Floater

They have a name for the winners in the world,

I want a name when I lose.

They call Alabama the Crimson Tide,

Call me Deacon Blue.

SD.

We are neither as good nor as bad as we think we are.  Me, I am a floater.  I floated through preschool, napping by a Kerouac stream under an Eisenhower sky.    When I got a bike I floated around the neighborhood, exploring the highways and the byways, from the fire-roads to the interstates.  I could float anywhere as long as I got home at 6:00 for dinner.  When I started school, I floated around with my buddies as the class clowns, trying to make the girls laugh.  My Dad said, “just get B’s baby” and I did, except one year I got a U in Conduct for Unsatisfactory, and a nun told me I had ‘consummate gall’ from too much floating.  

I went to the best prep school I could In New York and I floated around, so the brothers, sisters and priests wouldn’t beat me up.  I hung on the bottom of the honor roll so my parents wouldn’t bug me, and I could do whatever I wanted.  I was a floater, not a slacker but school was a fun game that I did not need to win.  I wrestled, swam and played lacrosse but wasn’t very good because I saw the scale of diminishing returns for becoming great, and I didn’t have the time or the interest.

So, I went to the best college I could and I found the sweet spot between moderation and mediocrity, theocracy and hypocrisy, and I hung on long enough to become a fair Engineer with some fine friends and great memories.   I didn’t want to work that hard again, so I floated around the country for six months as a traffic engineer but didn’t like traffic.  I liked water so I became a hydrologist, floating in water.

I didn’t want to get a real job, in a big city like New York and Chicago, with their endless eastern work ethic and constant hustle bustle.  So, I moved out west where the vibe was more chill and the priorities were more recreational.  California had been ‘had’ and Colorado was too ‘groovy’, so I found Utah, which was off the grid and under the radar.   Skiing was cheap, housing affordable and jobs plentiful.   It was Goldilocks; just right. 

I worked for a spell as a hydrologist with a small firm that built ski resorts, didn’t wear ties and took powder days off.  It was great fun and we did good work, like Deer Valley, Park Meadows and Silver Springs, but one day the ax just fell.  The firm got rich and corporate, canceled ski days and wanted me to be middle management, so it was time to go.  It was another ‘quality of life decision’ and a man must know his priorities and his limitations. 

I took a few years off to float, write and travel but found that travel is best when shared and no one else had the time and money to go with me.  Writing is good when you can write what you know, but at 25, I didn’t know anything.  So I had to put that career on hold for a few years.  Hydrology was my avocation, writing my aspiration.  Staring at a blank piece of writing paper is much more intimidating than building a computerized river model or building a 100 foot high dam.

So, I fell in love, built a house, raised a couple of families, and lived a life of domestic bliss.  It was simple and easy.  I made the money, ran the BBQs, cut the lawn and put out the garbage out.  She spent the money and took care of everything else.  A Trad Wife for the Rad Life.  We did a lot of camping and went on simple vacations.  We skied and biked and came home to hot tubs or hot chocolate on the couch.  Real Estate and Compound interest took care of our meagre savings and we grew comfortable. The kids grew up and moved on and so, eventually, did their mother, knowing that our floating days were over.  I dated and tested the waters and realized that human’s pair-bond and life is based on double occupancy.  So, I found another partner with the same vision and more suited to our simple life of floating.  A Rad wife for the Trad life.

I got a job with the state building dams and fixing rivers.  I floated the backroads to every small dam and river restoration in Utah.  Before I knew it, I became the voice of institutional wisdom and a team leader in the corner office, and they wanted me to be upper management again.  Being a ‘people person’ I thought that I would give it a try, but I didn’t like it because I wanted to float and be everybody’s friend.  I’m a hydrologist, damn it.  So, I retired early.

I have had some nice consulting and expert testimony part time work, teaching and board positions, philanthropy and community service, reading and writing, where I could float and do some good work, when and how I wanted.  For money, for friends or for fun.  We travel and take adventure trips without much planning or preparation, floating where the road leads us.  We hike and bike, board and ski, ride waves and rivers, but we don’t take anything too seriously.  I play Pickleball but don’t really care who wins, much to the chagrin of my partners.  I play golf, barefoot, with 4 clubs, but I don’t keep score and I’m not very good.  I count birdies.  Zero, so far this year.

I try to live a life where I don’t do much damage, trying to build a legacy for myself, my interests or my opinions.   The amount of devastation done to the world with too much ambition, good intentions and a bulldozer is mind-boggling.  I just want to live simply and quietly and not make too many excess waves or unnecessary ripples.  I have coffee on my back deck at sunrise and Bourbon on my front porch at sunset and let the day come-to-me in between, naturally.  I hope it is not a life wasted in mediocrity but rather a life celebrated in moderation.   Who knows?  Who cares?  I’m a floater.   Be more, appear less.

 

Shoulder Conspiracy

 

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

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

 

Case-in-point 1

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

Case-in-point 2

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

 

Case-in-point 3

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

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

What’s-your-point

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

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

Taste or Schlock

Rich man comes and rapes the land,

Nobody caught 'em.

Put up a bunch of ugly boxes,

And, Jesus, people bought 'em.

Eagles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BalletNext

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

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

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

Locals’ Art Festival – Park City 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

River Deep by Bryan Gruley

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Park to Pickleball

 

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

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

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

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.