matches were the easiest part of our week, was sublime.  There were no stars in the room, just a group of guys united by a common pursuit and a team effort fueled by our commitment to our school, our sport, and each other.  Fortes in Unitate.