Author Archives: dorworth

THE GOD OF SKIING

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The God of Skiing by Peter Kray is a reverent, ribald, realistic mixture of fact, fiction and fantasy about what some refer to as the sport of skiing but which high priests and devoted acolytes alike know as a way of life. Peter Kray is a beautiful, insightful and devoted writer, and what I can’t resist thinking of as The Book of Kray is among the very best books about the spirit and practice of skiing as a way of life ever written.
At this writing, just days after two U.S.S.A. developmental team members were killed in an avalanche in Soelden, Austria it struck me that Kray wrote the introduction to the book in Soelden in 2013 and concludes it thus: “In order to tell what’s true, I made up a couple of things. But only to balance out what I’m still afraid of telling. And I present the events as much by year as I do by season, which means you can call it a novel if that makes it easier to understand. Or a documentary. Or skiing’s double album. It is the celebration of a sport made of cold and clouds and the anticipation that the white water will come to wash us clean again. It’s the explanation of why Tack Strau told the reporter in Alaska, “Skiing is made of gravity and speed. It’s dying all the time.”
Yes, and being born all the time in many forms, including literature as good as “The God of Skiing.” Those of a certain age and familiar with a certain time and place of skiing who know about Fritz Stammberger will be drawn to the book simply because a photo of Fritz is on the cover. Those who don’t know of Stammberger will stop to look because the photo and the title fit together as perfectly as the line only you can see through the trees on the best powder day of the season.
Yes, skiing is a way of life made of the freedoms to be found in gravity and speed and the skills acquired playing with them in the snow and cold and mountains in which we live. Kray’s book includes his time in Jackson Hole at the base of the Grand Tetons (which in French means big nipples but in the vernacular describes what they are attached to). In that time he met Bill Briggs, the first to ski from the summit of the Grand Teton, about which he writes, “Once you have seen those peaks, the photographic evidence of Bill Briggs’ epic ski descent down the face of the Grand Teton in 1971 looks like a nude, a weather bleached church on a moon-bathed hill. His thin ski tracks down the peak are the black and white prototype of something bare and yet to be seen, as stark and unimaginable as a lunar landing, as if they were the footprints in the sand of a man trying to sprint off the edge of the world.”
But even the most hard ass skier can only ski 5 or 6 hours a day and “The God of Skiing” does not leave out the remaining 18 or 19 hours. For instance, of “The Stewardess” he writes, “In the morning I could watch her perfect round ass in the lightbulb above the loft like a poor man’s mirror. Everything was beautiful and round about her—her blonde bangs, brown eyes and perfect boobs—like Bambi in the fields with the sweet smell of flowers. Like I was a big Texas cowboy drilling for oil.”
In the section titled “The Grievous Angel,” Kray writes, ‘Gravity’s the only thing that matters,’ Tack said…….’The sky is all in your mind…..It’s just an illusion to create a feeling of distance—an imaginary barrier.’
“After the third joint it didn’t matter. My hands finally stopped shaking and I could marvel at the energy and electricity and how his blue eyes burned like twin planets seen from space, ablaze and unexplored.”
That gives you an idea. “The God of Skiing” is a must read for all skiers. You can find it here for $13.95: http://www.mirabooksmart.com/The-God-of-Skiing_p_584.html

SIERRA STARLIGHT: The astrophotography of Tony Rowell

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Until recently astrophotography was a word I don’t remember hearing or reading and if I had it vanished into the vast depths of unconsciousness like a shooting star. Too bad for me. There is in astrophotography astonishing beauty and subtle and sheer reminders of the connections between all things in the universe. When I read and viewed “Sierra Starlight,” the fine book of astrophotography by Tony Rowell I was treated to some of the best of that beauty as well as moving reminders of those connections, in this case some of them personal.
Tony’s father, Galen Rowell, one of the world’s finest mountain/outdoor/adventure photographers, was a close friend and I knew and liked Tony as a bright, energetic boy and young man but never maintained an adult connection. After Galen was killed in a plane crash in 2002 Tony and I had no contact. I heard he was pursuing photography but didn’t follow his career. When I learned Tony had published a book with such an intriguing title for one like me who has spent much of his life in the Sierra (some of it with Galen) I decided to catch up on Tony’s calling. I ordered his book.
It blew my mind.
Astrophotography, according to Wikipedia, “…is a large sub-discipline in amateur astronomy where it is usually used to record aesthetically pleasing images, rather than for scientific research, with a whole range of equipment and techniques dedicated to the activity.” The whole range of equipment and techniques is as complex and demanding as the images they produce are intriguing and nourishing, and the discipline is not for the impatient, inattentive, unadventurous or fragile. Almost every image of astrophotography is taken with a long exposure which accumulates the small amount of light photons that reach the earth from distant stars. Urban areas as well as some not so urban ones produce light pollution (thus the Dark Sky Ordinances of the towns of the Wood River Valley where I live) which makes seeing or photographing the night time sky a sullied experience.
The Sierra Nevada Mountains of California and Nevada (also known as Sierra Nevadas and Sierra) is a pristine environment for Tony Rowell’s work. He has written, “I joke with my friends that I’m putting in 9-5 days but my hours are 9 p.m. to 5 a.m.” I have spent countless days and nights in those mountains, including many hours of inspiring, nourishing, healing contemplation of its nighttime stars, but “Sierra Starlight” showed me a completely new dimension and perspective of some of my favorite places, Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, Mammoth Mountain and Mono Lake, among others.
The foreword is written by Kenneth Brower and includes, “Malcolm Margolin, our publisher, is smitten by Tony’s astrophotography, seeing it as a new way of looking at the Sierra. So it is, and yet at the same time it is very old. If there is nothing new under the sun, then there is also nothing new under the stars.” I, too, am smitten, and if there is nothing new under the stars we are all still learning (we hope) and in addition to Rowell’s images I learned two new words, astrophotography and moonbow.
Check them out.

THE INDIVIDUAL MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE

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What power or even influence has an individual against the behemoths of big business, big brother, big government, global warming, global terrorism, species extinction, starvation in Africa, obesity in the U.S., quagmire in Afghanistan, drought in western America, habitat destruction and eco-system collapse everywhere, and the exploding population of Homo sapiens on planet earth? Can one person alter the course of these and other runaway trains of destruction and tragedy? Do the actions and thoughts and example of an ordinary individual matter?
The answer is yes, but not enough people ask the question.
To judge from such indicators as the less than 50 percent of eligible America voters who vote, the burgeoning market in anti-depressant drugs, and the average number of hours a day most Americans spend watching mindless television it would seem that hopelessness reigns. If it isn’t hopelessness most Americans don’t view the aforementioned behemoths as problems. Another possibility is that many people see them as part of the price of doing business and are not wallowing in hopelessness, but, rather, are filled with hope that such problems will eventually go away before affecting their lifestyles too severely. Either way, the individual who chooses not to be engaged in issues larger than immediate personal survival, happiness, convenience and comfort is still involved in and affected by those issues.
That is, an individual can choose to not engage in the large issues of the time, but no one can choose not to be involved or unaffected. Jim Morrison once said, “No one gets out of here alive.” And no one gets out of here uninvolved. An individual who doesn’t cast a ballot votes with his absence. The individual who remains a silent witness to oppression and injustice and corruption speaks volumes. The man who surrenders passion to propriety has nothing more to say that hasn’t been said before, and he who gives up propriety for passion usually never shuts up about it but often has something worthwhile to say. Those who sell their integrity to the highest bidder are never paid enough, never satisfied or truly engaged.
It takes a whole individual to be engaged.
The whole individual is humanity’s elemental building block. Humanity is the sum of its individuals, each one is inescapably connected to the lives and deaths of each of the others. The unengaged individual is incomplete, and humanity strains to support the spaces the unengaged cannot fill. Humanity suffers, groans and breaks along predictable fault lines of unengaged individuals.
Do the actions and thoughts and example of individuals matter?
Gandhi broke the back and spirit of British imperialism and created modern India.
Martin Luther King broke the back (but, sad to say, not the spirit) of institutionalized racism in America.
David Brower kept the Grand Canyon from being dammed.
Renee Askins got wolves re-introduced into Yellowstone and the American west.
An unknown Chinese man stopped a tank in Tienamen Square by simply standing his ground.
Daniel Ellesberg shortened the war in Vietnam by many months, if not years.
Someone leaked the photos of American military personnel torturing Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison.
Jon Marvel started what has become the Western Watersheds Project which gives the landscape of western America and all its flora and fauna a chance to survive.
Maria Montessori started a school based on the wisdom of children helping themselves and their peers and, in the process, learning to feel (and be) competent and self-assured.
Robert frost wrote, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”
Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowdon followed their conscience, maintained integrity, remain whole.
Each individual matters.
To vote is to be engaged.
Write a letter to the editor.
Protest what you oppose.
Support what you approve.
Adopt a child from a Russian, Chinese or Nicaraguan orphanage.
Speak your mind without fear.
Take a walk in the woods, along a beach or by a river.
Walk across the room, unplug the television and throw it away.

SMOKE, SMOKE, SMOKE THAT CIGARETTE

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“But nicotine slaves are all the same
At a pettin’ party or a poker game
Everything gotta stop while they have a cigarette
Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette
Puff, puff, puff and if you smoke yourself to death
Tell St. Peter at the Golden Gate
That you hate to make him wait
But you just gotta have another cigarette”
Merle Travis and Tex Williams

That song was a household anthem of my post-WWII ‘40s and ‘50s childhood. My parents were heavy smokers. Mom often went through three packs a day. She died the long, slow way of emphysema at the age of 50, spending most of her last ten years hooked up to oxygen tanks. It was not pretty. Dad quit when it became obvious that smoking had destroyed his wife. Though I could have avoided more of them, I am grateful and fortunate that I completely avoided the vice of smoking. Still, my lungs have always been compromised by growing up in a house of smoke.
I mention this personal history as context to my personal reaction to the recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Health Interview Survey which found that in 2015 15.2 percent of American adults smoke cigarettes. That’s a troubling number of nicotine slaves to those who care about the health of fellow countrymen, but it’s a monumental decrease since 1962 when 42 percent of Americans were smokers, including Mom.
Stanford’s Dr. Robert Proctor has written “The cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization…. Cigarettes cause about 1.5 million deaths from lung cancer per year, a number that will rise to nearly 2 million per year by the 2020s or 2030s…. Part of the ease of cigarette manufacturing stems from the ubiquity of high-speed cigarette making machines, which crank out 20 000 cigarettes per min. Cigarette makers make about a penny in profit for every cigarette sold, which means that the value of a life to a cigarette maker is about US $10 000.”
One human life=$10,000 corporate profit.
Despite the best coordinated efforts of the tobacco industry’s “denialist campaigns” to deny that cigarettes are “the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization,” along with denying their awareness of this danger and making such absurd claims as that the science wasn’t complete and more studies needed to be made, etc., etc., the awareness of reality filtered into the consciousness of the majority of Americans with the help of higher taxation on tobacco and outlawing smoking in most public places. (A pertinent local side note: Sun Valley Mayor Dewayne Briscoe was instrumental in the passage of the Washington clean indoor air act in 1985, the model for subsequent anti-smoking laws in Washington and many other states.)
That is, exposing the lack of credibility of the denialist campaigns of the tobacco industry worked. Not perfectly. Not completely. But it’s better than it was in 1962 and a lot of people are alive who wouldn’t be otherwise.
That is, take heart, all you activists against climate change deniers, the causes of gun violence deniers and the world-wide environmental collapse deniers.
Persevere.

THE MYSTERIOUS MASS OF METHANE OVER OUR MOUNTAINS

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The largest cloud of methane gas in the atmosphere above the United States is sitting above the Four Corners region of the Southwest. It’s been there for several years and scientists have been aware of it since at least 2003. SCIAMACHY’s data from 2002 through 2012 consistently tracked the methane mass hovering above the southwest during that time, but it was concluded that SCIAMACHY’s (European Space Agency’s Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartography) data was “…so extreme scientists still waited several more years before investigating the region in detail,” according to the Christian Science Monitor.
“We didn’t focus on it because we weren’t sure if it was a true signal or an instrument error,” said Christian Frankenberg from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a statement.
Since NASA is far more focused on things like the slim possibility of finding life on Mars than dealing with the abundant bovine sized threats to life as we all know it on planet Earth, it is not shocking that it took their scientists 10 years to bother checking the data for error about a cloud of methane too extreme to investigate. But it is surprising that scientists outside NASA lacked the curiosity to check out a known 2500 square mile area (about the size of Delaware) of methane gas hovering above the Southwest. Perhaps the National Ski Areas Association should begin promoting Scientists Ski Weeks at western ski areas to help introduce the scientific community to the joys of skiing and the environmental and spiritual pleasures of mountains buried under snow rather than drying out beneath mysterious masses of methane. NASA scientists appear to be more familiar with interpreting data indicating that the dry winds of Olympus Mons blow 350 mph than with dry powder snow in the face coming out of a turn in the back bowls of Vail after a classic (remember the classics?) Rocky Mountain dump. NSAA has a potential market in NASA and NASA might find a perspective not too extreme to investigate in NSAA. More mysterious things have happened.
Frankenberg co-authored a study published last year in Geophysical Research Letters that concluded the mass over the Southwest contained atmospheric methane concentrations equivalent to about 1.3 million pounds of emissions a year, about 80% higher than previous EDA estimates. There is less methane in the earth’s atmosphere than CO2, but methane traps significantly more heat in the atmosphere than CO2. That is, methane is known to be a significant (perhaps the major?) contributor to human caused global warming and climate change.
A CBS news report last year was titled “Scientists Puzzled By Methane Mystery Over Four Corners.” The Christian Science Monitor story about the same matter carried the title “How scientists overlooked a 2500 square-mile cloud of methane over the Southwest.” In that article Terry Engelder, a professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University in state College, noted that it can be hard to determine how responsible industry is for methane emissions in certain areas and is quoted as saying “….we really don’t know to (sic) the extent to which the coal industry and coalbed methane increased and aggravated an existing, natural condition.”
Science is a difficult and exacting endeavor and finding mysterious clouds of methane, much less determining where they came from, cannot be a simple task. But it seems to me that whether one is a scientist with NASA or a professor of one of the sciences at a prestigious university a good place to begin any investigation is with the obvious. For instance, in the case of the mysterious mass of methane over the Four Corners it is worth noting and very obvious to the folks living there that the states surrounding that area—Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, California, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho and Texas—are home to some 33,000,000 cattle. Any scientist worth a cow fart could easily determine that a cow contributes approximately 220 pounds (POUNDS!) of methane to the atmosphere every year. Each cow’s yearly methane donation to the atmosphere’s rising temperature is the equivalent of an automobile’s CO2 gift to global warming after being driven 7800 miles. Even a non-scientist with a calculator can determine that every year the cattle of those eight southwestern states donate 7,260,000,000 pounds (POUNDS!!!!) of methane to the atmosphere above those states. Every year. 7,260,000,000 pounds every year. Year after year after year after year after…………
That’s a lot of methane and the fact that it is a mystery to NASA scientists how a cloud of it the size of Delaware formed above an area with 33,000,000 methane factories gives an added dimension to the old saw, “It’s not exactly rocket science.”

THE DALAI LAMA AT 80

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“Someone else’s action should not determine your response.”
“Instead of wondering WHY this is happening to you, consider why this is happening to YOU.”
Two quotes from HH the 14th Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama is 80 and has not slowed down or lessened his efforts on behalf of his stated three main commitments: 1.) Promoting the human values of compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, contentment and self-discipline; 2.) Promoting religious harmony and understanding among the world’s major religious traditions. (His web site elaborates, “Despite philosophical differences, all major world religions have the same potential to create good human beings.”); 3.) As a Tibetan and the spiritual leader of Tibet, the Dalai Lama’s third commitment is to preserve Tibet’s Buddhist culture of peace and non-violence.
Though the Dalai Lama represents the best of an ancient culture and viewpoint on human life (peace and non-violence), he is a futurist, an enlightened man who has written that modern science and the ancient practice of contemplation. “…share significant commonalities especially in their basic philosophical outlook and methodology. On the philosophical level, both Buddhism and modern science share a deep suspicion of any notion of absolutes, whether conceptualized as a transcendent being, as an eternal, unchanging principle such as soul, or as a fundamental substratum of reality. Both Buddhism and science prefer to account for the evolution and emergence of the cosmos and life in terms of the complex interrelations of the natural laws of cause and effect. From the methodological perspective, both traditions emphasize the role of empiricism. For example, in the Buddhist investigative tradition, between the three recognized sources of knowledge‑‑experience, reason and testimony‑‑it is the evidence of the experience that takes precedence, with reason coming second and testimony last. This means that, in the Buddhist investigation of reality, at least in principle, empirical evidence should triumph over scriptural authority, no matter how deeply venerated a scripture may be.”
Empirical evidence as well as common sense confirm peace and non-violence as preferable to conflict and brutality and in 1989 the Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He was among the first to show that peace and non-violence are available to every person and thereby the entire world.
In 2005 he addressed the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, D.C. despite the protest of a few hundred of its 35,000 members who objected to a religious leader at a scientific meeting. But more than a decade earlier after observing a brain surgery he asked the surgeons “Can mind shape brain matter.” That is, it has long been known that the physical condition of the brain affects the content and dynamics of mind. Can the mind, in turn, alter the brain?”
Though William James in the 19th century and subsequent scientists had suggested the possibility, no one before the Dalai Lama had proposed that question and asked science for an answer.
The answer, under the umbrella name of ‘neuroplasticity,’ is ‘yes.’ A mind devoted to compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, contentment, self-discipline, religious harmony, peace and non-violence can shape its brain the same. Think of that. HH the Dalai Lama does.

THE COSMIC LAW

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In the Shambhala Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen the first two definitions of “dharma” are : 1. The cosmic law, the “great norm” underlying our world; above all, the law of karmically determined rebirth. And, 2. The teaching of the — Buddha, who recognized and formulated this “law”; thus the teaching that expresses the universal truth.
As Buddhists we take refuge in the Buddha, the dharma and the sangha, the teacher, the teachings and the community of companions on the path. The dharma is the teaching—both received and given—by the individual practitioner in every second of every day in the normal actions, thoughts and intentions of daily life.
The dharma, the teaching, is continuously both received and given. In the dharma we are all students and teachers, and it is a mistake to become attached to either role. This point, in my view, deserves more consideration, discussion and contemplation than it receives.
The first definition mentioned above includes “karmically determined rebirth.” That is, the circumstances of our lives, according to the dharma, are a result of karma, cause and effect. How we were in the past (not just past lives) determines how and where we are in the present. How and where we are in the present and what we have and have not learned from the past will determine the future. That’s the dharma.
There is no truth or falsehood to the dharma. The dharma is just our everyday, normal lives, and by living within the dharma, “…the teaching that expresses the universal truth” we are able to find out for ourselves what is true and what is false. That is, the cosmic law is not a set of rules which we follow, but, rather, is the never ending dynamics and lessons of each of our everyday lives as we live them every minute of every day. Padmasambhava expressed the dharma this way: “If you want to know your past life, look into your present condition; if you want to know your future life, look at your present actions.”
That’s the dharma.
Look carefully.
No one else and no teaching can tell you what is true and what is false. If a teacher or a teaching indicates that it is good practice to develop a regular practice of meditation every day, that is, in my view, good advice, but the only way in which you can determine whether this is true for you is to practice and to remain open to what is. Is the practice true for you or not? Only you can discover for yourself what is true and what is false. Dr. Richard Davidson, Director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin and a friend and colleague of HH the Dalai Lama, brought up in a lecture a (to me) surprising premise: for some people, primarily those suffering from bi-polar and schizophrenic disorders, meditation may actually be destructive.
All who are practicing are eager to learn, to hear and follow the teachings and the path, to know what is true and what is false, eager to be certain so that we can relax. But the dharma doesn’t tell us what is true and what is false. That is something we must each do for ourselves in our own lives.
The only certainty is that the circumstances of our present life, each action, thought, breath, intention of that life is the dharma. As such, it is the means, the vehicle, the alarm clock that can wake us up.
There is a Zen admonition to live each moment with the awareness of a warrior in the night behind enemy lines, and, for that warrior, that is the dharma. Or, as Dogen said, “If you can’t find the truth right where you are , where else do you expect to find it?”

SECOND SUNS: A Book About Vision

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Everyone reading this who has had cataract surgery appreciates the second chance at vision that surgery provided, and they as well as readers with the good fortune of good eyesight cherish the opportunity to see goodness in the world. That’s one of several reasons why “Second Suns,” a book by David Oliver Relin is a nourishing read for everyone who endeavors to see the world more clearly. The world as it is, with more than seven billion imperfect humans struggling to survive on a planet that cannot and a human community that will not sustain them (us) in dignity, equality and good health, is a better and more inspiring place because of David Relin and the two central men of this story, Sanduk Ruit and Geoffrey Tabin.
Ruit was born into poverty in a remote mountain village of Nepal, a week’s walk away from the nearest school. Ruit’s obvious intelligence as a young boy inspired his family to arrange for him to be schooled in India, an education they could not afford without help and that began with an arduous 15 day walk with his father from his village to be left alone in a foreign land. He chose medicine as a field of study because of three siblings whose early deaths could have been prevented with access to medical care in developed countries, and within a few years of becoming an ophthalmologist Ruit had revolutionized cataract surgery in the poorest countries on earth.
Tabin, an American, is Professor of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences at the Moran Eye Center at the University of Utah. He graduated from Yale where he was captain and a star player on the tennis team, earned a Masters in Philosophy at Oxford and received his MD from Harvard. He is a well known and highly accomplished climber and the 4th person to have climbed the seven summits, the highest points on each continent, including, of course, Everest. He dropped out of medical school several times to go on climbing expeditions and somehow managed to get back in, and, according to Relin, “…tended to dance along the border of socially acceptable behavior.” He once recited an obscene poem to a group of medical school students, and his life experience, culture, personality, athleticism, opportunities and private life are as different from Ruit’s as, say, Kathmandu is from Cambridge.
Still, the two of them managed to team up (Ruit as mentor, Tabin as acolyte) to change and redefine the meaning and possibilities of modern medicine in the undeveloped countries of the world. Nepal, one of the world’s poorest countries has one of its highest rates of cataracts, and since Ruit opened the Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology in Kathmandu in 1994 nearly 200,000 (mostly) destitute Nepalese have had their eyesight restored. Ruit and Tabin have trained hundreds of ophthalmologists and established centers in India, China, Tibet, Bhutan and Africa and thereby restored sight (and hope, smiles and life itself) to hundreds of thousands of people.
“Second Suns” informs, inspires and resonates for several reasons at multiple levels, including the examples of two doctors and the writer who tells their story of living according to the human ethic of how much they are able to contribute to the world rather than the material standard of how much they can extract from it.

DAVE McCOY: A Man For All Seasons

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When Dave McCoy first saw the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California he said, “I’d never seen anything like it. I loved the snow: I started dreaming about it. I said, ‘This is where I am going to spend my life.’”
Many people reading this understand that experience and subsequent path.
That same year McCoy received the foundation of what he called ‘…the best possible education.’ He told Leigh Buchanan: “When I was in the eighth grade my folks separated. It was during the Depression, and so my mom and I got on a Greyhound bus and went to meet my father’s parents in Wilkeson, Washington. We got acquainted, and she left me there. I stuck around for two and a half months, but I didn’t like the rain, so I took my knapsack and headed back to California. I rode with the bums on the trains, ate at their campfires at night, and listened to their stories. It was the best possible education.”
At the time Dave was 13 years old. His formal education ended with high school, but with that best possible informal education, his love for snow and mountains, hard work and fun he built Mammoth Mountain Ski Area from a rope tow on the side of hill to one of the largest and best ski areas in North America. Many people reading this already know it but for those who don’t Dave’s influence on skiing and skiers is incalculable, and that story is best told in Robin Morning’s fine book “Tracks of Passion.” Dave, who I’ve known since 1953, will be 100 years old in August. I hadn’t seen him since his 90th birthday party but a few weeks ago I had the privilege and pleasure of spending a few hours in conversation with him.
That talk illuminated and reiterated why I am among many, many people who consider Dave McCoy among the most remarkable, decent, genuinely good human beings we have ever known, a great man by any measure. That is, his successes, accomplishments and positive impact on the community of Mammoth, the larger world of skiing and thereby the world at large did not make him a great man, but rather, the other way around. We reminisced about several people, events and dynamics of the life and lives we know and consistent perspectives and themes kept surfacing in Dave’s narrative:
“Most people are essentially good,” he said, “and if you give them the right chances they will show you that goodness.”
“All of us make mistakes. That’s part of learning. The thing is to learn from them and to move on and not repeat that one and don’t be afraid of making a different one.”
And there is this as told to Leigh Buchanan: “In 1991, we had to lay off 150 people, because we had six years of very light snow. Instead of keeping all the best people, I looked at the people that were really able to take care of themselves and let them go first. It worked out, because they ended up doing greater things than they had been doing. It may not have been wise, but that’s the way it is with me.”
Thanks, Dave.

NOBODY HOME

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This alone from “Nobody Home: writing, Buddhism, and living in places” by Gary Snyder in conversation with Julia Martin is worth the price of the book and the pleasure of the read:

“Snyder: Part of the actualization of Buddhist ethics is, in a sense, to be a deep ecologist. The actualization of Buddhist insights gives us a Buddhist economics not based on greed but on need, an ethic of adequacy but simplicity, a valuation of personal insight and personal experience over possessions. What I like most about Buddhism really is its fearlessness. So much of what warps people is fear of death and fear of impermanence. So much of what we do is simply strategies to try and hold back death, trying to buy time with material things. So at its best Buddhism provides people with a way of seeing their own frailty: you need less in the way of material objects and fortresses around yourself.”

As always with Snyder, there is more. Born in 1930 he was a founding father of the “Beat Generation,” a cultural/literary movement of the 1950s with an outsized influence on the consciousness of America. It was never large in numbers, but its early members included Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, John Clellon Holmes, Neal Cassidy, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs, while later adherents included Richard Brautigan and Ken Kesey. The Beats viewed the accepted mores of the establishment as constrictive to the human spirit, destructive to social equality and a sell-out of the best of humanity. Whether or not one embraced (I did and do) or rejected it (many did and do), the message of the Beat Generation lives on, nowhere moreso than in the work and life of its last standing founding father whose book Turtle Island earned the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1975.
This latest book began in 1984 when a young South African graduate student, Julia Martin, wrote Snyder a letter with questions about his writings. She writes, “It started as an intellectual exchange and became an exploration of practice. As a young person living in a society demarcated by the paranoid logic of apartheid, it was refreshing to meet the spaciousness of Gary’s way of seeing. His delight in wildness…the truly radical realization that things are not things but process, nodes in the jeweled net… a tendency to walk out of the narrow prison of dualistic thought.” Nobody Home is a compilation of some of their correspondence and interviews of nearly 30 years and shows, among other things, how the beat of the Beats is still keeping time. From opposite sides of the world they illuminate the connectedness of all things, times, places and people‑‑‑apartheid and a valuation of personal insight and personal experience over possessions, Snyder’s comment to Julia that “…you can hope that your country never becomes a superpower because that’s a huge drag” and the book’s closing lines from HH Dalai Lama, “Compassion, love, and forgiveness, however, are not luxuries. They are fundamental for our survival.”
The Beats go on.