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?

Drought and Bob Dylan

I participated in a panel discussion last month, with some of our biggest retail and wholesale water providers, presented flawlessly by the Summit Health Department.  Everyone had the proper astonishment of the general, regional and the latest climate conditions, where it is getting warmer and dryer at increasingly rapid rate.  We may have been preaching to the choir or talking to the wrong people.  Conservation is a battle of economic will that should not be foisted on the wholesalers and retailers of water but on the political will of the people.   But as Bob Dylan said, “The pump don’t work since the vandals stole the handle.”

 But these speakers pay their bills by selling water and they can only afford to bang the conservation drum so hard.  They do a pretty good job at seamlessly making our water plentiful and cheap and not privy to the slings and arrows of outrageous climate.  But they sugarcoated our Severe Drought as Moderate and called for El Nino to save the day, the Great Salt Lake and the Colorado River.  It’s all good, till it isn’t. 

 We figured out years ago; that runoff from the Weber and the Provo rivers peak now in May, instead of June, has done so since 2000, and this year it peaked in April.  Both similar river basins deliver 321 acre-feet per year less, above diversion points, and have been for 120 years.  That is enough water for 1 million people, or one big lake.  We knew this was coming, we saw this happening, but we do not act until it is a crisis.  We are looking optimistically at our exponential climate and water issues with linear solutions.  “We don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

 Isn’t it ironic that our second most valuable natural resource, behind air, which belongs to everybody and nobody, is being squandered because demand is high, supply is low, and the price of it is too cheap.  Water is distributed by the state, in a socialized manner, to those who want and need it first. The commodity is actually free! So, people are growing hay in Utah at 8000 feet, cotton in Arizona and rice in California, because they were first, while downstream users go thirsty.  The original system was set up to promote western growth and dependable economic development, order and certainty through the beneficial benevolence of the State Engineer.  It worked.

 Now the only way to really influence water use, human nature of fear and greed, or Game Theory and the Tragedy of the Commons is to charge what water is worth, not what it costs.  The capitalist system and market economy is needed to promote conservation and wise use of our water resources, where the age-old system of Prior Appropriation cannot.  It’s contradictory that we need capitalism to justly distribute a social resource for the public good. 

 Things are changing faster than we thought.  The Great Salt Lake and our regional rivers are drying up.  But the State did away with the Public Welfare requirements of Water Rights this year, so they can build more data centers and shirk responsibility for shrinking lakes and rivers.  That clause may have allowed or forced them to give every water user a haircut and devote enough water or the public good of avoiding toxic dust storms.  But eventually the State and the Feds will come in and buy up water they already own and control or direct it to where it will do the most public good.  We are capitalizing personal profits and socializing public expense. 

 Perhaps farmers can use less water to grow hay and sell that saved water for the lake.  Dry farming does not have to be binary, yes or no; it can be a scaled usage and maybe we just buy the anemic third crop water. I don't know whether the Feds or State could afford all that saved water for the lake.  Or as the price goes up, market forces could make water too valuable to squander on low-income crops.

 I would call our water situation Severe instead of Moderate now and impose the preordained 40% restrictions because of our physical predicament and to impress upon the public the severity of our situation.  My position may seem harsh, but I feel the middle is defined by the extremes in these situations and we can no longer afford to be naive or cautiously optimistic.  Appropriate cutbacks should be then enforced because it is better to ere on the side of conservation than profligate use.  “Even a blind man knows when it’s not raining.”

To Sleep, Perchance, To Dream

 

The keys, they say, to a healthy long life is; exercise, diet and sleep.  And the greatest is sleep.  And not getting hit by a bus.  Sleep is the interval of our lives, when we shut down and rest, for a third of our time on the planet.  It is a biological, neurological and metaphysical reset that we all need.  All animals do it, need it and love it, weather it is day or night.  It is what connects us all.  Sleep is one of the most intimate things that we do together, with lovers, spouses, children and pets.  It is something we share and connects us thoroughly, deeply, with each other.

You may be the fate of Ophelia
Sleeping and perchance to dream
Honest to the point of recklessness

Self-centred to the extreme            Sleep is also a very individual exercise.  It is a time for resting our muscles, tissue repair and hormone driven, stress free immune improvement.  It is a cleansing of our brain of toxins, bad proteins and memories we don’t need.  Sleep is a a cosmic car wash of the glymphatic system with cerebrospinal soap.  It is a time of neuroplastic shrinkage  and consolidation of memory.  Our brain works harder during sleep, backing up the systems, than it does when we are awake.  It shifts smart, short term memory from our hippocampus to our cerebral cortex for long term storage that constitutes wisdom.

We all have intensely symbolic dream sequences when we sleep that are a dialogue with our own conscious.  We have all seen a dog run and yelp in its sleep and wondered if it was frolicking, flying or fleeing.  We all experience similar dream symbols of going to school naked, to take a final exam, for a class we never attended.  Sleep is a primal, psychological blow off valve where we are most aware, creative and self-conscious.

Sleep is also a time when we let go of our individual ego, the ‘I,’ the 'fight or flight' focus of the waking day, and embrace a more universal ‘we.’  As Jung and Freud said, we embrace our collective consciousness.  As Heisenberg and Einstein infer, we forgo the specific, kinetic, matter-particle functionality of waking reality and slip into brain wave functions of pure potential.  Quantum entanglement suggests a universal connection and an alternate consciousness and sleep could be the time when our individual minds plug into the unified field of the universe, beyond space and time.  We are connected threads in a living, breathing cosmos and sleep is the tie that binds us. Sweet Dreams.

 

910 Ranch

 

I took a ride down East Canyon recently to see the Summit County 910 Parcel of the old Jeremy Ranch. It is a rough piece of land with steep hills on either side and good vegetation only on the north and east faces. It was a great opportunity for the county to buy this land and inclusively ask for opinions on how best to treat it.  

 

I agree that this should be a conservation parcel with just enough recreation for people to really get to see, appreciate it and preserve it. That may mean keeping cows, sheep, people, and dogs out of most of it for a while because this place needs time to heal. Perhaps that means making this a ride through park for a while, but the recovery will take many years.

 

The focal point of this 13.4 square mile parcel is East Canyon Creek which starts at Jupiter Peak and ends in East Canyon Reservoir, the Weber River and the Great Salt Lake. This Creek has been hammered from over one hundred years grazing, and this is where the conservation should start. The side banks of the stream are eroded vertically from the overgrazed slopes above and ubiquitous livestock access to The Creek. Limited grazing and aggressive riparian revegetation could eventually return the natural stream by helping to restore the natural geomorphology of the creek, helping the littoral beaver, fish, birds, bugs and bunnies. 

 

Returning the basin to the uber-species like deer, elk, and moose with less competition for the natural protein of the basin, is paramount.  Promoting natural predators like coyotes, wolves, lions and tigers and bears will keep all of them moving around and off the stream banks.  It worked in Yellowstone, as an unintended consequence, where stream morphology was markedly enhanced by introducing natural predators but beware of good intentions and unintended consequences.

 

The other need for The Creek is water. Climate Change and our conservation efforts have not helped. We simply use too much of the natural flow and leave nothing for the fish or to dilute our pharmaceuticals and Forever Chemicals. The ‘solution to pollution is dilution,’ but we have nothing else to give.  Even with all the new regional water being imported to the basin from the upper Weber River by WBWCD and subsequent increased return flows from the sewer treatment plant, The Creek is running dry. Ideas like recycling water from East Canyon Reservoir back up to the existing mothballed, Jeremy Ranch, water treatment plant have been floated for years without success, due to lack of water. There is simply less supply and more demand for The Creek, The Great Salt Lake and us.  

 

Instead, we should all use less water and let our lawns and golf courses go naturally brown in the summer and come back every spring. We could pay the Alfalfa farmers in the basin to dry farm more and not count on that weak second or third crop each year. The 910 Ranch is an opportunity to unite all the shareholders in this small basin, setting an example to the rest of the state, country, and world. If we cannot solve it with all our money and ability, then who can? Let us work together on this unique community opportunity, with foresight and forbearance. Thank you for the opportunities for free speech and open space.

Failure and Fortitude - Nathaniel Gee, PE, PhD.

Nathaniel Gee is a Mormon dam engineer with 11 kids, the smartest guy in the room, a good man and a friend of mine.  In his spare time, he has written Failure and Fortitude, the most seminal water resource book since Mark Reisner’ s Cadillac Desert, almost 40 years ago.  While Reisner was hard on the Mormons and the Bureau of Reclamation, Gee exonerates the LDS church for their humanitarian efforts and hammers the Bureau dam engineers for their hubris.  Although Gee worked for Reclamation for several years, he blames them for the systemic issues that caused the failure of the Teton Dam in Idaho in 1976.  There were not only technical and design failures, but there were human issues and haughtiness that combined to cause catastrophic failure.  That failure changed the face of Dam Design and Dam Safety in the United States and the World.

Gee starts with his smooth narration of the sunny Saturday morning failure of the Teton Dam with the energy of Kevin Fedarko and the grace of Wallace Stenger.  He tells this horrific tale thru the perspective of the dam engineers and construction workers, fishermen, farmers and the families that live downstream.  As the dam disintegrates in hours, people have mere minutes to make critical life and death decisions.  We are hooked from the start.

He then fills his tale with a litany of historical dam failures that have defined the dam industry like the Johnstown Flood and Baldwin Hills California, while intertwining the related political history of the United States and the Mormon Church.  He reveals the start of Reclamation, and their mission to develop the west and its water resources, in the early years and later under the leadership of Floyd Dominy.  He illustrates its battles with the Army Corps of Engineers and the Soil Conservation Service to become the preeminent dam building organization in the USA, during the heyday of dam construction, before Environmental Impact Statements and engineering fallibility.

        Prominent in these battles was Presidential support of politically based project funding.  The funding, back then, came with some highly questionable practices for justifying projects with flimsy benefit - cost ratios and long term - no interest payouts.  The cost and risks of dams were minimized while their benefits were greatly exaggerated.  The price tag was paid by; building big cash-register power dams like Coulee, Hoover and Glen Canyon, by the deep pockets of the American people, and by the unquantifiable damage to the environment. 

Teton came at the nexus of these conflicts.  Engineers did not filter-drain fine soil particles from piping through cracks and fissures in the right abutment and the outlet works was not completed to allow for slow filling or prompt evacuation of the dam.  Both practices are common now in large and small dams, but corners were cut and risks were taken because of the political, environmental and economic pressures on Teton.  Eleven people died in the dam failure and there was 500 million dollars in damage from the flood.  Reclamation initially denied guilt but eventually accepted it for systemic improvement in the Bureau and the dam industry.  Gee does not hold back when assessing blame for the failure or praise for the LDS driven recovery.

The Teton failure was enough to spur Federal Dam Safety legislation, but it took another dam failure in South Dakota, and finally one in President Jimmy Carter’s home state of Georgia.  This spurred the federal funding for the states to adopt the Dam Safety programs we have today.  Gee finishes with highlights of current state programs for dams, levees, low head diversions and water resource development.

Gee’s real talent and passion is showing how the leadership, culture and the congregation of the Bureau of Reclamation and the LDS church contributed to water development in the west and in the building, failure and recovery of the Teton dam in Idaho.  He personalizes the fear and the grief of those affected and is proud of how the local and regional LDS constituents pulled together to rebuild, before FEMA or Flood Insurance. 

There are good dams and there are bad dams and there are dams that have outlasted their usefulness that are consistently assessed for their condition and costs, risks and benefits, potential failure modes and evacuations.  The Teton failure put us on the path to honestly evaluate these things and Nathaniel Gee’s book drives this point home with horror, hubris, humanity and humor.  A good story that is well told.  

Choices

As I came into the age of reason in the eighth grade, my first adult decision was to go to the all-boy prep high school my dad hated instead of the coed party school, where I would waste all my time chasing girls. My second big decision was to go to the best college I got into, even though it was Catholic, in the Midwest, and Dad thought I would turn into a rah-rah, go-go boy.

Picking classes for freshman year, I considered guitar playing and American Hipster Literature, but Dad said he wouldn’t pay for that and that I needed to get a job when I graduated. Took pre-med and pre-engineering, and 20 credits my first semester because he said to take as many classes as I could since the price was the same.

Got hammered, literally, and worked my ass off, but I soon realized that all the pre-med people wanted to do was get rich, not help people, while all the engineers drank beer and wore flannel shirts. Dad and Gramps were engineers, so I was ‘in,’ and I got them off my back for a while.

Coming out of school, everyone was going to Chicago or New York or grad school, but I wanted no part of that. I was burnt out and needed a rest—for 50 years. Out West, and that’s where I was headed, young man. New England was beautiful but poor, you can’t eat scenery, and the snow and skiing were better out West. Dad was bummed that I didn’t have a job with a tie, but at that point he trusted me and said so.

I didn’t want to be a traffic engineer because of all the traffic, so I went out West to be a hydrologist, where there was no water but lots of jobs. California had been ‘had,’ and Colorado was too groovy, so I settled in a little Utah backwater mining ski town that was off the radar and under the weather.

Park City streets were barely paved, and the bar patios were a cable-spool table in a field or next to a dumpster. The skiing was undeveloped but great, and the pow was the best. Positioned at the top of the Colorado Plateau and the Great American Desert, when it wasn’t snowing, the sky was bluebird clear. The roads south revealed endless colored canyons that resembled Mars and would take a lifetime to explore.

The vibe in PC was already 60s–70s chill, friendly, free love, Rocky Mountain High, quality-of-life thing, a cross between California cool and Mork and Mindy mayhem. By the 80s, the weather cooperated one last time and stacked snow to the second story consistently so that, at times, the town felt like a snow globe, shaken, not stirred.

Work closed for powder mornings and ended at 4:30 on Friday when someone showed up with a bottle of whiskey to be shared. Ski runs closed without a rope and a sign were considered soft closings as long as you weren’t obvious enough to make the ski patrol look silly. There were other transgressions too, like snowball fights with tourists, après-ski wet T-shirt contests, lines on the bar, bumps in the bathroom, or blunts and bones in the back room, as well as a parade of exotic women in the bars followed by the cops every Friday night.

Summers were cool and clear and kept us around for good. The town neglectfully ran out of water one summer but bought more, and the six-story icon mine building mysteriously burned to the ground, paving the way for endless development. Locals all said hello and were very inclusive of newbies, although the miners would give you the stink-eye if you were a true hippie.

We had a mass transit fleet of little blue buses borrowed from the mental hospital, there wasn’t a traffic light in the county, and we were 20 minutes away from a budding metropolis and an international airport. It was 60/40 men to women, and the Mormon drinking rules were really weird, but no one really cared, and we shared the women and the wine. Little did I know that PC was to grow to be an international Olympic destination ski town with some of the most valued real estate in the country. And we would help.

We would build Deer Valley to set the tone of the 80s for customer service. We would develop the Sundance Festival and bring culture and class to the town with our own radio and TV station. We supported surreal events like Clown Day and the Tour de Suds, Art Fest, and Silly Market. We weren’t weird; we were funky. We grew up together. We kept score, not with money, but with ski days and vacations. We were individuals and a community, inclusive and accepting. Live and let live.

These little decisions we make at ungodly young ages, with little help from above, have huge implications for our future and make us what we are. Could have chosen to build skyscrapers in New York City or perfect sanitation in Mumbai, but my path was destined, serendipitously, for better things, down the road least traveled.

I challenge the young folks to find that funky, chunky place that no one knows about, is hard to get to, or is too cold, but speaks to your heart, and make it your own. Bring a partner or find one there. Do your homework and pay your dues but get a job that makes you happy in a place you can grow with, raise a family, and sell your house for ten times what you paid for it in 30 years. Need less and save more in a place everyone wants to be. Let time and compound interest cover the rest. Be happy.

We weren’t just lucky, we were good. We didn’t invent this lifestyle, but we perfected it. Find your own place and perfect it too.

Mary, Mary - Quite Contrary

When I find myself in times of trouble,

Mother Mary comes to me.

 

With that opening line, Paul McCartney includes his own mother, and the virgin mother of God, in his dream of Letting the Beatles Be.  It is a convenient and coincidental construction that I share because there are so many women of consequence in my life named Mary.  Being Irish Catholic does not help but I chalk it up to quantum convergence and entanglement where are all one energy and there are no coincidences.  Things happen for reason because we all share the same time and space, gravity and light and we affect each other significantly in ways we cannot know.  Like when you dream or think about an old friend and then run into them on the street the next day.  Déjà vu, kismet or happenstance?   I think not.

First there is my younger sister Mary K who despite a love/hate sibling rivalry when we were young, has become my greatest partner and confidant, mentor and supporter.  We are hatched from the same egg or cut from the same stone and we understand each other intrinsically.  There is nothing like sister to keep you honest, respectful and reverent to all women.

The next Mary bug did not hit me until high school despite all my grammar teachers being called Sister Mary Winifred or Fillippa with veins in their eyes and hair on their teeth. All the gals in grammar school were named Patty; light and breezy, strong and sexy, silent and sultry as only Irish Catholic girls could be at 13. 

High school began with Mary E. as my best friend without benefits.  Shy but sassy, she has always bridged the gap between sister and companion.  Soon came Mary A. who was my first true love.  Long and lean and quite savvy in between, she was a soulmate but we prematurely broke up because we didn’t think we were good enough for each other and too young for commitment. We still keep in touch.

So, I left childish ways behind for college at Our Lady of the Lakes, with the golden virgin Mary presiding over campus chastity like a beacon from heaven. There I found Mary B. who was a classic, brainy, blue eyed, buxom-blonde-beauty who loved all my handsome friends, but not me.  That was OK because we spent endless hours conversing and cavorting around campus and she lives around the block still and I get to see her weekly.  That kind of continuity is hard to find and harder to hold but the connection is unrelenting.  I like her hubby and wife loves her, she is a good egg. 

        In between there was; Mary Be, the Deans darling daughter who I took for coffee but not for granted and Mary Br who was the most interesting school sex symbol I ever chased, unsuccessfully, I might add, but who I still dream about today.  Then there were the lesser; Mary Bg who was a middle-class model at work with tight tee-shirts and crossed eyes, Mary Bh who unfortunately was the hoops star’s girlfriend, and Mary W. who was a mere psycho-physical fascination.  All reduced to stereotypical shorthand by my poor self-awareness and esteem, imagery and memory.

        Finally, I broke loose of the parochial bonds of nomenclature and discovered the world of Arlenes and Donnas, Pegs and Tracey Maries, among a random scattering of influential and intriguing Mary Vs and Bs thrown in tween just for fun.  What is in a name, but a freaky fascination and foundational firmness.  Was I attracted to this name or did it blur my individuality, anchoring or limiting me?   It is nothing I can shake or forget but it has served me well, allowing my Garden to Grow and Let it Be.