DAM HORSES

The Rancher starts before sunrise, at first light, dawn of a new day.  After a dark, heavy breakfast he heads out to his pasture with a few halters to track down a couple of horses for the day, like his family has been doing for hundreds of years. "Here'a'ya".  With a carrot or an apple, it is easy, most of the time, and some of the horses come to him when he clicks his tongue intimately.  He gets the feisty one for his’self, the young one for his boy and the gentle gelding for the gov’ment guy.  Even a mare and her foal know where he is goin’ and they want to go with. ‘Not this time’.  But the others balk and stall when loaded into the trailer with a groan and a grumble from both man and beast.  "Goaaoon’yup". 

The drive to the trailhead isn’t long but it is up hill and the diesel truck lugs in the cold morning dew.  It is August but the first hard frost has come and the trees are turning, especially the red Canadian Maples.  At the trailhead there are other acquainted ranchers with familiar horses.  ‘Moanin’.  They are all dam owners going up together for the annual inspection, and to turn the last of the water out.  They wear their favorite dirty cowboy hat and boots with Wranglers and Carhartt’s ('No Levies, Patygonia or Ray Banns'), gloves and an opaque dress shirt, so as you can see yis Garments.  It’s a special occasion; it’s a stockman party. 

As they casually, but systematically unload the horses and gear, a broken down old truck pulls up, with a faded State insignia.  A fuzzy hipster parks and hops out, glad to be early, glad to be there.  ‘Moanin’.  This ain’t his first rodeo.  Despite his long hair and gentile attitude, he is familiar with the crew, almost friendly.  ‘I’m from the gov’ment and I’m here ta help.’  They all laugh and the ice is broken.  The young dam engineer; isn’t LDS, doesn’t hunt, doesn’t chop wood or carry water, isn’t married and has no kids, catch and releases fish, likes Obama and believes in climate change.  He has six strikes against him before he gets out of the truck or opens his mouth, but they don’t pack the hanging rope or hold it against him.  ‘He’s a doer, he’s a goer, he’s a keeper.’  So, they help him saddle-up his favorite horse, Daisy. 

The dam man walks around the steed and pets it, trying to establish a relationship that will last all day, but the horse already knows this guy is from New York City.  It is just a matter of time to show him who’s boss and scrape him off on some tree or overhanging branch.  It ain’t her first rodeo either.  He is wearing bike shorts under his blue jeans and lathers toxic Army grade Deet bug spray on his open skin.  The real Caballeros surreptitiously wear stockings underneath their Wranglers to protect their balls, ass and knees, wearing some secret Avon softener that smells sweet and sour to the bugs and the Señoritas.  

Every year they do this ride and no matter if it is a bolt of lightning and thunder or a flapping poncho, someone was going High-Ho-Silver over the handlebars or off the back, leaping streams and galloping across meadows, hanging on for dear life.  Someone is going to get hurt, probably him.  It is hard enough spending a day in the mountains, let alone hauling 1200 pounds of attitude with you.  The dam safety rodeo they call it. 

They are going up to inspect a couple of dams in the High Uinta Wilderness Area, a place ‘where man is a visitor’ with no roads or machines.  Ranchers don’t hike.  Their legs are bowled and their boots have pointed toes and high-heals.  So, they take horses and make a day out of it.  Just like they used to do in the drought years when they were done farming early.  They would go up into the mountains and look for gaps around existing lakes they could dam up for another turn of water and another week of farming the next year.  Now they go up with the gov’ment guy who tells them to fix things and writes them nasty letters to document their liability.  But they get along anyway and bridge their discrepancies with cryptic conversation, while making a short story long and a long ride shorter.

 ‘Ya think it’s gonna rain?’ 

‘Somewhere’. 

‘Only fools and newcomers predict the weather.’ 

‘Which one are you?’ 

‘How ‘bout them Yankees?’

After some name reacquaintance, and bit and saddle hitch check, they head up a dusty, cobble, manure packed trail without consulting a map or restroom.  Relationships are re-forged between man and beast, men and men, beast and beast as a pecking order is formed according to age, experience and temerity.  They put the tenderfoot in the middle, like wolves do, so they can watch and protect him.  The air is cool and drying and the leaves are ‘going off’.  The beginning is always fresh with optimism and goodwill while the horses have a little hop in their gate that is not yet a ball busting trot.  It is a beautiful day and what could go wrong?

The trail begins to steepen quickly to the point that it felt like they were rock climbing on horses.  As the horses approach a difficult section, they bunch up and ram their snouts into the butt in front of them.  This is disconcerting to rider and steed.  At a particular pinch point the horse in front pauses to contemplate a 3-4 foot high, bouldering move on the tight trail.  After being nudged by the horse behind, he makes the leap of faith, planting its front feet firmly on top of the boulder while its back hooves scrape frantically at the face and the rider yells something about a ‘shit show’.  After his initial good-faith effort the horse looks behind to see if here is room to bail but the tailing horses urge it on.  So, with herculean effort, it stretches its neck out and mantles up with all the strength in its front end and somehow drags its body up the rock where it turns sideways to examine what it had just done.  The next horse is already duplicating the same move with it’s rider holding on to the saddle horn with one hand and his hat with the other.  The heck with the horse, save the hat.   

After all the horses have succeeded unscathed they rest wide eye on the steep trail.   ‘Taking a blow’ nervously thru their flaring nostrils, they are beasts of burden, resigned to the task at hand and resilient to the possible consequences.  While these silent sentinels stand stolid, a young cowboy slips off carefully to untwine his reigns from around the foot of his horse.  The horse is reluctant to lift his foot from his precarious purchase when asked with a ‘haaall’ grunt from his master.  He finally does comply gradually, but when the cowboy tries to slide the strap over the hoof, the horse balks and plunges his foot back down catching the cowboys finger in the leather, popping the nail end off.  The poor cowboy jumps back dancing painfully and sucking on his hemorrhaging digit cursing in ineffective parochial parody; ‘flippin, shoot, dang, doody, number 2’.   The others dismount carefully and apply pressure and a tourniquet and wrap the finger in a dirty rag.  The injured cowboy determinedly agrees to stay on the ride for continuity and convenience and holds his hand above his head to keep it from pounding with pain.  ‘Cowboy up.’  They ride on.

The next challenge is a muddy meadow with some new snow in the shade.  The horses clomp aggressively through the mud and posthole more carefully through the snow.  Riders are all reminded to ‘give them their head’ and not force anything that will snap a leg.  They are also told to stay on, for if they fall off, the horse will try to walk on them for traction and  purchase.   Not a comforting thought but they all make it though with only one old nag rolling in the mud, probably on purpose, in revolt.  Coming up lame, the horse is relieved of its rider, and a cowboy is forced to walk.  They each ‘take a spell, cause they hate having to hoof it’.

Not able to keep up with the group, some of the cowboys hang on the tail of a lead horse so they can walk faster with the help.  Most of the horses don’t mind but one gets antsy and rears up and prances around like a madman.  The walker forgets to let go and is dragged around, holding on to the tail with one hand and his hat with the other.  When the horse eventually settles, the battered walker goes to the front and yanks the halter and slaps the horse in anger with an open hand, pinching his ears.  The owner quickly dismounts and slaps the angry walker with his hat and leads his horse in concentric circles, gentling him with soft words and a light touch.   No more tail rides for this one.

They arrive at a small dam and hobble the horses in a meadow to hop around and feed for the few hours it will take to inspect the local dams.  They don’t want any of them philly’s heading back to the barn without their riders.  The dams are a hundred years old and stable but desperately in need of immediate and long-term repairs.  Built mainly out of local rocks, silt, sand with a Fresno full of clay for the impermeable core, and a Johnson Bar for control.  A Fresno was a type of metal scraper, and the Johnson bar was the lever used to operate it.  These dams leak like sieves, but the natural soil size distribution filters prevent them from eroding to much internal material.  The over-steep slopes won’t withstand the design earthquake, and the small spillways won’t pass the official 100-year flood, even though they already have, many times.

A plan is negotiated with the stakeholders, that is practical and affordable to the shareholders, given the limited access for machinery, materials and money.  Temporary Band-Aid solutions are compromised but these dams will eventually have to be stabilized or rolled over to slow breaching with low hazard heights.  They plan for a future dam thickness that can withstand overtopping while still promoting a safe and healthy fishery behind them.  The water storage will be moved to a lower new dam that can be easily monitored and maintained.  They call it progress.  

The end of an era is upon them as they think of their ancestors who built these old dams during drought years of the Dust Bowl, Dirty Thirties. They still ride when putting the cattle 'out to the public land' in the spring, and taking them home to feed on home-grown hay after the first snow, but more and more work is done on ATVs that 'stay where you park them'.   Their iconic and comic, mythic cowboy adventures will come to an end, as their land will be turned into condos so they can go south in their new motor homes.  They know their kids don’t want the ranch, but they realize that if they stop working they will die.  Cowboys don’t play Golf or Pickleball.

They stop, after the inspections, to have some dinner, take a nap and open-up the rusted outlets for the fall.  Stories are exchanged with each culture living vicariously through the others.  City slicker engineers long to be cowboys with the simple solitary life, living and dying with nature.  The cowboys long to see the big city with its big buildings and throngs of beautiful people. 

Mounting up to go home feels strange with new aches and pains and the loss of the romantic journey they started so long ago. The sunny day has turned cloudy with mountain showers menacing.   Raincoats come out as the afternoon breeze picks up.  Soon, one cowboy falls asleep in the saddle and ultimately slides off, waking up surprised just before he hits the ground.   At a rocky stream crossing, Daisey slips and goes down on her side and on her dam man’s leg.  He can’t get out but his leg isn’t broken.  Thankfully his head is above the water line of the stream.  The cowboys dismount laughing and coax Daisy to her feet as the other horses drink and graze on the ripe riparian grasses hanging in broken bunches from both sides of their mouths.  Just another day at the office. 

The sun is setting when they get to the trucks and silently load up, too sore and tired to make small talk.  They take their gloves off to shake hands, not their hats.  They are not golfers. One firm pump with eye contact and a shoulder slap for good 'ol friends is all it takes and they head their separate ways.  The Rancher gets home well past supper; he pulls into his pasture and lets the horses run free or roll in the long grass.  'Highyaaa'.  The day ends after sunset, the last light, dusk of a lifestyle.

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.  My grandfather and father were in Public Water Works on The Island.  My first job was painting fire hydrants for my dad for the Public Water Works.  My favorite job was being a lifeguard.  My first sport was swimming.  My first friend was a high diver, wild, reckless and fun.  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 it on, lucky my uncle was my orthopedic.  My first major in college was Fluid Mechanics.  My first occupation was hydrology and hydraulics - surface water - repairing dams and restoring rivers in the desert, a place defined by the lack of water.  My time is spent skiing in deep powder snow and swimming on the coast where the water is clean, blue and clear.  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 the beach and then launching me on a wave to ride towards the shore.  I must have been 6 or 7 and fearless.  The feeling of the ocean pitching me forward quickly, all the way to the beach was profound. It felt alive, powerful and a little menacing.  Dad showed me how to catch waves myself, looking for sets of 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 ocean floor 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 might need to know about the recklessness of water, 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 law of the beach. 

Conversely, I was swimming with my step-daughter 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 her lack of control and distance building from the shore.  I calmed her down as we tread-water and asked her 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 had to be patient and couldn’t fight it. 

The lifeguards looked oblivious to us 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.  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 angrily said NO as we walked back to our blanket for some tuna sandwiches, a beer and the mandatory half hour 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 surviving freshman year of high school, barely keeping my head above water, I reported to our summer Swim Club on the Great South Bay.   I was my first swim practice in our new, fast, floaty, saltwater pool built between the docks-of-the-bay and the Corinthian styled Clubhouse. The spacious lawn rolled down to the foreboding canal full of hackle-heads and blow-fish, electric-eels and manta-rays, horse-crabs and barnacle-bills.  No one ever wanted to go in the canal full of brackish, back-water, seaweed and slime.  

One day I was walking with my sister along the boardwalk along the canal with a quarter my mom gave us for French fries.  It was a big day for we usually got a dime for a frozen Milky Way bar, so we were in fat-city.  I jokingly showed her how a ‘millionaire feeds the ducks’ with a fake throw of the quarter into the air but I mistakenly let it go and it sailed into the canal.  We were horrified and she told me to go get it.  I said, “not for a million bucks”, that being our price point of the day.  She said, “I might”.  I few years later I maliciously threw her up high in the air and into that canal, out of spite, arrogance or jealousy.  I can see here her flying, kicking her legs and saying how she hated me, before she hit the water. 

But the canal was diabolically worse for sailors who had to tack their boats into the ubiquitous afternoon south winds to get out to the bay.  Being only 100 feet wide, and less with boats tied up on each side, so the tacking was quick and furious. If you did not keep up, you would go backwards or flip and turtle your mask in the smelly, toxic, anaerobic mud in the bottom, with the entire club watching, laughing, commenting and yelling advice.  It was the ultimate ignominy, in the ugliest of places. 

After swimming practice one day, I walked past the women’s locker room off 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, like most young women know how to do, instinctually[1].  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[2].  This emergent woman Regina, way up firm and high, was all new to me and I was coming of age where I could appreciate it. She was an athletic Goldie Hawn with a butterfly upper body and strong legs.  Va-va -va voom.  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 and smoke cigarettes. 

Gina loved Cat Stephens, Winnie the Pooh and me, not necessarily in that order.  We all love something. I unfortunately grew up and moved on to more aqueous women named Mary Anne, Mary Beth, Mary, Beth and Mary Ellen, away from Gina to landlocked Indiana and worse yet, Utah.  Mary Anne was a tall drink of water, drank ‘Beevos’, a ton of fun and way over my head.  Mary Beth had deep blue eyes and wavy blond hair, was savvy and smart and taught me a lot, but eventually got hip to my tricks.  Mary was voted ‘best butt on campus’ two years running and we could talk all night long but ultimately she was too attractive for me.  Beth was the Deans Daughter and Editor or our Stems and Seeds Engineering Newsletter but too shy for me.  Mary Ellen was a good friend who I still text all the time and visit yearly.    Gina became a champion swimmer, a great beauty and a wonderful person. It just wasn’t our time or place.   It is as important when, where and how you fall in love as it is to whom. 

I also had a great aquatic 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 in our Bonner Bob, Banana Hammock Speedos, all day long, doing clown dives and serious dives, but not knowing the difference between the two.  We had a sense of where we were in the air and were comfortable there.  One day we decided to skip swimming practice and smoke cigarettes surreptitiously in the white rocking chairs on the screen porch of the Clubhouse, incognito.  It was a blast watching the others work hard 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 Letter-A, from Amityville High School on it, my dad asked him what the A was for, meaning what sport.  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 Junior Clubhouse smooching Gina.  We shared girlfriends in those days, including Joan Zahusky who was quiet and had three huge brothers or Bobbie Waltz with long blonde hair and the biggest boat in the club – The Aquastar.  There was Nancy McCurdy who had deep blue eyes and scored 100 on her Algebra Regents in 8^th grade, Merle Cromerty who could play bridge and lived in the Amityville Horror house and Dianne Englert who was a sassy double D by 13.  We had quite a harem back then because of Willies athletic good looks and my quick wit.  I asked Willie what was going on and he said he was making-out with my girlfriend.  I said OK, but did they want to play water-ballet and bounce on the diving boards when they were done.  We all got up and swam for the rest of the day and summer like nothing had ever happened. 

Years later the three of us were drinking by candlelight on the night of the NYC second blackout.  We got kicked out eventually for changing the dinner specials sign to spell something more obscene than clam chowder.  We went home to Willie’s house in the dark, across from the Amityville Horror house with a full-sized baseball field in the front yard, so 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. 

We had a bevy of friends back then, older and younger, we hung out with; mellow surfer dude Jack Ireland[3], sailor boy Hugh Rawlins[4], the be-speckled professor Frank Parlini[5], my brother Mapo - Maude[6], tall water-skier triathlete Jacky Meehan[7], wrestler Ricky Licarre[8], suntan sun glasses Tom Fleming[9] , sleepy Stewart Weber[10], bumptious Pat McCormick[11] and his brothers Chris and Brian.[12]   I learned to play football with these guys, bare-foot and bare-chested on the lawn near the pool.  The Lifeguards would try to chase us away because we were ‘wearing it out’, but we wondered aloud what they were saving it for.  The gals came out to sunbathe and feign ignoring us.  There was blocking and tackling, trick-run plays and reverses, but mostly it was passing.  They taught me to square-out and square-in, button hook, stop and go, post, pylon, pirouette, Statue of Liberty and razzle-dazzle but my favorite route was to just go long.  My dad said I was a gum-shoe with small hands who should play quarterback, but I could catch anything so I just wanted to play wide receiver. 

We would alternate calling plays and playing QB and three completions would get you a first down, but we were never that patient.  Willie was QB and asked what I wanted to do.  I said, ‘Go Long’.  He said, ‘Real Long’ with a wink.  I was double teamed by the older McCormick brothers, so I gave a few jukes at the line and headed down field, fast, far, furious.  We were neck and neck, stumbling on each other when Willie launched the ball as far as he could throw.  At full speed we were running out of grass before the boardwalk and the spooky canal.  I didn’t care.  There comes a time for every boy to define himself, as a man with the older kids and to himself, and this was mine. 

When we hit the board-walk the McCormick brothers stopped instantly, out of discretion and sanity, and I kept going, launching my 80-pound frame off the edge out into the air, hovering ten feet above the dirty water.  With nothing else to watch for anymore, I now located Willie’s pass, caught it and tucked it away for the crash into the canal.  I came up with the ball in one hand and the entire crew, even the girls, yelling down at me in wonder, astonishment and disgust.  I had to swim several hundred yards in the slime, but I didn’t care. I became a legend that day and I swam with pride on my back, with the ball on my chest, squirting chocolate fountains in the air from my mouth that would make The Bellagio jealous.  

My brazen disregard to the dangers of flight and the deplorables in the canal came to define me as reckless.  As reckless as water.  We are all defined by something, but we are all also defined by water.  It is what we are, 70% at birth.   It is also what defines 70% our beautiful little blue dot to the rest of the universe, this planet dominated by nitrogen and oxygen, hydrogen and carbon, ice and clouds, but mostly by water.  Be what you are.  Be where you are.  Be who you are.  Flow like water.

---

[1] Like they know how to hold a baby on their hips

[2] Swimmers are not like racehorses; not all are born on Jan 1.

[3] California and Hawaii eventually

[4] Bad bike crash with brain damage

[5] Designed jets for Boeing but died of tongue cancer

[6] Colonel in the Pentagon

[7] State Champ – taught me to drink - we rode bikes 160 miles in one day

[8] State Champ – taught me to wrestle and sing American pie

[9] Male Model - NYC

[10] High Diver -Delaware

[11] Sing-Sing prison in Ossining NY

[12] Played lacrosse for Cornell and the Navel Academy

Supply and Demand Recreation Scheduling

Warning.  What follows are the thoughts of an entitled, whiney old, lifelong resident and recent Pickle Ball aficionado but do not necessarily represent the thoughts of the pickle ball community, or truthfully, anybody else.  The following may prove toxic to the young and athletic, good-looking and taxpaying members of this town, but I feel compelled to speak up. 

I remember when Bonnie Park and Jody Graham started Basin Recreation and my wife served as Chairwoman of the Board when the horse people were trying to take over the Basin, so I have some history with the organization, it’s mission and it’s madness.  I have served on County Boards and know the challenge of taxpayers as customers and clients, shareholders and stakeholders, in an affluent resort town.  I know, and like, many of the employees who serve their fee-paying clients daily with their qualified and courteous contributions to our county.  They know we are the customers, and as Nordstrom's and Deer Valley say, the customer is always right.

I know I am a worn-out old guy with no remaining athleticism or skill, with nothing better to do, that likes to waste his mornings before nap time with whacking Pickle Balls at other old people, women, altzhimers patients and handicap players. I played handball as a NYC kid, paddleball with my dad for haircuts as a teen, racquetball for dates in college and squash for macho respect after that.  It is all the same game but I understand the natural lack of respect for our ilk, since I scoffed at P-ball before I started playing, but it is moderate, low impact, social exercise that we play with friends and family. For six hours a week I am not invisible to attractive, younger women in Lycra or tennis skirts.  I also know we can appear haughty and rude when we don’t get our way, or say thank-you enough when we do.  As Don Draper said ‘that’s what the money is for.'  But we just are frustrated, non-athletes posing as Olympians of the whiffle ball courts. I get it that it is a silly game with a silly name like Cornhole, that gets no respect, but it is social, sporty and fun nonetheless.

I see lately that several big recreational bond issues that included more pickle ball courts have been rejected because of the exorbitant price and taxpayer fatigue.  Usually if something has open space, trails and recreation in the title we are all-in but things seem to be changing, and I am sorry for that.  This in spite of the fact that voters usually pay half the taxes of the non-voting homeowners who make up more than half the district.  So we have been turning down improvements lately that someone else is primarily paying for. We can be ‘make do’ people if we have to but that is like cutting bus service or closing liquor stores because they are too successful, to do more with less.  As Yogi said, ‘no one goes there anymore, it is too busy’.

I understand that the goal is to make as many diverse people happy as possible and provide a wide variety of opportunity to all participants, but I find a serious lag between supply and demand I cannot ignore any longer.  While 50 people play P-ball and wait for a court on summer mornings at Willow Creek, contiguous tennis courts stand empty waiting for someone to play.  There is no effort to fill those courts with temporary nets that could certainly yield if someone comes to play tennis.  In the winter the same 50 P-ball people line up to pay and play indoors but must stare at adjacent empty basketball courts reserved for phantom basketball players that could certainly yield if they ever choose show-up.  Reserving these courts for the chosen few who don’t show, only helps to preserve the expectation and exacerbate the conflict.  If half of life is showing up, scheduling should the other half.

I’m thinking that we don’t need any more pickle ball courts, just some more elastic scheduling and proactive planning priorities that will serve the most customers.  Pickleball players could play primarily in the morning, basketball players after school and tennis players in the evenings, if that’s what supply/demand dictates.  Flexibility can be built in to accommodate the non-conformists at times but not dictate inefficiently to all others, all the time.  Staff may have to focus at managing this and directors may have to do a better job ‘managing by walking around’ to see that their supply chain is meeting the changing demand. This is all the management rage these days, along with teams and Zoom.

We all remember the 1775 Adam Smith free market where subsidies and disruption of the supply/demand curves lead to inefficiencies, monopolies and government intervention.  I hope that the constituents, customers, clients, shareholders, stakeholders, staff, directors, board, County Council and Managers can come together to help us live with what we have, before requesting expensive and politically unpopular remedies or renovations.  We can all collaborate for the most common good and cooperate for the peak public welfare without throwing a lot of money at it.  If we are smart, we can make-do. 

Choose Hard

 

When I was a kid I went to grammar school to learn reading, writing and arithmetic, to play well with others on teams and to define myself individually.  Basically, we were taught how to learn, process and retain.  It was a lark and I underperformed, but I knew it could not last.  In time I must put aside my childish ways.  So, I rejected the easy, local pinhead-public high school and regional social-coed catholic school for a macho-male prep school in The City, where I learned how to think and study hard, compete casually with my peers and socialize successfully with the opposite sex. 

For college I also chose to go to the best school that I got into, that would challenge and simulate me to my limits.  I chose a studious Engineering major so I could get a good job after 4 years, in transportation or water.  It was brutal and Calculus intensive for the first few years to weed out the interlopers and ineligibles and the  uncommitted and undeserving. 

Little did I know that they were not just teaching integers and integrals but exercising the Prefrontal Cortex Lobe of our brains to be problem solvers, direct complex thoughts, achieve goals and generally see the world as engineers.  It was like going to the gym for our brains, every day for two years, to excel at what they call the Executive Functions and Critical Thinking. 

We learned to break big problems down into well-defined and solvable small ones by considering what data we had, what equations we needed, what variables we could rationally exclude and what ones we could guess at with reasonable error averaging and bracketing.  We identified what assumptions were sensitive and needed more work or data and what were the risk probabilities, consequences and costs of our analysis.  How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.

I imagine that this is why pre-meds take Organic, Inorganic, Bio-Chemistry,  and Anatomy to teach them to memorize and derive.  Or why they make it hard on intern and resident doctors, working 48-hour shifts so don’t they miss interesting cases and provide continuity of care and so they can think on their feet if they are tired or distracted.  Or why lawyers are scared to death, worked to death and bored to death with the Socratic Method in Law School, to train them in pressurized analytical and critical thinking and for the difficult  profession that requires courage, tenacity, and flexibility.  They all make it hard on purpose.  So we can make the good little life choices that define our destiny.

When I got out of school, I felt that I didn’t know anything about being an engineer but I had confidence that I knew how to think and learn.  I took this training into Traffic Engineering in The City but didn’t like living where there is traffic.  So I moved out west and studied more holistic Hydrology and Hydraulics, Water Resources and Fluid Mechanics, since there is not much water out west, it is important there and the skiing is better. I finally used all my training and intelligence and chose easy, for me, for the quality of life thing.  Life doesn't have to be that hard.  It's not always about work and money, problem solving and challenge.  It is about people, places and pleasurer.

You can get undergraduate and graduate degrees in hydrology but it is not as math oriented and technical.  I chose the hard way, inadvertently, to see the world differently than some of my colleagues who have not had the Frontal Lobe exercise that I have enjoyed. 

I tend to look at things more specifically, numerically and probabilistic, for better or worse,  instead of generally and organically deterministic.  I might look at a million different probabilities of the worst or most likely flood instead of a standard cookbook 100-year flood or rainfall.  I might model upstream backwater hydraulics affects in rivers rather than hydrological downstream capacities or depth.    I may create regressions from past event data to predict future probabilities rather than physically based, hypothetical variables to estimate flood peaks and volumes.  I might create a pipe network analysis to determine system interactions based on pressure, flow, velocity and head instead of static pipe capacity based on area and velocity. 

There is no judgement or value given to either view since we need diversity in thought and perspective, but I wonder if my efforts would have been better spent studying more geology, business, economics, politics, environment, biology, chemistry or computers.  A more well-rounded view of water quality could be helpful or business and personnel management since everything comes down to people and money. 

Our biggest hydrology problems now involve the dearth of water for the Great Salt Lake, the Colorado River, California, groundwater aquifers,  or any place experiencing unsustainable growth and use.  These problems are complex and involve surface and groundwater conjunctive use, politically opposed stakeholders and economically competitive shareholders.  

Communication of the issues is critical, like climate change and predictive model results, historical precedents and water rights as well as artificial boundaries of basins, states and countries.  The nuance and essence of these issues are not just an engineering issue and take all aspects of critical thinking to resolve. 

We are done with the low hanging fruit and are now left with the hard issues and hard solutions.  We procrastinate constantly until these issues become critical (or a fabricated matter of national security) and are worth the emergency, reactive, political capital it will take to address them.  We have chosen hard, as we usually do, and it will be hard to solve, and taxing on a lot of the participants.  

Look to our diversity of expertise and experience and look past our separate cubby holes and self-absorbed silos.  Stay in your lane with what you know, but see the entire road for what really is and what can be.  The solutions will not be easy or simple, unbiased or fair.  They will be complicated and complex, difficult and hard or else they will be unfair, unfinished and unreasonable. 

 When in doubt, Choose Hard. 

Unmitigated Growth in Park City

 Boom, Burden, and the Choices Ahead

This is an Ai article I created in less than 5 minutes.  It is not telling us anything that we don’t already know.  But it is prescient in cutting to the  chase through all the noise.  It is alarming in how good it is and how it ends with Tom Clyde's mantra of regional cooperation.  Not surprising since it uses the Park Record and the Wall Street Journal as  it's sources.  It has moments of hiccups, hallucinations and hypocrisy but it is an example of Ai ability and our inability to recognize and prioritize problems and basic solutions.  It is not rocket science, well maybe a little bit. 

Park City’s transformation from a quiet silver‑mining town into one of America’s most in‑demand mountain destinations is a textbook example of rapid, tourism‑driven growth. The city now hosts world‑class ski resorts, the Sundance Film Festival, luxury real‑estate development, and millions of annual visitors — all of which have brought wealth and jobs but also profound social, economic, and environmental stresses.

What growth looks like: numbers that matter

- Park City’s housing stock is heavily weighted toward seasonal and second‑home use: recent local reporting cites roughly 8,585 total housing units in the city, with only about a third occupied as primary residences and a large majority classified as seasonal or vacant. This skew toward non‑primary homes concentrates ownership and reduces the supply available to the workforce

 

- Visitor volumes and resort demand have surged. Conservative counts reported by local and national outlets put annual visitors in the millions; resort skier visits across Park City Mountain, Deer Valley, and nearby facilities reached record levels in recent seasons. Those tourism flows underpin the local economy while driving demand for short‑term lodging and real estate.

- Home prices have escalated into the luxury bracket. Reporting shows dramatic price growth in recent years — with median single‑family sale prices rising steeply and luxury listings reaching multi‑million‑dollar levels — pushing many local workers and middle‑income households out of the market.

- At the same time, regional population dynamics are complex: Summit County’s growth peaked in the early 2020s and showed signs of decline or stagnation in 2022–2023, even as jobs and visitor numbers remained high — a sign that housing supply and affordability are reshaping who can live and work in the area.

Drivers of unmitigated growth

- Tourism and festivals: Reputational assets like Deer Valley, Park City Mountain, and Sundance create a persistent demand for overnight stays and luxury hospitality, which rewards owners of second homes and short‑term rental operators.

- Second‑home buyers and investors: High‑net‑worth purchasers seeking vacation homes or investment properties have bid up prices, making year‑round residency unaffordable for many residents and converting housing into seasonal inventory.

- Short‑term rentals: Platforms such as Airbnb and VRBO have enabled owners to monetize units more lucratively as nightly rentals than as long‑term housing, reducing rental availability for workers. Local reporting and surveys increasingly link short‑term rentals to rent inflation and vacancy patterns.

- Regional spillover and amenity migration: As Park City and its resorts have become more expensive, development pressure has moved into neighboring towns (Heber, Midway, Kamas), driving growth across the mountain corridor and creating new infrastructure and traffic burdens.

Consequences: social, economic, and environmental

- Workforce displacement and service‑labor shortages: Businesses report difficulty recruiting and retaining employees because affordable long‑term housing is scarce; many workers commute from outside the city, lengthening traffic and eroding community cohesion.

- Housing scarcity and affordability erosion: Deed‑restricted affordable units remain a fraction of total housing. Park City and Summit County have set targets (for example, the city’s goal to add roughly 800 deed‑restricted workforce units by mid‑decade), but current production lags need.

- Infrastructure and traffic stress: Seasonal spikes in population generate congestion on mountain roads and strain transit systems, while regional growth increases daily commuter traffic into Park City.

- Environmental pressures: More development and more visitors mean greater water demand, higher wildfire risk in the wildland‑urban interface, and impacts to wildlife corridors and mountain ecosystems unless growth is carefully sited and governed.

- Community character and equity: The increase in luxury development and the prevalence of non‑resident ownership shifts local politics, real‑estate markets, and the sense of an affordable, year‑round mountain community.

Policy responses and their limits

Local governments and nonprofits have pursued a mix of strategies:

- Deed‑restricted housing programs and production targets (the city’s 800‑unit goal is the best‑known benchmark).

- Regulatory approaches to short‑term rentals and incentives for long‑term occupancy (though state rules and market forces limit how far municipalities can go).

- Regional planning and infrastructure investments intended to manage traffic and direct growth to appropriate nodes (e.g., Kimball Junction).

However, several constraints blunt these efforts: limited developable land in the mountain terrain, high construction and labor costs, the profitability of short‑term rentals versus long‑term leases, and political resistance to density in some neighborhoods. The result is a managed but still rapid expansion that often falls short of protecting affordability, the environment, and a year‑round community fabric.

What mitigation would actually require

- Scale affordable housing production well beyond current targets, including public investment, land banking, and stronger inclusionary zoning tied to major resort and commercial approvals.

- Rework rules and enforcement around short‑term rentals so that a fair share of housing remains for long‑term residents (while balancing visitor economy needs).

- Encourage year‑round economic diversification and living‑wage employment tied to housing commitments from large employers (resorts, hospitality groups, large developers).

- Invest in regional transit and road improvements coordinated across Summit and Wasatch counties to reduce commuter dependency and congestion.

- Protect environmental assets through tight land‑use controls in sensitive areas, conservation easements, and water/wildfire resiliency planning.

- Pursue regional cooperation: growth pressures.

The point is that when we cut through all the personalities and politics, private interest and preconceived bias, we can usually agree what needs to be done and how to do it.  We just need a computer to tell us sometimes, with its apparent veracity and infallibility.  But we need people to enact and enable these solutions, who can cut thru the nuance and the quantum connections of everything.  In the end it’s all about the people.