Share the Trails

 

After several cool, late spring days in the dessert riding on our own private White Rim Trail on the Lower Flint Trail in the Glen Canyon Recreation, we had exhausted the deliberate micro hikes in the slot canyons around our camp and decided we decided to head north to and higher for some cooler climes.  At the top of Indian Canyon between Price and Duchesne we found a nice cool and quiet campground on Reservation Ridge at 9400 feet that we never knew existed.  We congratulated ourselves for knowing how to read real maps and for finding the secret camping destinations in Utah that would take our entire lives to explore. 

After dinner I took a reconnaissance loop around the campground and, on the advice of some French Moto riders, I found an old ATV logging road.  It was technical and rocky, thin and steep but I put my e-bike in Turbo mode and was able to power up the 45-degree slopes without flipping over backwards, mainly because of 40 years of riding experience.  I decided it was ridable and that I would explore it the next morning when heart was fresh and my eyes were clear.   

My eyes are bad from falling on my head too much and do not process well dynamically, which causes me to fall on my head more, so it as a compounding effect, like compound interest of my brain.  My eyes can’t focus quickly so I have learned to look further up the trail.   My pulse had dropped to 30 beats per minute (bpm) a few years ago and my four chambers were uncoordinated.  So, they gave me a pace-maker that topped out at an orchestrated 120 bpm.  That didn’t allow me to ride very much but over the years I have convinced them to pick it up to 150 bpm.  I’ll buy the damn batteries.   The only downside is that if I exceed 150 bpm I can black out for a half minute or so, which is inconvenient, at least.  Without my Class-1 e-bike I would not be able to ride at all, and that is unacceptable. Mountain biking is apparently very dangerous, but I need to get out.

The next day after breakfast, I took off on the trail that was very steep, challenging and technical.  It wound through some great north facing forests and south facing clear cuts and I had to blaze some deadfall now and then to open the trail. It trended generally to the Northeast, and I figured it would contour around eventually to the campground entry road.  As I got further out, I realized that I was burning up battery power quickly on the unreal steep climbs and pushing my pulse rate.  I slowed my roll to save power and keep my pulse reasonable.  I soon realized that I had burned more than half my battery and therefore was unable to turn around and go back the way I came.  I became nervous and it became an official adventure at that point.  No one would find me out here. 

When worried I usually consider the worst-case scenario and then admit that, like a million times before, I would figure it out.  Comforted by that realization, I powered on.  I took some wrong turns and got lost a few more times but tended in the right direction and right before I ran out of juice, I found the road that led back to camp.  Tragedy narrowly averted, I pulled into camp where my wife and dog were, glad to see me, and I them. 

The point is, I would not be riding a bike without help and I would not have ridden this trail without a fair bike and some good skill for the great experience that makes me feel alive and nineteen again.  Some of my young or healthy friends will ride with me, as long as I ride in the back and do all the talking, so they don’t have to try to keep up.  Others are less inclusive and can’t stomach a ‘cheater’ that might challenge the exclusive right to trials to only those who are healthy, wealthy and wiled.  I just relish the opportunity to get out-and-about, see some nature, have an adventure and get some moderate exercise that won’t drain my battery or break my heart.  Ride on my friends, share the trails.  Ride a mile on my bike.

“I am Exalted by Water”

 

I am defined by water. I can’t imagine life without it.  I come from water and return to it whenever I can, daily, seasonally, yearly, constantly.  I was born on an Island, surrounded by water.  A Long Island near The City island.  My grandfather and father were in Public Water Works.  My first job was painting fire hydrants for my dad, Public Water Works.  My favorite job was being a lifeguard, languid and bittersweet.  My first sport was swimming, fast and furious.  My first friend was a high diver, daring and death defying.  My first love was a swimmer, warm, smooth and wet. My first broken arm required 9 casts since I kept jumping in the water with them on, lucky for me my uncle was my orthopedic.  My first major was Fluid Mechanics, Bernoulli, Newonian.  My first occupation was hydrology and hydraulics - surface water - repairing dams and rivers in the desert.  My retirement is spent partially on the central west coast where the sea is clean, blue and cold and I can watch it every day, even if I don’t go in much anymore.  Water encompasses and embodies me.  It is who I am.  We are all something.

 

My first recollection was of my dad taking me out in the ocean on his shoulders at Jones Beach and then launching me on a wave to ride towards the shore.  I must have been 6 or 8 and fearless.  The feeling of the ocean pitching me forward swiftly, all the way to the beach was incomprehensible. It felt alive, powerful and a little menacing.  Dad showed me how to catch waves myself, looking for sets with size and shape, and catching an early one before there was too much water on the beach.  It opened a new independent world to me, similar to learning to cross the street or tie my own shoes.  With his supervision, I moved out into deeper water to catch better waves, without losing my toehold of the seafloor that kept me from washing out to sea with the mysterious Under Toad.  Emboldened, I dropped into a big one but I was late and inside and It flipped me up the curl and crashed me down to the floor and sat on my chest for what felt like eternity.  Sputtering to the surface eventually and crying for my mother, I raced to the shore but found my dad there laughing and smiling incongruously.  WTF I said with my limited lexicon as he shook a mound of sand out of my little red surf shorts.  He asked me how I liked the ‘washing machine’ and I knew instantly what he meant.  He said next time drop my head and hands and go out the back door.  I asked him if there was anything else I needed to know and he just said yes.  I wasn’t sure what that meant but would figure it out after a PBJ sandwich, a Coke and the half-hour mandatory rest that seemed to be the prudent law of the beach. 

Conversely, I was swimming with my stepdaughter in big surf one day and she got caught in a riptide.  She wasn’t a strong swimmer, and I didn’t want her to be alone, so I followed her out.  She was besides herself due to the lack of control and distance building from the shore.  I calmed her down as we tread water and asked her calmly what she thought we should do.  She wanted to swim to an adjacent jetty and climb out.  We looked at the jetty and saw big waves cashing violently on it so that was out of the question.  I told her it was a rip current that would eventually dissipate and let us go in deeper water, but we couldn’t fight it. 

The lifeguards looked oblivious so I told her to swim parallel to the beach with me until we could find an inbound current.  We did this for a while with me asking her periodically if she was all right, and she would say yes, until she didn’t and said she was struggling and going down in the turbulent waves.  I told her swimming is 90% relaxing and calm breathing and I had her float on her back with her hands on my shoulders while I swam slowly.  She laid her head back and breathed rhythmically, trying to relax and recover.  Finally, we felt a current flowing towards the beach, and we turned and rode the waves in.  As we walked from the water a lifeguard ran over and asked if we were ok. I said YES and she said NO but we walked back to our blanket for some tuna sandwiches, a beer and the mandatory half hour beach nap.  After a while I asked her if she wanted to get back on the horse and go for a swim.  She said NO, never again. 

 

After freshman year of high school, I reported to our summer swim Club on the Great South Bay for our first practice.  There was a new saltwater swimming pool built between the docks of the bay and the nautical Clubhouse and lawn.  After practice I walked past the women’s locker room on the canal and out swung my old fiend Gina Sweeny in a bright yellow homemade polka dot bikini.  I didn’t recognize her out of her one-piece racing suit and she swung her hips that could sink ships, and brand knew tips way up firm and high, like most young women know how to do, instinctually, like holding a baby on their hip.  I had been in a carpool with Gina for years and knew she was crazy and funny, the best swimmer in the Club and exactly 10 months younger than me, when that was import in swimming and life.  Swimmers are not like racehorses, all born on Jan 1.  This woman Regina was all new to me and I was coming of the age where I would appreciate it. She was an athletic Goldie Hawn with a butterfly upper body and strong legs.  Va va va boom.  Wasting no time, for if you snooze you lose, I asked her to go for a swim, and we spent the rest of the day playing water ballet and swimming through each other’s legs blowing bubbles and laughing innocently.  We would spend the next four years growing up together swimming and sailing and going back behind the boats to smooch.  She loved Cat Stephens, Winnie the Pooh and me, not necessarily in that order.  We all love something. I eventually grew up and moved away from Gina to landlocked Indiana and worse yet, Utah.  All the kids still swim and sing:

 

Gina Sweeny had a ten-foot weenie,

And she showed it to the guy next door.

He thought it was a snake,

And wrapped it with a rake,

Now it’s only five foot four.

 

I also had a great friend, appropriately named Willie Hooper, who was a great swimmer and diver, football, basketball and baseball player.  Not William or Bill or Will but Willie.  With rugged Brad Pitt good looks, a baseball build, blonde hair and blue eyes, he personified and espoused ‘cool’ and was funny as snot.  We would bounce on the high diving boards all day long, doing clown dives and serious dives in our Bonner Bob, banana hammock Speedos.  One day we decided to skip swim practice and smoke surreptitiously in the white rocking chairs on the screen porch, incognito.  It was a blast watching the others work until big coach Reese snuck up behind us and banged our heads together and made us swim a double practice that day. 

When Willie wore a Dungaree Jacket with his Varsity A letter from Amityville High School on it, my dad asked him what the A was for, Willie looked down at the letter, perplexed for the moment, and then smiled and said, ‘A is for Outstanding’.  Not the sharpest tool in the shed but he was an outstanding guy with a big heart.

Despite him smoking 2 packs a day at age 12, my only goal was to beat him in the breast-stroke and in our last race we tied for third.  When we both sauntered up to the podium the coach was confused about what to do with the one ribbon.  Willie took it and ripped it in half and gave me the top part with a grin. He lost the Club Swimmer of the Year that summer by one half a point, but he didn’t care because Gina won it instead and we both loved Gina.  She accepted the trophy that winter in a homemade yellow polka-dot dress with Willie, in a sporty white turtleneck, at her side.  ‘I don’t recognize you with your clothes on’,’ we liked to say in the winter.

One day I came home from a two-week wrestling camp and found him in the Clubhouse smooching with Gina.  I asked him what was going on and he said he was making out with my girlfriend.  I said OK but did they want to go swimming when they were done.  We all got up and swam for the rest of the day and summer like nothing had ever happened.  And it didn’t.

Years later the three of us were drinking by candlelight at the Club on the night of the NYC blackout.  We went home to Willie’s house, across from the Amityville Horror house so we could ring their bell and run like old times, and Willie could show us his new motorcycle.   We all hopped on it to make believe we were riding.  Of course, we lost our balance and fell to the floor of the garage, becoming harmlessly pinned under the bike and laughing hysterically.  Willie’s dad came out to ask what we thought we were doing and Willie chortled that we were just going for a ride.  We were locked in the garage for the rest of the night, but we didn’t really mind.  Willie was haunted by fire and smoke and burned out young at 42, from lung cancer.  We all have something.  But we all still swim and sing along:

 

Every party has a pooper,

That’s why we invited you,

party pooper, Willie Hooper.

Follow the Water 1 - Overture

Picture this; swollen streams cascading out of the east face of a recently glaciated range, rolling down into lush wetlands, verdant grasslands as high as the belly of a Buffalo.  Imagine meadows incised with numerous meandering streams lined with Willows and clustered with Cottonwoods.  Envision floods over-flowing banks and beaver dams, spilling into a wide and undefined floodplain, saturating the natural sponge of wetland organics and alluvial deposits, recharging near surface and deep aquifers that slowly bleed their stored volumes to keep streams flowing all year round.  This was the Wasatch back, Park City, Parley’s Park, the Snyderville Meadow, a mere 10,000 year ago, a hydrologic system in balance.

Then came Parley Pratt with his toll booth, Sam Snyder with his lumber mill, H. C. Kimball with his junction, the US Army, the miners and eventually the farmers.  The trees were cut for mines, homes and heat, the mines drained ground and surface water, and the meadows were grazed and farmed.  The streams were diverted to better irrigate the meadows, Water Rights were claimed and shared, divided and decreed.  From Thayne’s Canyon and McLeod Creek, to White Pine, Willow Creek and Spring Creek, the upper reaches of East Canyon were developed.  Water was distributed according to need, for beneficial use, first come first served.  Disputes about flooding and drought were handled after Church, in the bars or at the ditches and head gates with swinging fists and shovels.  Everyone took their share of the surplus and the scarcity.  The meadow still flooded, the streams still flowed.

 

Flash to the present; the boomers have taken over, Trophy homes cluster the meadows and Mc Mansions dot the hillside.  Shallow and deep wells mine ancient waters to slake the unquenchable thirst, like a commodity.  Water disputes are not handled with reason and respect but are dragged vindictively through the courts - wasting time, money, energy and water.  Ski resorts and Sundance, subsistence agriculture and snowmaking, empty golf courses and vacant lawns, growing demand and shrinking supply, change the hydrologic regime from beneficial use to best-bang-for-the-buck.

 

A massive sewer pipe surreptitiously moves waste water away and provides a giant gravel under drain for its entire length.  Pavement and pumps, under drains and pipes protect the subdivisions in the wetlands.  Ski resorts and snowmaking, mountain grazing and global warming change the hydrologic cycle to water, energy, food, people, money.  It rains in January, it snows in July, snowmelt starts in March or ends in August.  Streams are put in pipes, ditches are abandoned and natural channels are made into plazas and parking lots.  Spring floods are a nuisance, to whisk quickly away downstream or just divert nefariously towards neighbors. 

 

Summer drought is solved, not with conservation and cooperation but with a checkbook.  Water flows towards money, yet entitled farmers use thousands of dollars’ worth of water to grow hundreds of dollars of crops, just to protect their rights and speculate on this new commodity, this old dichotomy.  Disputes are not handled with reason and respect but are dragged vindictively through the courts - wasting time, money, energy and water. It is said, however, that it is better to live at the headwaters of a system with a shovel than at the bottom end with all the water rights in the world. The water has been subdued, the meadow no longer fills in the spring, and the streams no longer flow in the summer, and the Great Salt Lake at the bottom of the system is dangerously drying up.  Is this evolution towards a better world for all or is it lifestyle entropy trending towards a more random and chaotic state of self-absorption.  Choose to be kind, be cool, evolve.