THE TOURS

The Tour de France is over.  Finally.  Thank God. The Nibali, Believe it or Not, Tour.  Nibali dominated from start to finish but we have learned with cycling that if something is too good to be true, it usually isn’t .  Fool me once shame on you.  Fool me seven times, shame on Lance.  So I will reserve judgment and wait for the testing and hope against hope.  Again.

Contador and Froome kept falling and eventually had to give up.   Talansky created a new word for courageous indefatigable stick-to-it-tive-ness.  He pulled a Talansky.  He didn’t quit.  He didn’t give up after falling three times.  He finished last, with class, style and heart.  Than he could not go on.  Sagan could not beat the huge German sprinter Krisstoff and never won a stage despite finishing second numerous times and winning the Green Jersey.  American T.J. Van Garderen would have had a podium if he ate correctly on the rest day and not bonked in the Pyrenees.  Ate what you might ask.  Kiwi Jack Bauer lead one stage for 200 km , only to be caught by the peloton and sprinters in the last 10 meters, as usually happens.  Big surprise.  At least he gave it his best shot and then broke down.

Not that I don’t love it.  Not that the sound of those two classy British chaps, flawlessly announcing the three week race, have not become the sound of July and defined my summers for years.  Not that the exploits of these athletes, riding 2000 miles in three weeks at 30 mph, does not continue to astound me. 

I am so astounded  that I tried to ride every day after the live morning broadcast, in simpatico and synchronicity, with sympathy and empathy.  I would watch their massive thighs churning up incredibly steep mountains, pushing gigantic gears with unbelievable accelerations.   I would imagine myself gliding with the pack, sucking along in the peloton as it transforms into a writhing snake, with a mind, heart and soul of its own. 

Then I would go out on my bikes and ride with inspired emulation of my heroes.   I’d ride the mountains, the roads or the trails in my orange jersey, the maillot l’orange, reserved for the oldest guy in the peloton.  I’d ride to the hardware store, to work and to lunch or thru the forest, mountains and back roads.  I would fearlessly short circuit traffic circles, bomb around blind turns and weather the cobblestones and ruts in the rain.  Not 100 miles a day but I would hammer for an hour or three, standing on the hills and tucking the descents. 

I got tired, it got old, I started dreading it and hating the bike.  I took a few rest days and rode my motorcycle around with people on the back, to mimic the impressive race officials and media bikes that keep up with the Tour while hauling a cameraman and camera over the entire circuit.  Finally on the last day I bonked and dragged my sorry ass around for a few hours and limped home like the last guy to finish on the Champs-Élysées.  It’s obsessive, it’s boring, it’s hard.  It is time to do something different, like golf, tennis or SUP.  

The Tour of Utah Starts next week and I have to be ready to ride.  Again.

I HAD TO LAUGH

I went out on a ride with my dog Cleo the other day.  Somewhere along the way she found a tennis ball and kept running with it in her mouth, even though it was inhibiting her breathing.  I eventually stopped and took it from her, so she could breathe, but she stared at it so intently I could not toss it away.  I had no pockets in my lycra so I stuck the ball in the spokes of my front tire, like we used to do when we were kids.  Cleo seemed content and we continued along the steep, raised banks of a local stream.

 I slowed at one point to take a look at the stream and as I slowed Cleo became transfixed by the rotating ball and started to try to grab it out of my spokes, with her mouth, because she is a dog.  Fearing she would shear her little face off when she grabbed it, I hit my breaks and pulled my left foot out of my pedal to stop.  Unfortunately I was leaning right, right towards the stream bank.  With no momentum I could not unclip my right foot and toppled over the bank, down the slope and into the stream.  

I was not underwater or drowning but I was upside down in the stream with my bike, watching the tennis ball float away.  Cleo came down the bank and grabbed the ball from the stream and looked at my quizzically.  ‘WTF’ she seemed to emote while smiling at me blamelessly, shamelessly, with the tennis ball in her mouth,’ you humans do the weirdest things’.  I had to laugh.

A Very Large Array

Driving thru south central New Mexico, my wife and I happened on a spot on the map in a deserted high mountain valley that said VLA.  We were intrigued as we drove down into the valley and saw radio telescopes, equally spaced as far as the eye could see, in the shape of a Peace Sign.  We stopped at a giant one near the road to get a sense of the scale and followed the signs to the visitor center for the Very Large Array (VLA). 

The array was set up years ago, by the government, when it was discovered that the center of our galaxy emits a continuous 3 Watt radio wave.  Further research found that all black holes emit such a wave and mapping them reveals great secrets of the universe.  Jody Foster stared in a movie called Contact, set at the VLA, where she was listening for ET and heard from her deceased father.  There are other arrays, large and small, located across the country and around the world but this one is the Very Large one.  It contains 30-40 huge radio telescopes stretched across the valley with a 14 mile diameter.  They are coordinated and phased in a central operation building and the processed data is available on the internet for all to share.

We went inside the visitor center and were lucky to find that we were there on monthly tour day and the real scientists were running the tour that day to give the normal tour guides a break.  We had two Chilean astrophysicists lead us around and tell us the secrets of the array and of the universe.  One was studying a hole in the universe one billion light years wide with no galaxies or stars.  The other was looking for the 95% of the mass, or Dark Matter, that is missing from the universe from the original big bang.  What a job.

They took us into the control room where an operator was preparing to change the program and the focus of the array for the next research project on his long list.  At the proper time the entire array started to move in unison, like choreographed ballet dancers, towards another spot in the sky, except for one.  Far out on the plain a giant radio telescope went limp on its stand, refusing to move or refocus.  I pointed this slacker out to the operator and he became very agitated, pressed a lot of buttons and asked us to leave the room.  Our guides gave me the stink eye as I mouthed the words ‘I didn't touch anything”.

We continued our tour with discussions on anti-matter, black holes and the place where god lives.  I faded away from the group when the questions deteriorated to topics of the federal government, funding, furloughs, data sharing and immigrants. I focused my attention on the flaccid little telescope out on the plains.  It had finally woken up and was joining the others in their singular focus on the stars and other worlds.  Our guides suggested that I do the same.

The Emerald Mile - Review

The Emerald Mile

By Kevin Fedarko

Reviewed by Matt Lindon of the Friends of the Park City Library

Kevin Fedarko’s book The Emerald Mile 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 snow pack continued to build unexpectedly in the Rocky Mountains until Memorial Day weekend when it all 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.  From this adversity came an opportunity for a select, almost mythical, group of river runners and guides.  They seized the moment, as well as the high water, and attempted to break the fastest rowing record thru 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.

Kevin Fedarko was originally a staff writer for Time magazine and a contributor to Esquire and Outside as well as other magazines.  He is a part time river guide in the Grand Canyon which manifests as respect, almost reverence, for that place and the river that carved it.  This may contribute to his over-the-top storytelling and his fraternity to the culture of the river guides.  Every chapter is an adventure, and every subsequent chapter is an exciting opportunity that is not to be missed.  He also translates the complex hydrologic engineering concepts and numbers into layman terms that flow like water.  The book therefore reads itself and is impossible to put down. 

Along with his complete history of river running and the development of the culture of the western river guides, Fedarko does equally well in describing the operating engineers for the Bureau of Reclamation at Glen Canyon Dam.  They are first seen anxiously watching car sized sandstone boulders shooting from the spillway tunnels and then hopefully putting plywood on the dam’s spillway gates to hold back the relentlessly rising level of Lake Powell.  Only BOR dam operator Tom Gambel really knows how close we really came to losing the dam that year.  From this gripping true story we all become more aware of the power, persistence and patience of the Colorado River from this story.   As these competing cultures converge in a crescendo of crisis, Fedarko navigates the storylines like a well season river guide riding an invisible eddy line. 

The story starts benignly enough at the beginning, where most good stories start.  Don Garcia, a captain in the 1540 Coronado expedition sent to find the seven golden cities of Cibola, accidently stumbles upon the Grand Canyon and is relatively unimpressed.  From that inauspicious first sighting of the Canyon by a white men, to the courageous first navigation of the Canyon in 1869 by John Wesley Powell, the story proceeds systematically to the dam builders, conservationist and the river runners of modern times. 

Martin Linton is presented as the enlightened entrepreneur and environmentalist who perfects the method of running the river in elegant but fragile wooden Dory boats.  He also fights along side David Brower of the Sierra Club against the dam builders for the preservation of the canyon.  His Dorys are subsequently named after environmental tragedies and we are introduced to a beaten and battered boat called the Emerald Mile that is named after an old growth, Redwood clear cut in Northern California.  This bastard boat is adopted by guru guide Kenton Grua and meticulously repaired and rebuilt for its epic run. 

Along with his equally skillful and obsessive friends, Steve Reynolds and Rudi Petschek, Grua ignores the National Park Service closing of the flooded river and, on the night of June 25 1983, launches the Emerald Mile just below the dam into a river swollen to almost 100,000 cubic feet per second.  This book is unmistakably about this historic run but it is wrapped nicely in the other side stories of the canyon, the river, the dams, the conservationists, the guides, the bureaucrats and the competing interests for the American west. 

It could be the text book of a Western Water 101 course and stands among the great books in this category along with Cadillac Dessert by Mark Reisner and Beyond the 100^th Meridian by Wallace Stegnar.  The Colorado River is the poster boy 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.

This is also the story of hubris and arrogance, confidence and adventure and the surprisingly counter-intuitive forces of nature on our unsustainable life style.   It is a rollicking ride full of the hyperbole and didactic exaggeration, courage and legend and the conquering of the gear and the fear that is the lexicon of the river culture.  Strap yourself in and prepare for a frantic and fantastic journey.  You will not be disappointed.

Size Matters

I went skiing the other day far from my home.  When I got there I realized that I had taken one of my boots and one of my wives boots.  Luckily one right and one left.  Unfortunately, she is a 6, I am an 11.  Nonetheless I painfully put them both on, as a penance for being a bone head, and went up skiing.

 It wasn't too bad but I had to adjust my binding to fit her boot and I could only Tele turn to one side on account of my scrunched toes.  I have skied with my boots on the wrong feet once, during my hung over college days,  when I thought it odd that my buckles were rubbing together like never before.   I often ski with my skis seemingly on the wrong feet but this was a new extreme experience.  The four hours of skiing were not bad but the two hours I spent waiting for a downloading tram in the après ski bars became excruciating, since I dared not take off my boots for fear of not getting them back on.   

When I finally stumbled to my car and took off my boots, I expected to see bloody toes and black toenails but found that my foot did not look bad and it felt real happy to get out of that boot.  By the next day my feet had completely recovered and I have determined that size really does not matter.  For ski boots, that is.

KEEP THE BEAT

We were camping at Chaco Canyon New Mexico on a cold and rainy night, having a comfortable dinner underneath a fortuitously overhanging wall.  The sand was warm and dry next to our fire and the lighting was exquisite as we listened to the subtle sounds of the dripping desert.  A car pulled into the exposed campsite next to ours and sat there for a long time with the motor running.  My indignant wife Tracey eventually told me to go over and tell them to turn it off.  I stormed over and tapped on the window.  When they rolled down the window and I saw the confused faces inside, I changed my attitude and I asked them if they would like to join us for cocktails under our rock.  The husband and wife pair was flabbergasted and grabbed some whiskey and wine and quickly joined us in the sand. 

They had just flown in from New York City, rented a car and headed off into the wilderness.  In the rain and the dark they were a little discombobulated, making the transition from the city to the country, and they were having a hard time getting their bearings.  They were designers and developers of sonic playgrounds in NYC where the action and motion of the kids energized tubs and drums buried underground creating a symphony of tympani and percussion.  They were great folks so we shared our dinner and drink, shade and warmth.

It turned out that they were drummers by trade and hobby and said they always travel with their drums.  We asked if they would break out their drums and play for us, pa rum pum pum pum.  They went back to their car and came back with a big rug that they laid out next to our fire.  Then they kept coming back with more and more drums, elaborate drum sets for themselves and smaller drums for us.   They pulled drums out of their rental car like clowns popping out of a circus car.

 They started playing and we all started grooving haphazardly.  After the first cacophonous round they offered us the key to good drumming, one hint.  We are all responsible for the best.  They started again, laying down a simple back-beat and we were encouraged to join in.  We started tentatively but were soon riffing and improvising, dropping related layers of rhythm on top and around each other, never forgetting the original beat.  It sounded great, in our cozy little amphitheater, and we jammed harmonically late into the night, talking and playing with our new found friends.  

They left in the morning, after coffee and breakfast, with their rug, drums and their rental car.  We exchanged hugs and contact information as they thanked us for our hospitality and we thanked them for the drumming and the life lesson.  We are all responsible for the beat.

Plainsong

By, Kent Haruf

I love literature, good literature.  A classic story well told. But I am an engineer with no training for picking good books. I always had an American Studies major friend in college to steer me in new directions; from Kerouac to Woolf, Leopold to Abbey, Fitzgerald to Steinbeck, and Stegner to McPhee.   In the real world it is harder to find a mentor who shares your tastes and can make new suggestions.  I am lucky now to have my friend Andy as my reading associate. Andy doesn’t sleep a lot so he reads voraciously, anything and everything western.  He has steered me from McCarthy to McMurtry, Sprague to Kitteridge, Guthrie to Reisner and from Bass to Doig. Andy has read them all and always has a new book or author for me to check out.  Literally.

He left me a note a while back and all it said was Kent Haruf.  I knew what that meant and it felt like a new door had already been opened for me.  Walking eagerly down the Library’s alphabetical Fiction Isle, I found Haruf nestled comfortably between Jim Harrison and Ernest Hemingway, my favorites.  I randomly grabbed a heavy hardbound edition of the book with the nicest cover, called “Plainsong”, and checked it out. 

Kent Haruf is a teacher at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and sometimes lives in Salida, Colorado.  The setting for all of his books is Holt, Colorado, patterned after the north east Colorado town of Yuma, on the edge of the Great Plains where he lived in the early 80’s.  A ““Plainsong”” is technically a body of chants used in the liturgies of the Western Church, but Haruf has explained the title as “any simple and unadorned melody or air”, most likely emanating from the Great Plains of the western United States.

“Plainsong” was published in 1999 and became a U.S. bestseller. Verlyn Klinkenborg of the New York Times called it "a novel so foursquare, so delicate and lovely, that it has the power to exalt the reader.” “Plainsong” won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award and the Maria Thomas Award in Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.

“Plainsong” blew me away.  Seldom have I read a book so deceptively simple and lyrical in style, and so well written that it evoked a deep emotional reaction.  I was reading it before bed one night and my wife asked me if I was crying.  I said yes because the characters were so real, so hurting and so good.  This is a compelling narrative about the town of Holt as exemplified by a pregnant school girl, a lonely schoolteacher, a pair of old, curmudgeon bachelor-brother farmers, two young boys abandoned by their mother and trying struggling father, trying to start his life over.  It is a story of community and compassion, and about our natural predilection to help each other in times of need, whether it is large or small.  It is about the inherent good in most of us and our inclination to bond together in our small communities, whether they are our towns or families, bars or our jobs.  Life on the plains seems too hard to go through isolated and alone, too lonely sometimes to even to try.  But we do try, with a little help from our friends. 

This is complete story with villains and thieves, heroes and protagonists, good woman and everyman.  It is a positive, uplifting story about the good in our human nature and our natural connections to others.  It does not punch you in the face but it infiltrates your soul.  Haruf craftily writes a simple story that builds on itself into a convincing tale of the human condition.  It is easy on the eyes and gentle on the mind.  The arc of this story flows thru your senses like the story of our lives and our towns, like the great American Novel should.  His everyday prose is neither flamboyant nor esoteric.  He uses the right words, not the biggest or the most words. 

You wonder if this story told itself to the writer during a period of inspiration, as he wrote it, revealing his subconscious view of the human condition, or if he technically blocked out the story, beginning to end, before he started.  I like to think the former.  This is literature.  Art divinely inspired and merely translated by the author, like a great song or sculpture.  In these times of isolation and ideological diversion this story attempts to bring us together in a spirit of compromise of consensus that minimizes the things that divide us and magnifies the things we have in common. 

When I finished “Plainsong” I wanted more.  The story was not tied into a neat bow or a happy Hollywood ending.  To my surprise this book was the first of the ‘Holt Trilogy’ followed by “Eventide” and “Benediction”.  These stories involve the trials and tribulations of the community of Holt with some repeating characters and story overlap.  They stand on their own, however, as singular stories with resonant themes of frailty, family, resilience, redemption, humanity and community.  They are worth the read but they fall off in content and feeling and are ultimately not as good as “Plainsong”. 

Haruf’s other early books such as “The Ties That Bind” and “Where you Once Belonged” show the progression in story telling that got him to “Plainsong”.    His narrative to the High Plains photos by Peter Brown, in their award winning book “West of Last Chance”, is worth picking up to feed your fascination with images and stories of this  brutal and beautiful part of the country. 

Keep Kent Haruf in your pocket like a good old friend you call to cheer you up and renew your faith in mankind.  He will never let you down.