Changing Ocean and Beach

I can’t help but notice that the ocean is both intimidating and comforting at the same time.  It is dynamic and ever changing. It’s size and power is unimaginable and sometimes overwhelming while its rhythms and tempos are soothing and uplifting.  The ocean is a force of nature powered by the sun and the wind, moon and the stars.  It has a personality and purpose to be respected, revered and relished.

The changes in illumination where the sea meets the sand are a picture of rolling rainbow colors and moods.  The happy-clear, reflected blue-brightness of midday is contrasted by the mystery and menace of midnight, even when punctuated by a full moon or the Milky Way.  The contrasting clouds and storms can paint this impressionistic picture a melancholic grey or dramatic black and white, to suit the mood.

The waves add a schizophrenic face to the surface of the sea. This face is at times calm, smooth and peaceful, other times choppy, confused and random while occasionally it is incomprehensibly huge, thundering and powerful.  This face is painted by the wind and tides, seashore and continental shelf but is shifting constantly with the caprice and whims of Mother Nature under the universal laws of Father Physics.

This ocean power is what forms and changes the beach.  Four times a day with the tides.  Four times a year with the seasons and several times a year with the big storms.  Sand and slope come and go, kelp and seaweed lines rise and fall while random deposits of debris and detritus constantly surprise us with their variety and unpredictability.   You can never step on the same beach twice.

The waves and tides, winds and skies make the beach different every day, which excites us with our anticipation of its variations and fascinates us in its diversity yet reassures us in its consistency of change .  The only thing you can count on is change.

Whistling and Fishing

We saw the Ferrari vs Ford film last night and I confess that I cried at random parts.  Maybe I’m getting old but I cry in movies all the time now.  I know that this was a true story (spoiler alert) but did they have to have Ken Miles lose the race and die too.  I usually cry for beauty, truth and kindness but now it’s for Bruce, bravery, mentoring, inquisitive kids, sad wives, fast cars and of course dogs and all other animals, except cats.

The other day I was over at my new neighbors and the kids had new K-mart fishing poles that needed setup.  Mom was busy and frantic so I said I would help if the kids said please and thank you.  I set up 6 year old Ruby’s rod and she skipped off to the creek to fish.  Three year old Boon was next and as I threaded his fishing pole eyelets and attached the giant fake hook, I sang John Prine’s - Whistling and Fishing in Heaven song.

Father forgive us for what we must do
You forgive us and we'll forgive you
We'll forgive each other 'til we both turn blue
And we'll whistle and go fishing in the heavens.

Fish and whistle, whistle and fish
Eat everything that they put on your dish
When we get through we'll make a big wish
That we never have to do this again, again? again?

When I finished a wide eyed Boon asked me to sing it again, again and again and he tried to help me.  He was so cute and innocent that it brought a tear to my eye but when his mom came around the corner laughing, she brought the house down.  The point is that I’m a sad and sorry sot, easily bemused.  I still cry at "Rudy", every time.

Back to the movie, dynamic Christian Bale acts circles around cardboard Matt Damon and Lee Iaccoca is inserted for his name recognition as much as Ford and Coca-Cola are splattered across the screen.   If they are going to do so much branding, they could show a real Shelby Mustang named after the Matt Damon character or relate how Iaccoca eventually saved Chrysler as well as Ford.  

All the actors had strong moments but there were times when they seemed to stop acting well, perhaps because of poor dialogue or directing.  The sole female role of the wife had only one shining scene when she was racing around in her Country Squire to punish her husband for his quiet secrecy, and she knocked it out of the ballpark.   The movie, like the story and the times, was male dominated and that felt hollow in this modern world.

The stereotypical evil corporate controller part was a bit overdone as well but set up the conflict of good and evil and gave us a premeditated excuse for the tragic loss of the big race at the end. The cheap shots at the new Mustang design were undeserved and its unveiling could have been a nice Iaccoca sub plot in the film since it was all about saving Ford.  In the end it was about the people, characters and their story, since Ford did very well before and after this story happened and these legendary guys may just bend up as corporate speed bumps in the overall Ford story.

This film was a fun ride and the sound and cinematography was excellent, especially the early bumper level racing sequences.  The classic 50’s and 60’s period shots were tremendous and the small town, small track California scenes were bittersweet and nostalgic.  It all hearkens back to an early, simpler time when men were men, cars were cars and heroes were heroes.  This was a herculean effort and a real hero of a movie.

However, the best driving from that movie occurred on our way to the show.  I was driving the camper van when I saw, no, I felt a large 20 long SUV moving up fast on my right to try to impossibly pass me in a 14 foot space before ramming the stopped cars in front of him.  As usual, I knew my position and the position of all around me, since I am an excellent driver, so I swerved almost subconsciously as far left as I felt I could without hitting others and the crazy guy slipped into the limited space and avoided the inevitable catastrophe.  He sped away unscathed but my wife remarked on the tragedy narrowly averted by complimenting my driving, for the first time, ever.

They don’t make movies like this anymore that on the surface are totally enjoyable but have a subtle message underneath.  Movies that hit the punch line and don’t lose the teaching moments to dribble away in lame dialogue.  Movies where the guy kisses the girl in the fog at the train station and does not just say 'I'll see you around'.

Spielberg is the master of this with his simple depiction of the perfect split level California home with the happy loving, slightly dysfunctional but perfect family in the new subdivision with cookie cutter houses and the American dream.  The occupants are all willingly ignorant of the big picture cost of this lavish, conspicuous consumption American lifestyle and mindless growth but blissfully participate in it for the next great adventure.

In the early eighties Spielberg was making nature films before we knew what climate change was, he was making family films before there was a crisis of connubial confidence and he was making Nazi films before there was Trump.    Was Jaws a Melvillian man against nature or common man against local government film?  Was Indiana Jones just an adventure film or overstated anti Nazi.  Was Close Encounters a film about family madness or space invaders. 

I thought ET was about kids and spacemen, but it is apparently about the adversarial relationship between man and nature, the effects of our thoughtless growth and consumption with its affects on other creatures.  It’s also about the evil government and authority effects on the innocents. But is ET really Jesus?  He descends from heaven and is left here by his father, he becomes man – merged with Elliot, he is recognized and appreciated only by the innocents, he does miracles, flies, heals cuts and dying plants – he is life, he dies, is resurrected by the love of Elliot and ascends back to heaven to sit with the father.   Who knew?

I even thought Game of Thrones was about dragons, incest, gratuitous nudity and head chopping violence.  Now I hear that it’s about Climate Change - Winter is coming.  It is the World War I transition from feudal contentious warring tribes and families to the new method of building consensus and alliances united nations.  It takes the old Hammurabi code of an ‘eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth' to the Christian philosophy of 'turn the other cheek and love your enemies'. 

And finally, I thought Bagger Vance was about golf but it's really about being our authentic selves in concert with the real world as we perceive it.    What does it all mean?  What makes us laugh, what makes us cry, what makes us think, what makes us lie?  I don't know.  I'll just whistle and go fishing in Heaven. 

Live and Learn

Heading over Teton Pass recently in a raging snow storm, I am reminded of an earlier time coming over this same pass in 1979 as a greenhorn.  We were 21, indefatigable, indestructible east coast preppies and we were trying to make it back to Jackson Hole from Targhee during a fierce storm in my big old 1969 Country Squire Station Wagon.  ‘The Green Monster’, as we called it, was a stripped down version without the wood panels or the backwards barf seats in the rear, but it was mine, it was paid for and it was a beast.  The FM converter was blasting some bootleg Grateful Dead out of Jackson and the car was littered with beers, boots, burgers, skis, a shovel and one sleeping bag.  We may have been young and dumb ski bums but we were not stupid. 

On our first try over the pass, we stalled halfway up behind some conservative old guy in a boxy silver Volvo with New Hampshire plates who foolishly slowed and stopped when he could not see anymore.  ‘Live Free or Drive’ we yelled at him. With only rear wheel drive we could not continue the climb without good momentum, so we backed into a U-turn, getting out to push our car and help the frightened New Englander do the same, and we headed back down in defeat towards the calm flats near Victor and Driggs, Idaho.   

Not to be dismayed, at the bottom of the grade we pulled another Kojack style U-turn and headed back to the pass at full speed.  I positioned my three passengers and all our equipment in the back over the rear wheels for maximum traction.  As we came around a blind corner, we saw a guy in a bus driver’s uniform taking a pee in the roadside snowbank.  WTF we thought, before it was a thing.  When we came around the next corner, we found his bus stuck in the snowbank on the right side of the road with all its passengers milling about helplessly in the road and on the shoulder.  Knowing we could not stop I started beeping the horn wildly and waving frantically as they scrambled and jumped into the safety of the snowbank.   

My buddies were howling in the back, praying and pushing down with all their weight on the spinning rear wheels.  We barely made it over the Teton pass successfully on that second try and coasted sown past the Glory chute and into the Jackson Motel-6 ($13.99?) just in time for happy hour and Gong Show reruns.  Persistence pays.  Youth is not wasted on the young, it is a prerequisite.  

Now I’m heading north to Montana for another ski trip in a modern, four-wheel-drive German sedan. I feel that I have come a long way in 40 years of driving and skiing and living in the north, snow country.  The road is bad but the car is good and I make my way up and down Teton pass towards Driggs.  I am passed only by local contractors with super beefy, studded Wyoming snow tires that grip and rip the ice.  Those guys aren’t kidding.

The snowplow drivers are out closing roads in the Teton River valley, with big gates at critical intersections, but they allow me thru with a wink and a nod, ‘at my own risk’.  I make my way towards Henrys Fork, Island Park and Montana, but the last cop in Ashton Idaho says the road is closed over the top and there is no way I’m going up.  So, I double back to Rexburg to hit the Freeway, the only way north for a hundred miles.   The freeway is open with a one lane ice rink heading north into the dark winter weather and people are cowardly bailing off the exits and accidentally into the center divider, likes rats from a burning ship.  After a while I am all alone, heading north into the mouth of the beast storm.

The Freeway is sketchy, at best, with blowing ground-snow and white-out conditions.  Visibility is 50 feet and at times going over the Mon-Ida pass I am completely blinded by a full face-shot, for what seems like 5-10 seconds.  None-the-less when I look down at the speedometer, I am going 60 mph along with a white knuckle trucker that are foolishly following me.  It is Montana after all, where the speed limit is -  ‘Safe and Prudent’.  What does that Mean?

It is high stress driving and I have to pee like a racehorse, but I don’t dare slow or stop at the exit or on the soft shoulder.  I soldier on, for what seems like hours,  until somewhere near Lima Montana, I pop out of the cloud cover and the snow slows to a mere blizzard.  I can see mountains and blue skies and a few other cars and I know that I have been miraculously delivered, once more.  I stop to pee and stretch and count my lucky stars.  I make my way towards civilization and a friend’s house for a weekend skiing the frigid ma and pa resorts of Montana.  Persistence pays off again.  Live and learn.  Or not.

Eva-lution

After another great powder day skiing in Utah’s Wasatch mountains, I was soaking in my backyard hot tub enjoying the orange-pink alpenglow hues on the surrounding hills. I had spent the day charging ahead of the maddening crowd with good friends, outflanking the competition, seeking untracked runs while searching and destroying pockets of pow.  My soaking was a fitting respite from the dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest war that is the new age, powder day at our crowded, corporate ski resorts.  I was complacent after enjoying some of my favorite old haunts and ski lines by thinking outside the box and trying new and different strategies for survival and optimization.  Zig when they zag.  Evolve or lose. 

My brand new puppy Eva was out in the backyard with me, exploring the trenches I had stomped for her in the virgin snow.  A soft, black cattle dog nearly 8 weeks old and only two days removed from her mother, siblings and heated barn bedding, she knows only snow and has never seen or smelled the ground.  She is fascinated with our us, our house and with the heat that comes up magically from a vent in the floor. 

As she snuggled the pure powder and pounced on imaginary leaves and mice, I saw her look up quizzically with a flake frosted face and follow a shape across the evening sky.  I looked up as well and saw our local Barn Owl glide by, with his silent four-foot wing span fully extended and his head down, not twenty feet off the ground, considering and calculating.  I jumped from the tub, in all my naked-isity, and scooped up young Eva from the fresh, white snow.  I stashed her quickly back into the safe warm house.  She needed more time to grow and learn, experience and analyze this Darwinian world.  We will both live and learn and evolve to see another powder day. 

Winter Renegade

I ran in slow motion, as if in a dream or a nightmare, through the deep and dirty, uneven snow piles stacked up by the plows on the side of the road the stormy night before.  My frozen, wet galoshes felt like concrete blocks and I could hardly lift each foot off the ground as a mad man chased me down for pelting his car.  My two pre-teen, 1960’s compatriots, Michael Powers and Kenny Boufart, scattered in opposite directions, abandoning each other quicker than Judas Iscariot.  Mike was quiet, funny, and loved BB-guns and the Beatles while Ken was older, stronger and a lady’s man.  Partners in crime but not in punishment, it was universally understood; each man for himself. 

I looked over my shoulder and saw the irate motorist gaining on me in his pinstripe suit with a wide red power tie and slick Italian loafers, his car door flung open out on highway 31.  He was yelling something about ‘getting you god damn kids’.  Kenny headed upstream against traffic, recklessly on the muddy shoulder while Michael headed downstream quickly with it.  I chose the high road, up and over the artic roadside mounds, heading towards the familiar backyards and open lands I knew so well. 

Seconds before we three amigos were engaged in a harmless past time of throwing snowballs at the big panel trucks rolling by in the dirty Levittown alpenglow of the suburban sunset.  The thick east coast snow packed down into hard and dense snowballs, too hard to throw at people or cars but perfect for making a beautiful thud when they hit the hollow trucks in the evening rush hour.  A high, hard fastball got away from me and hit a passing black Cadillac Coup-de Ville with red interior, a classic Mafia type sedan in our young minds.  The surprised Wise Guy slammed on the brakes and jumped out of the car before I even knew what had happened.  My friends and I exchanged surprised glances at each other and instantly had the same thought.  Run!!!

I made it around to the first corner house, Lenny Arkinore’s.  He was a weird skinny kid with greasy hair, dandruff and flakey skin, a mean mother with no husband and a barky dog called Tennessee Jed.  The low front fence was scalable but when I tried to jump over it I missed heavy and low and it hit me at the waist as I tumbled over it into the snow.  Jed was on me instantly and the irate Henchman was not far behind.  I jumped up but the big Goodfella reached over the fence and grabbed me by the collar, my scarf and the scruff of my neck.  I wiggled and shook wildly, spun around and dropped to the ground, crazily freeing myself from the man’s grip of everything but my scarf, which I abandoned with no remorse and headed across the yard with Jed nipping at my heals.  I had obeyed he first rule of a street fight:  Go nuts early. 

Another fence scaled, and I was in Bobby Bacarella’s back yard slipping around the covered underground pool and behind the pool house.  Bobby was younger but was a good athlete and a funny-cool kid with a ‘built-in’ pool so we hung out occasionally, especially in the summer.  No one was home so I went undetected as I stealthfully skirted the property perimeter like the two-bit outlaw I thought I was.  My last glimpse behind me revealed the mad man standing there hopelessly holding my scarf and looking at Jed and all the backyard fences.  Michael and Kenny were nowhere in sight, safe due to my distraction. 

I slipped thru the last slatted fence and into the open field behind the Mandra’s small farm stand.  They were the last rural holdout in this land of suburban sprawl.  They had goats, chickens and an old barn complete with a crazy old Aqualung type farmhand and a hoot-owl.  With my hands on my knees I caught my breath and contemplated my fate.  With some remorse I understood the man’s startled rage but never expected him to chase me down or rag-doll me on the fence like some Dickens Trollop.  I was just 11, a kid, having some fun.  Couldn’t anyone take a joke anymore. 

I shook it off but started to chill down a bit after running and sweating in the damp twilight cold.  I walked down the thin snow covered farm road rustling out a small white rabbit and slipped into the grammar school field behind my house.  I scaled the last fence into my own back yard where, through the dark play gym and monkey-bars, I saw my mother working at the kitchen window.  She was making dinner in our small and cozy, steamy-warm, middle class Irish home with a cigarette between her lips and a drink at her side, in her pearls, grey pants suit and rubber kitchen gloves. 

I burst through the backdoor onto the plastic mat set up for snowy boots and began pealing the wet layers, dropping hats, mittens and boots to the floor.  I jostled my kid sister in her baby-jumper roller-chair as my Chinese Pug dog named Ling-Ding clawed, licked and sniffed me like a long lost friend.

“How was your day”, my mom asked.

“Fine” I said. 

“What did you do” she countered.

 “Nothing” I admitted.    

On the Other Hand

I was skiing some pow bumps in the woods with a friend yesterday and as I turned over an innocuous rise, I landed a loaded ski on a rock on the back side.  It tossed me steeply and quickly downhill, on to the back of my head and helmet and I heard a crunch in my neck on another rock as I let out a low groan. I thought 'this is what its like to break your neck'.

I sat there for a bit and my trusty friend Paul came up and asked me if I was OK.  “I’m not sure”, I thought, “I’m too old for this shit”.  I could move my head around gingerly, so my neck wasn’t broken, and It didn’t feel like a concussion, so we sat there for a minute and got it together slowly.  “I’m fine.”

As we skied back to our band of brothers, I felt the stretching soreness down my back and in my chest, into my lungs and heart.  I skied cautiously and conservatively for the rest of the day.  I could not fly.  I could not swoop.  I feel better today after a night of icing and a morning of heat, but a seminal feeling remains in the back of my mind.  “Don’t get cocky kid.”