Before I Even Hit The Ground

I tore my Achilles a month ago and have been going through a slow painful rehabilitation.  Initially I did not want to journalize my trials and tribulations, as suggested by the Doc and my Physical Therapist, but on second thought, it might be a good exercise so bear with me.  For the sake of something creative to do I will try to post semi-daily for a while.  It might be a little self absorbed but it might be a good outlet to dump my thoughts and ideas.

My wife Tracey and I took this weird Covid season off from skiing and winter in Park City and came down to Tracey's mom's empty house in Tucson.  Marana to be more exact.  She has a great little place in a clean active retirement community with a Clubhouse, gym, pools and tennis courts.  We have stayed her before and liked the easy access to Saguaro National Park and the West desert, Oro valley and Tucson proper, a nice little down and dirty middle class town with a good mix of Anglo and Mexican flavor.  We were going to take it easy and heal and reboot our love of skiing that has changed over the years.  We brought bikes and motorcycles, hiking shoes and golf clubs along with lots of free stimulus money to enjoy the new and different climate and attractions.

What surprised us was the weather.  Its 45-75 and sunny all the time here.  I don't know what we were thinking but this is much nicer than we even imagined, especially when we hear of the Blizzards and Polar Vortex up north on the evening news.  We are winter - snow people and not weather snobs but it is pretty nice down here, I have to admit.  I would not want to be here at 120 degrees in the summer but there is a time and place for everyone and everything.

There is an active Pickleball community here that we met last year and we were determined to learn the nuance of a new game and activity.  After an appropriate quarantine we started showing up at the courts where there is a healthy group of 20-30 people, roughly our age, who play at varying levels.  

They are led by an ex cop, exercise madman named Billy who is obsessive-athletic and a very good pickleball player.  He saw my potential last year and took me under his wing, becoming my personal coach and trainer.  This was going to be my private P-ball mini-camp and a chance to focus on something new and different and non destructive.

Things were going swell with p-ball in the mornings, a swim and hot tub at noon and a ride after lunch and a nap.  I was learning and improving and doing well since I am younger and more mobile than most so I could run around and chase all the wild-man shots.  My body was healing from 40 years of mountain town abuse and feeling better than it had in years.  

After a nice weekend van-camping trip in south west Arizona at Organ Pipe Cactus NP, we came back for a local p-ball tournament after Presidents day.   I was happy to be in the top 4 seed and I was playing with Billy's wife Terry who is an old tennis player and a solid p-ball player.  We were playing the best two guys out there and we were winning 9-1.  

On a nondescript volley I saw the opportunity to move up to the net as Billy had taught me, running not walking.  So I twisted slightly to face the ball and took off from the baseline on my right foot, like I have done a million times.  Halfway through the step I felt a tear and heard a pop in my head as my Achilles tore in half and I howled.   I knew what had happen and what it would entail for the months ahead, before I even hit the ground.

My Walden – Willow Creek

 

As I have said, for the Covid quarantine I have been re-reading Walden.  Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 masterpiece manual of romantic transcendentalism and self-reliance.  Why not, what else is more appropriate now than sequestered nature-worship and introspection.  You are what you read. 

I had a similar Walden notion to remove myself from the hurly-burly of the real world and simplify my life.  I thought of escaping to a cabin in the woods, on a beach or on a lake in the mountains or in a cave in the desert or on a lonely and anonymous park bench in a big city where no one would bug me or know my name.  But that was too much effort and counter-intuitive to my desire to simplify.  So, I walked out my back door into the Snyderville meadow and sat on a shady, low bench besides bucolic Willow Creek and swore not to return to reality until I was good and ready.  Simple ain’t easy.

Willow Creek, flowing behind our house, supplies the canceling white noise and the music of our lives.  During long summers, when it sometimes dries up, we start to hear the noise of the neighborhood in our beds at nights; the barking dogs, the spraying sprinklers, the local highways.  But the stream is dynamic and changing and gives us something different to focus on, like the stars or an old time campfire or a radio show or TV in modern times.  Its not the Colorado River or the mighty Columbia, but it is here and it is ours.

It is our place and reason to pause, usually in the morning, before our to-do lists consume us and we run off with the chores of the day.  A place to sit and watch the sun come up, to chart its seasonal migrations and appreciate its warmth on cold winter mornings.  A place to sit and let the day come to you at its on pace.  A place where hummingbirds flutter backwards from the feeder and hover in front of your face quizzically before dashing away franticly to their next impetuous appointment.  A place where priorities automatically and effortlessly fall into place.  A place where the neighbors cat chases a vole, or an owl sits in a tree watching for mice, or a fox or coyote jogs pass obliviously.   A place to resist temptation to fix or adjust something or the constant desire to improve on things, our surroundings or accoutrements of our home.  A place where elk or deer, moose or cows, sheep or goats can visit infrequently but not unexpectedly.  A place to just be, for a minute, an hour, a day or a lifetime.

Willow creek used to meander lazily, diagonally across the Snyderville Meadow taking the direct path of least resistance to the northeast corner to join with Silver Creek, or Poison Creek from Park City.  It then headed naturally east towards Wanship and the Weber River, Echo Reservoir, Morgan, Ogden and the Great Salt Lake.  

Now it is plumbed to flow due north along the old PC railroad grade (and new sewer grade) where it could be diverted to flood-irrigate the hay meadows to the east.  It now flows unabated, in the absence of irrigation, due north towards East Canyon Creek and Reservoir before heading to its confluence with the mother Weber River at Morgan, circumventing 40 miles of the main river channel.  

Willow Creek now picks up additional underdrain flows from the resident subdivisions, draining the ancient wetlands and groundwater discharge areas, instead of recharging the huge organic sponge of the meadow that would drain slowly over the summer, keeping the meadow green and lush.  It is a gaining stream now instead of the historical loser.  This must be progress.

The Snyderville Meadow incised by Willow Creek is a tabletop, flat plane tilted to the northeast at three percent.  It is alluvial deposits dropped only 10,000 years ago at the end of the most recent ice-age when the glaciers in the upper mountains receded and washed out, dropping colluvial boulders up high, cobbles lower down and alluvial sandy gravels where the slopes flattened out at the bottom.  These free draining soils sit on top of the local sandstone and limestone bedrock and are capped with 5-10 feet of perfectly organic topsoil that is so rich it feels like peat moss.  

This is the fertile sponge that makes the meadow so verdant, where summer grasses grow as high as the belly of the Bison that used to roam here.  It became productive irrigated hayfields and pasture for the first settlers (Snyders) in support of the local mining communities.  Now it just sprouts subdivisions like they are going out of style.  

A few groves of Cottonwoods remain along the Section lines with only a quarter Section of alfalfa remaining that still send their roots deep, chasing the receding ground water.  Shallow rooted conifers still need a little help getting established in the developments but after a few years their roots dive deep and they are on their own.  These trees, along with the omniscient Aspen trees we landscape with, consume more unaccounted water than would ever run through our water meters for our billable domestic use.

So living here by Willow Creek, you do not need to go to the ends of the earth to entertain or remove yourself or give you things to do.  We spend all our time here in self stimulation, constantly entertaining and occupying ourselves.  Instead of us travelling the world, searching for someplace different but only being happy when we find a place just like home.    Wherever we go, there we are.  The constant is us. And Willow Creek.

Raison d'être

 

Today the day came on a little different for us when the morning warmed quickly under the hot spring sun.   We took our dog Eva for a long walk in the meadow with the Sand Hill Cranes, eagles and hawks, the gophers, and the ducks.  She left the Cranes alone on our command but sneaked up and pounced on the gophers repeatedly despite knowing that no dog has ever caught a gopher in this manner.  She was invigorated by the walk, as were we and we went about our chores content that we had gotten some warm-up exercise early.  We found a dead juvenile hawk caught under a willow wicker chair in the back yard and marveled at the intricacies and varieties of all its feathers.  Eva licked it.  Evolution is an amazing thing. 

I took Eve out for her frisbee workout with some friends and they were amazed at how she could burst out after the thrown disk, picking its flight up quickly over her head and calculating instinctively its trajectory, complete with a Fibonacci compound curved decay as well as spin, force and wind effects while keeping an eye on the terrain and any obstacles she should avoid.  She has closing speed to match Ronnie Lott’s and the peripheral vision of Wayne Gretzky (her eyes are slightly wider set and on the side of her head, in defense of Wayne). 

Breaking quickly to where the disk is going to be, she sprints at first, with a quick first step to match Karl Malone, but lays off as she approaches the interception point if she is early, or powers thru like Michael Jorden to finish strong.  Instead of jogging out under the descending frisbee and catching it as it settles to the ground like most dogs, she leaps in slow motion 4 – 5 feet in the air and snatches the disk at the apex, styling nonchalantly with her slightly curled legs, before sticking the landing and jogging away proud and triumphant. 

On the beach Eva can run super-fast in the dry or wet sand, with the dry sand being much more tiring.  She prefers to land in the water after the catch to lighten the impact and cool down.  She is self-aware and loves to style in the air and prances as she come back to me for another throw.  She self regulates and rests or stops when she is tired but she loves an audience and will continue endlessly if someone is watching.

There are no bad catches, only bad throws.  I threw one too close to a fence one day and she adjusted and picked the disk off the top of the fence like Freddy Lynn pulling a ball off the Green Monster.  Eve has never seen baseball, Fred Lynn or the Green Monster, she just made it up as she went along.  If she were a pro athlete, she would make $30 million a year and make everyone else look silly.  My friends were suitably impressed and howled and laughed with appreciation. Eva was not unaware. As many people have said ‘that dog has skills’.  And she knows it. 

The point is that Eva is always ready for whatever comes at her.  Always ready for frisbee, never sore or tired, and she always performs at a high level.  Always ready for a hike or ski tour, even if the snow is ten feet deep and it is well below zero and we are out all day.  Her coat is both warm and cool, her heat radiation efficient even though it is only thru her mouth and tongue and I have never seen her hot, cold, tired, or hurt.  Eve never really needs to eat or drink much, just 25 cents of good dog food a day and a bowl of water.  We have taught her to ‘camel up’ and drink more and chill out before long hikes.  

She is perfectly designed for whatever comes and is always game.  She is a cattle dog by nature and mutt pedigree, so she has intelligence, energy and athleticism and she demands a job, something to do, a reason to be, every day.  Frisbee is her job, no, her avocation and she loves it to obsession.  She ignores people and dogs, gophers and food, even bathroom breaks, when she is playing Frisbee, her raison d'être. 

SIMPLIFY

 

For the Covid quarantine I have been re-reading Walden.  Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 masterpiece manual of romantic transcendentalism, satire, and self-reliance.  Why not, what else is more appropriate now than sequestered nature-worship and introspection.  You are what you read. 

We all read this story in high school and loved the idea, for about ten minutes, but then went back to over-complicate our lives with college and jobs, wives and kids, houses and dogs.  We have not really come that far in our efforts to simplify.  But now we are all forced into our own little Walden, our own little 100 x 150 foot cabins in the woods or on the beach or in the city.  With this self-imposed semi-isolation, we are compelled to contemplate and experience the simple life.  All the distractions and minutia have been stripped away and we have been forced to honestly look at our lives and ourselves, who we are and who we want to be.

Thoreau self-quarantined in 1845, in his 10 x 15 cabin on the pond for a year or two.  Simplify he said.  But simple ain’t easy.  Actually, he was only a mile from Concord, and he went home on weekends to have his mother do his laundry and iron his puffy shirts, but it felt like the wilderness of western Massachusetts, and it probably was.  ‘Many men go fishing all their lives’, he said, ‘without knowing that it is not fish that they are after’. 

The first chapter of Walden is called Economics; not Adam Smith or Milton Friedman economics but personal microeconomics.  Henry talks about all the things he has but does not need, like houses and farms, animals, and imported food.  How the farmer is a slave to his farm, as the shoemaker is slave to his shop, for generations.  How we are all slaves to our own sustainability, sustenance, maintenance, and entertainment.  How most of our concerns are about stuff and not people, how eventually the possessions possess the possessor. 

His friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson owned the land around Walden, but it was too expensive for Henry to purchase at eight dollars an acre ($300 today) so he was a squatter, with permission.  Thoreau paid him back by cutting his lawn and trimming his flowers, but they had a classic have/have not relationship.  When Ralph visited Henry in jail for civil disobedience (not paying taxes) he famously asked him ‘what are you doing in there’ to which Henry replied, ‘what are you doing out there’.

Henry cleared off 2.5 acres near Walden and planted a garden the first year, but he was too busy farming the first year and had to sell much of his food for only 15 dollars ($50).  The next year he planted less than an half-acre that he could farm just ‘with his left hand, at odd hours’.  Then he built his house mostly with stuff that he found lying around for $28 ($1000) and he was all set.  No oxen, nor horses, no cows, no sheep, no fertilizer, no tractors, no bankers, no contractors, no Home Depot. 

Ralph Waldo said, ‘Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond itself, a world’.  Henry David probably said, ‘yeah/no, maybe not’.  Ralphie, the thinker and innovator, wrote his classics “Nature” and “Self-Reliance” a few years before and Thoreau, the doer, decided to give his social experiment a try.  Hank was a more approachable voice for the nature movement than Ralph, less grand-eloquent, so he went to the woods to write his first book.  Henry was set up in his cabin for life, but he only made it two years before moving on to something else.  He had TADDs - Transcendentalist Attention Deficit Disorder, and he got a little bored.     

Thoreau tried to show us that it does not take much to be happy, that less is more.  I picture him in modern days, a Rastafarian street person living under the viaduct, or a bearded curmudgeon living in a desert cave in New Mexico or cabin in Montana.  But he was well educated at Harvard, ambitious, thoughtful, and outspoken, and might be like me, living in the material world but fighting the good fight to simplify while keeping up with the Joneses. 

Our collective sequestration would appeal to Henry, as it appeals to me.  I am lucky to be safe and healthy, wealthy, and wise, or at least three out of four, so I can enjoy my plethora of free time.  They say that free time is the blessing and curse of the upper and lower class but for a while it is forced on the declining middle class.  Some can embrace it, some resist.  Some struggle, being only one paycheck or health emergency away from the poor house.  Some scream irresponsibly, to return to ‘normal’ and continue our mindless consumption and pursuit of self-entertainment for something to do.

If only we could be more like Hank and Ralphie and be content to let the day come to us, let our lives proceed by their own design.  This is an opportunity, not to get ‘back’ to normal but to evolve forward, to reinvent ourselves and the world as we know it.  Life is not a spectator sport but it is sometimes too much with us, trying to make our legacy, and would be better off if we all just tried to leave it a better place.  This is our chance to let our problems solve themselves, as they often do, with or without us, and just kick back like Henry, and let the mystery be.  We should all be more content with ourselves and each other and simplify the world we live in.

You are what you write.

‘Maybe this was a big mistake’, thought Henry David Thoreau for the umpteenth time that cold, lonely and grey Massachusetts winter.  He sat in his dreary dripping, dark and dank 10 x 15 log cabin of his own construct, looking past the dead flies on his little window sill at the sleet blowing sideways over a frozen pond and through the numerous permeable kinks in the armor of his castle.  More like a dungeon.  He heard the uncatchable rat stirring beneath his bed of rags as he put the last of his daily ration of wood on the smoldering dinner fire to cook his beans and corn gruel.  “It’s going to be another frozen night’ he thought.  ‘Simplify, my ass, I am wet and cold and hungry and lonely’.  

It seemed like such a good idea in the spring, and summer wasn’t half bad, besides the bugs, but the autumn winds blew early and he underestimated his need for fire wood.  Now he could only trudge through the deep snow to collect sticks and branches for his needs.  ‘Screw economy’, he thought as he remembered the home hearth where his father took care of the fire and his mother took care of everything else.  That home hearth was only two miles away, but his stubborn pride prevented him from abandoning his experiment and limping home in defeat.  He was a laughingstock when he went out to the pond and he would be damned if he would be a laughingstock going home.  ‘Wait till I write my book’, he fumed.

So he took out his quill pen and rough paper and began to write again, in a different voice, a voice of confidence, of character, of unrepentant joy.  He wrote of his hypothetically noble relationship with the land and the pond, the forest and the animals, his farm and his house.  He wrote of reducing his life to the basics, the things that count, time, solitude, thoughtfulness, being.  No things, no people.  He was distracted by the drip drip from the leaky roof on to his paper and dismissed thoughts of Thanksgiving dinner with the family, his clean warm bed at home or of the roll in the hay he took with a local farm girl before he self-quarantined in the wilderness.  But he persevered with his fiction.   ‘Why should I tell them’ he said with loathing self-pity.

As he scribbled his fictional account he started to warm to the task.  The last log in the fire caught an updraft and flared its heat and light into the room.  He felt inspired to tell his story, truthfully or not.  The words flowed from his pen and he dipped his quill deep and wrote hard on the rough paper with passion. He spun a yarn for the ages about self-reliance and economy.  He invented figures of superior planning and stories of enlightened experiences.  He incorporated all the high brow tales of Transcendental Naturalism, nature worship and self sufficiency he could think of and when he was done, he sat back feeling better, almost believing it himself.  He stood up and scratched his itchy butt, drank the rest of his putrid melted ice water and thought warmly, ‘Maybe this was not such a bad idea after all’.

Thoughts on Updike’s ‘Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu’ After 60 Long Years

 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1960/10/22/hub-fans-bid-kid-adieu

Ted Williams despised Yankee Stadium,
The size and shadows persist.
Built on a glacial wetland,
Underlined by polished schist.

So the outfield was historically sub-irrigated,
Into a slow and swampy sod.
Naturally moist and ever green,
On which Mickey Mantle plod.

Like all the people around John Updike,
at Ted’s final Fenway win.
In the New England eternal autumnal wetland ballpark,
In Boston’s Post-Cambrian ancient Fens.

The chain-smoking Boston babes, the frat boy humor,
The insecure insouciance of the Harvard freshmen.
Knowing all, knowing nothing,
A place we all have been.

But John, the Ted hypotheticals are a little thin:
What if Mickey Mantle was healthy,
and didn’t drink like a fish,
or if DiMaggio was not so wealthy.

The tired timeless statistical comparisons,
with Ty Cobb and Shoeless Joe Jackson.
A different game played at glacial pace,
Another era. Another eon.

Winter Weather and Climate Flashback

     

We were in a nice multi-day storm cycle last winter, a Westerly Flow we used to call a Rocky Mountain - Eight Day Blow.  It was fueled by cold air from Alaska and moisture from Hawaii, prosaically called the Pineapple Express, that they now call an Atmospheric River, to better sell the weather on TV.  Moisture shot off the Pacific between the counter rotational pressure zones like baseballs out of a wheel driven pitching machine.  It was just a series of disturbances that floated through our area on a favorable jet-stream, enhanced by the Nevada desert, the warm Great Salt Lake and the orographic lift of the Wasatch Front. It wasn't huge and it felt like it would last forever but we skied it everyday like it would stop tomorrow. 

Snow falls lightly and calmly here now without the frontal energy of a historical  storms.  Gone are the predictable prefrontal south winds and the violent frontal passage that shift winds to the north west in a matter of minutes.  Daily accumulations are moderate now, not the four - foot storms of bygone days.   We now get two foot snow storms in the Cottonwood Canyons, one foot on the Wasatch backside and six inches in my Park City driveway, with maybe three wet inches on the Salt Lake City benches and nothing but rain nowadays at the International Airport.  It is nice for tourists and nouveau powder hounds without the reference of how it was in 83-84 but skiing has gotten so busy and the climate is changing so rapidly that things are not what they used to be.  Both are the compounded effects of too many people.  I blame mankind.  And Vail.

This is the new norm caused by the uneven heating of the atmosphere and oceans, the north migrating jet stream, and the resulting persistent positions of the highs and lows.  It is the tangible unintended consequences of ignoring our effects on the climate.  ‘Climate always changes’ or ‘Man could not possibly affect the big global climate’ the deniers insist. ‘God would not let that happen’ the evangelicals claim or ‘it is a liberal conspiracy to limit family size ‘ the local brethren here claim in legislative message bills.  But there are 9 billion of us taking our daily little slice of the sky and as they say, ‘death by 9 billion slices is still death’.  But it is not just normal change.  It is the change in the change, geometric, exponential. 

Exponential change is not intuitive.  That’s why it surprises and excites us.  It is the change in the rate of change, the second derivative.  The change in the change.  Where the fun is.  Like acceleration, gravity and most natural phenomenon, because of their compounding derivative based relationships.  Like compound interest, "the greatest force known to man", according to Einstein.  We think and extrapolate linearly and need imagination, vision and leadership to process exponential change. It excites like gravity and confounds with the  compounding.

It is the change in the change of the climate, it is our fault and we might be able to do something about it if we try hard, now.  And the rate of change has increased, exponentially, due to compounding climate effects and tipping points.  Polar ice melts and reflects less light, for example, and then the great invisible heat sink mass of the oceans heats more, changing its chemistry and constitution. Long term drought dehydrates and desiccates all vegetation - tinder dry.  Then huge  fires burn in un-raked California, un-managed Australia and in the developing Amazon.  The lungs of the planet, burning and smoking for a few new farms, instead of breathing for the entire world.

We are wired to take care of ourselves and the present.  We have a harder time thinking about the common good and the future.  That’s why we won’t address the climate until it is a catastrophe that affects us and our pocketbooks.  Why should I change if no one else changes.  Why should China and India change if the US won’t.  The Tragedy of the Commons, the masses, the public welfare.

I follow the weather for my recreation and the climate for my work as a hydrologist.  I see it, I feel it, I study it, I live it, every day, for 40 years, since it all started really changing in 1980s.  It is the event of my career and it is the issue of our generation.  Weather and Climate have both changed in my lifetime, anecdotally, measurably and dramatically and it causes me pain. If you don't think the climate is changing, you need to get out more.

All weather is local, personal.  My weather.  Weather is what happened today, to me, in my back yard.  I take it personally.   If you don't like the weather, move ten miles or wait ten minutes.  Climate is global, it is what happens state wide, nationwide, world wide, over the past 30 years, and the next 30.  One bad-ass storm does not give you climate change but climate change will give you at least one bad-ass storm.  We have to start thinking globally, naturally, exponentially, imaginatively and empathetically.  We have to stop burning stuff, growing rice and cotton in the desert and eating so much meat, ignoring the future for the present. 

 This winter thing is hard and it is getting weird.  My body is worn out from climbing up stuff and skiing down it, jumping off stuff and falling down.  It is tired of shoveling snow and getting in cold cars.  I am tired of the long dark nights and the grey days that are becoming de-rigor.  Perched at the north end of the Colorado Plateau we used to have a high dessert climate with snow or sun but now it seems that the cloudy, grey continental climate of Wyoming and Montana has taken over here and we are in that pissy rain/snow in between flow again. Mostly it is too many people.  We are a migrating race and we move someplace new and wear it out and then move again, until we run out of places to move and ruin. As Jimmy Buffet said before he knew, " I want to go where its warm."