Shoulder Conspiracy

 

Well with the mid-summer heat wave redefining the word drought, the Colorado River running dry, and the Great Salt Lake losing a half inch a day, and nobody seeming to care, it is time to address our other summer fascination – road construction.  With orange cones everywhere, why should Tom Clyde have all the fun.

 I have no explanation for the things UDOT does other than possibly it is an empty shoulder conspiracy.  They insist that they need a 15-foot-wide shoulder everywhere they go, even though no one ever uses it.  Who breaks down that can’t pull over in the gravel for a few minutes?  No one.  But can we really afford all these shoulders, everywhere.  It’s like building a dam for a million-year flood while all the schools will flood every 100 years.  Lets have some consistency.   Is there a benefit cost analysis or risk assessment or are they just using their West Valley City Road template everywhere.  Let’s have some site specific consideration and sensitivity.

 

Case-in-point 1

I-80 east exit to U-40 south backs up to Kimbal Junction, not just on holidays but all day, every day because it is a one lane exit, going up a hill, with oil trucks.  During the last Olympics they painted that as a two-lane exit, and it worked fine with half shoulders.  Not anymore.  And it was just redone.

Case-in-point 2

U-248 is an abomination, an embarrassment and a disgrace that it is always backed up with two empty shoulders and a left-hand turn lane to nowhere!  It drives me nuts and I never drive on it.  And it is redone every year.   There is ample room on each side for four free flowing lanes with gravel shoulders and a movable center barrier in the middle with a ‘no left turn’ sign.  If someone has a problem, once in a blue moon, we can all slow down and go around but not suffer grid lock everyday for the luxury of the ubiquitous empty breakdown lane.  Snow storage?  Get a bigger plow, and besides it doesn’t snow any more.  And now we have added a monster Maverick at the Frontage Road death intersection, but with a new traffic light, before U-248 inexplicably shrinks to two lanes again for 500 feet, with two huge shoulders.  What are you thinking?  You don’t need another study, you need common sense.

 

Case-in-point 3

Is U-224 going to be nine lanes wide, wider than most aircraft carriers or runways, to accommodate empty bus lanes and shoulders and random left hand turns.  Stop the insanity.  And my last pet peeve is the sidewalk in the middle at the junction by the car wash so left hand turns to Smiths can back up cars to Jeremy Ranch.  It’s a road, not a sidewalk or garden bike or parking lane.  Even with two new turn lanes now, it is a bottleneck.

And that brings us to my final comment.  These are major arterial roads, not collectors, made to move people safely and efficiently from point A to point B.  Forget the frills and national templets, shoulders and turn lanes, bike lanes and by-ways, make them work for us.  Time the lights, restrict access, paint the lanes, build them for peak flows.  At least until we all get our own personal computer Olympic drones and traffic becomes Ai – 3D by 2034.

What’s-your-point

I know bigger roads lead to more traffic, but we are beyond that here with already failing levels of service.  In New York and New England they stopped building roads and told people to live with it.  In many places like Boston people drive on the shoulders unrestrained when traffic gets bad.  Will it take that kind of revolution here.  We are not rural and quaint anymore.  We are a metro, urban, crowded, world class destination resort.  Live with it. 

I wish you luck with the bus lanes and paid parking with day skiers and resort workers parking at the junctions, as they should.  But so much of our traffic is now people going to work and contractors, building and fixing and cleaning more homes every day.  All kidding aside, it is not just the shoulder conspiracy.  We are now the problem.  Water and traffic flow towards money but you can’t buy or build your way out of gridlock.  You have to be smarter and make sacrifices.  You can’t have it all.  In the psychology of traffic, the most important component is the nut behind the wheel.  Can we be the solution. 

Taste or Schlock

 When did we lose the ability to differentiate between Tasteful and Schlock.  Back in the day we had taste and we approved Deer Valley and kept our eye on Park West and K-Mart, we buffed out Main Street and kept our eye on Park Avenue and Swede Alley, we built the Muni, and Nicklaus GC,  and kept an eye on Hideout and Wohali.  We had professional architects and planners, engineers and designers on the city and county commissions who knew good from bad, right from wrong, taste from schlock and new how to say NFW.  They respected zoning and codes, setbacks and height limits and made exceptions only for taste and not for the developers’ bottom line.  We didn’t need a bunch of consultants, accountants, economists and lawyers to tell us what we can do.  We could see it. We had an aesthetic.  It wasn't all about money

Perhaps we lost our aesthetic when they burnt down the Coalition building, a new and old symbol of our town, to build Lower Main Street.  Perhaps it was when they started building visible water tanks on the hillsides, with no revegetation, that stick out like a sore thumb.  Plant some trees, you have the water!  Perhaps it was when we refused a classic fly-over intersection at 224 and 80, or when they built concrete planters on 224 and 248.  Maybe it was when we had a design-by-committee mall on Main Street that we replaced with another mall.  Everything got too tall, too wide, too massive and too ugly.

Take, for example, the proposed twisted Scandinavian design submitted for the Kimbal Art Center for Main Street that was unique and stylish but was rejected for height limits while across the street they made the old Utah Coal and Lumber building into a ten-story monstrosity.  That proposed masterpiece could have been an anchor on Main Street like the Gehry Museums are for Cleveland, Seattle or Bilbao Spain.  It just takes a little vision. 

Instead, Kimbal sold out and promised to do something classy on the new City Arts Parcel along with Sundance.  Then Sundance and Kimbal fled because of the price tag and delays.  Fair enough.  So now we are looking at schlock affordable housing with a postage stamp dog-run park and a hotdog stand on the corner because that’s what the developer wants and the city wants to recoup some of the money they spent on the parcel. 

Forget the money, it’s gone, move on.  Let’s do something nice and tasteful, useful and practical on this parcel that we can all enjoy in perpetuity.  Like Olmstead built Central Park, for example, or the Rockefellers donated Teton NP and the UN Plaza in NYC.  How about a few small apartments on a big lawn, like Tomas Jefferson built at UVa, with a few coffee and sandwich shops like the Seattle Seaport, and a rail trail connecting to uptown like the Highline from Hell’s Kitchen to Hudson Yards.  Hide a parking, bus-transit center underground like Cleveland or add a gondola to the skiing like Telluride and Whistler.  

Let’s get boldly creative with our  and allow them to build something striking at the Yarrow Crossroads or ingenious like cantilevering 448 over the adjacent wetlands like the road to Aspen or Glenwood Canyon.   Let’s put 224 underground like the Big Dig in Boston and build people and wildlife crossings on top with some stores and houses, so we don’t become another freeway town like Vail.   Let’s build tunnels instead of endless cut and fill sections for our roads or lets pull our streams out of their pipes and make them part of our landscape instead of a nuisance.  Lets make walkable and bikeable districts instead of shopping mall parking lots, with Daytripper parking on the outskirts and busses to the CBD.

This isn’t rocket science and we don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but we shouldn’t ask a third-party developer what he thinks. I realize it comes down to money but honey we’ve got plenty of that and the second homeowners pay for most of it anyhow.   We can raise enough money for a $100 million climbing wall and pool, (a dollar a day per home) if we include open space and trails, so let’s focus this kind of energy on finishing this town with style and grace.    It just takes a little inspired foresight and proactive creativity to keep Park City Cool, reject the schlock and imagine something new and different and tasty. 

BalletNext

 On a quiet Thursday afternoon, I took a gander at the Park Record list of things to do for that night and saw a BalletNext posting of a Beethoven and Grateful Dead ballet recital that night.  I love ballet with its strength and stability, movement and balance, grace and beauty, lithe limberness.  Besides those are two of my favorite bands, so I rode out to Stein Ericksons old house in Thayne’s Canyon where Michele Wiles lives and runs the BalletNext Company.  Michele is the real deal and was a star with the American Ballet Company in New York for 13 years.  Now she is sharing her talents with the community, performing and teaching, interpreting and inspiring.

Well, she blew the doors off her small studio with her dance partner Matthew Helms and with her small troupe of pre-professional students and visiting artists.  They virtually went through the roof with lifts and throws, spins and twirls, dips and doodles that would make a true Deadhead envious.  The choice of music and choreography was impeccable starting with Althea (Honest to the point of recklessness) and finishing with Dancing in the Streets, with some Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd quartered in between.  I just couldn’t believe there was this much talent stashed away in our little town, to be enjoyed on a whim, with so little fanfare and flourish.  This is the kind of thing that keeps Park City Cool.

Luckily, they will reprise this Echoes of Time performance Tuesday, August 25, 2026, at 6:30 PM at the Rose Wagner Black Box Theatre in Salt Lake City.  This will feature a bigger stage and more explosive performance that will surely rock your socks off.

Locals’ Art Festival – Park City 2026

It was locals’ night at the Art’s Festival in Park City, an annual event when we all pretend to be shoppers and connoisseurs of large and expensive art.  Instead, we walk up main street to see our old friends we haven’t seen since ski season and ask each other, ‘who are these people’.  There are more and more second homeowners joining the parade with their dogs and strollers, old baseball hats and new style coiffeurs. 

There is Charlie showing off his new knee and improved range of motion, Contrarian John walking down the upside of the street saying last year was the best ski year ever, and Nicolette styling her new blonde curls and pickleball outfit.  Contrast that with all the fancy young girls in their summer clothes, with new boobs and leather fringe motorcycle outfits, cowboy hats and chaps.  Or the ubiquitous parade of bridesmaids, in their matching blue-brown dresses behind the bride-to-be dressed in off white and pink.  It is a warm night with monsoons lurking by Sunday, so we take our time and enjoy the spectacle.

All-and-all, it makes for a slow, scenic stroll up Main Street to the brewpub parking lot for a Pusillanimous Pulverized Pale Ale and some Nepalese Nepotic Nachos.  When the band and the crowd up there get too raucous or rambunctious we turn tide and walk back down Main, faster yet more determined to chat up old friends, artists, volunteers and the polite police department.  Time is spent at nature photo booths, guessing where obscure shots were taken or discussing grizzly bears with the photographer.  Suddenly a large brass bison looks interesting, and a 3D wood carved map of NYC looks compatible with your current log cabin decor.  We all shop at a different pace, so we phase in and out of each other’s orbit to meet at the bottom of the street.  Anything is possible after a few beers and the gummies kick in. 

Finally, washing out at Low-Main where Fat Paw or another Grateful Dead cover band is playing and the real heart of the town is hanging.  There is our old Mayor twirling with the new County Commissioner, surrounded by millionaires and billionaires in pre-torn dungarees and Deadheads in training, just learning how to sing and dance.  Old ski bums exchange hugs with new adventure athletes and keep score by how many months off, days skied, adventures survived or exotic vacations enjoyed.  The vibe of false bravado prevails from living in an Olympic town and never quite being the best at anything.  Is all good since we did not invent this lifestyle, but we have perfected it.

So, another PC tradition prevails, handed down from old to new timers, each putting their own sash and flash on it as we differentiate the generations.  Our strength is our diversity with new people and different ideas, yet similar sensibilities.  We all want to keep Park City kind, Mountainkind as the Chamber says, and we want to keep Park City cool, despite climate change.  We strive ‘to be more and appear less’ as Ira said a long time ago.  Locals’ night seems like a slow, annual passing of the torch, from wisdom to beauty, experience to grace, sense and sensibilities, with hope for the future.

The Odyssey – Homer 1026 BC – Christopher Noland – 2026 AD

 We all know the blind poet Homer’s story of the Odyssey.  It is a story about going home, like; “Oh Brother, Oh Brother”, “The Wizard of Oz”, “The Martian”, “Garden State”, and almost every other story ever told.  But we have been told that ‘you can never go home’, just like ‘you can never step in the same river twice.’  That’s because you are always changing and the river and home are always different and besides that, the road is long and home is far.  Therefore, there are tremendous trials and tribulations in these stories preventing us from actually going home. 

When Homer wrote this epic story 3000 years ago, about Odysseus (nick-maned Nobody) going home to Greece from his success in the Turkish Trojan Wars (outlined in his earlier best seller The Iliad), he threw in everything but the kitchen sink.  There are savage storms and hairy seas, Cyclops monsters and man-eating giants, sexy Sirens and ugly witches, generous gods and gorgeous goddesses with navigationally insane trips to Africa, France and Italy.  Meanwhile every stud rich guy in Odysseus’s Greek hometown of Ithaca, (near Corfu and Albania) is chasing his wife so they could be king, much to the chagrin of his son who would like the job, if his mom would just give up on Odysseus.  ‘Out of sight, out of mind’, said Homer.

This begs for this epic tale to be re-sung, as Christopher Noland sings in his latest cinematic rendition of the tale, since ‘songs are the poetry of our history and if this history is forgotten, it is repeated’.    While sticking to the original poem and ‘feeling free to add some good stuff’ with modern affections, historical humor and gratuitous F-bombs, Noland has created a masterpiece of the much maligned and misused, modern day multi-media.  Every scene has a zinger line or two to sum up all the heroism and hubris, but most adventures ultimately wind up in a comic, Pythonesque ‘Run Away’ resolution.

Odysseus laments shooting the Cyclops in the eye and angering both Cyclops and the god Poseidon, for which he suffers 20 years of ruthless weather and ferocious seas.  When asked by a soldier why Cyclops did not talk to him, he haughtily asks, ‘Do you talk to ants?’  When the sexy Sirens told him he sacrificed his ability to go home for ‘all the promises he failed to keep’ he finally admits that the ‘clearest view of man is from below’.

In the end it is a film about upholding god Zeus’s law, even before Hammurabi’s ‘eye for an eye’ or Jesus’s ‘turn the other cheek’.  Zeus said you should treat others as they should treat yourself, because they might be gods.  That means kindness to strangers and hospitality for guests and don’t look a gifted Trojan Horse in the mouth.  Odysseus felt bad for giving the Trojans a trick gift horse and then jumping out of it and destroying their entire civilization, ‘breaking Zeus’s law forever’.  Like fellow Noland hero Oppenheimer, he has become death.  He questioned the wisdom and usefulness of ego, greed and war, and for that he was banished for 20 years.  When told that the gods dictate that all his troops will be lost and only he can go home, he says that ‘I will defy the gods’.  It is almost like Negro Jim said in Mark Twain’s great American novel ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ that if he did the right thing he would go to hell and he famously replied, ‘then I will go to hell’.

This movie will be on TV forever but go see it now, while you can, on the big screen, or better yet in the IMAX format it was painstakingly filmed on.  Go for the big picture but stay for the details.  The story is as old as civilization but nonetheless, resonates today.

River Deep by Bryan Gruley

 

It’s curious that good writers often are drawn to the Mystery format to tell their stories, while great writers can just tell great stories, no-holds-barred.  I suppose the structure is reassuring and can be written backwards or forwards with twists and tangents from premeditated outlines or divinely inspired stream of consciousness.  It is no surprise that Bryan Gruley employs this structure to tell his latest scintillating story of murder and mystery, sprinkled with hockey and high jinx.  I put down several books of literature to read this Mystery story and could not put it down.  Ther-in lies the rub.

I have read all Gruley’s novels and short stories and know him to be a fine writer and stand-up guy, if not a sensitive new age family man of the 1970’s.  He hides that well with his gruff, beat-reporter and crude hockey room persona.   We all write what we know and it is apparent that he loves the fun and diversion of this genre after being an award-winning journalist for years. 

He sometimes distracts us from our manly fixations by writing from the point of view of women.  Jack Nicolson famously said that this is done by ‘writing as a man and then removing any semblance of reason or logic’.  But that is just a movie punch line since Jack’s favorite writer, Jim Harrison, excelled at this craft.  Tana French can also write the opposite sex merely by including episodes of burping, scratching and fraternal inebriation. 

Brian also employs hockey references and metaphors to make his point, humorously at first but effectively in the end.  It is a tool he is committed to and he makes it work.  Like the ‘prosecutor sizing up the defense, like a forward going to the corner deciding whether to hit or out skate his opponent’.  It is as Springsteen often dismisses his own profound or sensitive comments when saying something like ‘God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of’.

Gruley’s characters are attractive and likable, to a point, and human in the end.  Attorney Devyn is a swarmy babe and a hockey stud with needs and desires like the rest of us.  Ex-cop Willie Hooper has a pirate eye patch and a dilapidated minivan but checks himself into jail for a few days of R&R.  Bryan writes about real people with real dialogue, motivations and insecurities, because he knows people.  Things are tied up in a nice bow by the end, leaving enough ragged edges for a sequel or two.  We never find out how deep the river actually is, but sense things often aren’t as they appear or as we wish they would be.

I will spare you the details but in summary; Gruley’s story is about revenge and redemption, community and team, nice small towns and big bad cities, family, fraternity and friendship.  Bryan shines with his experience in journalism and the process, police work and its limitations, court proceedings and their distance from truth, justice and the American way.  It’s all part of the cloak and dagger muse to tell his own story of hockey obsession, journalistic excellence, self-doubt, and finally; the acceptance of self with what we really are and really want.

Good stories go viral and great ones become universal.  My only hope is that this unique Gruley Hockey Mystery genre catches on to the masses and becomes part of our culture like so few varieties do.  Bryan can then keep pumping these stories out, make piles of money and ride off into the sunset, secure in the fact that he had something to say and someone who wanted to read it. 

From Park to Pickleball

 

Late last spring, while I was staying at my cousin’s swanky Park Avenue apartment, I went down early to the East River to play Pickleball at the courts near Gracie Mansion, out of the wind, where ocean freighters could still be seen chugging down the river.  The Mayor was not there that day so I started playing with some nice ladies in tennis dresses who were both sporty and sociable.  We made instant connection and one gal even grew up a block away from me on Long Island and dated one of my childhood friends.  Small world. 

They told me that the good players usually show up at noon, and they did.  I tried to get into their game but was informed by an agro-aggressive, rasta-bloke in a Bob Marley T-shirt, that these were good players and I had no chance.  I patiently bided my time and found an opening with the good group with rasta man as my partner.  We started slow and polite and quickly degenerated into the bashing game of intermediates.  Trash talk was rampant, even between partners, as I spurred my slacker agro-man to bone up and contribute more.  One of the players was an NFL referee who made definitive line calls loudly and with confidence, even if he didn’t see them. I asked for video review.

We finally settled into an advanced game at the net with dinks and angles, topspin and head-fakes.  I have to say I held my own on the court and in the trash talk, having been raised in the milieu.  The New Yorker came out in me and my appreciation for it deepened.  After five hours I was knackered, without food or water, and crawled the eight blocks home.  Who knew it was eight blocks from First to Park 4^th Avenue?