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.