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?

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-centered to the extreme.

Garcia - Hunter            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.

Don’t be a Hot Dog

It was a classic early 60’s, New York Little League game with the parents screaming at the Ump and coaches and the kids jagging around in the field, talking trash to the batter, ‘batter, batter, swing batter’. 

 

The field was wedged between the small woods behind my house and the new Waldbaum’s shopping center, old Schwarting Elementary School and the dilapidated basketball courts.  Noisey suburban parkways encircled the area and the constant hum was palatable and we could smell and taste the sea, not five miles away.  The batter swings and slices a high pop-up to the first base foul territory. 

        Last year we picked a great coach and went 2-22 and had a great time.  This year we were 22-2 and hated it because the new coach was a dick and he just wanted to win.  His son Gary was the star pitcher and not a bad guy, and the catcher was a back-stop kid named Bobby Baccarella who would let nothing get behind him and had a bazooka to Second base.  The outfield was an afterthought with midget miscreants that didn’t care, but we had an all-star infield. 

We had Albert Stein on Third; a short, dark, funny Jewish kid with a rocket arm and a chip on his shoulder.  Little Kenny White was at Short; he was a Palooka kid who could catch any ground ball and throw strikes to First, like a mini-Bud Harrelson.  His dad purportedly pulled the overloaded breaker-switch for Con Edison in 1963 that put Manhattan in a black out and saved the eastern seaboard.  Gabe Martinez was at Second and was a Mexican who looked Asian with a cherub, baby face and a wry smile but was so naturally athletic and likable that all the girls loved him.  I even had an inexplicable boy crush on him.

I was on First, with my specialized, lobster, first baseman’s mitt, long hair and white shoes, just like Joe Namath - who had a fur coat and Joe Pepitone - who had a hair dryer in his locker.  I couldn’t hit or field, maybe because I couldn’t see and wouldn’t wear glasses, but I could catch anything thrown at me, by watching who threw it and how It was thrown.  I drifted into foul territory after the pop fly, sweeping the crowd aside with my waving arms and deep baritone, 10-year-old voice – ‘I got it.’ 

I wound up near my dad who had come to his first, and las, Little League game ever, and he moved out of my way, slightly.  He was as confident as I was since we would play catch with a ball 2-3 days a week after he came home from work and had a cocktail.  He knew I could catch anything if I kept my eye on it, moved my feet and didn’t try to short arm it to look cool.  He hated that.

The foul ball drifted high in the midafternoon wind, obscured slightly by the urban  haze and the clouds.  ‘Man, that guy must have hit that ball a ton to go so high,’ I thought in my ADD, dyslexic - spectrum brain.  ‘I wonder if Patty O’Rouke is at this game’?  She was keen on Gabe but I was keen on her.’  ‘She wore her uniform dresses way up high at school and free form outfits even higher at church on Sunday’. 

 

‘That Gabe was so cool; he taught me to play hockey last winter and made me a stick out of a metal pipe and lent me some skates’. ‘Gabe taught me that an assist was better than a goal’.   ‘Joey Giordano was there that subzero day and brought cigarettes and a gun his Wise Guy brother lent him, but he could not skate and he thankfully left early.’  ‘We didn’t want to have that much fun.’  ‘We stayed till dark and dragged our frozen assess home in time for dinner and to watch the Jets win the Super Bowl’.  ‘Looking back, that was fun.’  ‘Wow, here is a 747 lined up to land at the newly named JFK airport!’  ‘I wonder if I have math homework tonight or if they will let me watch those new hippy shows, The Monkeys and Laugh-In.’

‘Focus’ I told myself, ‘be in the moment’.  Dad had taught me that the ball would be accelerating down a non-intuitive, ‘32 feet per second – per second, the change of the change calculus,’ whatever that means, but it would be fast.  I backed up but then had to run in, across someone’s blanket with beers, a dog and a baby on it.  Everybody was yelling, including my team and the other team.  It was slow motion pandemonium.  Gabe, Gary and Bobby came over to back me up and Bobby had his catcher’s mitt upside down to poach the catch but Gabe gave him the ‘back off’ look and he held his ground. The Ump joined the melee to make the call, and just for the fun of it.  Finally, the ball came down and hit my mitt just above my head, where I couldn’t see it.  It bounced out and hit the ground.  The crowed moaned in disbelief.  I was mortified.  My eyes welled with tears as I assumed my position on the field and Gabe patted me on the back.  My dad looked at me and said with a wink, ‘don’t be a hot dog, Junior’. 

Years later I was in a high school wrestling match.  I was wrestling Varsity as a Freshman because I weighed 98 pounds after dieting and dehydrating myself into a coma.  The team was all older guys and I would get pinned regularly, but they didn’t expect much and were generally sympathetic.  My dad showed up for once and sat in the front row.  Being an old football player he didn’t know much about this wrestling stuff but since I weighed 98 pounds, I didn’t play football or hoops and I sill sucked at baseball.  It was my way in.

When it was my turn, Dad gave me the thumbs up and I went and shook hands with the bad ass guy from The City across from me.  I was exhausted by the time the guy finished shaking my hand a hundred different ways.  I could hear this guy’s big father deep voice booming in the back ‘grab the left nut Jerome.’  The guy on our team that went before me had his eyeball ripped out and left the gym bleeding and howling.  I prepared to guard my left nut, at all cost. 

We started dancing around and wrestling and this guy was manic, fast and strong.  ‘Pace yourself dude’ I thought, ‘it’s a long match’.  I paced myself but after the first two minutes we went completely anerobic, sucking for breath.  The second two minutes our muscles worked to exhaustive failure and we started to flop around like a tuna fish, clutching, grabbing and stalling big time.  The third period was a blur as I slowly lost my sight, competitive spirit for self and team, and will to live.  I was hammered, knackered, kaput.  But slowly, seemingly out of nowhere, came an inner strength and miraculous second wind.  I could breath and I got stronger.  My vision and will to win returned.  I was an athlete, in his prime, going for the victory.

‘It’s probably from all the killer practices we had each day from 6-9 pm’, I told myself, ‘after the JV basketball practice and study hall, in the back gym, wearing rubber sweats and sweatshirts, with wind sprints and neck bridges, spin drills and the dreaded up-and-downs’.    After that was the cold-shower-wet winter rides home in the back of a friends pickup, listening to American Pie, and home in time to do my mandatory three hours of homework and get some shut eye and do it again a 6am’.  ‘I’m thirteen, I’m supposed to gain weight and not lose it and get 10 hours of sleep for my growing mind.’  Nope, this was the culture of wrestling I chose to endure, to be a contender. Since there was no diving, skiing or hockey team yet’.   ‘Bring it’ I thought gamely as I began to dominate the match for the first time.

The crowd energized, as I did, or maybe we just became aware.  I looked to see if my gal Sally Snowshoes was in the stands but the faces were just an expectant blur.  ‘Man, I can’t wait to get an ice cream float after the match with the boys, sleep on the bus and finish my homework tonight so I can go to the Giants game tomorrow unencumbered’.  ‘Focus.’  My opponent was fading and my coach was yelling for me to DO IT.  DO WHAT, I thought, until I realized that was our code word for the secret, killer Half Nelson move. 

So, I DID IT and rolled the guy over until he stopped resisting.  I thought about checking on him since last week I slammed a guy on the mat and he went limp and I told the Ref.  We stopped and he got help and came back with a vengeance to pin me, with me looking up at the roof lights and the banners and hearing the crowd groan.  My coach was furious and told me next time to pin him first and then tell the Ref.  So, I did.  I checked my left nut and rolled this guy over and 1-2-3 BOOM - pinned.  I jumped up and raised my hands in the air, as is the custom.  We shook hands and the Ref raised my am in victory and my coach and teammate came out to shake my hand and tassel my hair.  Returning to the bench with a big grin on my face, I passed my Dad, who smiling slyly said to me, ‘don’t be a hot dog, son.’ 

Finally, in the one college Lacrosse game my Dad attended, I was running down the left midfield wing with the ball thinking typically about girls and work, homework and spring break.  ‘The Golden Dome on the Admin building and Cross on the Cathedral was shining over our training field.  On separate days, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Regan visited our practice filed while running for President’.  ‘Win one for the Gipper’ Ron said ironically.  ‘I shouldn’t be playing Lacrosse, since Engineering was hard, and I had a job, a girlfriend, a dog, a car, a mini fridge full of beer and a hole in my heart that made me uninsurable, but I was going for it.  It was just a club sport at that time and pretty casual but we had to go to Chicago or Florida usually to find another club to play’.  Now they play for the national championship yearly and recruit most of their stars out of my prep-school.  I like to think I was a trend setter but it was just happenstance.  Quantum coincidence.

When the opposing defender slammed me for not looking up, I crashed to the ground but saw our center streaking for the cage.  He was a tall guy so I mystically threw it high to him, with my last effort.  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him reach high for the pass and simultaneously get folded in two by the big burley crease defenseman, but not before deflecting the ball into the net, high – stick side.  We all celebrated each other and he wheezed, ‘don’t ever do that again’ as we headed to the bench.  As we trotted victoriously past my Dad, he murmured to me with a wry smile, ‘don’t be a hot dog, Matthew’.  Which was nice.

 

The Apple and the Tree

Both my parents worked so they never had much time or interest in our organized games, and it was kind of our own, independent kid thing.  All they ever said was, ‘be home at 6 for dinner.’  Parents didn’t helicopter-hover over their kids back then and let them fail, get in trouble and make mistakes like Dr Spock advised them to do.  One time though, the parents and coaches were riding the young Ump, who was a good friend of mine at school, so badly that all the kids walked off the field and went home.  So did the Ump.  My dad didn’t like that crap.  So, he seldom showed, not because he didn’t like me or care, but it was not his world and he would rather have a beer and mow the lawn.

Dad had an aversion to haughty hubris since, when he was a kid, he didn’t get into our exclusive, private prep-school where his friends went.  They eventually became wise guy, Wall Street men that womanized, drank too much and sent themselves to early graves.  He went to the local public school that kept him grounded and humble.  They won the football championship and his best friend kissed his ass in the middle of Long Beach Boulevard when Dad surprisingly graduated, as payment for a long-term bet.  He tried to marry his sweetheart but was sent to Korea, instead of jail, for a misunderstanding with the cops.  She didn’t wait for him.  But my mom did and encouraged him to move from faming-carpenter to Building Inspector to a proud and successful Superintendent of Water Works in a small, rich, north shore town.  I followed him into hydrology and hydraulics.

He didn’t criticize meanly or maliciously at all but realized early-on that I was a wise guy, smart ass, show off and a hot dog.  My favorite sports were skiing and diving, showy sports where you keep your legs together, squeeze your ass, and style counts.  He was a simple, honest, hardworking man where; what-you-see-is-what- you-get and deprecating humor ruled the roost in our family home.  He knew that his job was to keep me humble, grounded and prevent my head from getting too big.  ‘Be more, appear less’ was the motto.  ‘You are neither as good nor as bad as you think you are’.  Things like that.  Some of it took and some of it didn’t.  I like to think that he was proud of me, loved me as a son and liked me as a person.  What else is there?

For every fancy trophy school I attended he would warn that I would fail out and go to the local occupational high school or the community college.  I showed him.  When I was trying out for the football team he asked what position I was going for.  I said wide receiver since I could catch anything.  He told me I was a gumshoe with small hands and I weighed 98 pounds so that wouldn’t work.  I was devastated until he said that I was a smart kid and knew the game, so I should play QB.  I got cut in the first round.

I passed these lessons to my stepson who played football for me vicariously and hockey for himself innately.  He is natural, confident but humble.  He passes before being hit, skates behind every charging defenseman and makes everyone on the ice a better player.  He reluctantly followed some of my advice and his own passion into aviation and married a woman who makes him want to be a better man. 

Recently, I found Dad’s Hydraulics Handbook and realized that we had an aptitude, acumen and a love for fluids and hydrology in common in our family.   My stepson even named his dog Hydro.  Dad’s text was a short and simple old book that he paid $1.94 for in the ‘50s.  I looked at my old hydro textbook and it was calculus based and complicated version that cost me $8.40 in the ‘70s.  When I found our stepsons hydraulics book, it was all about jets and aviation and cost him $105.00    I guess the apple does not fall far from the tree but the lessons get harder and more expensive. 

Perhaps personality traits vary sinusoidally and skip a generation, and some don’t.  It is nice that we have multi-generational influence to keep us connected and balanced and tall shoulders to stand on for beer vision and perspective.  In an alternative universe, I catch that Little League foul ball and Dad says ‘good job’ but I become a completely different person in a different world.  We are all affected by each other, if we are humble enough to listen and learn.  Be like Dad.  Don’t be a hot dog.

When Enough is Enough

When we last left our apocalyptic water tale of doom and gloom, we concluded that there was enough water out there and it just depended on us to use it wisely.  Well, I found out that is not exactly true.  I had the opportunity to speak recently with the first legates of Utah water, the Clyde family, who said ‘maybe not’.  Steve is the preeminent water lawyer in the state, walking in the formidable footsteps of his father Steve Sr. and mentoring his own hipster son Jonathan as the next generation of lawful water excellence.  They have their own Law Firm called Clyde – Snow, founded in 1949 that plays well with The Church, The State, The Feds, and the private sector. 

        Steve’s prodigal brother Tom is a Woodland gentleman-rancher and columnist who founded, writes and stars in The Park City Follies.  He is a wicked Telemark skier and water aficionado, like most skiers and ranchers.  He is also a lawyer by profession, and not a bad one at that, who was the Park City Attorney for several of our formative years.  They are solid, smart people, who are serious, righteous dudes, with a sense of humor.  They are usually the smartest guys in the room, as long as Chris Robinson or John Haney are absent. 

The dirty little secret of water lawyers is that they all quietly wanted to be engineers or hydrologist. Tragically, they could not get thru the brain numbing, calculus calisthenics that enable engineering thinking and they did not look good in flannel shirts.  They do have a surprisingly good sense of the engineering concepts and numbers, and can even convert from CFS to ac-ft/day in their heads (multiply by 2)[i]. 

The Clydes reminded me recently that even though The State of Utah gets/got 60 million ac-ft of precipitation in a year (2 trillion gallons) we receive only 3-5 million ac-ft we can use after evapotranspiration and infiltration.  The Great Salt Lake needs 8 million ac-ft (250 billion gallons or enough to fill Flaming Gorge).  That would mean that in order to save the Great Salt Lake, we would have to use no water at all, for anything, agriculture, golf courses, lawns and all, in the state of Utah, for two years.  There simply is not enough water.  The same bleak numbers apply to the Colorado River, which now gets 10% of the water it was originally dedicated to deliver.  Eureka!

This latest 20-year exponentially compounding drought and our current 6-month, record smashing heat wave are more of a symptom of the real sickness that is climate change.  It is because Utah uses more water per capita than any state and we put too much carbon in the air.  So, the real answer is to grow less grass for cows and golf courses, stop burning stuff and voting for people who say silly things like ‘drill baby drill’.    For now, it is a question of political will and communal discipline to create a pivotal culture change for the long-term public welfare. 

Sure, we could cut down all the frivolous forests and pave the Cottonwood Canyons to increase our water supply but what kind of dystopian world would that be.  There may be nuclear powered desalinization plants, to augment The River, or saltwater pumps from the ocean, to augment The Lake, in our future.  That is when the price of water gets high enough to justify the fair economics of spending trillions on these solutions. We need to fit into the world and the climate more than forcing it to fit us.  Dominion over all means restraint and responsibility not repression or domination.  Beneficial Use of our water resources is for the common good of the majority.  Salt Lake dust storms and the dry Colorado River is not beneficial use for the public welfare and we must emphasize that concept, not ignore it.  Since supply is decreasing we need to demand less. 

The Clydes remind me that we are in this together, all for one and one for all.  We need leaders like we had when we started numbering World Wars and Depressions, 9-11, January 6 and Covid -19.  Leaders with the charisma, backbone and foresight to meet the seminal challenge of our generation; climate change, which is coming to fulfillment before our very eyes.   It is about time we start listening attentively to the scientists, engineers, meteorologists, hydrologists, economists, and all the experts, even if they are lawyers.  We need people who can communicate and lead the masses using a slide rule and the rule of law, the Socratic and Scientific methods.  Like the Clyde family.

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[i] CFS or cubic feet per second is a flow rate of 450 GPM and the size of a basketball weighing 64 pounds.  An acre foot is 326,000 gallons, a volume enough for 2-4 families per year that can cover a football field in one foot of water and weighs 2.5 million pounds.   The Colorado River usually flows 20-100,000 CFS, enough for 40 million people and the Great Salt Lake usually holds 8-million-acre feet of water – enough to suppress toxic dust and even induce seismicity of the Wasatch Fault.  Water is heavy, powerful and valuable. 

 

 

 

Matthew Lindon, P.E.

Snyderville Utah

 

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