Author Archives: dorworth

REMINDERS FROM YOKO

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During the winter of 1963-64 I worked as a bartender/pizza cook at the Sun Valley’s employees bar in the Quonset hut behind the Challenger Inn that later became the laundry. Called the Holiday Hut, it had a full service bar, pizza, ping pong tables, sofas and a television and was in business to discourage off duty Sun Valley employees from hanging around the guest bars in the lodge and inn. My old friend and boss, the wonderful Ned Bell, had set me up with this job that included room and board, a lift pass, some spending money and enough time to ski and train at the gentle levels required to recover from recent surgery and sickness.
Thanks in part to Ned it was an enjoyable, unusually relaxed winter and period in my personal life, a vacation from the concentration of competitive skiing, allowing room and energy for the contemplation of larger issues. And it was a strange and unsettling time in American culture when such issues encouraged contemplation, reassessment and personal connection to and responsibility for them. Just a few months before, President John Kennedy had been assassinated. A year earlier, George Wallace’s inaugural address as Governor of Alabama included, “…segregation now; segregation tomorrow; segregation forever!” Six months after Wallace’s shameful (and shameless) racist polemic, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. And the obscene disaster that a few months later would become known as the Viet Nam War was already underway under the radar but being felt and heard like the distant thunder of an imminent shift in and expansion of the consciousness of the unsettled American culture.
A milestone in my own awareness of and participation in that shift and expansion happened in the Holiday Hut one February 1964 night, the 9th to be precise.
Usually the Holiday Hut had about 10—15 customers doing the things young people do in such places after work, but early that evening the place unexpectedly filled up. I had never been so busy making pizzas, serving drinks and trying to keep customers happy. I asked someone what was going on and was properly chastised for being clueless. The Beatles were appearing on the Ed Sullivan show that night and the Holiday Hut had the available TV. Since I had been out of the country for most of the previous year I didn’t even know who the Beatles were.
I, along with 73 million other people who watched Ed’s show that night, soon found out.
And the Beatles were more than fine musicians and pop stars. They embodied, inspired and gave literal voice to both shift and expansion in the culture’s consciousness, at least for those not too mired to shift or/and too tight to expand. The Beatles were the right people in the right place in the right time to be the literal and musical voice of an era. It was an era of change for many, but even many of those who couldn’t embrace, for instance, peace and love as a mantra for social organization or getting America out of Viet Nam as a political goal, incorporated the Beatles music into their lives. The Beatles’ personal and professional lives were part of the cultural fabric, not because they were celebrities but because they were the public face of shifts in perspective and thinking of a significant part of the culture. The lyrics of their songs were studied and oft repeated. “All You Need is Love,” “Good Day, Sunshine, “Let It Be” and, later, “Imagine” made far more sense for all people than, say the systems analysis thinking of people like Robert McNamara who orchestrated the Viet Nam War and for whom some people were more disposable than others. I mean, anyone with half or less a brain knows that Gandhi is a better role model than Attila.
So, even though life moved on and the Beatles broke up and went separate ways the music and the message lived on. Even when John Lennon joined Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and thousands of lesser known oblations to the gods of America’s gun culture the music of the Beatles endures with lyrics like:

“But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is brother you have to wait”
And then just the other day a book called “Acorn” by Yoko Ono, Lennon’s widow, showed up. She calls it a book of ‘conceptual instructions’ and notes, “I’m riding a time machine that’s going back to the good old ways. Great!”
Among Yoko’s instructions:

“Mend an object
When you go through the process of mending
You mend something inside your soul as well.”

and
“Take your pants off

before you fight.”
The beat goes on.

The War Prayer

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“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle—be Thou near them! With them—in spirit—we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe.
“O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended through wastes of their desolate land in rags & hunger & thirst, sport of the sun flames of summer & the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave & denied it—for our sakes, who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask of one who is the spirit of love & who is the ever-faithful refuge & friend of all that are sore beset, & seek His aid with humble & contrite hearts. Grant our prayer, O Lord & thine shall be the praise & honor & glory now & ever, Amen.”
Mark Twain, from “The War Prayer,” written in 1905 during the Philippine/American War.

Mark Twain was vice-President of the anti-Imperialist League and America’s most prominent literary opponent of war at the start of the 20th century. One of literature’s great satirists, Twain was writing during and against the American invasion/occupation of the Philippines. President Theodore Roosevelt declared that war over on July 4, 1902, but the date was only patriotic symbolism, the gesture just a political move to circumvent a Senate hearing into embarrassing atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers in the Philippines. In reality, neither the war nor the inevitable atrocities were over. The two best remembered (in the Philippines, though not in America) massacres of civilians took place in March of 1906 when the 6th Infantry, commanded by General Wood, massacred 900 Muslim men, women and children at Bud Dajo, where they had taken refuge in a dormant volcano crater; and in June 1913 where U.S. soldiers under the command of General “Black Jack” Pershing slaughtered 500 Muslim men, women and children at Bud Bogsak. These slaughters took place after Twain wrote “The War Prayer,” which, like most anti-war literature, was suppressed and long unnoticed. Anti-war literature makes people uncomfortable with the deep substance of the consequences, as well as the small-minded hollowness of the supposed glories, of war. Discomfort, of course is its intention.
Harper’s Bazaar, which regularly published Twain, rejected “The War Prayer” as “not quite suited to a woman’s magazine.” Of Harper’s refusal to publish the prayer, Twain wrote to a friend, “I don’t think the prayer will be published in my time. None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth.” He also mentioned that his Harper’s editor was “responsible to his Company,” and “should not permit laughs which could injure its business.” In fact, “The War Prayer” remained unpublished until 1923, long after Twain was dead, and it is a truism of commerce that uncomfortable truths are often bad for business and as a consequence are suppressed.
Mark Twain was the first great 20th century American of letters and the arts to use his craft in the service of anti-war belief. He was not the first in history or the last of a century in which more than 200 million people died in wars, the great majority of them civilians.
Film was the art form of the masses in the 20th century and my favorite two anti-war films are “Coming Home” (1978) which won academy awards for best actor (Jon Voight), best actress (Jane Fonda), and best original screenplay (Nancy Dowd, Waldo Salt and Robert C. Jones); and “Born on the Fourth of July,” (1989) based on the autobiography of Vietnam war hero Ron Kovic who went to Vietnam as a true-believer/patriot/warrior and came home to America a paraplegic and one of America’s leading anti-war activists. Each film, one a true story, is a powerful portrayal of a man who went to war in the belief that he was doing the right thing, and came home crippled in body and spirit and questioning the premises of war itself. In my opinion, every American teen-ager should view these films in the course (sic) of public education.
But the ne plus ultra treatise of anti-war thought is Dalton Trumbo’s novel “Johnny Got His Gun.” Published in 1939, it won a National Book Award. The protagonist, Joe, is a WWI American soldier who is in a British hospital. He has no arms, legs, eyes, ears, mouth, tongue, or face. No one knows who he is, and he cannot tell them. Nevertheless, he is ceremonially decorated as an anonymous war hero. All that’s left are his mind and his memories and his humanity. Joe can move his head and he begins banging his head in Morse code, attempting to communicate. At first they think he is having seizures and he is sedated, but finally his nurse figures out what he is doing. She notifies his doctors and they communicate, Joe banging his head, the doctors drumming on his head with their fingers. Joe realizes he is a hero and a monster, and he wants to go on display with his disfigurement to graphically illustrate to the world the true horrors of war.
The reply, literally pounded into his head in Morse code, is, “What you ask is against regulations.”
It is against regulations to display the monsters that result from the horrors of war. Only the dead are permitted to tell the truth. Laughs are not permitted that could injure business as usual, but, a hundred years after Twain wrote “The War Prayer” and the 21st century settles into (military/industrial complex) business as usual, Johnny is still getting his gun, in the unlikely event you haven‘t noticed.

Searching For Simplicity

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“A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.”
Eleanor Roosevelt

A friend recently dropped by for a visit while on a vacation trip of indeterminate length on a search for a simpler life. The bumper sticker on the back of his traveling home on wheels was familiar: “Your worst nightmare is my favorite vacation.” Like so many bon mots this one can be interpreted in more than one way, including that your nightmare and my vacation as well as vice-versa are not separate events. For various reasons involving recent readings and the on going awareness that the health of planet Earth in all areas (water, air, land, human population growth, the growing number of extinct species, global warming, environment in general, etc.) is rapidly deteriorating, it was a reminder to never confuse standard of living with quality of life. All too many people do not differentiate between such two very different realities.
They are as different as the inner life of the heart and mind and the outer landscape of conspicuous consumption, or organic farmer/ citizen of the earth and derivatives trader of its extractive resources, or devoted, skeptical scientist and devout, true believing Creationist. And each can be interpreted in more than one way, including just the opposite of what the standard bearer intends.
The worst nightmare of, for instance, the CEO of any large corporation is that the business of the corporation ceases to grow. At the same time (the present moment), for the earth and all its inhabitants, human and otherwise, the worst nightmare is that the business of corporations continues to grow. The world’s economic model is based on the lurid fantasy of unlimited, endless growth, each increment of which compounds the complexity of life. Simplicity is an alternative, even an antidote to complexity and boundless growth. It can be viewed as a vacation from the prevailing worldview, economic engine and ethic of every multi-national corporation, perhaps best and most famously summed up by Ed Abbey: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
Cancer is a nightmare for everyone, it is no one’s favorite vacation and growth for the sake of growth is its ideology. The implications of relentless growth for individual, society and the earth itself are obvious. Author and Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Sustainability at MIT Peter Senge, who was named a ‘Strategist of the Century’ by the Journal of Business Strategy and who describes himself as an ‘idealistic pragmatist’ says of the current state of Earth, “We are sleepwalking into disaster, going faster and faster to get to where no one wants to be.” That is, by 2050 the capacity of the planet to renew itself (clean air, water, arable land, sustainable fisheries and the like) will be 300 to 500 percent beyond sustainability. And there will be 9 billion people struggling (and waging wars against each other) to survive. It is difficult to imagine that there will be much in the way of vacation.
The antidote to sleepwalking into disaster is to wake up and to take a vacation from walking to where no one wants to be. Wake up and take a vacation from the nightmare crisis of complexity caused in large measure by growth for the sake of growth. As every study one can find involving the demographics of both standard of living and quality of life clearly shows the resources supporting both are quickly running out. The problem is enormous—more than 7 billion humans and growing by 50 million a year at this writing—gargantuan enough that one person might understandably feel overwhelmed, helpless, resigned. But Mahatma Gandhi, who had some experience in such matters, pointed out, “In a gentle way, you can shake the world.” You—one person—can take a vacation from and thereby shake off the nightmare. You can shake the world, gently, or, if you prefer, you can let it shake you, perhaps not so gently.
As a place to start I like what Yvon Chouinard, the founder and owner of Patagonia, Inc., says: “I think the simple life really begins with owning less stuff.” Very few, probably none, reading this can say with a straight face that they don’t own too much ‘stuff.’ In a gentle way you can shake the world—and take a vacation from the nightmare of endless consumerism—by nothing more complex than taking, say, ten things you don’t need to the community thrift store. It will put you ten steps closer to a simple life and, gently, help wake up the world.
Give it a try. Those steps might lead to others.

TO ALL THOSE

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To all those for whom honesty is commodity
instead of standard
To all those who see integrity in the dictionary
instead of within
To all those whose hearts are in the way
instead of lighting the way
To all those who turn from love
instead of loving
To all those who see adversary
instead of mirror
To all those who wound for the greater good
instead of healing the self
To all those for whom Earth is resource
instead of Mother
To all those who traffic or carry weapons to live
instead of almost anything
To all those in shadow who will not speak
instead of speaking loud and clear
To all those who proclaim greed a virtue
instead of sickness
To all those for whom mercy is political
instead of organic
To all those who give into hatred
instead of hating giving in
To all those whose words confuse
instead of illuminate
To all those who salute authority
instead of embracing brotherhood
To all those who turn their back
instead of the other cheek
To all those who play poker
instead of playing straight
To all those who cannot smell what stinks
instead of cleaning up
To all those for whom cruelty is utility
instead of unacceptable
To all those who keep score
instead of keeping care
To all those who teach with gift and punishment
instead of by example
To all those who learn by acceptance
instead of question and examination
To all those for whom intuition is superstition
instead of guide to reason
To all those for whom respect is attachment
instead of innate
To all those who price the priceless
instead of knowing it
To all those
life must answer
No!

QUESTIONS FROM FRO

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Robert “Fro” Frolich was a beloved member of the Squaw Valley/North Lake Tahoe community for many years. When he died in 2010 after a long battle with cancer, the world of mountains and the soul of adventure lost one of its most passionate and articulate spokesmen and chroniclers. His two coffee table books, “Mountain Dreamers: Visionaries of Sierra Nevada Skiing” and “Skiing with Style. Sugar Bowl: 60 Years” are classics. Fro was many things to many people—writer, skier, climber, adventurer, seeker, bon vivant and trusted confidante with huge shoulders. First of all, to me, Fro was my friend, and just after my book “Night Driving” was published he sent me these questions.

Fro: You’ve been pumping out an array of stories for over forty years. Finally, you’ve published a book. It’s about time. What’s been the hold up and is there a novel on the way?
DD: The short answer is that if I had a dollar for every publisher rejection I’ve received I would be able to take that money and fill up my car with gas, drive to Squaw from Ketchum, buy a lift ticket for the day, ski all day with a fine lunch at High Camp, take you out to dinner in Squaw’s best restaurant, fill up my car again and drive back to Ketchum and have a few dollars left over. The long answer is that my writing career, as I once told Mort Lund, “……has been hampered by all the time I spend skiing and climbing and traveling. If it weren’t for the mountains, I think I could become a hell of a good mountain writer.” I’ve got at least two more books worth of material already done that if “Night Driving” proves successful I’ll try to get published. Yes, there is a novel on the way, though it’s still in my brain and not on paper or even in the computer.

Fro: Your writings and your lifestyle have been compared to part Kerouac part Edward Abbey even part Hunter Thompson. Whose actually been a big influence and do you have any Hunter stories?
DD: Well, those three were writing about several issues, experiences and attitudes that interested me and they are among my favorite writers; but I’d been driving long distances around the U.S. long before I became aware of Kerouac, altering my own consciousness long before “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was published, and pissed off about the environmental destruction of my homeland before I knew about Abbey. Among the beats, Gary Snyder certainly has long been an influence. Hemingway was such a strong early influence that much of my early work sounds like third rate Hemingway and I had to quit reading him for about 20 years, but now that he’s no longer a threat to my own voice I admire him more than ever. My young influences included Mark Twain, Jack London, Thomas Wolfe (not Tom), John Steinbeck, Scott Fitzgerald, Montaigne, William Blake, Gertrude Stein, Edna St. Vincent Millay and, of all people, Monty Atwater. No, I don’t have any Hunter stories that haven’t already been told.

Fro: Night Driving has long been celebrated as a classic piece of writing. And it has just as much power in its words today as way back yonder when you wrote it. Have we come full circle as a society to still embrace its message?
DD: Society as a whole seems to me as out of control as ever, but every individual can read a book, embrace its message and change some small part of their world that needs changing. There is great hope in that and if “Night Driving” in some small way adds to that hope in action I am pleased.

Fro: You write that our ultimate tragedy, the deepest despair, is to not be who we are. It seems to me you’ve been several different people in your life—athlete, rogue, loadie, Buddhist, etc. Not to be sophomoric, but is there a time and place for truly discovering oneself?
DD: Yes. The time is now. The place is here.

Fro: You write in “A Place To Start” that “…hope is the intention to trust the true nature of things.” Yet so many times we feel despair. We feel hopelessness sometimes whether reading the newspaper or just looking at our own lives. Have you ever had the same feelings and where did you look to start believing again?
DD: Fro, it is a continuous, unending struggle. Joy does not exist without sorrow, nor does life without death. It is the human condition. And, yes, I’ve had my fair share of black holes in life. The great writer and activist Terry Tempest Williams was asked by a conservative U.S. Senator who disagreed with her thoughts about Iraq and other national policies, “What are you willing to die for?” Terry answered, after a great deal of introspection“….that was not the question, it wasn’t what I was willing to die for, but what I was willing to give my life to.” You get out of black holes by figuring out what you are willing to give your life to. What else is there to believe in?

Fro: You’ve hung out and played with some dynamic and groundbreaking people. My favorite friend of yours, of course, was Steve McKinney. Do you have a favorite McKinney story?
DD:  Steve was raised as a McKinney, though biologically he was not. His biological father and mother had divorced when he was young, and the father was estranged from his children and bitter and angry. The parents’ disputes and differences were, as usual, dropped upon the heads and hearts of their children. Steve knew who his father was and even where he was, but he did not know his father. Steve was in his 20s when he decided one night he wanted to contact his biological father who lived on the other side of America and who he had not seen since he was an infant. He phoned. His father told Steve he did not want to have any contact with him and to never phone him again. Steve did not, but he told me he was very hurt, confused and depressed by his father’s response. I asked him what he thought about it, and about his father. His reply took my breath away and has always resonated with me. Steve said, “Well, I know he was doing the best that he could do with what he had to work with at the time.” That’s my favorite Steve McKinney story and how I remember him.

Fro: Who’s the downright craziest skier or climber you ever knew? Was there ever anybody you stayed away from because they were just too weird?
DD: All the real crazies of my era and even of a couple eras after are dead or no longer skiing or climbing. Without mentioning names, yes, there are a few people I avoided (and avoid) for a variety of reasons involving personal taste and self-preservation.

Fro: In today’s ski industry the wooing of “extremism” is so big that no one can deny its influence. Its movement has changed the perception of ski terrain radically. High risk means high pleasure and, though attempting defy-defying acts for most sane folks is tantamount to digesting a bowling bowl, especially Tahoe skiers and boarders, who chase cliffs the way a dog chases tires are called crazy and willing to be hit. Do you think that extremism sends a mixed message to young people out there who think this is what the sport is only about, about going big and skiing sick lines? You were one of the first going big and doing it on huge skis. Does it blow your mind with what’s being skied on the hill these days? What advice do you tell young skiers jumping all these cliffs and skiing such outrageous lines?
DD: To borrow the title of Bode Miller’s fine autobiography which I recommend to every skier of any age, ability and degree of love for the sport, “Go Fast, Be Good, Have Fun.”

Fro: The Lake Tahoe Basin, surrounded by a dozen alpine resorts, and blessed with big mountains complemented by big snowfall, is extreme skiing’s breeding ground. Extreme skiers traveling to Lake Tahoe is comparable to surfers visiting the North Shore of Oahu, or windsurfers making the pilgrimage to Ho’okipa on Maui. Tahoe’s terrain is a rite of passage for the ski or snowboarding enthusiast, especially Squaw Valley. Is Squaw Valley the mother ship for extremists and is it that rite of passage? What are your thoughts?
DD: I probably don’t know enough about modern extreme skiing to make an intelligent comment, but the most extreme skiing and lines I’ve seen have been in Alaska. I was very grateful that I was too old to think that I needed to ski them, though those who do are wild and beautiful adventurers.

Fro: You’ve traveled to some of the most remote places in the world. You probably have more frequent flyer miles than the Rolling Stones. What are some of the most far out places you’ve traveled to? Do all airports look alike or do you have a favorite. Any place you ever went where you should have stayed home?
DD:Kashgar, China; the Rongbuk Valley under the north face of Mt. Everest, Tibet; Mustagh Ata, Pamir Mountains, China; Patagonia, Argentina; the bottom of the Grand Canyon, Arizona; Mt. Steele, Kluane National Park, Yukon, Canada; Yosemite, California before, say, 1975; Lake Tahoe, California/Nevada before, say, 1960; Mt. Shasta, California; Sawtooth Mountains, Idaho; Indian Creek, Utah; the volcanoes of southern Chile. I like airports less and less with every journey and there are no candidates for favorite. Yes, like all people who tend to wander, there are many places I went where I should have stayed home, but I didn’t know that until I got home.

Fro: After decades of being on your skis you appear to not have slowed down. How many days per season do you still “boot up”? Skiing is your lifeblood. Has it ever felt like a job or does the love for the sport continue to increase every day?
DD: I ski nearly every day all winter, though often for only a couple of hours; between the lift served mountain in Sun Valley and the backcountry I probably ski 120 to 140 days a year. Like most skiers, I began skiing for the joy of it; then it turned into a competitive endeavor; and then to a professional one; and now it is back to being what it was in the beginning. Yes, it has been a job at times, but my love and appreciation for skiing continues to grow.

Fro: The ski industry has jettisoned itself from a rather fringe sport into big business fueled by corporate takeover and real estate. It’s a far fling from the days of staying at the Heatherbed in Aspen Highlands or The Star Hotel in Truckee. However, the ski industry as a whole continues to move from independent ownership to a structure fueled by corporate takeover and real estate. Has there been anything lost in the transition of free enterprise? What are some of the good and maybe some of the bad directions taking place in today’s snowsport industry?
DD: Think of the principle that guides a community, and think of the principal who guides a corporation. Think of a privately owned cattle ranch with meadows that have supported cattle for a hundred years, and think of a CAFO.

Fro: Reading “Europe: Fourth Time Around” made me laugh and cry. Those were great days. Adversely, do you think skiing has lost its soul, its on-slope experience? KT-22 on a powder morning has one of the worst vibes full of grommets, poseurs and gapers jostling in liftline. What are people’s anxieties about these days? In general, what’s everybody so stressed about? We are living in mountain paradise in a wonderful community amongst groovetron folks. Why are people so upset? Are people just as tweaked in the mountains and need counseling as in the urban areas?
DD: Beats me what the people you’re talking about need, but it’s a shame they can’t get it. The business of skiing has lost its soul, but the experience of skiing and the skiers who tune into it have not. The basics never change in skiing or anything else.

Fro: That looked like a really cool camper that you hung out in while writing your essays at Camp 4. Whatever happened to that rig?
DD: I bought that from my friend Louis Bergeron (now a doctor in Elko) for two pairs of skis, drove it for a few years and sold it to a gentleman (I’ve forgotten his name) who was into restoring old vehicles. I like to think the old Chevy is still on the road at old car reunions, full of soul and good karma.

Fro: If there is one thing to take on the road what is it? Peanut Butter, Bible, Swiss Army knife, Six Mix-A-Lot CDs? And what is the one indispensable thing you take with you when you’re doing big walls. (Dave Nettle once told me a headlamp as example).
DD: On the road take good coffee; on a wall take a pair of prusiks.

Fro: Does it ever blow your mind about what a long strange trip it’s been? What is your favorite testimonial to Tahoe and what does Squaw Valley mean to you in the big canvas of things?
DD: Yes. Didn’t you read “Night Driving?” I grew up at Tahoe and grew up some more in Squaw, and, to pursue the big canvas metaphor, Tahoe and Squaw are the undercoating to everything.

Fro: Do you have a favorite anecdote from a moment through the years that puts your lifelong efforts into perspective; funny, humbling? Is there a moral to all this?
DD: If there is it was summed up in “Europe: Fourth Time Around” by Emile Allais when he laughed and laughed while sitting in the snow after a fall and said, “Oh, it’s good for us to fall down every now and then,” and he laughed some more.

Fro: Bonus Question: What’s your favorite line at Squaw Valley?
DD: The Nose, the West Face, the East Face, Chute 75 in powder were my favorites, but I haven’t skied Squaw in several years.

YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN AFTER PARADISE IS LOST

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“Most often we think of the natural world as an economic resource, or as a place of recreation after a wearisome period of work, or as something of passing interest for its beauty on an autumn day when the radiant colors of the oak and maple leaves give us a moment of joy. All these attitudes are quite legitimate, yet in them all there is what might be called a certain trivializing attitude. If we were truly moved by the beauty of the world about us, we would honor the earth in a profound way. We would understand immediately and turn away with a certain horror from all those activities that violate the integrity of the planet.
“That we have not done so reveals that a disturbance exists at a more basic level of consciousness and on a greater order of magnitude than we dare to admit to ourselves or even think about. This unprecedented pathology is not merely in those more immediate forms of economic activity that have done such damage; it is even more deeply imbedded in our cultural traditions, in our religious traditions, in our very language, in our entire value system.”
Thomas Berry

Just before his untimely death from tubercular meningitis American novelist Thomas Wolfe finished his last work, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” about a writer who has written a successful novel about his home town. When he returns to his town the writer finds its citizens full of hatred, resentment, rejection and scorn towards him for what he has revealed to the world and to themselves about themselves. In response, the writer becomes a wanderer in search of a home to replace the one to which he cannot return. The novel, a great one in my opinion, is required reading for the disaffected of America. The phrase “You can’t go home again,” has become part of the lexicon of cliché (or wisdom, depending), such as “You can’t go to the same party twice,” and “You can’t step in the same river twice,” by which we orient ourselves and understand a hurriedly changing world.
That you can’t go home again is a primordial tragedy, one not to be confused with foolish and futile though sometimes enjoyable efforts to reclaim the past. Whether this elemental disaster is part of the human condition or unique to the past hundred years is a useful query. So is whether the spirit of reclaiming the past is mournful or celebratory. Both are valuable questions for another time and place; but they are entirely different matters.
Such thoughts wandered more than usual through my disaffected brain after I took my first climbing trip to Yosemite Valley in several years in the spring of 2004. I first arrived in the Yosemite climbing scene in the spring of 1968, and spent a considerable amount of time there for the next six or seven years. I missed by a few years the height of the golden years of Yosemite climbing, but I certainly inhaled deeply of its mellow yellow years. I climbed hard and thoroughly enjoyed what was (and is) some of the best rock climbing on earth. I found a suitable niche and immersed myself in what was (and is) the free-form, eclectic, high-energy, social experiment revolving around that scene. It was a great time of life for many reasons, among them the irreplaceable good fortune of being able to live for long periods of time in the midst of the beauty of the Yosemite Valley, to climb each day with the finest of climbing partners and comrades, and to return at night to the simple and Spartan existence (some would say decadence) that characterized climbers’ lives in Camp 4. It was a paradise of sorts for disaffected Americans who had wandered or been driven into climbing, populated by few who ever made it into the mainstream. Even those who would later become wealthy and well known in American society have a tenuous hold in the mainstream.
If we were truly moved by the beauty of the world about us, we would honor the earth in a profound way. We would understand immediately and turn away with a certain horror from all those activities that violate the integrity of the planet.
If we are not truly moved by the unrivaled beauty of the Yosemite, then what possible means do we have to honor the earth? More, if we are not truly moved, what are we, truly?
That we (Homo sapiens) embrace rather than turn away in horror from those activities that violate the integrity of the earth is self-evident.
If we were truly moved we would understand immediately, but we aren’t and we don’t and our profound confusion, ignorance and stupidity are as clear in Yosemite as the air of California is not. The Yosemite I found that spring is a growing monument to what Berry terms a trivializing attitude mankind has towards the integrity of the planet. As a species, we suffer from a pathology not shared by any other creature on earth. It affects all the creatures and all the places of the earth, the formerly inspirational ones like Yosemite as well as the always corrupting ones like the freeways of Los Angeles, the stale waters of Lake Powell, the toxic brew of the Berkley Pit of Butte, Montana, the air of Mexico City and Beijing, the clear cut logging wounds of Oregon and Washington and British Columbia and Brazil and Costa Rica and elsewhere and the radiated grounds of Hanford, Washington, among others.
On a cloudless California mid-May late afternoon we drove into Yosemite Valley from Crane Flat, as we had done so often in other times. I had not climbed in Yosemite for some 15 years, and the last time was with Galen Rowell. On that occasion, we had been unable to secure a place to camp in the valley, and, along with Galen’s wife and partner, Barbara Cushman Rowell, we had stayed in Mariposa, commuting each day up to the valley to climb. In my enthusiasm to climb, I hadn’t given adequate thought to the significance of a Yosemite Valley with no room for another camp site. That had never been my experience. Each morning we drove up from Mariposa, climbed, and returned in the evening. The climbing was great and to ride in an automobile driven by Galen was a completely absorbing adventure that made it difficult to notice anything beyond the next curve in the road. Being a passenger of Galen’s usually felt like being on lead at the limit of your abilities with the last protection 25 feet below your feet, except you didn’t get to make the moves. Galen did. That is, Galen’s passengers didn’t tend to notice scenery, much less landscape and environmental subtleties. For whatever reasons, I didn’t really see Yosemite on that trip.
On this last trip, as my friend Jeannie and I drove down into the valley on the Crane Flat road, my excitement to be again in one of my favorite places was tempered with nostalgic memories of Galen and Barbara, who had been killed two years ago, and colored with less melancholy reminiscences of people, climbs and events of another time. The awareness that you can’t go home again makes that home more poignant and, perhaps, meaningful in the present moment. Both Jeannie and I had climbed in Yosemite but never together, and we were pleased enough to arrive in “the valley” that we sloughed off our residual irritation and frustration with the congestion, traffic, exhaust fumes, haze and inattentive driving practices of the tourists encountered along Highway 49 as it passes through the chic and celebrated towns that serve as monuments and trendy consumer outlets to California’s gold mining history—Coloma, Placerville, El Dorado, Sutter Creek, Mokulumne Hill, Angels Camp and Chinese Camp. Naturally, our annoyance with California crowds was in no way alleviated by the awareness that we were as complicit as any, a part of the crowd, jockeying for position in pursuit of our own missions of overriding importance, emitting our share of carbon dioxide and angst to the stew of global warming air with each mile we drove. Irony should be a required subject in the public education of every citizen.
On both sides of the road the signs of the devastating fires of a few years ago were evident, as were the regenerative powers of nature. The blackened husks of fir and pine and cedar, standing and fallen, were a stark contrast to the carpet of green rising like Lazarus from the ashes of yesterday’s infernos. Forest fires are as natural and necessary as the turning of the seasons, and that we choose to fight rather than adapt to them is one of many symptoms of the pathology to which Berry refers. The green that springs from fire’s ash is the greenest of them all.
Yosemite classic climbing areas appeared: Reed’s Pinnacle above the road, the Cookie somewhere below, the Rostrum across the lower canyon, and then after Highway 120 meets the valley floor, the main Yosemite rock features come into view, the Cathedral Rocks, Sentinel, El Capitan, Half Dome. There is no sight quite like it in the world I know. A rock climber could spend several lives there without exploring it all, and some climbers have done and are doing just that. More than 130 years ago John Muir described Yosemite: “The most extravagant description I might give of this view to any one who has not seen similar landscapes with his own eyes would not so much as hint its grandeur and the spiritual glow that covered it………..The level bottom seemed to be dressed like a garden—sunny meadows here and there, and groves of pine and oak; the river of Mercy sweeping in majesty through the midst of them and flashing back the sunbeams. The great Tissiack, or Half-Dome, rising at the upper end of the valley to a height of nearly a mile, is nobly proportioned and life-like, the most impressive of all the rocks, holding the eye in devout admiration, calling it back again and again from falls and meadows, or even the mountains beyond—marvelous cliffs, marvelous in sheer dizzy depth and sculpture, types of endurance. Thousands of years have they stood in the sky exposed to rain, snow, frost, earthquake and avalanche, yet they still wear the bloom of youth.”
“….the spiritual glow that covered it.”
“….the bloom of youth.”
How things change. Signs of Yosemite’s transformation during the past 30 years are inescapable and clear. Tens of thousands of years of rain, snow, frost, earthquake and avalanche, to say nothing of hundreds of years of the Ahwahnee Indians burning the valley floor from time to time to regenerate it, changed Yosemite Valley far less than a hundred and fifty years of the trivializing attitude of modern man. John Muir would have a hard time recognizing Yosemite today. Only a National Park Service booster or a flack for Yosemite concessionaires would be crass and inexact enough to describe Yosemite as covered in a spiritual glow or exhibiting the bloom of youth. Muir was neither mindless booster nor servile flack, but the Yosemite experience which touched Muir so deeply and which he described so movingly and extravagantly is no longer available to modern man. And the sad if salient reality is that Muir, like the rest of us, inadvertently (at least for most of us) contributed to Yosemite’s demise, and we continue to do so.
Yosemite is a microcosm/metaphor for life on earth.
The first and most obvious thing one notices on the valley floor of Yosemite after a several year absence, the river of Mercy continuing to run through its core, is the traffic. Automobiles controlled by several wildly different pilot systems—auto, agro, bozo, spaceo, mano-a-mano, retro, macho, dumbo and weirdo—clog the one road, stopping unexpectedly whenever a distraction short circuits the pilot system. It is California, after all, where automobiles rule, and ours contributes its fair share to the congestion and smog of the golden state, diluting clarity of vision, filling lungs with toxins. This black carbon smog is not limited to California, of course, nor is its underlying cause of overpopulation of the planet; but, according to Veerabhadran Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, a brown cloud of dust, pollution and chemicals is absorbing solar radiation and scattering sunlight before it reaches earth. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Sierra Nevada of California, including Yosemite, which produces its own share of pollution but is also downwind from the air pollution capital of California, Los Angeles. The clarity of Yosemite’s once pristine air and vistas are now gone, a fact and metaphor of modern life I find particularly disturbing. A dirty haze covers Yosemite, some of it caused not by automobiles but by controlled burns still smoldering and pumping smoke into the already corrupted air. The photos of Ansel Adams are images from another world. Even Ansel couldn’t take those wonderful photographs now. A sign at Fern Springs warns against drinking the water. We used to fill all our water bottles at Fern Springs, considering it the best drinking water in the valley. So far as I know, no one in our circles ever got sick from Fern Springs water, but the sign is there for a reason and I believe it.
Our friend Helen has a camp site for us, but she has not yet checked in via cell phone and we do not know where to go and have some spare time. We drive around the valley in bumper to bumper traffic to Camp 4. I am curious about my old haunt. A few years ago Camp 4 was slated to be shut down and turned into housing. The climbing community, led by Tom Frost and Dick Duane, reacted and fought and lobbied and sued and managed to give Camp 4 Federal Historical status. As a result, it is still a walk in camp for Yosemite climbers, and all climbers are pleased. The parking area is packed, but we find a place and take a sentimental lap around Camp 4. Most of the citizens of Camp 4 are 30 to 40 years my junior and easily recognizable as climber dirt bags for a day or a season or three seasons or a lifetime, depending. Neither of us knows any of them. One gray haired fellow with the look of many hard moves and uncomfortable bivouacs is a couple decades older than anyone around him. He looks vaguely familiar but I cannot place him. We exchange nods and smiles of recognition and the kinship of age but do not speak. We watch a young lad practicing with astonishing skill on a slack line hung between two trees. Groups of climbers are telling climbing stories, complete with acting out the moves of the crux. Others are bouldering. A couple of parties are already in progress. A couple is setting up their tent. There are lots of tents. There are more men than women, and the boys are hanging around every camp where the girls are. A forlorn looking climber with still taped hands is sitting in a chair beside his pack and rope, drinking a beer, staring at without seeing a point in the distance. Even after 30 years, many aspects of Camp 4 are familiar, easily recognizable, almost like going home.
Barely is enough, but almost doesn’t count.
Other aspects, much like the black carbon smog substituting for air in California, are overridingly unrecognizable. The ground of Camp 4 has been trodden into a lifeless hardpan that is the antithesis of spiritual glow or the bloom of youth. It obviously would be and has been and will be again a mud bog in a hard rain. Lots of tents, lots of people, not much room between them. I estimated that 10 times more climbers inhabited Camp 4 than in the ‘60s and ‘70s. It is an overcrowded if logical extension of the rest of Yosemite, but unless we connect with Helen it is the only available camping in the valley. I told Jeannie that even if we have to drive to Wawona or Mariposa each night, I do not want to stay in Camp 4. She agrees. Fortunately, when we get back to the car there is a message from Helen with directions to a camp site among the Winnebagos, generators and the rollout Astroturf patios under fold up awnings. And, in the interest of full disclosure, we were happy to have it. We set up camp, cooked dinner, ate, talked into the night and slept in our tents in comfort. A bear wandered through camp in the night looking for the one camper there will always be who neglects to put food in the steel bear proof boxes abundantly scattered throughout the valley. Bear found no such neglect in our neighborhood that night, but he left a large pile of bear shit next to one of the tents just to say hello.
The next morning, after coffee and muffins in the chill haze, we went to the base of El Capitan for the day’s projects. There were scant places to park along the road near El Cap, but we found one and had soon made the short hike up to the rock. Just as we arrived at the base we encountered a climbing acquaintance of Helen’s helping his partner down the path. His partner had (obviously) badly broken his ankle in a fall several hundred feet up the Salathe Wall, and they had spent the past few hours getting down. We dropped our packs and spent the next 45 minutes helping carry the wounded rock warrior to their car. We were tired and our backs were sore by the time we finally got back to the rock and racked up and ready to climb. We began with the classic La Cosita, right, which was, as always, hard, strenuous, beautiful and very, very polished from thousands of ascents. The fine granite of Yosemite’s most trafficked free climbs is worn as smooth by hands and feet and the placement of gear as glaciers and rivers have polished rock throughout the Sierra Nevada. But the slippery cracks of Yosemite climbing were polished in far less time than it took the glaciers and rivers.
At the end of the day I was belaying Helen as she struggled with the off width moves at the top of Sacherer Cracker. The sun was behind El Cap and it was cold. Jeannie suddenly said, “Dick, don’t look now, but there’s a bear about ten feet behind you.” Sure enough, there he was, a large, brown coated somehow unhealthy and goofy looking bear scoping out our packs for food content. Since I was occupied and Helen did not want my attention distracted, even by bears, I told Jeannie to throw rocks at him but not to hit him. She did and bear scampered away a few yards. She threw some more stones and bear vanished only to appear a few minutes later, waiting to make his move. Jeannie threw rocks and shouted, “Go away, bear.” I belayed and shivered. Helen, among the coolest, quietest climbers on a hard lead I’ve ever known, silently struggled and sweated. Bear was patient, persistent and wary, but he kept appearing every few minutes until, shortly before we left, he vanished as quietly as he had appeared. Tommy Caldwell and partner walked by, coming down from fixing some pitches on the Dihedral. I recognized Caldwell from magazine photos and we talked about the bear and the problem of bears at the base of El Cap. They left. I thought of his famous Asian mis-adventure and of the ultimate climber’s nightmare of being shot at while on a wall, a prospect which puts a certain perspective on the ‘problem’ of bears, even grizzly bears. Give me a grizzly with his natural disposition and hunger and turf over the lunacy of a fundamentalist (not all of them Islamic) with (or even without) a weapon, any day.
Grizzly bears were once plentiful in California, and the grizzly (Ursus arctos horribilis) is on the state flag. The Golden Bears of California are named for the grizzly. However, as a difficult neighbor for the anthropocentric and those unable or unwilling or too ignorant to honor the earth in a profound way (all of mankind, it would seem), the grizzly was exterminated from California by 1922. The last grizzly known to have been killed in Yosemite was in 1895. The more amenable to human encroachment upon the land black bear (Ursus americanus) has remained. For many years black bear/human encounters and conflicts, though not unknown, were manageable, in some part because the Yosemite garbage dump provided a substitute for the reduced food supply in the bears’ shrinking natural habitat. Then in the late 1960s the dump was shut down and Yosemite’s garbage was trucked out of the valley. The bears of Yosemite lost the food source to which they had become habituated. Naturally, as they had when their first and natural source of food was cut off, they went to the next best option: the plethora of food items brought into Yosemite by hikers, climbers, back packers, campers and drive through gawkers, easily gathered in many forms and wrappings on camp tables and in tents, backpacks, cars, vans, ice coolers, garbage cans, haul bags, and, in a few rare and particularly pathologically unconscious instances, the hands of tourists mistaking Ursus americanus for Ursus Theodorus. The intelligence and ingenuity exhibited by Yosemite bears in extracting sustenance from the aforementioned food containers are amazing and the stuff of legends; and, naturally, bear/human conflicts and confrontations became daily and sometimes destructive occurrences. As always, in the long run, bear lost.
By the early 1970s the Park Service reported it was responding to “rogue” (those suspected of being repeat food thief offenders) bears by trapping, drugging and “relocating” This seemed both humane and practical. Then, in the early 1970s, climber Chris Vandiver was searching out new climbing areas below the Crane Flat road when he stumbled onto the graveyard of rogue bears. He found the rotting carcasses of dozens of bears the Park Service had killed before furtively dumping their bodies off a cliff from the Crane Flat Road. Vandiver told Galen Rowell about it and Galen photographed and wrote it up, embarrassing the Park Service but forcing them to seek other solutions to the “bear problem.” While the Park Service’s assertion that it was “relocating” the bears was, from one pint of view, correct, the impression it fostered was misleading, dishonest and disgusting, while at the same time giving its flack men the illusion of deniability.
“We would understand immediately and turn away with a certain horror from all those activities that violate the integrity of the planet”.
To say nothing of the integrity of the people who relocated the bears as well as the mouthpieces who covered for them. Having the ability to find deniability in the undeniable bamboozling of the citizenry, to say nothing of hiding the graveyards of bears and other creatures, including honorable soldiers in caskets, seems to be a requisite for long-term government employment.
To their credit, the Park Service has since installed hundreds of steel bear proof storage containers and garbage deposits all over Yosemite Valley, causing bears to work harder for their supper but giving both bears and people a better chance to live together. So far as we can tell, the Park Service is no longer relocating large numbers of bears, rogue or otherwise, at least not in Yosemite. But a few years ago Yosemite big wall climbers began stashing supplies overnight at the base of multi-day climbs to save time on the first day of climbing. It didn’t take bear long to sniff out the new food location and to begin foraging along the base of Yosemite’s walls for the unwatched backpack or haul bag. Though climbers and campers have for the most part learned, pickings are relatively if randomly good, as evidenced by the bears that walk through camp in the night and scavenge along the base of the walls favored by climbers. During our time there, Jeannie and Helen did the south face of Washington’s column. They took a haul bag with climbing and sleeping gear but devoid of food up the fourth class ledges to the base of the climb, returning the next afternoon to spend the night before starting the climb early the following morning. They found a bear had scrambled up the fourth class ledges, ripped open their haul bag and devoured a tube of sun block cream, scattering their gear and ripping a few things in the process. They also found dozens of abandoned plastic water bottles and abundant garbage left by climbers. When they returned to Dinner Ledge after their climb, they cleaned up as many discarded plastic containers as they could carry. What they could not bring with them is the unyielding stench of urine that pervades Dinner Ledge and other ledges pissed upon by generations of Yosemite climbers. While most (but certainly not all) of my climbing friends have always practiced the ethic of hauling out our garbage and even the garbage of others when possible, more than 30 years ago I too pissed upon Dinner Ledge and other ledges of Yosemite. Everybody did. Everybody still does. What else is a climber to do? Many climbers could do a better job of picking up after themselves than they do, but the sheer numbers of climbers have turned Yosemite into what one waggish friend described (accurately, in my mind) as “the world’s largest urban outdoor climbing gym.” It is a fact that man is turning more and more of the planet into an urban landscape, and a good argument can be made that the values of urbanity itself violates the integrity of the planet.
One day I hiked up to Half Dome via Vernal and Nevada Falls and Little Yosemite Valley, a six and a half hour round trip workout and somewhat of a sentimental journey for me. It was an astonishing experience as hundreds of people clogged the trail as far as Vernal Fall, dozens as far as Nevada Fall. The last time I’d hiked that trail I’d encountered perhaps twenty people all day. Not until Little Yosemite was the hike anything other than a passage through an urban landscape. The Mist Trail below the falls was reminiscent of walking up one of San Francisco’s hills on a drizzly day, except the trail was more crowded than the streets of that fair city. Indeed, the entire trail is paved to the falls, as it must be to handle such traffic. There were several groups of teen-age students accompanied by teachers. One hugely overweight young man was struggling mightily if unhappily up the stone steps. His friends were cheering him on to persevere and it was not clear that he would be able to do so. The support of the fat boy’s friends was commendable and encouraging, but it occurred to me that one manifestation of the pathology to which Thomas Berry refers is the overabundance of young people in our society for whom walking uphill for a couple of miles on a fine spring California day is agony instead of pleasure, a major accomplishment instead of a ritual of healthy living. It is a safe bet that that young man in the bloom of youth did not notice a like bloom on the landscape around him.
I was happy to reach Little Yosemite simply because it was the first remotely non-urban experience I’d had since driving into Yosemite Valley more than a week earlier. The previous sentence was written in full awareness that the automobile itself is an integral part of modern man’s urban value system. Like everyone reading this, I am a modern man and part of the problem, and if there is a solution short of the not out of the question extinction of mankind part of the solution. There were only a few hikers in Little Yosemite, but I was surprised to see a Park Service log cabin that had appeared since I had last been there. I wandered along at my own pace and took in the great south face of Half Dome and reminisced about my friends Galen Rowell and Warren Harding, both now dead, and of their fine first ascent of the south face and of their epic rescue off that face on their first storm bound attempt. The air was hazy, but it was wonderful to feel something of the spiritual glow that infused John Muir’s Yosemite and which I missed with pangs of homesickness. I stopped to eat lunch on a boulder before heading up the trail to the east shoulder below the cable to the summit. I passed only one other hiker coming down, but when I got beneath the cable I was treated to a surprising sight: some 15 or 20 people were strung out along the cable, both ascending and descending. The cable was not yet up and was lying against the rock, so hikers were forced to bend over to hold on as they went up, or, with more difficulty, came down. As is the case in all endeavors, some were having an easier time than others. One gentleman seemed to have panicked half way up the cable and was spread out on the rock with a two hand death grip on the cable and both feet off the rock. People both ascending and descending were stopped, trying to help the hapless hiker. He didn’t move for some 10 minutes before being coaxed/aided to retreat back down the cable. I watched the Half Dome cable summit scene for awhile before deciding that it was too crowded for my mood that day. I had been there before and perhaps would again, but I turned around and went back down to the valley.
We climbed the superb rock of Yosemite a few more days. Three of our more hard core friends from Jackson Hole drove straight through from Wyoming, slept for seven hours, and in the next three days climbed three different routes on El Capitan and then drove non-stop back to Jackson. We were impressed. On our last day we climbed the moderate, classic Nutcracker Suite, a route I’d done many times. We had a hard time finding a place to park because a television commercial was being filmed and vans, equipment trucks, cameramen, actors, actresses, grips, directors and the entire scene that sells consumerism to America had taken over the area. We unloaded our climbing gear and walked through a very urban atmosphere to Manure Pile Buttress. We had a fine time on Nutcracker. The polishing of the route was noticeable, not surprising as we were one of five parties on the route at the same time, two Italians in front of us, two Germans behind, all good fellows and fine conversationalists on the belays, which were, to say the least, crowded.
After the climb we left Yosemite. It was late afternoon. During the week we were in Yosemite Tioga Pass was opened and we took that route east. As I guided my gas guzzling van up the Crane Flat road towards Tioga I reflected on Yosemite Valley today. The National Park Service in Yosemite and elsewhere has a mandate to “provide for the enjoyment of the visitor” and, at the same time, “leave the park unimpaired for future generations.” Enjoyment is a personal, subjective matter, and one man’s enjoyment is another man’s agony. I question whether the Park Service can or even should be asked to provide for the enjoyment of visitors, especially if, as is the case, in the process the park becomes impaired. And there is no question that Yosemite Valley, like the other National Parks, is impaired. The two metaphors that stick in my mind about Yosemite today are the television commercial crew and equipment and the opaque air that even Ansel Adams could not have seen through to clarity. And, of course, the crowds, which are not a metaphor but, rather, the state of planet earth and both cause and effect of the disturbance at a basic level of consciousness to which Berry refers. It is not the Park Service’s fault that Yosemite has become a polluted, crowded, urban traffic jam, or that snowmobiles inundate Yellowstone, or that the air in the Smoky Mountains is among the worst in America. It is the fault of man’s collective trivializing attitude toward the earth. Climbers are as much to blame for Yosemite’s degradation as the Winnebago crowd, the tour bus circuit, the Park Service itself, the concessionaires, the oil/automobile industries and the spineless members of the U.S. Congress for whom the environment and National Parks are only another business opportunity for their campaign contributors. I do not know what it will take to heal Yosemite, but each of us, climber and non-climber alike can do something—-learn to leave no trace, carry out trash and feces, don’t join the crowd, turn away in horror from that which violates integrity, monitor the trivializing attitude, get involved. Write a letter. Phone a Congressman. Get pissed. Such small intentions may not take care of the problem, which is humungous, but they will benefit the practitioner, who is sacred. Personally, I favor more drastic measures. Yosemite will not be healed until all the roads into the valley are closed, all vehicles banned, all houses and lodges and restaurants and permanent tents removed. Let people who want to see the Yosemite walk into the valley, climbers included. To those who level the charge of elitism to such ideas, I reply that the idea that the wonders of the world are worth some effort to see and to keep unimpaired, and the notion that they are available to everyone with the skill and strength to sit in a seat, step on a gas pedal, steer an automobile and pay for a tank of gas is one that trivializes the planet and makes of it an economic resource and place of recreation, empty of spiritual glow.
Let them walk.
Let us all walk.
Let Yosemite have a rest. Give the earth a rest. But even banning automobiles in Yosemite is a stop-gap measure, one that should be put in place. It is man’s trivializing attitude toward the very nature which sustains him that needs changing. Banning cars in Yosemite may give him some time to make those changes and learn to turn away with a certain horror from all those activities that violate the integrity of the planet.
Such thoughts bubbled away in my brain even as I guided the van along the Tioga road. I talked to Jeannie about the week in Yosemite and of what we had experienced and about the crowds. We had had some fine climbing, a good time in one of our favorite spots which we were leaving with both satisfying and unsettling memories and impressions. We talked about how the earth and all its creatures are suffering from man’s blind cleverness. We enjoyed the talk and the drive and each other’s company and the memories we shared.
A few miles before reaching Tuolumne Meadows a medium size very black bear burst out of the trees on the right and ran across the road in front of us. This bear was beautiful and healthy and fast and on a mission to somewhere. It was a thrilling sight, but around his neck was a bright blue radio collar, and no bear can ever go home again with a collar around its neck.

The Unsinkable Titanic

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Titanic. Everyone has heard of the British luxury liner of that name which sank in 13,000 feet of water about 400 miles south of Newfoundland on the night of April 14-15, 1912. The Titanic was on its way to New York City from Southampton, England when it struck an iceberg and, in less than three hours, sank.
Because of the most modern and clever technology and industry with which it was built, the Titanic was considered unsinkable. It was the largest, most luxurious ship afloat and designed so that it could never sink. Everyone said so.
After April 15, 1912 everyone quit saying so but by then it was too late. About 1500 people sank with the ship or died in the water. The water was cold. And deep. The rich and famous and wise and good died as easily and ignominiously as the poor and unknown and foolish and venal. The courageous and the cowardly went down side by side. About 700 people survived with memories of a night they would never forget.
Perhaps there were none more foolish than those in command of the Titanic who knew icebergs lay in the waters ahead, but who chose not to alter course to avoid them. After all, everyone said the ship was unsinkable and a mere, if natural, chunk of ice was not considered significant enough to change the path of the latest marvel of the technological/industrial age. The more than 2200 passengers and crew ate, slept, drank champagne, danced, loved, argued and both celebrated and anguished over the small and large details of their lives, all the time encapsulated in a technological bubble called Titanic. Outside that thin sac of steel, however, lay the biologic world in which all things are connected and where nothing is unsinkable.
It has been many years since I first heard of the unsinkable ship Titanic used as a parable for the biologic life of the good ship Earth. It came from a Zen Buddhist teacher during a talk about human relationship with the rest of the natural world and how far out of balance this relationship has become because of man’s dependence on technology. He had seen the film “Titanic” on a flight to Poland, a country with some of the worst industrial pollution on earth. He said the film reminded him of modern man’s blind, addictive reliance on his own technology that is steering earth to the brink of biologic collapse.
The technologies of humankind have superseded and are destroying the technologies of Earth’s biological communities at an alarming rate. These communities give and maintain all life on earth, including that of man’s own technologies.
Such unbounded confidence in man’s technology combined with the human lack of capacity for connection with (and respect for) the natural world has been called “autistic” by Thomas Berry, the American writer, historian, teacher and Catholic monk. Berry says, “My own description of what has happened is that my generation has been autistic. My generation has been so locked into itself that it was totally without any capacity for rapport with the natural world. My generation could not get outside itself and the outer world could not get in. There was a total barrier between the human and non-human. This is what needs to be explained. This autism did not begin with modern centuries.”
Indeed, it did not. The evolution of mankind’s moral sense has developed over thousands of years and it has arrived at a curious and dangerous place. Berry says, “We have a moral sense of suicide, homicide and genocide, but no moral sense of biocide or geocide, the killing of the life systems and even the killing of the earth.”
Berry, so far as I know, was the first major thinker to use the image of the Titanic to describe life on earth today. In a talk entitled “Ethics and Ecology,” given at Harvard University in April 1996 Berry said, “What happened to that ‘unsinkable’ ship is a kind of parable for us since only in the most dire situation do we have the psychic energy needed to examine our way of acting on the scale that is now required. The daily concerns of the ship and its passengers needed to be set aside for a more urgent concern for the well being of the ship itself. Microphase concerns needed to give way to a macrophase issue. So now there was a need to recognize that the planet Earth is threatened in its survival by our industrial economy. Already the well-being and basic functioning of the planet in its air, its water, its soil and its basic life systems have been so disrupted that a biologist as extensively acquainted with the life functioning of the planet as Peter Raven of the Missouri Botanical Gardens has addressed scientific groups under the title “We Are Killing the Earth.”
Pursuing the Titanic theme, Berry referred to a paper signed by over a thousand of the world’s most illustrious scientists entitled “A Warning to Humanity. The introduction states: ‘Human beings and the Natural World are set on a collision course. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and Animal Kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know.’”
The captains of our industrial/technological civilization would be wise to change course. There are icebergs ahead.

 

Dharma Exchange

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An old friend who has survived the normal vicissitudes of life as well as cancer and its chemical and radiation opponents recently sent me the following:

On Being Almost Sixty-eight

Maybe it’s because you’d gotten in and out of bed more times during a single night than anyone since Wilt Chamberlain. Unlike Wilt, you did it to pee. It’s as if you’re hung over, only you’re not, haven’t been in forever. You’d like to fall back asleep. You would if you could.
Out the window you see two deer drink from the creek in the yard. Snow gleams on the peak rising from the far bank. Triple blue sky above. Your first cup of coffee is strong the way you like it. Real cream, three spoons of sugar, stuff you avoided when you thought you’d live forever and would want to.
Your favorite mug. A present from your son a hundred years ago. “Dear Dad, You are the gratest.” You sit alone at the kitchen table. On the stove is the teakettle you got for your wedding and got to keep in your divorce. You drink your coffee listening to music because you can’t read the papers anymore or watch the news. The pious certainties of politicians. The young, pretty actress reciting insincerities she memorized from her publicist.
Once she might have aroused an almost unbearable longing in you. Now she’s like a new baseball glove or a hundred million. What would you do with her?
On the wall is a picture of the dog dead now how many years? Nights you still feel for him at the foot of your bed. There’s the photo of the little guy with snow in his goggles and snow in his hair and his ski hat pulled funny and his cheeks red as‑‑‑red as the blood you just now noticed dripping from the back of your hand. You try to think how you might have cut yourself. A butter knife could have done it.
The pills, all those pills. A round pink one, two blues, a big white lozenge, a capsule, ibuprophen for your back, glucosamine for your joints, multi-vitamin, saw palmetto, gingko biloba, ginseng. This one with food, that one without, one in the morning, one before bed, may cause nausea, dizziness, headache. Don’t operate heavy equipment.
These are the pills that mother gives you. None will make you taller. None will make you small. You need others for that.
The coffee is so good you brew yourself a second. You know it won’t taste like that first and that your jaw won’t unclench until noon. You used to like that feeling, driving to work, jacked on caffeine. Ready for anything, ready for freddy. Bring it on! Back then your word for it was coffeedence.
A song catches your attention. West African percussion, fado melody. It touches you like music can. Something in her voice. She’s lived, you can tell she’s lived. She sings what she knows. What they call saudade. Honeyed recollection of the love you had, the love you lost, the love you wished you had and never did. Of times past, old friends, people and places you’ll never see again.
You make your bed, plump the pillows. Your wife taught you that. Your mother tried. Satisfaction in small acts completed as if they mattered.
In the bathroom where once you preened, you now avoid the mirror. You haven’t owned a comb in decades. Every shiny surface‑‑‑store windows, sunglasses, the pupil of another’s eye‑‑‑once whispered to you: Look! Your face is no longer your face. It is not the face you remember nor want to.
Tough being you.
You shave by feel, not caring about the places you probably missed, under your nose, the cleft of your chin. In the shower you still wash with Dr. Bronner’s. The pepperminty smell is the smell of your hippie days. Your hand still drips watery blood.
Your skin, paper thin, stained like old plaster, nearly translucent. All those years you spent in the sun. Hawaiian Tropic, Bain de Soleil. The lotion smelled like summer to you, the beach, like good times. Now you have sun block, the odorless kind, SPF 2000. You don’t go out without a hat.
You had abs before there were such things. Eight biscuits to a tin. You could have hidden a paperclip in the cuts of your thighs. You look at your body now. What’s happened? Dad was a boxer, a lifeguard, a diver from bridges, chiseled, a god. You watched it happen to him. Stomach distending, butt disappearing. How did you not see this coming?
You don’t even know what’s in style anymore. What’s comfortable is what you wear. T-shirt. Khakis. Running shoes. Faded ball cap. Your uniform. You remember shopping up on Forbes Street, taking the streetcar downtown. The big department stores. Tassle loafers. Monogrammed shirts. Back when your father bought your clothes. When your mother washed and ironed them.
Walking down the stairs your left knee reminds you of that fall afternoon fifty years ago. Moore Park, your father in the stands. Pryor, the great South Hills quarterback, number 9 in blue. You weren’t worthy of his notice. You were nothing to him, a weed in his path. He left you tweaked and crumpled in the dirt. You were seventeen years old. When courage was all that you aspired to.
The coffee shop. The cute barista who takes your order never lifts her eyes. You are invisible to her, a talking dollar tip. You talk baseball with the regulars. You talk colonoscopies, PET scans, CAT scans, knee replacements, hip replacements, procedures, operations, ones you had, ones you need. Had you wanted to know so much about aches, ailments, syndromes, chronic conditions, ACL’s, MCL’s, all manner of malady, you’d have gone to medical school.
The gym. The brown lunch bag your mother used to pack for you weighed more than these pink dumbbells in your hands.
On winter mornings, it’s the mountain. The sun is bright, the air frigid, the snow unwrinkled, rolled flat as a fitted sheet. Kids bomb down the hill. You can’t imagine. You only hope you don’t get hurt. At least you’re still up there. The air, the view, the sky. At least you’re still upright. You think of your old buddies who would like to be. After a couple of runs you call it good. You only need a taste.
Afternoons in the library. Authors you never read in your youth and wouldn’t have understood if you had. A nap by a sunny window, the open book on your chest.
A friend has had a stroke. You bring him magazines, spend an hour with him in his hospital room. Years ago you worked together on a framing crew. Back then he could stack a roof with 4×8 plywood sheets, 5/8ths inches thick. Heavy mothers. Awkward, too. Fifty sheets, fifty trips up the ladder. These days they use a hoist.
“You’ll be good as new,” you say to him. “Give it a month or two.” He needs a nurse to help him out of bed. He needs a nurse to help him shit.
You park your car at the trailhead, start out the path. Ten minutes out you double back, think that maybe you hadn’t locked your car.
The great stands of fir, their needles carpet the ground. Across the valley elk graze high on the sage covered hill. Twenty of them, thirty, heads down, rumps to the wind. You take it easy, jog within your breath. A mile or two is all. No more medals to be won or lost. There’s still the pain. There is no gain.
You’d been hypnotized by the myth of self-improvement. Constant striving. Always getting “better.” Never good enough. The ever present discontent. Now you see. It was there all along, hidden in plain sight. The striving is the discontent.
Here, in your sixty-seventh year, under the high, white clouds, among the fragrant trees, on this mild, sunny Idaho afternoon, you know that this as good as it will ever get. There is no hope. No hopelessness, either. Things are as they were meant to be.
What great selfless deed has earned you this?
Mexican food with an old old friend. Cold Pacificos. Salsa and chips. Salad for her. The usual for you. Burrito, black beans and rice, hold the sour cream, please, easy on the Poblanos.
Decades ago you were lovers. She was a different person then. So were you. She shows you pictures of her grandsons. You assure her that she’s not boring you. You’ve learned something over the years. One day, maybe you’ll have pictures of your own.
It’s your turn to pay the check. You walk her to her car. You hug, affectionate, deeply felt, prelude to nothing. A brief kiss. You remember when the taste of lipstick was an invitation. She goes her way, you go yours.
At home you flip through the channels. Fox News, Real Housewives. Conspiracies, cosmetic surgery, blowjobs for jewelry. You see the absurdity. People will do whatever they do. You can’t control them. Why annoy yourself? But you can’t help it. You do.
You undress, fold your clothes. You’ll wear the same outfit tomorrow, and the day after, and maybe the day after that. You pull down the comforter. Flannel sheets. Feather pillows. The mattress cost more than your first two cars combined: the white ‘56 Volvo, two hundred and fifty bucks, surf racks included; Five hundred for the red MG TD. You loved that car. You love the mattress more.
Not yet nine o’clock. You open a novel. Your reading glasses are not on your nightstand, nor in the drawer, though you are sure you left them there. You’re screwed and McGoo’d without them. You have twenty pairs stashed around. In the desk, two in the car, in the silverware drawer, your shaving kit, your backpack, your gym bag, your toolbox.
You climb out of bed, grab a pair, climb back in, locate the place where you’d left off. Hadn’t you already read this page? Not long until your eyes get heavy. Takes you months to finish a book.
Daylight leaking from the sky. The creep of night. You turn off the lamp. The welcome of the sheets. No thoughts of tomorrow, of emails, managers, or where you have to be at noon. There’s nowhere you have to be at noon. There’s only tranquil blackness, the trickle of the creek, the lonely bark of a dog down the road. Peace descends like anesthesia.
If someone had asked what you thought dying was like, if you had to guess, you’d say that you imagine it might be something like this.
And if you were right, if it is as you imagine, then what is there to fear?


I replied:
Nice. Even if you were wrong, what is there to fear? There is no fear to hold on to, no fear to let go of, just like the past and the future. Right now, at 75, I need to make dinner.

The World Clock

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“Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness are, by their own nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral, and subject to chance.”
Arthur Schopenhauer

Everyone who spends much time on the internet has favorite sites. One of mine is called World Clock, one aspect of a larger web site presented by Peter Russell who has been and is perhaps best described as “Eco-Philosopher Extraordinaire.” He is also a businessman/self-help guru who, through his web site, will sell you books, tapes, DVDs, meditation instruction and speaking engagements to help you find happiness as described by Arthur Schopenhauer. As such, Peter Russell is not for everyone.
But the World Clock is, and I check it out about once a month just to monitor some of the changes in our highly uncertain, precarious world.
World clock presents approximate data continuously updated by the second, day, week, month and year about a wide range of the earth’s dynamics, including its human population, species extinction, shrinking forests, expanding desertification, CO2 emissions and military expenditures. The clock gives concrete numbers to many of those highly uncertain, precarious and ephemeral and subject to chance sources that, whether or not we pay attention to them, affect our individual happiness and the collective lives of all creatures that live on earth. Like everything in this world, including each and every person reading this, the data and the dynamics they represent are inextricably connected.
At this writing, according to the clock, there are about 7 billion 116 million humans on planet earth with 170,000 more arriving each day. Almost 70,000 acres of forest are leveled each day and another 32,000 acres become desert. Each day, day after day after day. You can watch in real, present time the average temperature of the planet, and that figure never fluctuates, it only raises a miniscule amount every second. Hardly enough to notice (and all too many people don’t) until one realizes there are 315,576,000 seconds in ten years, and then those miniscule amounts noticeably add up.
One disturbing if interesting and surprising (at least to me) statistic from the clock is that each year more than 110,000 people commit suicide, more than the numbers of loss of life to war and all the other less organized forms of violence combined, at least for this year. During our nation’s search for phantom weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, for instance, loss of life to war numbers were considerably higher. There are more than 4.5 million new automobiles produced each year and more than 150,000 people are killed in traffic accidents. There are almost 14 million bicycles built each year. The clock doesn’t report how many people are killed and injured riding those bicycles, but it can be surmised that a significant percentage of bike riders are sufficient unto themselves and whose happiness belongs to them. At least compared to drivers of the automobile, especially, say, those in a southern California freeway gridlock where happiness is not the prevailing state of mind.
One of the most fascinating, unhappy items on the clock is “Military Expenditure.” The numbers in each time frame from day to year change so fast the human eye cannot keep up. These expenditures are not broken down by country, but every responsible U.S. citizen knows that the U.S. spends more on military than the next ten nations—China, Russia, UK, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Italy and Brazil‑‑‑combined. Combined!! The U.S. accounts for more than 40 percent of the world’s military expenditures, paid for by nearly 50 percent of the U.S. budget. When you see the military expenditure numbers on the world clock moving faster than the eye can follow, it is useful to consider that 40 percent of those whirling numbers represent your tax dollars at work (or war or waste, depending on perspective). At this writing, the whirling military numbers were reporting just under 5 trillion (TRILLION!!!) dollars a week. This indicates that every week of every year more than 2 trillion dollars of your taxes are spent supporting what the U.S. military is doing in the world. Two trillion dollars a week.
The thought arises from contemplating such data that even, say, half a trillion dollars every week could be put to better use in America than it has been in, for specific instance, Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan. We could start with a health care system, the infrastructure of road and water systems or mass rapid transit systems. Personally, I would favor using that money for education. The U.S., which spends more on the military than any nation in history, is today ranked 54th among nations in education expenditures. And it shows. The U.S. is ranked 17th among world nations in education. Idaho, where I live, is ranked 47th in education among states in the 17th ranked Unites States. The implications are obvious. The possibilities are as vast as the data on the World Clock.
Check it out at www.peterrussell.com