Author Archives: dorworth

Mountain Running

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Mountain running
around pine, fir,
manzanita.
Stopping atop a ridge
to view, reflect.
Hunting eagle
scans the land
with eagle vision,
rises on some quiet current,
sights man
and veers away
to other territories.
The man runs
along trail
across bridge
above
clear rumbling water
past rusted, empty tin can
and snow flower
shouting triumph
in red.
Deer bolting
like terror
stops man
frightened first,
thoughtful second,
third‑‑
runs on,
encounters lizard
fixing him
with granite
eye.

Wovoka’s Ghost Dance Still Rolls

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Native American prophets and holy men have long troubled the uneasy conscience of the modern culture of North America. These native sages have played a larger part in the conscious and unconscious lives of the people of North America than is generally recognized. A few of them, like Lame Deer and Rolling Thunder are known at least by name to the general public, though exactly what they had to say is less familiar. While Western prophets envision Armageddon at the end of the (literal) line, native prophets see a circle, an endless process in which the past and future are alive in the present. It is worth contemplating that combining a straight line and a circle results in a spiral.
One native prophet of great interest is Wovoka, a member of the Paiute nation. He is thought to have been born in 1856 near Carson City, Nevada and died in 1932. Wovoka was also known as Jack Wilson. By the time of his birth European settlers in Nevada had destroyed the Paiute nation and way of life. Native American nations throughout the continent had been stripped of their lands and traditions, the buffalo had been slaughtered and their peoples were herded onto reservations. All that was left to most of these peoples were their world view, their spiritual beliefs and their medicine men, many of whom, in desperation and sadness, were trying to dream the white man out of existence.
Because of a dream, Wovoka had a profound, lasting and tragic impact on the course of the relationship between the European immigrants and the Native American. During a full eclipse on New Year’s Day of 1889, Wovoka had a dream which resulted in what came to be known as the “Ghost Dance” among Native Americans. Like most Paiutes of that time, he had considerable exposure to the Christian faith of the settlers, and his dream was a mixture of native and Christian beliefs. In his dream, Wovoka died and an eagle carried him to the sky; when he returned alive, he said something like this: “When the Sun died, I went up to heaven and saw God and all the people who had died a long time ago. God told me to come back and tell my people they must be good and love one another, and not fight, or steal or lie. He gave me this dance to give to my people.”
In a short time, Wovoka’s message and dance had spread from Nevada to the plains Indians, particularly the Lakota Sioux of Pine Ridge, South Dakota.
The ritualistic dance lasted four and five days, and was deeply appealing to Native peoples whose world view and spiritual traditions were based on nature and who were mystified by what Robert Toledo termed “the pew-bound protocol of Christian faiths.” Though Wovoka clearly and consistently spoke against violence in any form, the Ghost Dance was turned into a militaristic ritual by the Lakota. Whatever the effect on Lakota people of non-stop dancing for days at a time, white settlers, mostly as a result of newspaper reports of savage natives dancing themselves into a pagan and violent trance, were terrified. Blame for the situation fell on Wovoka, who was in Nevada and opposed to violence, and Sitting Bull, the Lakota chief medicine man, who was apathetic to the Ghost Dance. Nevertheless, Sitting Bull was killed on December 15, 1890 in a botched attempt by government officials to arrest him and stop the Ghost Dance.
Fourteen days later, unable to stop the Ghost Dance,  the U.S. Army slaughtered 290 mostly unarmed mostly women and children Lakotas on the frozen plains of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation. Thirty-three soldiers died, mostly from friendly fire; 20 Medals of Honor were presented to soldiers with the courage to massacre women and children. Because of Wovoka’s dream, Wounded Knee became the predominant symbol of America’s brutality toward its first people. It also stopped the Ghost Dance.
In 1971 Rolling Thunder, a Cherokee and Shoshone shaman, said, “People should treat their own bodies with respect. It’s the same thing with the earth. Too many people don’t know that when they harm the earth they harm themselves, nor do they realize that when they harm themselves they harm the earth.”
Lame Deer, a 20th century Sioux shaman, said several years ago, perhaps presciently, “…in my vision the electric light will stop sometime. It is used too much for TV and going to the moon. The day is coming when nature will stop the electricity. Police without flashlights, beer getting hot in the refrigerators, planes dropping from the sky, even the President can’t call up somebody on the phone. A young man will come, or men, who’ll know how to shut off the electricity. It will be painful, like giving birth. Rapings in the dark, winos breaking into the liquor stores, a lot of destruction. People are being too smart, too clever; the machine stops and they are helpless, because they have forgotten how to make do without the machine. There is a Light Man coming, bringing a new light. It will happen before this century is over. The man who has this power will do good things too—stop all atomic power, stop wars, just by shutting the white electro-power off. I hope to see this, but then I’m also afraid. What will be will be…….I’m trying to bring the Ghost Dance back, but interpret it in a new way. I think it has been misunderstood, but after 80 years I believe that more and more people are sensing what we meant when we prayed for a new earth and that now, not only the Indians, but everybody has became an endangered species. So let the Indians help you bring on a new earth without pollution or war. Let’s roll up the world. It needs it.”
Yes, it does.

 

Dr. Albert Hofmann

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Dr. Albert Hofmann is famous because he discovered/invented/synthesized LSD‑‑lysergic acid diethylamide-25–in 1938 in the process of looking for medicinal uses of a fungus found on rye, wheat and other grains. At the time he was an unknown if brilliant chemist working for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel, Switzerland. He was a Swiss scientist in the traditional mold searching for ways to improve human life. He succeeded beyond his wildest expectations in unexpected ways, and his discovery of LSD deeply altered the lives of millions of people and, thereby, the course of human events. LSD has been profoundly misunderstood and demonized by non-cognoscenti, seriously abused by some who could be called cognoscenti, banned for many years in much of the world and called with deep affection “My Problem Child” by Hofmann himself. It strikes terror into the quaking hearts and fearful souls of those authorities who mistake control for order and who quiver with rage or uncertainty at questions (or chemicals) that challenge their certainty about what is what. Still, LSD is alive and well, inspiring, enlightening and helping to heal the psychic and psychological wounds of many people.
When he died in 2008 at his home in Burg im Leimental, Switzerland at the age of 102, he was the head of a large family including eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. He was admired, respected and beloved by many people far outside the realms of science and his life as a Swiss professional. He took LSD many times and considered it a profound psychic medicine and thought that its use as a recreational “pleasure drug” was a mistake. Like many others—perhaps including some reading these words—at a certain point he realized he no longer had a use for LSD. Like many others, he turned to and recommended older methods of attaining “extraordinary states of consciousness”‑‑breathing techniques, yoga, fasting, dance, art, meditation. He said, “LSD brings about a reduction of intellectual powers in favor of an emotional experience of the world. It can help to refill our consciousness with this feeling of wholeness and being one with nature.” Which would seem to indicate a key element of any “extraordinary state of consciousness” is nothing more complicated than connecting the heart to the brain.
A good argument could be made that Albert Hofmann might accurately be described as the 20th century father of reminding humanity that hearts and brains only work properly in unison. LSD was the tool he offered to connect them. This ancient knowledge‑‑heart/brain connection‑‑seemed like the newest, most profound wisdom to ever come down the road of life to those acid trippers of the 1960s and ‘70s who were trying to come to terms with the stultifying, repressive, heartless hypocrisies of the 1950s, the murders of John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the horrors and rationale of Viet Nam, the deceitful disservice to America of such public servants as Richard Nixon, Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger and others whose hearts were ravaged by ambition, greed, hubris and disconnection from the world they so cavalierly manipulated. There was a general sense of things not right in the wealth-driven homogeneity that characterized the capitalist values of America, and many who took LSD were able to see a way to set them right.
And so they did, if you know what I mean. If you don’t, perhaps a dance class, some yoga, a fast or a meditation practice is in order.
Besides inadvertently taking the first LSD ‘trip’ on April 16 1943 after accidentally getting a tiny amount of it on his finger, Hofmann was a serious, socially conscious chemist with a long and distinguished career. As a graduate student, Hofmann revealed the structure of insect chitin. Later he mastered the complex chemical world found within ergot, a cereal fungus with an enormous range of effects on the human nervous system. He called these derivatives of ergot his “children,” and they include drugs that remain in the pharmacopoeia to this day: methergine to prevent obstetrical bleeding, the anti-dementia vasodilator hydergine, dihydergot for migraines, in addition to the problem child, LSD.
Psychedelics were well known by the time Hofmann discovered LSD, but LSD was some 10,000 times more powerful than mescaline. Through the 1940s and 1950s LSD created a revolution in psychiatry. It was used successfully in the treatment of neurosis, psychosis and depression. Some 40,000 people underwent psychedelic therapy, perhaps most notably the actor Cary Grant who received some 60 LSD psychotherapy sessions and said of them, “I have been born again.” Aldous Huxley requested an injection of LSD on his deathbed. And many psychotherapists took the drug along with their patients, a fact not noted nearly enough in the literature or appreciated enough by those unwilling to appreciate the healing and wholeness to be found in expanded and extraordinary consciousness.
In pop culture LSD is associated with Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, the ‘hippie’ mores of San Francisco’s flower children, Grateful Dead concerts, Woodstock and psychedelic art as, of course, it should be.
But it was Albert Hofmann’s child, and though it was a problem child he never gave up his belief in its goodness and usefulness as “medicine for the soul.” He never believed in it as a pleasure drug for the masses. He said, “As long as people fail to truly understand psychedelics and continue to use them as pleasure drugs, and fail to appreciate the very deep psychic experience they may induce, then their medical use will be held back.” The LSD experience was somewhat familiar to him when he encountered it as an adult; it was very close to an epiphany he had as a child while roaming in the woods near his childhood home. He said, “It happened on a May morning‑‑I have forgotten the year‑‑but I can still point to the exact spot where it occurred, on a forest path on Martinsberg above Baden. As I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with bird song and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light. It shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart, as though it wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an indescribable sensation of joy, oneness and blissful security.” Throughout his long life, pilgrims passed through Switzerland to visit Hofmann, to seek his counsel, and, perhaps, to score some of his stash of the original LSD. He considered it his responsibility to meet as many of these people as possible. He said, “I have tried to help, instructing and advising.”
On Hofmann’s 100th birthday he was able to see an international symposium convene in Basel to discuss LSD research and a renewed interest in the therapeutic potential of LSD and other psychedelics. A year earlier the British Journal of Psychiatry called for a reappraisal of psychedelics “based upon scientific reasoning and not influenced by social or political pressures.”
Hofmann was active, vibrant and intelligent and involved to the end of his days. If he suffered any ill effects from his hundreds of LSD trips they were not evident. Since he lived to be 102 it would seem the medicinal properties of LSD did him some good. He lived to see his Prodigal Son come home to scientific respectability. What scientist could ask for more?

Don’t Forget Tibet

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“One Tibetan monk who is now close with me came (to Dharamsala) in the early ‘80s (and) joined with me. He (had) spent more than 18 years in Chinese prison labor camp. So we used to talk and he told on a few occasions he really faced some danger. So I asked him, ‘What danger? What kind of danger?”—thinking he would tell me of Chinese torture and prison.
“He replied, ‘Many times I was in danger of losing compassion for the Chinese.’
“That’s marvelous, isn’t it?”
HH Dalai Lama

In the past few years dozens of Tibetans have self-immolated in protest of the lack of freedoms, the lack of basic human rights and the repressive, punitive policies imposed on them by the Chinese government. That is, they soaked themselves in gasoline and set themselves on fire to protest their treatment by the Chinese, to draw attention to their situation and to encourage the other nations of the world to persuade China to change their tyrannical policies that are nothing less than the cultural and actual genocide of Tibet.
China has shown no indication that these protests are causing it to consider changing its brutal, totalitarian policies and actions toward Tibet and Tibetans. An editorial in The Global Times, a Beijing newspaper with ties to the Communist Party opined, “China’s Tibetan region has been affected by outrageous political influences under the name of religion. The selfishness and ruthlessness of the Dalai group are carefully packaged by the West (and) the fact is the more self-immolations happen in Tibet, the more comfortable the life of the Dalai group becomes.”
Such a statement takes political/public relations spin to new realms of velocity and, in truth, darkness, even to veteran, jaded observers of the bleak, mind-numbing spin of the world’s political whirlpools. The Dalai Lama fled Tibet more than 50 years ago to save his own life 10 years after the Chinese invaded his sovereign nation. A national uprising against the Chinese precipitated the Dalai Lama’s escape to India and more than 100,000 Tibetans fled their homeland at that time. In the two decades following, hundreds of thousands of Tibetans died in Tibet as a consequence of China’s policies. Any westerner who has visited Tibet (or China), studied the history of Tibet and China, followed the work of the Dalai Lama on behalf of his country and countrymen and who reads that the Chinese government insists that ‘the Dalai group’ becomes more comfortable with each self-immolation of a fellow Tibetan can readily understand that even a Buddhist monk could be in danger of losing compassion for the Chinese.
It is, as HH Dalai Lama observes, marvelous that compassion can and should take precedence over several other possible responses to China’s subjugation of its neighbor, Tibet, one of many obvious reasons why we should not forget Tibet. And it may be the primary reason that those who might wish to forget Tibet will never be able to do so. Though China makes every attempt to sweep Tibet behind a curtain of secrecy, Tibet is not going to go away because, among other reasons, neither Tibet nor Tibetans are going to lose compassion.
And neither should we.
Losar, the Tibetan New Year, is traditionally celebrated with music, chanting, brilliant costumes and pageantry. Last year was different. Lobsang Sangay, the Tibetan prime-minister-in-exile, asked Tibetans throughout the world to refrain from celebration but to somberly observe traditional and spiritual rituals “…for all those who have sacrificed and suffered under the repressive policies of Chinese government” and because of the ‘grim news’ that continues to stream out of Tibet. Instead of celebrating Losar, the entire Tibet government in-exile, including HH Dalai Lama, fasted. Sangay encouraged Tibetans to continue to protest ‘non-violently and legally.’
“We once again fervently urge the Chinese government to give serious consideration to our legitimate demands and appeals we have made so far,” a Tibet government-in-exile statement said. The world knows that while the Chinese government has invaded, conquered, subjugated and brutalized Tibet and its people, China does not and never will represent them, speak for them or force them to lose compassion for all people, including Chinese.
Government officials from the United States, Germany, Britain, Australia, Canada, Poland and the European Union have all spoken out in protest of China’s repression of Tibetans. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “We have made very clear our serious concerns about China’s record on human rights…We continue to call on China to embrace a different path.”
China’s record on human rights in the past 60 years is among the worst in human history. The U.S. and the other nations mentioned should, in my view, do much more than make very clear their concerns about Tibet, and one hopes they will do more than talk about it. Meanwhile, do not forget Tibet. A country and people whose leader recognizes that it is marvelous to not lose compassion for those who lack compassion have, in addition to the right to live in peace in their own country on their own terms, much to teach the world.
Do not forget Tibet.

Muffin Recipe

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3 bananas/thoroughly mashed

1 egg

1/8 to ¼ cup olive oil

2 dashes cinnamon

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 dollop (or, perhaps, a bit more, depending on taste) molasses

1 cup maple syrup (grade B is best)

¾ cup oats

2 tablespoons millet

1 ¾ cups flour (spelt/whole wheat)

2 cups skim milk

3 cups bran

1 teaspoon salt

1 ½ tablespoon baking powder

(bran and milk go in last)

mix thoroughly

bake at 375 F for 25 to 35 minutes

Right Livelihood

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The Eightfold Noble Path—Right View, Right Intention (WISDOM), Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood (ETHICAL CONDUCT), Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration (MENTAL DEVELOPMENT)

Right livelihood is the 3rd of the three moral or ethical principles of the eightfold noble path of Buddhism. The other two are right speech and right action. The principle is that one earns one’s living legally, peacefully and in a manner that brings no harm to others. At first glance this seems sane, obvious and not that difficult. The Buddha specifically pointed out that dealing in weapons, living beings (including raising animals for slaughter, the slave trade and prostitution), working in meat production and butchery and selling intoxicants and poisons like alcohol and drugs brings harm to others. He also said that any means of livelihood that violated right speech and right action is to be avoided.
The means of livelihood is a major component of each of our lives. For most people, the work we do takes up more time and energy than anything else and has an enormous impact on our lives and, since all things and people are connected, on the lives of our families, friends, communities and the world at large. If we are sitting each morning as a means of developing compassion and understanding in ourselves and building atomic bombs or tending bar in the afternoons, we are going to have some conflicts within ourselves. Those conflicts create suffering for ourselves, defeat our practice, and, in turn, inflict suffering on the world.
Thich Nhat Hanh has written: “Our vocation can nourish our understanding and compassion, or erode them. We should be awake to the consequences, far and near, of the way we earn our living.”
And it is not just the effect of our own means of livelihood on our inner selves and, consequently, the compassion, understanding and suffering that we (literally) project on the world. Each of us is affected by the individual members of our families, the people around us, our communities and the world. All of them, in turn, are affected by their means of livelihood. I like Thich Nhat Hanh’s perspective on Right Livelihood—vocation can nourish or erode.
Since everything is connected, including the people of a modern civilization, absolute purity in Right Livelihood is probably impossible. Even if we don’t build atomic bombs, some well-intentioned teacher taught the bomb maker nuclear physics; a farmer grew the food he eats; a carpenter built the house he lives in; a mechanic fixes the automobile he drives to work; a ski instructor gives him lessons on the hill—-and all of them are paid with the money the bomb maker earns making bombs. Since atomic bombs (so far) are only made by nations and not individuals, the money that pays the bomb maker comes from the taxes of ordinary citizens—you and me.
While building atomic bombs is an extreme example of the Buddha’s warning against bringing harm to others, it illustrates the interconnectedness of all things, including Right Livelihood. It shows that our personal spiritual efforts and accomplishments are entwined with the secular world at every level and that principles are living organisms that guide us in life; they are not written in stone; they are not pure in the Fundamentalist sense that, it seems to me, justifies and in truth inspires much of the violence and suffering in the world.
I’ll end with a perspective (with which I don’t necessarily agree, but which I hope will inspire some thought and discussion) from a Chinese Chan (Zen) master of the 20th century named Hsu Yun, about a man struggling to determine what is Right Livelihood?:

“…he cannot earn his living through ‘cheating.’ (Uh, Oh. That lets out used cars, aluminum siding, politics and TV evangelism.) The more he thinks about it, the shorter his list gets.
“And so he and the rest of us are all left wondering just what does Right Livelihood mean?
“Most religious commentators avoid answering such questions. And nobody can query a book.
“What is necessary, here, is common sense. Religious professionals who earn their living from the donations of working members of their congregations can afford to be angelically employed. Having no family responsibilities to anchor them to earthly reality, they can afford to float above such defilements. (And while we are on the subject, it is shocking to see how easily The Pure accept ‘dirty’ money. A whore can go from the crib to the pew and if her trick receipt is put in the collection box, it is welcomed. This, of course, is true of any religion. None is fussy about a donation’s provenance.)
“Therefore, the solution we apply to the problem of Right Livelihood is simple: A Buddhist may earn his living in any way that is honest and legal. He may sell guns… but not to someone he reasonably suspects is insane or who intends to use the gun for a criminal purpose. He may be a vegetarian and a cowboy… a shoemaker, a butcher, a soldier, a bartender, and, lest there be any doubt, he may even be the man who throws the switch on someone legally condemned to die. If he doesn’t approve of capital punishment, he doesn’t have to take the job.”

Of Troglodytes and Technology

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I glide into the eighth decade of life on earth and the seventh of climbing and riding up and skiing down its snow-covered hills and mountains with the intention to continue doing so more attentively than tentatively. Personal intention and attention are things we can control, or at least influence, unlike the weather and the snowpack and the intentions and attentions of our fellow skiers and other citizens of the planet. Like every person past the age of innocence I am continually reminded of both change and constancy in the things of life and in the intentions and attentions of its peoples, and the world of skiing and skiers is, it seems to me, a microcosm of the larger world.
Years ago, Bob Beattie, one of the best friends American skiing has ever had, passed on to me a universal truism that I always try to keep in mind, especially if a situation or premise seems opaque, contradictory or just feels wrong. He said, “The basics never change.” Those four words have helped me more than words can describe, though sometimes the basics seem buried in an avalanche of modernity and have to be dug out and revived in order to be more fully appreciated, and their corollaries certainly describe some constant verities and directions: “If it looks dangerous it probably is;” “Why would something appear too good to be true if it wasn’t?;” “If it feels bad, it is;” “If you wouldn’t do it if the camera weren’t there and you do it anyway, perhaps your lens is not as well-ground and polished as the camera’s;” and the Kris Kristofferson koan so well known to people of my generation and bent of mind: ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”
Such ruminations about the basics come naturally to one who counts himself basically fortunate to still be carving tracks seven decades down the slope, still contemplating and observing that in skiing as elsewhere sorting out the basics among the changes is a constant practice, as necessary as weeding and watering the garden. A list of recommended gear for the well-prepared, modern, back-country skier prompts some reflections and observations.
The modern back-country skier is encouraged to carry the following: backpack ($150), helmet ($100), skins ($100), saw ($20 to $50), probe ($30), stove ($50 to $150), cook kit ($15 to $60), water bottle ($15) (thermos ($30) optional), compass ($15 to $70), map ($20), whistle ($3), two-way radio ($35 to $100), phone (satellite if possible) ($50 a week to rent, $1500 to own), shovel ($30 to $70), Avalung ($130) or ABS Airbag ($800), snow study kit ($70 to $120), heart rate monitor ($60 to $650), first aid kit ($20 to $150), transceiver ($200 to $500), bivouac bag ($150), tool kit ($45 to $75), GPS ($300), goggles ($30 to $180), colored ribbon and orange chalk—for the helicopter in case of rescue—(ribbon and chalk are inexpensive but you can’t afford the helicopter), headlamp ($30 to $100), extra clothes, food and the knowledge and training of at least a Level I Avalanche Course $200 to $500) and a First Aid Wilderness Responder Course ($650) as well as the latest local avalanche advisory (prices included as caveat emptor for prospective backcountry skiers as well as caveat for those ‘earn your turns’ back to the basics Brahmins who sniff at the effete, less organic, lift-riding, alpine skier elitists who generally have far fewer avalanche concerns). These and other things are used in one of the three categories of avalanche gear: avalanche avoidance, avalanche survival and search and rescue.
These items and the admonition “be prepared to spend the night out” are among the modern prerequisites for a day trip into the local mountains. For an overnight tour or longer a tent, pad, sleeping bag and more food need to be added. The majority of the items mentioned are tools of security, not toys of recreation. The life of skiing is recreation, and while back country skiing may well be among the most dangerous of outdoor activities (including climbing, hang gliding and BASE jumping), the question arises: at what point do the anxieties of security diminish/destroy/deny the pleasures of recreation? The solo ski mountaineer is an anomaly in today’s backcountry in some measure because the soloist cannot rely on or, really, even consider technology as useful in a crisis, and yet for some the solo experience of the backcountry is the best recreation of all. The expansion of the possible in skiing big lines, steeper slopes and riskier situations has gone hand-in-hand with the technology of security. (It also goes hand in hand with the democratization of abilities that the technology of wider skis and stiffer boots has introduced to skiing.) It seems to me that both metaphorically and experientially the combined physical and psychic weight of all that security both changes and interferes with the joy and freedom of a well executed turn. I have already mentioned that skiing is a microcosm of our world.
It is true that the only sure way to stay out of an avalanche is to ski slopes less than 30 degree steepness, and that gets old and tame and not very exciting. It is (equally?) true as well that having and using all the most modern avalanche technology and scientific knowledge and analysis does not guarantee that the slope analyzed as safe will not slide. There are no guarantees, only risk assessment.
Two recent conversations are relevant. I was describing to a highly experienced and competent back-country skier an incident in Switzerland nearly 40 years ago when I shut down a film shoot involving the day’s work for 10 people simply because I didn’t like the look of the bowl we were set up to ski which slid on its own two days later, substantiating my sense of its instability. It was a huge slide. My friend said, “Didn’t you dig a pit?” I replied, “No. We didn’t know about the science of digging pits to understand avalanche danger.” What I didn’t say to my friend, for whom the techniques and technology of back country security are intrinsic to the experience, is that had we known such things and had the shovels to dig a pit the results might have confused more than clarified what was, for me, a straight forward issue. Pits are a treasure of useful information for the knowledgeable digger, but spatial variability in the snowpack is as real as the differences between every snowflake that has ever fallen or ever will. If we had dug a pit and the results showed stability there would have been enormous peer and professional pressure to keep the show going, to ski the slope and get the shot. While peer approval confers its own kind of security, it is basically as riven with a sort of spatial variability that makes the most trembling snowpack look like Gibraltar. Peer pressure, like the illusion of security in what is in essence a dangerous activity, tends to distract both mind and heart from the basics of survival. Before continuing, I wish to make it clear that this in no way is a call to not dig pits, study the daily avalanche reports, carry the tools of rescue or acquire as much knowledge as possible about the proper use of those tools and the contingencies of disaster, all of which have and will continue to save people’s lives in the back country. It is only to point out that they change the back country skiing experience in more ways than extra weight and expense. For some people they tend to make risk assessment a technological issue and instill an unwarranted confidence that, it can be argued, costs as many (or more) lives than it saves.
I mean, a great deal of backcountry skiing was accomplished before snow science, transceivers and the other gear was developed and used, and, while modern skiing in all ways is of a far higher standard with a greater range of possibilities it is worth questioning whether personal skills of survival are being replaced by technological fixes of security. It is an issue that I think deserves more attention than it gets. One leading avalanche professional commented on the subject, “I’m the sort to embrace technology to give me an edge. Having an edge is all it takes to stay alive sometimes.” The question is this: does embracing technology both give an edge and tend to push one over it?
Of the three categories of avalanche gear, the first—avoidance—is by far the most significant, important and useful. I know many people who have survived avalanches unscathed, a few who have survived with varying levels of damage, and all too many who did not survive. That said, in my view the only attitude and intention to take into the back country is that if you are caught in an avalanche you are completely fucked. Fucked. Fucked. Fucked. Using the gear in and of all three avalanche technology categories requires proper use of human faculties prior to and with at least as much proficiency as with the technology. At the (considerable) risk of appearing to indulge in what a devoutly Christian ski mountaineer in a decidedly un-Christian (or, at least, un-Christ-like) comment about a piece I wrote a few years ago about other changes in our world of mountains as another “troglodytian rant,” there is, is seems to me, a tendency among devotees of the technological to relegate to Purgatory or even lower realms the pure, organic, Caveman’s, basic judgment of the kind that knows in the bone that security and survival are not the same thing. The security of wearing a transceiver in an avalanche is insurance that one’s companions will be able to find and dig out the transceiver, but it does not mean that what the transceiver is attached to will survive.
Not long ago I was talking with a friend who is one of America’s best avalanche authorities. I had been expressing my admitted lack of knowledge tinged with skepticism about the relative merits of the Avalung and, more important, the subtle shift in a sense of security and thinking about the consequences of risk its bearer will take into the mountains. I know that a (very) few skiers have survived avalanches because they had one, but I was questioning the premise that most skiers caught in an avalanche will have the time, presence of mind and ability to grab the air tube, place it in his or her mouth and keep it there while the avalanche runs its bumpy course and finally buries the Avalung equipped skier. My friend agreed that it could be a problem but that a skier about to ski a slope that might slide will have the mouthpiece handy in case it becomes necessary. My friend prefers the ABS airbag system that will help keep the avalanched skier or at least the airbag on the surface, partly because the ABS rip cord is more accessible and easier to engage than the Avalung mouthpiece. An avalanche pro I know says  “…almost every time I put the Avalung mouthpiece in at the top of a run I hear a voice: ‘Can’t hurt. Could help a lot.’”
I agree.
However, as I carve tracks into the eighth decade I hope to continue my basic Troglodyte ways of never skiing a slope that I even suspect might slide, whether skiing alone or with a partner or partners. And though I make sure my backcountry partners carry shovels and know how to use their transceivers, I shy away from seeking a security I do not feel in a bag of air or a mouthpiece that any avalanche worth a collapsing snow crystal might rip out of my mouth as quickly, easily and irrevocably as, say, the SEC’s most recent failure to adhere and pay attention to the basics and protect the American economy.

A True Hero of the Old West

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“We have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.” Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Skiing is as crucial to the vitality of many mountain towns of the modern west as, say, mining and logging and ranching once were and, in some places, still are. It is arguable whether the cattle, mining and logging barons (some of them robbers, some not), and the gunmen who did their bidding, of the west’s 19th and early 20th centuries could be viewed as heroes, but they certainly were powerful icons of undisputed influence who have, for the most part, left environmental and therefore social devastation in their clear-cut, open-pit, over-grazed, violent wake. Skiing, however, has some genuine heroes who, as Joseph Campbell points out, have left a thread to guide us to the center of our own existence where it is possible to see more clearly what we do and why and what it might mean.
Each year there are more and more skiers venturing into the backcountry. They seek different rewards—nature, solitude, untracked skiing, a relief from the congestion, pretension and effortless convenience of modern ski resorts and a better workout than can be found on their lifts, and adventure with consequences for lapses in judgment, knowledge or respect—traveling out to find “the center of our own existence.”
And in western America the first great hero of backcountry skiing must surely be the Norwegian immigrant known as Snowshoe Thompson. Born Jon Torsteinson-Rue (later changed to John A. Thompson) April 30, 1827 in a small town in the Telemark region of Norway he came to America at age 10, living in Illinois, Missouri, Iowa and Wisconsin before moving to Placerville, California in 1851 to join the gold rush. In 1855 he saw an ad in the Sacramento Union newspaper: “People lost to the world; Uncle Sam needs a mail carrier” to carry mail from Placerville east across the snow of wintertime in the Sierra Nevada to Mormon Station, Utah which later became Genoa, Nevada.
Like most Norwegians of Telemark he had learned to ski as a child and brought those skills to the New World. He was the only applicant for the mail job, and in January 1856 a crowd in Placerville watched him leave on his first 90 mile journey across the Sierra. His homemade skis (called ‘snowshoes’, thus the nickname) were 10 feet long, made of oak and weighed 25 pounds, though in later years he got them down to about 9’4” and a bit lighter. Few in the crowd thought he would make it, but five days later he returned, having delivered the mail going east and bringing back the mail going west. Thus began the career of a true hero of the old west, the father of California skiing, and a truly legendary postman.
Two to four times a month for the next 20 winters Thompson made the trip, 3 days east, 2 days coming back west, covering between 25 and 40 miles a day. Because his sack of mail weighed between 60 and 100 pounds he carried minimal personal equipment: a few crackers, some bread and dried meat to eat; a heavy Mackinaw and a wide rimmed hat for shelter and sleep. He didn’t use a compass and once said, “There is no danger of getting lost in a narrow range of mountains like the Sierra, if a man has his wits about him.” Every modern day backcountry skier—with lightweight tent and sleeping bag and insulated mattress, compact stove, skis, boots, poles, gloves and layered system of clothing weighing less that one of Thompson’s skis, GPS, cell phone, transceiver, shovel and probe—can appreciate the simplicity and austerity of Snowshoe’s tours across the Sierra.
The Sacramento Union wrote of Thompson, “His reliability, kindness and physical prowess quickly earned the admiration and respect of the Sierra residents.”
He was never paid for his efforts and service. He continued to do it for reasons that are speculative; but every skier can appreciate that skiing is something other than the economics of skiing, especially in the backcountry. Ron Watters wrote of Thompson, paraphrasing Dan DeQuille “The mountains were his sanctuary, and storms were just another part of its raw beauty. On his skis, he could freely move across the snow covered landscape. The feeling of freedom must have been never more real to Thompson than when gliding downhill, holding his balance pole out in front of him, dipping it one direction and then the other, his wide-brimmed hat flapping in the wind and the Sierras spread out in front of him. At times like that, he must have felt like a soaring eagle.”
And S.A. Kinsey, the postmaster of Genoa, where Thompson is buried, said, “Most remarkable man I ever knew, that Snowshoe Thompson. He must be made of iron. Besides, he never thinks of himself, but he’d give his last breath for anyone else—even a total stranger.” A true hero of the old west, at the center of our own existence.

Water, water………where?

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Most of the living tissue of every human being is composed of water, constituting about 92 percent of blood plasma, 80 percent of muscle tissue, and 60 percent of red blood cells and over half of most other tissues. Water is an important component of the tissues of most living things. This (in its unpolluted, natural state) odorless, tasteless, transparent substance is the world’s most familiar and abundant liquid, covering about 70 percent of the surface of the earth, some of it in solid form (ice). In varying amounts it exists as well in the atmosphere. Water is the lifeblood of planet earth.
Put another way: as goes water, so goes life on earth. Water is the ultimate indicator.
Forty five years ago all indications were that the water of the U.S. wasn’t doing too well. Some people knew that, but many more were too busy or detached to know it, or, perhaps, too invested in the status quo of industrial pollution to want to know. It took something dramatic to get the country’s attention. On June 22, 1969, a train on a bridge above the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio dropped a few sparks into the waters of that river which were so polluted with industrial wastes that these sparks caught them on fire. Flames roared fifty feet into the air from these waters, and the images from this event were covered in the national media. Even the busy, the detached and the overly invested could not ignore the wrongness of the waters of life on fire. Rivers are supposed to nurture life, not burn it. Water is for putting out fires, not fueling them.
The public indignation over the Cuyahoga River fire eventually led to legislation known as the Clean Water Act, one of the most successful environmental laws in American history. It was enacted in October 1972 in a sadly rare example of the U.S. Congress exhibiting more courage than callowness by overriding Richard Nixon’s veto. At the time only 30 to 40 percent of America’s rivers, lakes and coastal waters were considered safe for fishing or swimming. Thanks to the Clean Water Act of 1972, today nearly 60 percent of the country’s waters are considered safe.
While having 60 percent of the waters of life safe to swim in and fish from is better than 30 percent, it still means that at least 40 percent of the waters of America are dangerously polluted. 40 percent of our country’s lifeblood is toxic. Whether this number is acceptable can be viewed, I suppose, as a personal decision except for those persons adversely affected by other people’s decisions; but with the energy industry’s assault on environmental regulations in full swing and escalating every day that percentage will climb. We are in the process of reverting back to the water quality standards of 50 years ago, and each of us is mostly composed of water. The implications are obvious.
Water is the ultimate indicator.
Industry is the largest polluter, but not the only one. Many communities discharge untreated or only partially treated sewage into waterways, threatening themselves and their neighbors and all life downstream. Thorough treatment of sewage destroys most disease-causing bacteria, but does not take care of viruses and viral illnesses. Most sewage treatment does not remove phosphorus compounds from detergents which cause eutrophication of lakes of ponds. That is, it kills them.
Other contributors to the mix of undrinkable, unfishable, unusable waters include runoff from highways with oil and lead from automobile exhausts, construction site sediments, acids and radioactive wastes from mining operations, pesticide and fertilizer residues and animal wastes from farms, feedlots, dairies and hog factories. Almost all water pollutants are hazardous to all life forms, including humans. Sodium is implicated in cardiovascular disease, nitrates in blood disorders. Mercury and lead are known to cause nervous disorders. Many contaminants are carcinogens. Polychlorinated biphenyl compounds (PCBs), used in lubricants and many kinds of plastics and adhesives, cause liver and nerve damage, skin eruptions, vomiting, fever, diarrhea and fetal abnormalities. PCBs and DDT, banned in the U.S. since the same year the Clean Water Act was enacted but still manufactured in several other countries, are widespread in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Dysentery, salmonella and hepatitis are just three of the maladies transmitted by sewage in drinking and bathing water.
Once pollutants reach underground water tables it is somewhere between very difficult to impossible to correct, and it spreads over wide areas.
In western America we have historically tended to take water for granted since we had an abundance of it nearby that was safe for drinking, bathing and fishing. And if water wasn’t handy we could always build a few dams, dig a few canals, buy a few water rights and politicians from the next state over and get on with business as usual which is often confused or conflated with progress.
But that dynamic and reality has changed, even if human expectations have not.
If history is any indication, it will take another Cuyahoga River fire type of incident to shake the citizenry out of its lethargy about the state of its waters. In the meantime, and, in fact, in all times, each and all of us affect the state of our rivers and streams and lakes and oceans, and we are responsible for them. That’s because we are responsible for the lifestyles we lead, the cars we drive, the products we buy, the companies and industries we support, the food we eat and our knowledge of where it comes from, and, of course, for the people we elect to manage our government according to the dictates of the industries that pay for their campaigns. These things affect the quality of the waters of life, and water is the ultimate indicator.
And what water indicates is a big, big, fracking problem, brothers and sister, fellow inhabitants of planet earth. What are we going to do about it?

Chief Seattle’s Speech

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“Teach your children what we have taught our children — that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.” ……We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his fathers’ graves behind and he does not care. His fathers’ graves and his children’s birthright are forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only desert…… What is man without the beasts? If the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected.

These well known words are attributed to Chief Seattle, the great leader of the indigenous Suquamish people of what is now Washington State, part of a letter written to President Franklin Pierce in 1854 and a speech given in 1855 lamenting the end of his people’s traditional way of life with the arrival of the voracious and environmentally insensitive European. They are words of obvious wisdom from the head of a native people who lived on the land thousands of years before the late arriving white man took it over. Among environmentalists they are words to live and create land use policy by. They have the ring of deep truth, and, like many who believe in deep ecology, environmental integrity, large areas of wilderness, free running streams free of cow manure and urine, and national parks without snowmobiles, I am among those who like the romantic imagery of these words coming from a noble chief of an American Indian tribe.

The problem, as most people familiar with Chief Seattle’s speech know by now, is that Chief Seattle never spoke, much less wrote, those words.

For fans of Chief Seattle’s speech that is a big problem.

For critics of Chief Seattle’s speech and its underlying meanings, most of whom are in logging, ranching, farming, mining, snowmobiles, ORVs, SUVs and land development and prone to romanticize the lives of modern Americans, it is evidence of a hoax and the fraudulent premises of environmentalism.

Both fans and critics of the supposed words of Chief Seattle are a bit off base. While Native Americans certainly kept far better care of the land we live on and from than do modern Americans, the environmental movement does them a disservice to romanticize their lives and put them on an ecological pedestal from which they will fall or be pulled down by foes of environmental ethics. While critics of Chief’s Seattle’s bogus speech/letter are correct in denouncing its inauthentic attribution, they are disingenuous to pass over the genuine wisdom in the words. Though the Chief never wrote the President, he did give two speeches in 1855 at the Port Elliott Treaty negotiations. A Dr. Henry Smith, a physician, took notes at those speeches which he translated into English and published as a single speech of Chief Seattle in the Seattle Sunday Star of October 29, 1879. No one knows how accurate Dr. Smith’s rendition of the Chief’s words is, but it is reasonable to assume that Smith came as close as he could. We do know that Chief Seattle was a great leader of his people who tried to live peacefully with the white man and in harmony with the world, though in younger days he had been a fierce and intelligent warrior for his tribe. In 1969, William Arrowsmith rewrote Smith’s version into more modern English, but the essential content of the speech was unchanged. A couple of years later, a screenwriter named Ted Perry asked Arrowsmith’s permission to use his version of the speech in a film script. It was a film designed to raise people’s awareness of the earth’s ecology. Perry correctly called the speech he wrote a fiction, but the film producers did not credit Perry for the writing of Chief Seattle’s speech, thus beginning a huge misunderstanding that persists today.

Perry’s fictional speech is what we know today as Chief Seattle’s speech. I have seen it printed as “Chief Seattle’s Statement on Ecology.” Even though it’s fiction, it’s a valid statement and well worth studying and incorporating into an environmental ethic for America. Just because Chief Seattle didn’t say it doesn’t mean the speech attributed to him isn’t full of wisdom and deep truths.

Ted Perry’s statement on ecology, with credit given to William Arrowsmith, Henry Smith and Chief Seattle, is a beautiful and profound (and practical) expression of a workable environmental ethic. It should be required reading for every citizen. Just these few words—-“….the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth,” is an environmental ethic to live by.