Author Archives: dorworth

Seven Billion Gorillas in the Garden (but don’t talk about them)

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There are many advocacy groups that have an influence on the American west and elsewhere. Each of them has its adherents and critics, and some of them actually contribute to the benefit or harm of the planet and its inhabitants. That is, at some level they are effective. Among the groups that come to (my) mind are: Sierra Club, Wise Use Movement, Smart Growth, National Rifle Association, Idaho Rivers United, The Aluminum Association, Greater Yellowstone Coalition, Wyoming State Snowmobile Association, Planned Parenthood, National Right to Life Committee, Snake River Alliance and the Pacific Logging Congress. There are others too numerous to mention, and every person could easily make a different list.
I oppose the tenets of half the groups listed and am in favor of most of those of the other half, but all of them neglect what Professor Chris Rapley, Director of the British Antarctic Survey, terms the “Cinderella” issue of the environmental debate, so called because its implications are so controversial that no one is comfortable raising it. The issue is that more than 7 billion evolved descendants of gorillas who we call human beings live on planet earth; About 50 million new people arrive each year. The U.S. is the fastest growing industrialized country on earth, expanding at a rate of 58,000 additional people a week or about 3 million a year. The earth, the original mythic Garden of Eden with its finite and diminishing resources, is not expanding and cannot support this many people.
This is neither new nor difficult to access or process information. It’s just that, like sex in a Puritan society, homosexuality in a macho/red neck one, or the lies of the majority of world leaders and their corporate masters in every country in polite ones, it’s a distressing topic that raises so many other issues that it’s easier to pretend it isn’t there. This, of course, as the pop adage has it, is like ignoring the 500 pound Silverback gorilla sitting on the kitchen table.
Thomas Malthus, among the first to address the obvious, wrote in 1798, “It is an obvious truth, which has been taken notice of by many writers, that population must always be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence; but no writer that the Author recollects has inquired particularly into the means by which this level is effected: and it is a view of these means which forms, to his mind, the strongest obstacle in the way to any very great future improvement of society. He hopes it will appear that, in the discussion of this interesting subject, he is actuated solely by a love of truth, and not by any prejudices against any particular set of men, or of opinions. He professes to have read some of the speculations on the future improvement of society in a temper very different from a wish to find them visionary, but he has not acquired that command over his understanding which would enable him to believe what he wishes, without evidence, or to refuse his assent to what might be unpleasing, when accompanied with evidence.”
When Malthus wrote those words there were about one billion humans on earth, just over 5 million of them in America. In 1950 there were two and a half billion of us. In about 40 years it is expected that nine and a half billion humans will live on earth. That is several billion more than “the level of the means of subsistence.”
The phrase “Don’t Californicate Colorado” was popularized at one time by Coloradoans who got there first. Similar sentiments are expressed every day (with understandable reason) in Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon and Arizona, among others. The Minuteman Project and the Yuma Patrol are civilian groups devoted to keeping Latin Americans from illegally entering the U.S. Such “gated” community/state/nation solutions to over population cannot and do not work.
Rapley estimates that over the long haul the earth can reasonably support between 2 and 3 billion people at what he calls “a good standard of living.” He means that the 500 pound Silverback gorilla really weighs 1500 pounds and is moving down the table to see if there’s any food at the other end. All the sound and fury of the advocacy and activist groups mentioned are the sounds of the table breaking.
Meanwhile, as mentioned, 76 million new people arrive at the breaking breakfast table every year.

What Are You Doing?

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Many years ago I participated in a weeklong, intensive, silent, Zen sesshin that began each morning at 4:45 with 108 prostrations and included 10 periods of meditation interspersed with kinhin and ended at 9 p.m. with the last sitting. I’ve attended many sesshins and other Buddhist retreats, but an incident in the zendo from this particular one often comes to mind and I consider it an ongoing dharma lesson.
There were 30 or 40 students at the sesshin and about halfway through the week a small but significant episode took place. By that stage of any retreat most participants are usually fatigued, invigorated and highly tuned into inner space and immediate outer surroundings. It is a time when deep and repressed thoughts and feelings often surface. We were doing kinhin between periods of sitting, slowly walking with precise steps, evenly spaced in a line around the dimly lit zendo, each of us attending to our own practice, our own space and every breath of meditation. One could be forgiven for viewing such intense, peaceful, focused experience as the very essence of Zen Buddhist practice.
Suddenly, the silence exploded.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” a male voice boomed.
“YOU’RE NOT DOING IT RIGHT! WALKING TOO SLOW,” another male voice replied in a shout.
A brief scuffle between two students about 10 people in front of me shattered the atmosphere of the retreat day. It was shocking and disorienting. For the next few minutes chaos and confusion prevailed in the zendo. The roshi intervened and escorted the two Zen combatants outside the zendo. Kinhin and sitting resumed. An hour or so later the roshi and one of the students returned to resume practice. The other student was not seen again.
What had happened was this: the accepted protocol during kinhin is that students keep the same space between them. Student A was in front of Student B and was, apparently, lost in his own thoughts and not aware that the space between him and the next student in front was larger than the space between the other participants. Student B, apparently, was not lost in his own thoughts but was acutely aware of Student A’s kinhin pace. To speed things up and to set them right, Student B violently shoved Student A from behind, almost knocking him down.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”
“YOU’RE NOT DOING IT RIGHT!”
The roshi talked with the two and decided to exile Student B from the Zen center for a year and he was told to and did leave immediately. I do not know if he ever returned.
This event has come to mind many times in different circumstances and I consider it worth contemplating as an example of the dharma in action. How many times in our daily interactions with and observations of others do we have the thought, “YOU’RE NOT DOING IT RIGHT!”? And how many times each day do we think about others, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” And how often do we each give voice to those thoughts? And, then, how often (much less I would hope) do we give physical action, aggression, even violence to that voice, those thoughts? And how do we respond when they are given to us?
Deconstructing this incident or any confrontation in any of our lives, with the Eightfold Noble Path in mind is a useful dharma tool for better understanding. What part does right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration play in this incident? What can we learn and use in our daily lives from the actions of Student A, Student B as well as the roshi? Do you recognize yourself in the role of each of them? If so, what have you learned? If not, what are you doing?

Happiness

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Excerpt from a memoir in progress

“My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.”
Aldous Huxley

…happiness is priceless. It is also a compass and an elixir, and there is always a price for great happiness. The capacity to pay in the coin of the kingdom, whether the realm is material, spiritual, mental, emotional, physical, social, political or psychical, is the difference between bankruptcy and wealth, joy and disaster. Being true to your self is always authentically hard and often risky. Not being true to your self is always soft and usually falsely secure.
The joy of skiing may not be available to every skier, just as the joy of living is not seen or experienced by every human. The path to joy, all-encompassing, fully committed, no retreat, no prisoners taken and no excuses offered joy, goes through passion, and not everybody is comfortable with and willing to trust their passions. Those who do trust them include the world’s musicians, vagabonds, woodcarvers, long distance runners, poets, Isadora Duncans and John Muirs. Skiing is many things to many skiers (and something else to non-skiers whose lives are touched by it)‑‑‑athletic endeavor, outdoor activity, exercise, social forum, escape, personal statement, lifestyle, search, adventure, cheap thrill, relaxation and vacation‑‑‑and it is all or some of these at different times to every skier, including me. But skiing was and is primarily a joy that took me through passion and taught me to be comfortable with myself and the world, at least during those hours on skis. In due time that information seeped into the rest of life.
Skiing saved my life.
The elements of joy on a pair of skis can perhaps be described, but joy is just a three letter word if it isn’t inscribed in the mind and heart and soul by personal experience. Clean air, often cold, always refreshing. Wind. Sunshine. Falling snow. Sometimes rain. Fog. Clouds. Pine and Fir Trees and some Aspens in the Tahoe Basin, sometimes white and drooping with the weight of snow and then clean and green and stark against the snow covered mountains down which we skied. Mountains, especially the mountains. There is nothing like a mountain unless it is a snow covered mountain, or a mountain range, or a snow mantled mountain range. Snow is miraculous, an exquisitely beautiful substance which comes in many forms continually in the process of transforming into another variety of snow and eventually returning to soft water making its hard way back to the sea. Snow can be powder, corn, ice, wind pounded, glop, slop, hardpack, crust, sastrugi, Sierra cement, blue ice, surface crystals two inches high of such intricacy and fragility and delicate beauty and geometric form that nature herself stops to pay homage. Snow can run in melting rivulets upon itself. Snow can fall from the sky with such gentleness that one could be buried and die within its cover without ever hearing a sound. An avalanche of snow can sound like a bomb or the whisper of two sheets of silk moving against each other. Snow can land on the ground or on previously fallen snow with the weight of a feather, and it can be driven by wind to stick on the side of vertical cliffs with the fury of a needle in the eye. Snow, among the most beautiful of nature’s range of materials, gives life and saves lives and it can kill.
Anything that gives life and is the home of joy can kill and will.
Snow and mountains comprise the ground of skiing. The action within that lovely arena formed and saved my life, developed my character with all its strengths and weaknesses, and sustained, illuminated and made conscious to me my soul. The way I think and write and relate to people and to the world has been informed and guided by skiing.
First was the clean clear thrill and focus of the simple act of skiing, followed closely by the slightly less clean but even sharper focused and more complicated thrill of competition. For many years competitive skiing was the most important aspect of my life. That which was first became second and skiing became buried beneath the competition. The best of both always comes from the heart and always will and I became a ski racer. But first was the skiing, the art of the turn, on hard pack, on ice, in powder and in storm, the grace and beauty of holding the line of an arc of your choosing by the power and skill of your control, with a freedom and reason and esprit that is all your own and feeds the soul with unrefined nutrition. There is great satisfaction, accomplishment and personal growth, as well as other legitimate reasons to immerse oneself in competitive endeavors, but the joy of skiing is available to every skier while the joy of competition by its very nature is non-organic, non-democratic and comparative (winning and losing, winners and losers, success and failure according to man-made standards) and is more thrill than bliss, more war than peace, more ego than heart, more trial than joy.
But first and always is the skiing, along the line of happiness in an arc of your choosing.

Thinking of Louis Armstrong

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Louis Armstrong. Satchmo. A trumpet played with a sound like no other. An inimitable singing voice resonating life, joy, humor and strength. An improvisational genius of jazz. The name, the nickname, the horn, the voice and the artistic imagination would never be mistaken for anyone besides the man we know as Louis Armstrong.
His music is an integral part of the fabric of American life and culture. As with many Americans and jazz fans from all over the world, Armstrong has been a presence in my life for as long as I can remember. In many ways he is the quintessential American icon, part myth, part legend, completely human and as vital as a heartbeat.
Sometimes his music arrives in the mind while I’ve been working early in the morning or late at night. In that peculiar way of all music and genius musicians particularly, the sound of Louis Armstrong loosens the imagination, warms the heart, and entices the mind to wander into memory and away from the task at hand. Whether this phenomenon contributes to or damages the work in progress is, maybe, something to consider; but it is unquestionable that the music of Louis Armstrong enhances the lives of his listeners.
Though Armstrong died in 1971, I use the present tense because, in truth, the music never dies. His music speaks to the present moment as clearly and with as much vitality as the day it was played.
I saw Armstrong in concert several times in the 1950s and 1960s in the casinos of Reno and Lake Tahoe where I grew up. Until the early 1960s the only black people allowed in the majority of Nevada casinos were entertainers like Armstrong and his band, and they were only allowed on stage and in the dressing rooms.
Since my father was the manager of the New China Club, the only casino in Reno that allowed black people to spend their money within its doors at that time, the subject of racial inequality, prejudice and injustice was familiar to me. An audience of raucous white people (myself included) paying homage to and being entertained by the great Louis Armstrong in a segregated Nevada casino was a twisted, undelicious irony.
He wouldn’t have been allowed to join his own audiences in Nevada to see, say, Frank Sinatra on the same stages. This beautiful man with black skin gave his all in every performance to every audience, black and white and tan. If he resented the racism of his country, it didn’t show through his smile and his music and his song.
Armstrong wasn’t an angry black man, a social activist or even critic. He was the greatest jazz trumpet player of his time, a happy conjunction of talent and soul. His distinctive rough, hoarse singing voice was part of his personality but, in fact, was caused by polyps on his vocal cords. It was his infectious spirit in combination with talent and soul, personality and polyps that made him a major influence in the evolution of jazz, American entertainment and the culture of the world. Armstrong was as American as America gets.
He even made a connection with the world of skiing.
There exists a silly but happy photograph taken in Sun Valley of Armstrong on skis with Andrel Molterer, Roger Staub, Dieter Grieser, Pepi Gramshammer and Stein Eriksen. Armstrong is the dominant person in the group, and it is his smile that stands out among these pale face/Aryan/Nordic grinners. Sun Valley is a long way from the New Orleans ghetto of Storyville where he grew up in the Coloured Waifs’ Home where he learned the rudiments of his music.
One of my associations with Armstrong’s music is with skiing in Italy. In the competition days I was dining in a small restaurant in a village in the Italian Alps and feeling the weight of competitive expectation, the alienation of being the lone American competing against a bevy of Europeans on their turf within their culture trying with inconsistent success to speak their languages, and feeling the will of toughness and constancy dribble away into homesickness and longing for the familiar.
Louis Armstrong’s music began playing over the restaurant loudspeakers. Satchmo’s horn and voice and spirit spoke to me in that little restaurant. Armstrong chased my blues away and allowed my resolve to come back home to my mind where it belongs. Hearing Louis Armstrong in that restaurant was like having a paragraph of encouragement and a good joke from a best friend and advisor at just the right time.
The music of Louis Armstrong has been a friend and balm for the spirit on more than one occasion. In this I am not alone.
Armstrong worked incessantly his entire life, playing his last gig two months before he died. He was a lifelong smoker of the dreaded marijuana, he married three times and he was probably one of the earliest of American draft dodgers.
It is likely that the generally accepted myth of his birth date of July 4, 1900, is a fabrication. His parents were illiterate and many people without birthdays chose July 4th at that time. He was probably born in 1898, though not on July 4, and he would have lied about his age to avoid the draft in World War I.
He had music to play, not wars to fight, and, though the man is gone and the wars are history, the music never dies.

Zen Lunatics

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“Poets on the Peaks” by John Suiter is a very cool book. Buy it. Read it. Let its story sink in, slowly, with appreciation, like watching a mountain at sunup. It is a scholarly book about the connections between people, places, cultures (and culture), politics, religion, scholarship, wilderness, mountains, rivers, poetry, literature, ecology, community, environment and revelation. It is full of information, insight, inspiration, history and wisdom. As the back cover reads, “….it tells how the solitary mountain adventures of three young men helped to form the literary, spiritual, and environmental values of a generation.”
“Poets on the Peaks” does that and much more. Those three young men, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac and Philip Whalen worked as fire lookouts in the North Cascades in the early 1950s. Snyder was the leader, the pioneer, the guide, the only one of the three with a mountaineering background and the temperament and training to flourish in a solitary, isolated environment surrounded by wilderness. It was Snyder who convinced his two literary friends to take jobs as fire lookouts. First Whelan, then Kerouac. All three were (Snyder and Whelan still are) serious Zen practitioners, and Snyder quoted the Zen lunatic Han Shan a thousand years earlier: “Who can leap the world’s ties/And sit with me among the white clouds?” Suiter writes, “Gary could, Whelan could; and so should Jack.” An experienced and accomplished northwest mountaineer by the time he was 20, Snyder and his young friends climbed “….to develop a fresh mountaineering mind set that was totally opposed to the notion of conquest.” He writes, “I and the circle I climbed with were extremely critical of what we saw as the hostile, jock Occidental mind-set that thought to climb a mountain was to conquer it….I always thought of mountaineering not as a matter of conquering the mountain, but as a matter of self-knowledge.”
This is not the sort of writing about mountains that tends to make it into Climbing Magazine or The American Alpine Club Journal, but it did help form the core values of a particular generation of mountaineers, backpackers, writers and readers that, in turn, has influenced the generations to follow. Still, climbers of all attitudes and intentions will be charmed to find Fred Beckey, of all people, popping up in the text somewhat the way he has popped up in the mountains of the world for the past 70 years. This book has too many layers to explore here, but the top one is the effect the solitary fire lookout experience had on the thinking and work of these three major American writers. There are several other layers in “Poets on the Peaks,” all of them fascinating, well-researched and eloquently described. Suiter had access to “scores of previously unpublished letters and journals” as well as recent interviews with Snyder and Whelan and others, giving a fresh perspective and quality and a deeper dimension to a story of great significance to American literature and thought, and to members of America’s “rucksack revolution.”
Anyone who has read Kerouac’s “The Dharma Bums” will remember the character Japhy Ryder who is based on the person of Gary Snyder, and remember, too, the climb up MatterhornPeak in the Sierra described in the book. It is one of the most memorable climbs in American literature. The actual climb which Kerouac used as the basis for what he wrote cemented the friendship/brotherhood between him and Snyder. Kerouac’s alcoholic withdrawal from Snyder, Buddhism, the West and the zest for life that had driven his best work and best times is presented here in his own sad, fascinating words.
The Evil Axis of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee makes an appearance, as it must, in this record of the connections between politics and the life of the mind. Snyder was blackballed by McCarthy and the HUAC as not patriotic enough to work any longer as a fire lookout for the U.S. government. Such jingoistic stupidity would be humorous but for the serious impact it had on Snyder’s life. Unfortunately, such stupidity is still alive and well and active in American life, like a cobra living under the front porch.
Snyder made poetry out of such viciousness:

“I never was more broke & down
got fired that day by the usa
(the District Ranger up at Packwood
thought the wobblies had been dead for
forty years
but the FBI smelled treason
–my red beard)”

Suiter writes, “In the end, his blacklisting from the Forest Service had not been a huge catastrophe for Snyder. Unquestionably his rights had been egregiously violated—as were those of many thousands others—but in Zen fashion Gary managed to make the latest obstacle part of his journey.”
Each of the three made the Cascade experience a part of their own literary, spiritual and personal journey. In the spring following his first season as a fire lookout, Whalen found the experience running through his work. Suiter writes, “….Philip began thinking of the mountains again. A sharp memory of the Avalanche Lilies on Sourdough boring up through the thin snowdrifts above Riprap Creek the year before touched off a short naturalistic poem with a twist:

‘Now and then they ask me
To write something for them
And I do’”

It seems to me that John Suiter had a sharp memory of Snyder, Whalen and Kerouac in the Cascades boring up through their fine body of literature, and they asked him to write something for them, and he did. And it is good.

Wildlife Oxymoronics

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     “The enemies of the wild are the abundant and ever-multiplying forms of human control…..Many forms of control are dangerous to the wild, from cadastral maps, bureaucracy, statistics, surveillance, biotechnology, and nanotechnology to social engineering and scientific management…..to the mass production of game species, an intellectual move that laid the foundations of modern wildlife management (an oxymoron).”
Jack Turner

Wildlife management is an oxymoron, one of many, including serious fun, common sense, fighting for peace and Creation Science that modern civilization blithely uses to obscure reality and the personal and public costs and consequences of its out of control, obsessive, even psychotic need to control the uncontrollable and understand the unknowable. A couple of years ago western wildlife oxymoronics were showcased when the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services and/or the Idaho Department of Fish and Game hired a helicopter for an undisclosed sum of taxpayers dollars. The helicopter was installed with an undisclosed number of “aerial gunners” who were paid an undisclosed amount of taxpayer dollars to fly around north-central Idaho on a mission to shoot and kill wolves from the air “…in an effort to protect elk herds.”
After an undisclosed number of hours of flying time the aerial gunners managed to kill five wolves. Idaho Department of Fish and Game Deputy Director Jim Unsworth announced that the hunt was being suspended indefinitely because it was “inefficient and expensive.” He said the wolves are in thick timber which makes them difficult to shoot from the air. Unsworth told the Lewiston Tribune, “The elk and deer are on green-up down low and the wolves are there with them. They are in that lower-elevation, big-timber kind of stuff. We can find the packs, but you can’t find the wolves to do anything from a control standpoint.”
‘From a control standpoint’ is an interesting phrase. If ‘you’ can’t find the wolves to do anything then there is no point of control to stand on. Maybe ‘you’ who can’t find the wolves should check in with ‘we’ who can find the packs where the wolves, by definition and practice, hang out. Every report, justification or rationale for killing wolves that I’ve seen is always filled with interesting phrases, some oxymoronic, others just colorful, opaque, incomplete, misleading and, on occasion, unreal, and they always raise more questions than they answer. Even people like myself who view the term ‘wildlife management’ as an oxymoron and are not in favor of shooting wolves, especially at taxpayer expense, appreciate and ponder such colorful language as “The elk and deer are on green-up down low and the wolves are there with them. They are in that lower-elevation big timber kind of stuff.”
One obvious question: didn’t the Idaho Department of Fish and Game know the wolves they couldn’t find were in that lower-elevation big timber kind of stuff? If not, why not? Isn’t it the job of Fish and Game in their oxymoronic role of managing wildlife to know that wolves favor that big timber kind of stuff and that to a healthy wolf’s ears the sound of a helicopter is as loud as its inefficiency and expense to the taxpayer, from a control standpoint? For those people who enjoy the thrill of killing defenseless wildlife from the air, it must have been a great hooah experience at taxpayer’s expense, but, as is so often the case from a control standpoint those hooah moments are inefficient and expensive.
It’s simply not true that “…you can’t find the wolves to do anything from a control standpoint.” At least five wolves were found and killed, and, from a control standpoint, it would be an interesting and revealing exercise in accountability to determine the cost of killing each wolf.
The contention that the inefficient and expensive wolf killings were carried out “…in an effort to protect the elk herds,” is, at best, incomplete, and, at worst, misleading. Wolves and elk existed as wild creatures for thousands of years on this continent in an unmanaged natural (and wild) balance between predator and prey in which elk herds are kept healthy by wolves dining on the old, the weak, the lame and the slow. Without human ‘management’ they would continue with their wild, natural dynamic. Everyone who has looked into it, or even thought a bit about it, knows that the biggest dangers to elk are loss of habitat due to human encroachment on their natural territory and hunting of elk by those same humans.
Most of the elk habitat loss is due to real estate development and the public lands welfare sheep and cattle ranching industry which each year loses a miniscule number of their flocks and herds to wolves. And hunting is a big business. Killing wolves on taxpayer dollars is not done to protect elk herds from being killed by wolves, but, rather, to eliminate competition for killing those elk herds so that the wolves’ fellow predator, man, will have more elk to kill. It is also done to placate the strong political lobby of the cattle and sheep industry.
Aerial gunners in helicopters or ground troops on foot (or on 4 wheelers, or trucks) are not killing wolves at government expense to protect elk or any other wildlife. They are the hired guns of industry. Those amateur sportsmen who kill wolves for sport turn the word sport into an oxymoron.

Anger

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The foundation of Buddhist practice is sitting. Just sitting. Just sitting and letting go of all the ‘stuff’ filling our minds, everything that keeps us on the wheel of karma, the wheel of life as we know it. At the center of all depictions of the Buddhist Wheel of Life are a rooster, a snake and a pig representing greed, anger and ignorance, the three poisons that lead humans to evil action and personal suffering. Anger is the snake. Anger encompasses hatred, ill-will, animosity, rage, fury, wrath and aversion. Its poison causes far more destruction in this world than that of the rattlesnake or the cobra.
An essential component of Buddhist practice is letting go of anger which, among other things, is a huge hindrance to realization. That is, for a Buddhist ‘righteous’ or ‘justifiable’ anger do not exist. Think of that: anger is never righteous, never justified. Metta, the practice of loving kindness toward all beings, does not permit anger…not toward the driver who cuts you off in traffic, the friend who betrays, the liar who misleads, the greed and ignorance that travel with anger. It is not the person, event or situation toward which anger is directed that is the issue. Anger itself is the root of the problem. That is, the root of the problem of anger is in you, not outside.
But anger happens to every human being. Anger is part of the human condition. Anger and aggression are too often confused with strength, but that is delusion. Anger is a poison and makes one weak, but no one entirely avoids anger, even Buddhists, not even Buddhist masters. The path is not easy. Buddhism is not for sissies.
What to do?
According to the Dhammapada, Buddha said, “Conquer anger by non-anger. Conquer evil by good. Conquer miserliness by liberality. Conquer a liar by truthfulness.” Keeping in mind while contemplating the words, “Conquer anger by non-anger,” that Buddhism is a practice, not a belief system. You do not defuse another’s anger before you have conquered your own. John Daido Loori summed it up this way: “…what you do and what happens to you are the same thing…cause and effect are one, not two. And when you realize—not understand, not believe, but realize—that what you do and what happens to you are the same thing, there’s no way to avoid taking responsibility for your life. There’s no longer any way you can conceivably say, ‘He made me angry,’ because you know that only you can make you angry. And when that fact really comes home, you empower yourself to do something about anger. So long as he made you angry, you will continue to be a victim.”
Einstein said, “Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools.”
What to do?
Mindful Buddhist practice requires honesty and the first step when you are angry is to acknowledge that you are angry. “I am pissed off.” Do not be one of those people who is clearly angry but for some reason insists they are not. It is crucial that the recognition of your own anger includes the realization that your anger is created by yourself. No one makes you angry. You make yourself angry. Your anger is your responsibility and you need to conquer it. Don’t lay it on the world which already has more anger than it can handle.
People who hang on to anger tend toward depression, obsession with political ideologies, real or imagined enemies or one or more of life’s very real negative aspects. Anger causes us to reject without reflection whatever displeases us or infringes on our ego without understanding our inescapable connection to the object of that displeasure. Anger and ego are illusions born of the mind. Anger is the easy way, the dishonest way, the poisonous way, and it always creates more anger, more dishonesty, more poison.
Let it go. Let go of anger by (literally) sitting with it. Letting go of anger requires patience, sometimes a lot of it, compassion (especially for yourself), honesty, lots of time on your zafu and the realization that your anger comes from your own mind. Do not indulge your anger. Thich Nhat Hahn says, “When you express your anger you think that you are getting anger out of your system, but that’s not true. When you express your anger, either verbally or with physical violence, you are feeding the seed of anger, and it becomes stronger in you.” Again, anger is not strength. It is weakness. It takes patience, compassion and courage to look at your own anger and realize that it is poisoning you and that you are the only one who can get rid of that poison.
Let it go. Sit with it. Let it go.

Water and Time

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Water marks time

in rock and sand,

seeking its path

across the land.

Following gravity

in ripples and waves,

water rages in rivers

and pools in caves.

From birth in a raindrop

to death in the sea

water is life

to human and flea.

It comes and goes,

nurturing all in its path,

including the destruction

of its flooding wrath.

The largest wave

in the ocean deep

is the same calm water

of the pond asleep.

Only humans mark time

with water and watch,

while water keeps moving,

no time for a scotch.

Me and Ed: Remembering a man I never met but felt I knew

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In late January 1963 I was in Sun Valley, Idaho. A recent college graduate, I was a 24 year old ski racer who didn’t seem to quite fit into mainstream America. Through a friendship with Ron Funk, who cared even less about the fit than me, I found myself committed to one of the more audacious ski adventures of my life, running the Diamond Sun down Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain. As I wrote in The Straight Course, “The Diamond Sun may be the most difficult standard race in the world. It is the fastest I know of and starts on top of Bald Mountain and finishes at the Wood River 2 3/5 miles below. The route is any way possible down Ridge, Rock Garden, Canyon and River Run.” The Diamond Sun had been run only twice since WWII and is fast, dangerous and scary, and I was appropriately cognizant of this reality.
I mean, the night before the race I was scared shitless, filled with doubts about myself and whether I had what it takes and, more, whether it mattered that I address those personal doubts and questions. In order to relax and take my mind off such heavy toil, my friend Mike Brunetto and I went to the movie showing in Ketchum that night. The film, Lonely Are the Brave with Kirk Douglas and Walter Matthau, is, in my view, the best work Douglas ever did and is one of my all time favorite films. Among other things, it touches on the integrity of personal freedom and the freedom of personal integrity and the price one might pay for them.
At any rate, the film touched and inspired me and added a sliver of resolve to my scared shitless mind and spirit. The next morning we ran the Diamond Sun and everything went flawlessly for me. I set a new record (which still stands as the race hasn’t been run since) of 2:21.0 for the 2 3/5 mile course. A fine memory of a good time, and I always thought of Lonely Are the Brave as an integral part of it. More important, the race gave me the confidence I needed to go to Chile the following summer with the intention of setting a world record for speed on skis.  We went to Chile and set a record and that experience changed my life in myriad ways including better self-knowledge and the doors that open with a world record on the resume that would remain closed without it. The expanded awareness of my own human capabilities helped form much of my life and activities, including the writing, and, more important, the same commitment to writing as a path in life as dangerous and scary as the Diamond Sun, though slower of pace. Some of the doors that opened I probably shouldn’t have walked through, but self-knowledge is a process, not an accomplishment.
A few years later (1971) I began writing for Skier’s Gazette which a year later became Mountain Gazette and which eventually led to my work being published elsewhere. Mountain Gazette was as crucial to my writing as the Diamond Sun had been to my skiing.
By the early ‘70s I had read Desert Solitaire a couple of times and knew that Ed Abbey was a great writer and, in some ways, the spokesman of our times. I read his occasional pieces in MG and was impressed when then editor Mike Moore told me that Abbey sent his contributions in accompanied by a check to help out the struggling publication. Since MG paid me for my work I was grateful to Abbey for more than his fine writing, vision and personal integrity. When MG published my long essay/memoir Night Driving in 1975 it took up most of the issue except for a wonderful Abbey piece about desert driving, and I was thrilled to see my name with his on the cover. Good stuff.
That same year Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang was published. It is a very good novel that resonated with a large segment of America that didn’t quite fit into the mainstream and it nurtured all but the most pesticide sprayed imaginations. After I read it I gave it away as Christmas gifts. I was living between Truckee and Squaw Valley at the time and my neighbors, two New Jersey hippies whose son went to school with my son Jason, were among the recipients. A spacey friend of theirs was visiting from the east coast that winter and one snowstorm morning I went over to my neighbors’ home for a coffee. The spacey friend’s grin wouldn’t leave his face as he thanked me for giving The Monkey Wrench Gang to his hosts, and then he told me about his previous day. He had spent most of the day and into the night reading Abbey’s paean to the purposeful destruction of eyesores and pavement and machines that destroy the earth. He finished the book at 1 a.m. and was inspired to immediate action. Perhaps other, less literary influences were at play as well, but despite the late hour and the storm he hopped on a bicycle with a huge bow saw and rode the 3 or 4 miles to the freeway near Truckee and, under the cover of darkness and the storm, spent a couple of hours dropping a huge, offensive-looking, wood-supported billboard advertising one of the local ski areas. Then he rode the bicycle back home. He had taken Hayduke’s credo to heart (and action): “My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don’t know anything else worth saving.”
The dropping of the eyesore billboard was the first eco-revolutionary act that I knew of in the Tahoe area, and though I was only one of a few who knew who had done it, I was only one of many who were amused, informed and inspired by it. Life went on and I read more Abbey and rightly thought of him as a giant literary and environmental and thereby societal influence of our time.
And then, some 20 years after the Diamond Sun, I was browsing in a book store and came across an Ed Abbey novel I didn’t know about entitled The Brave Cowboy. A quick glance showed that it was the basis of the film Lonely Are the Brave. The novel is really good. I was and am amazed that I hadn’t put the two together, but knowledge, self and otherwise, is a process, not an accomplishment. A bit of research expanded my awareness that Dalton Trumbo had written the screenplay for the film, and if ever a Hollywood writer type could be a soul-brother to Ed Abbey it was Dalton Trumbo.
I was bemused and informed and once again reminded of the ever present connections and influences, known and unknown, that permeate all our lives, and I promptly wrote Abbey a letter of praise and thanks for his contribution to my life. He graciously answered and reiterated the worth and power of the written word and encouraged me to continue writing. We agreed to meet up sometime, somewhere in the southwest desert, but it never happened and so like most of his fans I have the easy privilege of remembering and thinking of him through the greatness of his work, unencumbered by the rough edges of his person and the inevitable objections I have to some of his ideas.
Ed Abbey died in March 1989. As he requested, Abbey was buried illegally in a spot in the Cabeza Prieta desert of Arizona known only to his friends who buried him, Doug Peacock, Jack Loeffler, Tom Cartwright and Steve Prescott. It is reported that a large quantity of beer and hard booze accompanied the burial, some of it poured on the grave to help Ed on his way. In May of that year a public memorial for Abbey was held near Arches National Monument outside Moab, Utah. The day before the service a friend and I climbed Castleton Tower in Castle Valley. It was May 19, my son Jason’s 18th birthday and I sat on top thinking that both Jason and Ed Abbey would have enjoyed the view from there. The next day we attended the memorial which was wonderful, moving and appropriate. Barry Lopez, Ann Zwinger, Doug Peacock and Dave Foreman were among those who gave beautiful eulogizes for Ed that day. Wendell Berry, who never met Abbey, recited a poem, calling him to Berry’s native Kentucky:

The old oak wears new leaves.
It stands for many lives.
Within its veil of green
A singer sings unseen.
Again the living come
To light, and are at home.
And Edward Abbey’s gone…

I think of that dead friend
Here where he never came
Except by thought and name:
I praise the joyous rage
That justified his page
He would have like this place
Where spring returns with solace
Of bloom in a dark time,
Larkspur and columbine.
The flute song of the thrush
Sounds in the underbrush.

But for me the most moving, astonishing speaker at Abbey’s service on May 20, 1989 was a woman whose name I had never heard and whose work I had never read. Her name was Terry Tempest Williams and she spoke of her long hikes and talks with Ed in the Utah desert and of the importance of friendships and connections and the environment. Terry ended her talk by whipping out some post cards and waving them like a baton, intoning “Keep in touch. Keep in touch. Keep in touch. Keep in touch.” With friends, with connections, with the environment. I was so impressed with Terry that I tracked down her work and have kept up on it ever since. As mentioned, knowledge is a process, not an accomplishment. As are awareness, friends, connections, the environment, work, life, the joyous rage, staying in touch. Thanks, Ed, for that and much more.

CS Concerto

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A name matters. Naming something is an action full of significance and statement. The namer tells a story in the name about him-or her-self, his or her relationship to the named and about other things as often as not unnamed.
This is as true for climbing routes as it is for streets or gated communities.
When Royal and Liz Robbins did the first ascent of the fine route “Nutcracker Sweet” on Manure Pile Buttress in Yosemite in September 1966, it was a milestone in American climbing. This beautiful, five pitches 5.8 route was the first ever put up in North America using only nuts for protection.
Thus, the name.
Within the month the Robbins’ and two British climbers also put up a thousand foot route near Sentinel Rock that became known as “Nuts to you.” The 5.9 route involved a bivouac and Robbins considered it the hardest route of that length done in America without the use of pitons. These were bold, innovative (visionary even) climbs that opened the way to clean climbing in America. They were landmark climbs with cute names.
Royal has something of a reputation as a punster. (A route he and I did on Half Dome in 1970 had certain aesthetic difficulties and half way up Half Dome I asked him what we would name the route. “The Dog,” he replied, but when he wrote up the climb in “Summit” he called it “Arcturus,” which means Bear Watcher, which is what dogs do. I kept the original and traditional “The Dog” when I wrote up the climb with less punning for “Climbing,” but “Arcturus” it is in the guide books.) But the name of “Nuts to you” was taken from a remark Chuck Pratt made when Royal first included some of the new, alien, strange, non-traditional pieces of metal called ‘nuts’ on his rack for a climb the two of them were going to do. “Nuts to you,” said Pratt, a traditionalist at heart.
Royal, of course, was the undisputed King (or, perhaps, CEO) of Yosemite climbing of the time, and, as such, an irresistible target for the barbed, earthy witticisms of the dirt-bag denizens of Camp 4, for whom monarch was a kind of butterfly and air something better for breathing than wearing.
Chuck Pratt was a King of a different sort in Yosemite climbing of that time. A natural intellectual with the soul of a poet, the social conscience (and lifestyle) of a hedonist, a shy personality and a wicked, wicked sharp and earthy wit, Pratt was as different from Royal as, say, Hunter S. Thompson was from Tom Wolfe.
As J. Taylor of Simon Fraser University in B.C. writes in “Mapping adventure, a historical geography of Yosemite Valley climbing landscapes,” “Examining climbing guidebooks for Yosemite Valley also reveals a cultural shift during the 1960s in how climbers represented themselves and their deeds. New trends in route descriptions and naming practices reflected shifts in social mores, environmental conditions, and sporting behavior. Guidebooks produced since 1970 suggest a coarsening progression in sport and an altered community demography, yet these texts also illustrate how change reinforced climbing’s values and customs.”
A coarsening progression. An altered community demography. Pratt says to Robbins, “Nuts to you” when Robbins wants to introduce clean climbing to the piton hard traditions of Yosemite. Robbins does a major route using just nuts and calls it “Nuts to You,” undoubtedly making his point with Pratt.
In response, Pratt, who reveled in the cultural shifts of the ‘60s, put up a lovely three pitch route on Manure Pile Buttress, a variation of “After Six” to the left of “Nutcracker Sweet.” It is a great route, though it has some run outs. He named it “Cocksucker’s Concerto,” undoubtedly making his point as well, though in the guide books it is listed as “CS Concerto.”