We have met the enemy

In a church committee meeting last week I heard the disturbing news that an acquaintance of mine had been seriously injured in an accident. It’s not your usual accident. I’ll tell it as I heard it. The acquaintance, a woman who lives near my last residence a few miles from here, played the piano with me a couple of times in church and her husband is an artist. She asked one of her neighbors if she could have some apples off his tree and he said sure. She went out there and in the orchard tripped a wire connected to a charge set to either scare or injure animals, some said deer and some said dogs, who were bothering him. The charge involved a 12 gauge shotgun shell and some kind of pipe bomb apparatus, I’m guessing described on the internet. She received about a hundred lead pellets in both legs, some in places too difficult or embedded to remove and spent some time in the hospital. One account said she had a pellet under a knee cap that was potentially a future problem. Apparently the neighbor forgot to mention the booby trap. Gossip was that his wife was out there with her. I guess the wife either didn’t know or forgot as well. For some reason this didn’t make the news. I watched and found a small notice of an arrest of a person in that tiny town for the offenses of reckless endangerment and aggravated assault. It was about the right time and I knew this person as well. When I lived over there he had been a companion I visited neighbors with. I thought he was well meaning but a little goofy. He’s now in his late seventies. When I ran into the artist in the store I offered my sympathy and asked if the offender were he whom I had suspected and was told it was indeed. Everyone I’ve talked to thinks it’s a really stupid thing to have done on the part of the planter of the device but I can’t escape the feeling that some people think a person has the right to do what he wants on his own property and can’t be blamed if someone else, presumably a trespasser, is to suffer. I also wonder if the connection to guns has caused it to be kept quiet so as to not put gun owners under a cloud by association. After all, I was told yesterday, Guns are what protect our freedom. Walt Kelly’s line “We have met the enemy and he is us” is impossible to leave out.

More poetry

A haiku I wrote years ago and have been refining:

Sitting on a lawn

at sunset, golden, glowing

red mosquito bite

I was in the airport on the way home from a Thanksgiving visit to Indiana and being tired and out of my element my mind started wandering. I was walking through a concourse and had the words of some verse come into my head. They were the lines: I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree. I couldn’t remember who wrote it but I thought it was a woman. I remembered it from high school. As my mind continued to wander I began to imagine the voice of a woman over the loudspeaker in the airport. She was saying “Mr. Kilmer, Mr. Val Kilmer, please pick up the white courtesy phone. Mr. Val Kilmer, Please pick up the white courtesy phone. We have a poem for you. It’s a very lovely poem. Perhaps as lovely as a tree. Mr. Kilmer, please pick up the white courtesy phone. “

I couldn’t make a connection between the poem and the announcement. I think I went on to fantasize about something else. True story. Sersely.

My kid could carve that

Thanks, Barbara, for telling me to watch “My Kid Could Paint That”. The emphasis in saying it outloud is on Kid, as if in mocking modern art. I don’t like getting involved in things that don’t have a clear ending. This one certainly didn’t have a clear ending. After the film I had to watch a special feature made a few months after the finishing of the film which further muddled things for me. I need to have an opinion. My only firm opinion is that the filmmaker did and honest and painful job of making the documentary and suffered emotionally for it. The indecision I feel about attributing Marla’s art to her alone makes me want to watch the film again with running commentary by an artist but I’m afraid I still won’t know truth. The question and answer period toward the end of the special feature had one person asking the question I had. This was :Why does the picture Marla was filmed creating looks different in style and composition from many of the others? One artist said artists just have different moods and intentions. This didn’t satisfy me. The whole experience reminded me a little of reading Into The Wild by Krakauer. We feel a need to judge firmly and finally in that book whether Alexander Supertramp was stupid, suicidal or a tragic hero. The real story was in identifying with his experience without judging. I can’t quite identify with Marla’s art but I think I’ll go out and buy a bunch of tubes of paint and get started. Maybe not just my kids but I, myself, could paint that.

Saturday night was the full moon, a big one.  The sky was clear at sunset and as I drove to the grocery store I saw it coming up over Towhead peak.  It startled me when I realized what it was.  I thought it was a street light or a car sitting in the trees with its headlights pointing at me or a jetliner coming in for a landing on Main Street only it was bigger and brighter than any of those.  The ski club’s moonlight party was scheduled for 10 pm but I doubted more than a couple of people would show up.  It was 17 degrees and falling.  I got my yogurt and frozen dinners and bundled up for the outing and went to the parking lot.  I was early because I thought I might as well get it over and go to bed since no one was coming.  The lot was empty at the driving range where we begin grooming the 4 1/2 mile track but before I got my skis on a couple showed up in a jeep with their skating skis.  There can’t be more than half a dozen pairs of skating skis in this town and now half of them were here.  I brought a headlamp and turned it on but it wasn’t to see anything, it was so people could see me from a few hundred yards away, maybe so they could see how fast I was going, zipping along in the night that was bright enough to see all the shadows of the marks left by skis but not bright enough to tell if a person an eighth of a mile away was me or just a bush.  I did a half mile warm up and came back to find cars starting to arrive.  At ten o’clock we had more than a dozen people tramping around the golf course.  Some had scarves covering their faces but most of them have lived here long enough that they don’t feel the cold the way I do.  My month long growth of beard was worth the itching.  We all went up to the higher part of the track on the hill and scattered according to our abilities.  After an hour I went to the truck where I’d left a gallon thermos of hot water and some powdered hot chocolate.  As the others came down they had a cup and some cookies brought by another club member.  The moon had done its part and now the clouds did theirs by coming in just thick enough to warm the night about 5 degrees but thin enough to leave the ground bright.  It was a thoroughly distracting evening.  What I was distracted from was a lesson I should have prepared for the 9 am teachers quorum.  In the morning, after too little sleep, all I could come up with besides reading the manual was a picture I found in a box of pictures from my father’s house.  It was of my parents, my brother, and me as a baby, sitting in deck chairs on the Queen Mary in June of 1949, coming to America from England.  I passed it around to the 14 and 15 year olds and got nearly no reaction to something I thought was the coolest picture around.  It had no relevance, of course, to the lesson.  I was just stalling.  On another occasion, during a lesson on obedience, I passed around a picture of me lying on the ground as a nearly 10 year old, covered with blood and surrounded by paramedics, police, parents, and horrified onlookers.  It was after I broke my leg.  That picture got a much more satisfying reaction from the group.  “This is what happens when you disobey your father when he tells you to stay on the trail.”   I still need ideas for next week’s lesson

Poem

Last week I was in Indiana for Thanksgiving and in the distorted dreams that come with sleeping in a new bed and environs I had something come into my head and I tried to write it down when I woke up.

A Poem

by Paul

entitled

Me

or

The Cowboy Poet Within

Written on the occasion of his 60th birthday, plus five days, and which came to him in a dream.

(to be read outloud in a rural southern Utah accent)

Write verse?

Git Serse*

*See Pronunciation Guide to Washington County and Parunuweap*, by Young and Lee, Southern Utah State College Press, Cedar City, 1948, under the entry for “serious”.

*This book du’n't exist, sersely. Think the poem’s too terse? I think yer delerse.

It’s water, there must be fish in it

Barbara was born in Seattle.  I remember going to the hospital in the car to pick my mother and her up.  I once described my memory to my father and he said it sounded like an accurate recollection.  There was a road that dropped down to a drive-up entrance.  That’s about all I remember now except that it was cloudy.  I was three.  The same year Richard broke his toe by tipping over a cinder block in the basement of the house on Union Bay Circle.  I vaguely remember some blood.  It was much worse in Vernal when Aunt Ruth’s daughter shut the car door on Richard’s finger about 5 or 6 years later.  I just assumed it would be smashed flat and have to be amputated but somehow it healed.  I sat stunned in the car, unable to speak or look at it.  Richard also fell on a picket fence when we lived on 700 West in Provo and again I thought he probably would die since it looked so horrible.  That was about when Patty was born.  I was always trying to tag along with Richard but he and his friends didn’t want me around.  I found a garter snake in the back yard and went to get Richard who reluctanly came to the spot where the snake had been.  I couldn’t convince him it had really been there.  Some neighbors across the street had a tortoise.  That was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.  Someone had painted the shell different colors on the scales but I thought they always looked like that.  There was a blind boy who either lived there or was a neighbor.  I played with him a little.  I was about 5.  In Seattle there was a rain barrel under a downspout and it seems like it was always full.  My father let me use a string and safety pin to fish in it.  I can’t remember whose idea it was.  We went across a floating bridge once.  The idea confused me.  It took years to understand.  At 620 North I had my own encounter with a picket fence.  I caught a pantleg on a picket as I tried to jump off and went headfirst onto the sidewalk.  How did we survive?  Barbara and Patty will have to describe the Monopoly game in which they were run over by an elderly woman who lost control of her car and ran into the front porch.  I’m not making this up.  A lot of early memories seem to be traumatic events.  One was just a pretend one.  I did something when I was five and my mother insisted on my father spanking me.  He took me in the kitchen and whispered that if I cried convincingly he would just say he spanked me.  I couldn’t do it.  I kept laughing.  I cried for real when I got suspenders for a present for Christmas.  My father had brought home a new garbage can as a family present and told me there was a special present for me inside.  Suspenders.  Times were different.  In the third grade I got a good birthday present.  It was a motorized Robby the Robot.  I pretended to go to school but then went back to my room in the basement when my mother wouldn’t let me take it to school.  I wasn’t missed for hours and had to start making noise.

Uncle Eugene taught school in Calexico, California for a few years.  I think it was about 1956 when we drove down there for Christmas.  Before going my mother bought all the Christmas presents to take with us.  There was a model shop up by Smeath’s market and she and I went there so she could find somthing for Richard.  I saw a model plane that actually flew with a rubber band powered propeller.  It had a folded cardboard body that was covered with aluminum to make it look like metal.  It cost $2.  I wanted it badly.  My mother refused to consider it for me and told me to go wait in the car.  She brought out a bag and told me not to look in it.  I did anyway and saw the aluminum airplane in there.  She was exasperated with me and told me it was for Richard.  I was totally deflated.  When Christmas morning came in Calexico I found that the plane was for me after all.  I took it out and wound it up and it flew a couple of times at most and crashed nose first into the ground and broke the propeller and didn’t fly again.

Gunslingers

There was a murder in town last week. Actually it was a double murder but the other was in the town 5 miles north of here, which in a big city would make it practically next door, but here 5 miles puts it in another jurisdiction. I don’t know if it made it beyond the local news. I’m not sure about the local news either. I was in the copy shop next door and heard the alert on the radio to be on the lookout for a certain make and model of car and they gave the license number and I didn’t pay attention. The next day the mailman said they’d arrested the guy and it sounded like a love triangle (there’s a better term) and I guess it’s over with. It’s more interesting to me to talk about the weekend in the Grand Canyon a few days earlier. I’m compiling a dictionary of terms used in ultramarathoning. I made them all up but they might catch on. In track running you have the rabbit who sets the pace for the first lap or two of a mile run, maybe another one to help on the third lap, and the guy they’re setting up takes over for the last lap and does what he can alone if he has any kick left. Everybody knows you don’t go out ahead from the start if you want to win. In a marathon it’s a little more tricky finding a strategy since you probably don’t have a rabbit and if you don’t know the other runners well you might not know if they’re going out too hard. If they are you have to sit back and perhaps lose touch with them for a few miles before reeling them in. In an ultramarathon it’s more of a mind game than the shorter runs and you may go for many miles and hours without even seeing anyone ahead of or behind you. You go by reports from the aid stations about who’s doing what and you have to watch your split times and know the course well to pace properly. You rely on determination to get you through low spots and your crew to keep you from sitting too long. You may have a pacer whose job is to keep you on the course and lie to you and tell you look good, that you’re gaining on the guy ahead, and that you’re going faster than you really are.

Last week was a group fun run. Races aren’t allowed in Nationa Parks and who’d want to race anyway? Nevertheless, people play mind games and take some pleasure in things like pretending to look better than others after the run or saying they wished the run were longer. They also play games on the run but it has to be subtle since just winning isn’t enough if no one claims to be racing. It’s sometimes a job of trying to demoralize the other runner that you’re focusing on to get him to make a comment on how much stronger you are than him, even though you’re in the same place after many hours on the trail. Some of the short strategies include the Moellmer maneuver (not named after any real person) which is to go very hard for a short distance, stop to rest and when the others reach you you immediately take off again as if they’re fresh and didn’t need a rest. This aggravates them since they were expecting to rest when they reached you. Then you apologize as if you weren’t aware they wanted to stop. In the namesakes instance the leader really is unaware they wanted to stop. Then there’s the MacFarland gambit (once again not named after a real person) which is to run very fast when you’re out of sight ahead and then appear to be dawdling when you’re in sight of the person behind you. This gives the impression that you’re moving effortlessly and the person behind is more tired than he thought since he can’t catch someone is appears to be waiting for him.

Last weekend was the second time I’d seen the Stewart ploy (not named after someone who used it about 15 years ago on a group training run). This one is more complex. Our group consisted of four people coming down from Salt Lake, and me, whom they picked up on the way. The driver was Horatio (not his real name), a bigwig in the financial office of a research firm. He hadn’t been training much and was a bad bet for doing the whole run. The fastest runner was Quincy (not his real name), who has been burning up the courses at local ultramarathons. His girlfriend came along. Her name is Honoria (not really) and it was the longest run she was to do so far. Next was the chemist, Juan Carlos (not his real name). Last was me, Cellorunner. Juan Carlos (JC) Had come up with the plan for the trip which included using the Tanner trail from the South Rim 7 miles down to the Colorado River, the Escalante route along the river for about 12 miles, and the New Hance trail 8 miles up to a different spot on the South Rim than the starting point. The most important point about all the segments was than none of the group had ever been on any of the trails. Ever. JC did a lot of research on the trails, including bringing GPS waypoint, photos from the Web, and descriptions of people’s experiences along the way. We thought we were prepared. Since we came out alive we must have been. The problems began when Quincy came down with Strep throat the day before the run and stayed on the rim when we left in the twilight to descend. He went to the clinic and got diagnosed and got some antibiotics. Three hours into the run Horatio decided his training would be inadequate to get him all the way and he turned back alone. We thought it would be safe for him since it was early in the day and he’d already seen the route. His fatigue would slow him down but he had more time than even a sick runner would need. After another few hours of unexpectedly difficult trail the three of us remaining came to the main obstacle of the day. One group on the Web described it as a 50 foot cliff that had to be climbed. We’d seen pictures and it didn’t look so bad and the other parts of the trail we’d been over had been overly slammed for their difficulty so it was a bit of a surprise that it really was quite a climb. Not a sheer cliff and not 50 feet but enough to scare all of us. We made it since the alternative was to take a longer route back than what remained and it was getting late in the afternoon. The handholds were adequate. On the other side was a steep scree slope that would have been scarier if we hadn’t just done something that was at our limits. Another hour and we were starting up the last section and looking up at the rim, which seemed so far off that Honoria kept asking if we had to go all the way to the top or if there weren’t some other ending point closer. Unfortunately, in the Grand Canyon it’s the rim or nothing. It was close to a vertical mile to get out and Honoria began to flag. JC was then seduced by the Stewart ploy. It’s a matter of conjecture for me to describe what he was thinking but I feel justified from my many years of experience running with him.

It was late in the afternoon. We new sunset was about 2 hours away and that we were slowing at a predictable rate and would get to the top long after dark. It was a moonless night. JC had a headlamp, I had a keychain flashlight, and I thought Honoria had a headlamp. JC began to hurry and was about to leave us for good when I left Honoria and ran up five minutes to give him a message. The message was that Honoria was fading fast and that JC should use his radio to call Quincy, who was waiting on the rim with the car and a radio, and tell Quincy to start down with a bottle of Coke and meet Honoria. I told JC I’d wait with her, that she was in no real danger, and we’d come up slowly. JC couldn’t reach Quincy at that spot because of cliffs blocking the radio signals but I was sure he would soon so I waited five minutes for Honoria and we started climbing slowly out while JC was already lost to us up ahead. I then discovered that Honoria had left her headlamp with Quincy at the start of the run since he was sure everyone would be out long before dark. The plan was for a 4pm arrival with dark at about 7. Now it was closing in on dark and the trail was getting worse, involving climbing up three or four foot boulders and following cairns since it was such an unused trail that you couldn’t see where people had gone. A keychain flashlight is a big help when it’s pitch black but not adequate for an enjoyable romp with two people. It was slow going and I just kept saying we would get there and though we’d miss dinner it was a great adventure. Honoria kept a stiff upper lip and plugged along until Quincy met us, about an hour after dark, with a Coke and her headlamp. He had only come down about a mile, a difficult feat for a sick fellow, but it took another half hour for us to get out. Honoria sped up considerably when Quincy showd up in the dark, and of course she could see better. JC had been at the rim over an hour and had been annoyed that he’d had to use a light to get out. Quincy had had to wait for JC to get up before he could start down. The reason is there’s no parking at the trailhead. The closest parking is a mile away so Quincy waited for JC to get to the top and radio him, then drove over to pick him up and left the car with JC to take over to the parking lot to wait for us. At the trailhead you can tell you’re there because there are two signs about 50 feet apart with arrows pointing at each other and the words No Parking on them. There’s no shoulder to park on anywhere closer than the lot a mile away. There’s no sign at all for a trail, for obvious reasons. If you don’t see the obvious it’s that the trail is so obscure and difficult the park doesn’t want anyone on it.

Here’s the tricky part. Quincy was probably annoyed with JC for misrepresenting the length of the trip in time. Honoria was very tired and worried she might not even make it so it might be a reasonable conclusion that she felt tricked into coming. I was having a good time but JC couldn’t know that. My reasoning is that by trying to get out himself by dark would prove that those behind him were just too slow and it was their fault, not his, that the trip was not working out as planned. (In the Stewart ploy’s initial example a woman had brought a friend on a group run, promising her that she’d be home in time for a wedding reception. When it became clear that they would be late the inviter left the invitee on her own in an unknown place and proceeded to hurry to the end to show that it wasn’t her fault. In the meantime, the invitee got lost and had to be chased down and brought back to the course. Only by luck was she prevented from finishing her run in the wrong county 50 miles by road from where she was expected.) JC made the remark after the run that there was a 40 percent attrition rate. I responded that from my viewpoint it was 60 percent. The murderer’s motives were a lot easier to infer, hence more boring.

p.s.  Horatio made it up slowly but just fine.

Remembering my father

In the fall of 1958 my family went up to a Salt Lake valley canyon to go rock collecting. I think it was for granite crystals. We parked the new Chevrolet Yeoman station wagon at the mouth of the canyon and took a trail across the creek and up to the south onto the sunny west facing hill. On the way up we passed a steep stream cut and I said to the group at large that it would make a nice short cut on the way back. My father responded “Don’t you dare! That’s too steep and dangerous. Promise me you won’t think about it.” I probably agreed. We went on up and scattered around, each of us looking for the speckled fragments. I was a wimpy 9-year-old and although I liked looking for stuff I got easily bored and tired and soon wanted to go back to the car to sit and cool off. I was allowed to go down alone. It probably wasn’t more than a quarter mile and after getting out of sight I came upon the tempting short cut again. I picked up a milkweed pod and casually tossed it down the slope and watched it bounce from rock to rock, thinking that’s what I would do if I slipped. I wasn’t planning on slipping but I did on the very first step off the edge. A loose rock gave way under me and I began summersaulting down the slope, landing with one good leg and one broken one in the creek. Blood from a gash over a cracked skull spilled into my mouth. I couldn’t move but managed to scream after I’d come to rest. If it hadn’t been for a man who actually saw me fall I probably would have gone into irreversible hypothermia in minutes. He pulled me out and laid me on the bank. Somehow an ambulance of the Ghostbusters type appeared after a while, along with a newspaper photographer, my mother and father, some search and rescue people, some of the other friends on the trip, and an onlooker or two, not necessarily in that order. The one thing my father didn’t say, and never said later, was “I told you not to take that short-cut.” Maybe most parents would be too caught up in the trauma of seeing an injured child to think of something like that but I was feeling too guilty to let the absence of the remark go unnoticed. I don’t think either of my parents was tempted to chastise me under the circumstances. Later on it would be a natural thing to bring it up in asking for compliance with some safety precaution but it never happened.

We went on a lot of other rock collecting trips. Places that stand out were Topaz Mountain, Antelope Springs (trilobites and geodes), some badlands near Vernal where we found gastroliths and a few dinosaur bone fragments, and a ranch near Salina where we hunted Indian artifacts. One trip was especially memorable for a little kid because my father allowed us to shoot off some firecrackers. He thought it was the biggest waste of time and money there could be but we pestered him until we each got a full string of lady fingers. They would have been the eqivalent of about two months of allowances. I couldn’t decide between getting the longest enjoyment out of them by taking the string apart and lighting each one separately or getting the most exciting effect by lighting the whole string. I think my brother lit the whole string and I was disillusioned by having some of them get blown off the string without lighting. I must have opted for the one-at-a-time method, although I was a bit miffed that my father wouldn’t let us light them and throw them. We had to put them down and light them and run. It was still acceptable as memory material. We used old tin cans but found that a lady finger doesn’t lift them very far. We had a campfire and real wool GI blankets from an Army-Navy store to sleep under. After the fire died down the view of the Milky Way and shooting stars was far better than the firecrackers. That particular trip was a quest for snowflake obsidian. My father always did sound research on exactly where to go so we were usually quite successful. One trip to Topaz Mountain involved success in the rock department but we ran out of gas and had to get a sheepherder to syphon some from his truck. I think that trip was pre-Yeoman so we would have been in a 1947 Chevrolet sedan with a water bag on the radiator and some really scratchy seats. We tied a belt between the front seat belts so three people could sit on the single bench-type front seat with an illusion of safety. We sometimes had one of those tube-type air conditioners that mounted in the window and forced air through a wet burlap mesh or something. We also had to make occasional stops to let the car cool down. It’s been over fifty years so some of the details may be a bit off but I know my forearms had rashes for a day or two after every trip in that car from scraping on the arm rests. Also under my knees if I was wearing shorts. I usually had a headache from all of us shouting to be heard over the noise of the wind in the open windows or just the noise of siblings trying to out-do each other. The shouting was often an exclamation at spotting a new state on a license plate or some unique product on a sign or a Burma Shave rhyme. Another instance involved an electric fence which my father insisted on touching before we could to see if it was live. It was.

My uncle Heber had a black and white pony that he kept in Paris, Idaho. I was allowed to ride it once and was immediately reprimanded for letting it go under some trees which could have knocked me off but I had no idea that I could make the horse go where I wanted it to. I thought it was in charge. My father had a chance to ride it and jumped on it like a cowbow, instantly at ease and in control, which shocked me. I’d only seen him casually walking off toward campus or toward an interesting rock outcrop or mowing the lawn as his outdoor skills (or that one occasion where he took off running after my brother for an improper remark). He didn’t say much about it, probably because we were seldom around horses, but he once mentioned that he’d grown up on them. Eating dinner in a cafe once in Salt Lake we saw a team of draft horses pulling a wagon down Main Street, an unusual sight in around 1980 or so. I thought it was just interesting. My father commented that they were working way too hard for such large horses on a hot day.

Local mentality

The roof has sprung some new leaks.  I was shoveling snow on the roof to create a drainage path for the melting snow yesterday and a couple of guys walked by in the back parking lot.  One of them said “No guts”.  I said “Sorry, what?”  The other guy said “So you don’t want to see what your roof will hold.”   I have no interest in pushing my building to the limits the way the one down the street has been, on the point of collapse.  Someone came and put plywood and two-by-four braces up thinking, I guess, that it would keep it from falling over.  It might be that they’re hoping just to protect the neighboring building if it does collapse.  How do you learn your limits if you stay away from them?  I find that limits are elusive.  After finishing my first 100 mile race I found that 100 miles was not my absolute limit and that I didn’t have any interest in finding where it was.  I’m hoping my building has the same reservations.

My neighbor’s place