Author Archives: dorworth

NOTES OF AN OLD SKI BUM

Posted on by
1

 Bum
Noun
1. A person who avoids work and sponges on others; loafer; idler.
2. A tramp, hobo, or derelict.
3.Informal. An enthusiast of a specific sport or recreational activity, especially one who gives it priority over work, family life, etc.: a ski bum; a tennis bum.

“When you are enthusiastic about what you do, you feel this positive energy. It’s very simple.”
Paulo Coelho

Informal is an apt description of most people I would consider ski bums. Their lives, at least while on skis and in many but not all cases off, are filled with enthusiasm, simplicity and positive energy. Except for a few fortunate trust-fund recipients, all the ski bums I know or know of work at least as much as their more formal, mainstream non-or even anti-ski bum brethren who do not ski as often as they might like. No ski bum is accurately portrayed with the more derogatory (formal?) definition of ‘bum’.
Au contraire.
The life of a ski bum both on the mountain and off is filled with effort and there is neither time nor space for loafing, idling or hopping trains, though in truth there are a few derelicts in the ranks. While the term ‘ski bum’ is of recent origin, it is inconceivable that the enthusiast who gave skiing priority over many other aspects of life has not existed since the invention of the ski sometime around 5000 BC. In modern ski culture there seems to be a perception that the ski bum is a recent phenomenon, but this is not true. In North America the first high profile ski bum was Snowshoe Thompson (1827-1876), though there were surely others. From 1856 to 1876 Thompson carried mail across the snowbound Sierra Nevada in winter on his homemade 10 foot long 25 pound oak skis. He made the 90 miles from Placerville, California to Genoa (then called Mormon Station), Nevada in 3 days and the return in 2 days. He made the journey 2 to 4 times a month for 20 years and was never paid for his efforts. Every ski bum reading this can relate to Snowshoe’s enthusiasm, positive energy and the simplicity of his solitary life in the mountains between Placerville and Genoa.
So, by the time I was old enough to determine my own priorities the lifestyle of the ski bum was a well established if unacknowledged tradition in North American skiing, and so it remains. In 1957 Ron Funk, Tony Perry and I lived together in one small room of a residential home in Aspen while we trained for alpine ski racing. I don’t remember the rent, but somehow $25 a month each sounds right. One of our (and others) money saving strategies involved daily lift tickets which cost around $10. At that time in Aspen lift tickets were attached to the ski pant zipper by a small, metal, detachable keychain. One of our group would buy a ticket each morning, attach it to the pant zipper, get on the lift, detach the ticket, insert it in a spare glove tucked inside the parka and drop the glove to a waiting fellow ski racer at the first lift tower who would then repeat the process. And repeat. It required a lot of effort, attention to detail, inconvenience and imagination to be a ski racing ski bum in the 1950s. We traveled together in full cars to share gas expenses and sometimes drove all night between races to save the cost of a bed. As I wrote in “Night Driving” about a 1959 (when gasoline sold for 25 cents a gallon) nonstop trip from upstate New York to Reno with Don Brooks, Redmond Wilcox, Gardner Smith and Renee Cox (later Gorsuch): “At around two in the morning we pulled up to the back entrance of my parents’ tiny Reno apartment. We had been on the road for sixty-five hours. We unloaded about twenty pairs of skis from the rack and stored them in a corner of the living room. My fellow passengers immediately crashed on the floor in sleeping bags, but my fatigue wouldn’t let me sleep. I showered, put on clean clothes and took a refreshing walk along the Truckee River. When I got back, I joined my mates on the floor, and I slept the sleep of colored dreams. In the morning I loaned Brooks enough money for a bus ride to Portland and saw him off. A week later he returned my money, paying me from his first check. Gardner hung around a couple of days, and when Reno made him nervous, he moved on down the line. Red stayed a bit longer and then just disappeared one day, driving off into the Northwest (I think) in his trusty black Oldsmobile. I got a job on a newspaper in Fallon, commuting 120 miles a day six days a week. Richard Nixon was going to try for the presidency in a year. It was a long summer.”
By the early 1960s Sun Valley had become my ski bum home. At that time Sun Valley was still owned by Union Pacific Railroad and many jobs within the company included room, board, a lift pass, some money for partying and other necessities and time to ski several hours a day. As a ski racer with friends in management I had the good fortune of some advantages, and I was able to work as a bus boy, pizza cook and bartender, prioritized according to training and ski racing schedules. One of my roommates in the Sun Valley dorms was the irrepressible Bobbie Burns who was in the process of revolutionizing freestyle skiing with his flamboyance, enthusiasm, energy and unbelievable skiing skills. Another year I lived for free with Funk in the small Ketchum home he owned in those days. One year Mike Brunetto and I rented a two bedroom basement apartment in Ketchum, though we both worked for Sun Valley, so we could have more personal space, privacy and comfort than the dorms allowed in those times between skiing and working. Mike later became one of the most respected ski designers and manufacturers (as did Burns) in the business. He worked for Head, Dura-Fiber, Lynx, The Ski and K2 before starting his own ski companies, RD and then Wolf Ski which were made in Sun Valley. Wolf Ski business hours were 7:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. and from 2:30 p.m. until whenever the day’s work was done in order that the staff, including Brunetto, could ski.
In 1963 I took a job in La Parva, Chile as a ski instructor (and which taught me to teach skiing), included round trip transportation from the U.S., a few dollars and time off to train and join Funk and C.B.Vaughan for the speed runs in Portillo.
In 1964 I had the opportunity, which included a free plane ticket, to go to Europe and race for a month. I took it and at the end of the month decided I wanted to stay in Europe. I cashed in the return portion of the plane ticket and spent more than a year skiing and racing in Europe, working in the Kneissl ski factory in Austria, working for a spedition (moving company) in Germany and teaching skiing on my own in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Italy.
When ski racing ended for me in 1965 I returned to America and took my first real job as a ski coach in Heavenly. For most of the next 30 years I earned much of my living coaching and teaching skiing (and writing about it, of course). My enthusiasm for skiing has never waned and I still manage between 100 and 140 days a year on skis, some of them in the backcountry. The purpose of my priorities was always to stay on skis. That’s what ski bums do, stay on their skis.
It’s very simple.

 

DHARMA TALK: Which comes first, spiritual practice or spiritual experience?

Posted on by
2

It is a chicken/egg question, but one worth asking because it provides insight into the path of each individual practitioner. It is, in my view, a private question that may or may not have a clear, definitive answer and which the individual may or may not choose to share with others. In this talk I choose to share some of my answer with you. Both question and answer will lead to further questions (and answers) and will inform and illuminate each person’s practice.

For instance, is watching a spectacular sunrise a spiritual experience? Why? Is being taken to church against your will as a child spiritual practice? Why?

What has led so many of us, whose entire western culture spiritual tradition is Judeo-Christian based, to the spiritual practice of Buddhism? Spirituality is an inherent aspect of every human being, but each person’s concept of spirituality, spiritual practice and spiritual experience is different.

Religion was not part of my upbringing. My father was an atheist, my mother an agnostic who was baptized a Catholic on her deathbed, though so far as I know she never set foot in a church except to attend weddings and funerals. My religion was the outdoors, but as an English major I studied several religious traditions from a literary perspective and my college advisor taught a great course entitled “The Bible as Literature” which I did not take because at the time I associated it with the Elmer Gantry, evangelical type of hucksterism.

Fortunately the ‘60s happened, and like many others I embraced psychedelics and the consciousness expanding ideas of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) as if they were the path and guides to Nirvana. They weren’t, but they were a first step to spiritual experience and I am eternally grateful to them. For a few years after that introduction to spiritual experience I studied the ideas of Meher Baba and then practiced Transcendental Meditation for a couple of years before becoming, spiritually speaking, aimless, rootless and disconnected.

Though I read many books about spiritual matters and was particularly interested in Buddhism from an intellectual perspective, for all those years after the ‘60s I didn’t have a practice until I became a Zen student and took my vows of refuge in Buddhism through the Jukai ceremony in 1988. When I took those vows I was acutely aware that an experience I had in China eight years earlier, one I can only call spiritual, had directly led me to Jukai.

In one of my old journals from that time I wrote about that experience.

From my journal: “June 30, 1980. Peking (Beijing), China….Each day here has magic in it. Yesterday at the Temple of the Azure Clouds something very strange and special happened. The Hall of the Luo Han has a group of 508 five foot statues made of gilded wood. Each is a different face and character, and I think but do not know for sure that each represents a different aspect of Buddha nature. As soon as I went in there I felt something beginning to happen and as I walked around in there I found myself separating from the others. I wanted to be alone, for my mind and awareness was shifting into that plane I sometimes reach in special moments. Difficult to describe that place, but it’s something like being stoned on a heavy dose of acid, having x-ray vision into time. It started with one of the statues who caught my eye, and the eye that caught mine was not dead, not wood, not paint. It contained the living spirit and it did not frighten me. And then as I looked around all the statues began to radiate the soft gold color of holiness. The whole room was alive. Each statue has its own spirit and living presence and message and reason, and yet they are all one and the same. I was filled with energy and deep and abiding peace. I was home. I could have stayed there forever, except that is not my path in this life. I walked the aisles and enjoyed my vision and learned all I could and only left when I felt I might be hanging up my mates. I would like to go there again in my life. It is a place of power.”

So, for me, I can say with certainty that spiritual experience comes before spiritual practice.

KIM SCHMITZ

Posted on by
1

The first noble truth of Buddhism is that life is suffering. By that measure, as well as others less agonizing — including high adventure, the burning fires of passion as well as the healing waters of compassion, humility, kindness and seeking Kim Schmitz, a longtime Buddhist, lived life to its limits and, sometimes, a bit over.

Schmitz, who was born June 26, 1946, in Oakland, California and died September 19, 2016 in northern Idaho spent most of his early life in Portland, Oregon.

He was one of the finest climbers in history. After graduating from Lincoln High School he spent a couple of semesters at the University of Oregon in Eugene. But though he was a voracious reader with a keen intellect and curiosity about the world, classrooms and academia were too confining for Kim Schmitz. He lived to climb and ski in the classic tradition of mountaineers for whom mountains are the defining relationship of their lives.

By the time he was a teenager he had climbed Canada’s Mount Robson and Mount Waddington and gained a reputation for first ascents on some of the hardest technical climbing routes of the Northwest. He climbed a lot at Smith Rocks in Oregon.

“Without rival, Kim Schmitz emerged as the top all-around Smith climber during the first half of the ’60s,” guidebook author Alan Watts opined,

Schmitz and climbing partner Jim Madsen arrived in Yosemite in the mid ’60s and quickly raised the local standards of the valley’s big wall and hard free climbing. Schmitz never lived full time in the Northwest again, spending his summers climbing in Yosemite and winters working as a ski patrolman in Squaw Valley. After his friend Madsen was killed rappelling off the end of his rope on El Capitan in October 1968, Schmitz teamed up with Yosemite climbing icon Jim Bridwell and, among many other things, pioneered new routes on both El Capitan and Half Dome.

By the 1970s Schmitz was climbing and skiing in Asia. His 1977 first ascent of Pakistan’s 20,623-foot Great Trango Tower in the Karakoram range, a 4,300-foot wall, was the first big wall, hard technical climb in a high-altitude alpine setting and became know as “the biggest big wall.” In 1979 Schmitz returned to the Karakorum to be the first to climb 20,043-foot Uli Biaho Tower, 34 pitches of difficult technical climbing that took 12 days and became the first Grade VII climb in the world.

In 1980 Kim joined trip organizer Galen Rowell, Ned Gillette and Dan Asay for a nearly 300-mile ski tour called the American Karakoram Traverse Expedition across northern Pakistan. The trip started March 27 and ended May 8, and each man’s pack weighed approximately 120 pounds. Toward the end of the tour food ran low, their energies followed, and their pace had slowed from 4 miles an hour to 4 miles a day. Schmitz devised a solution that Rowell described in a fine essay about the trip: “Kim was our medical officer. Although not a doctor, he had a strongly developed historical sense of medication for mountaineering. He knew of a drug that had been developed precisely for this purpose by native people who found it necessary to carry tremendous loads at high elevations with low caloric intakes. Small amounts of this extract from a South American leaf were at one time the main active ingredient of the most successful multinational soft drink until the potential for abuse made it illegal. Propitiously, Kim had been able to purchase an ounce of this material at the Khyber Pass to add to our medical kit.”

In October of that year Schmitz was part of an American expedition to 24,790-foot Minya Konka, the tallest mountain in China’s Sichuan Province. High on the mountain Schmitz was roped up with Yvon Chouinard, Rick Ridgeway and Jonathan Wright when an avalanche took them on a 2,000-vertical-foot ride. The accident killed Wright, broke Schmitz’s back and some ribs and pummeled Chouinard and Ridgeway without seriously injuring them. The broken back was the beginning of the decline of Schmitz’s climbing career.

By then Schmitz was a Jackson Hole resident for much of the year, making his living guiding for Exum Mountain Guides, skiing in winter and climbing as much and wherever possible. Al Read, longtime owner and president of Exum and leader of the Minya Konka expedition, who invited Schmitz to work for Exum, knew him for most of his life and recalls him as “an imposing species of human who was intimidating because of his goodness, his physical presence and his unbelievable strength and skill in the mountains. Just knowing Kim made me a better man.”

On Aug. 4, 1983, while guiding a client on the Jensen Ridge of Symmetry Spire in the Tetons, Schmitz fell 80 feet, landing feet first on a ledge, shattering both legs in numerous compound fractures and sustaining a major head laceration. It is safe to say that Schmitz never experienced a pain-free moment from that time to the end of his life 33 years later.

“I was amazed on Minya Konka at how strong Kim was climbing at altitude, and then after the avalanche, at how stoic he was,” Chouinard said. “He had to ride a horse off the mountain with a broken back. After his accident on Symmetry Spire I visited him in the hospital. Kim pulled back the covers on his bed to show me his legs. The sight of them caused me to pass out on the spot.”

Schmitz endured numerous major surgeries over the years as a consequence of that fall and, later, intestinal cancer. Those who knew him best considered his return to climbing, guiding, skiing and as normal a life as one can have in constant pain, both miraculous and a testament to his inner strength (and stubbornness) as a human being.

By the time he got serious about zen practice, he was 44, and his glory days as a climber had ended. His leg injuries made it impossible to sit either cross-legged or kneeling, but he didn’t want to get up on a chair, so he usually did zazen with both legs straight out in front of him.

In the early ’90s Schmitz joined Jack Turner, Thekla von Hagke, Jeff Foott, Susan Stone, Rod Dornan and others in the Jackson Hole community in founding the Cold Mountain Zendo.

Schmitz’s life and his practice were complicated by repeated health challenges: numerous hospitalizations and surgeries, ongoing pain, recurring abuse of alcohol and painkillers, DUI convictions and incarceration and losing his job at Exum. The loss of his job also meant financial problems and forfeiting his place in the world literally (his cabin) and figuratively (his identity as a climbing guide).

Schmitz was preceded in death by his father, Alfred “Alla,” who immigrated to the U.S. from Germany in 1929 and was himself a climber and outdoorsman and a leader of Sierra Club and Mountain Travel trips on which he introduced Kim as a boy to his destiny. Kim’s mother, Virginia “Ginny,” and his sister, Dede, also passed before him. He never married and had no immediate family, but he leaves a large extended family of friends and cohorts, none more devoted than Dr. Bruce Hayse, Jim Williams, Andy Carson and Thekla von Hagke.

 

kinds of winter

Posted on by
1

KINDS OF WINTER
by
Dave Olesen
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
$19.99

Dave Olesen is a thoughtful, articulate adventurer who closely notes the details of an extraordinary existence in which the mundane chores of daily life entail severe consequences for inattention, keeps track of his experiences and observations in journals which he turns into books to share with fortunate readers. His latest book “Kinds of Winter” is, to sum up, beautiful. Olesen lives with his wife and two children, forty three huskies and a ninety year old Danish sailboat on a remote homestead by Great Slave Lake next to the Hoarfrost River in Canada’s Northwest Territories where average winter nighttime temperatures are below -20F and there are five hours of daylight in December. He works as a bush pilot and guide and for 15 years was a competitive dog musher, finishing the grueling Iditarod Trail Sled dog Race eight times. That’s a long way from the small Illinois town where he grew up, but in 1987, armed with B.A. degree in Humanities and Northern Studies, fled to the north to pursue a life that inspired Gary Snyder to write of Olesen: “I salute this man and his passion, and his family for giving him space to explore it. An old Inupiaq Eskimo once said to me as I set out in a canoe on a September river, ‘Don’t have any adventures.’”
But the daily challenges of life at Olesen’s home are a backdrop and nutritious foundation for the kinds of winter he seeks and discovers when he and his teams of sled dogs really do go looking for adventure. He explains it thus: “Once a year for four consecutive winters I hooked up a team of dogs and set out on long trips away from our homeland, traveling toward one of the cardinal points of the compass: south in 2002, east in 2003, north in 2004, and finally west in 2005. Having gone out, I turned home again. It was as simple as that.” Yes, as simple as a man alone with his team of dogs going south for 155 miles, east 380 miles, north 210 miles and west 520 miles through the kinds of winter that keep the Northwest Territories sparsely populated.
The adventure alone makes “Kinds of Winter” worth the read, but Olesen is no chest-thumping conqueror of the extreme compiling a resume of achievement for the reader to admire. Olesen, like his literary/spiritual predecessors Muir, Thoreau, Leopold, Abbey and Snyder is reminding himself and the reader of Muir’s admonition: “Keep close to Nature’s heart…and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”
Every human being can, with a bit of intentional effort and spirit of adventure, break clear away, once in awhile, and wash the spirit clean. But there are very few who do so who also have the literary skills and discipline combined with the human and environmental insight to realize and write: “Time. It is all nice and fuzzy that: ‘Go out in the wilderness and just let Time flow’ or ‘let Time have no meaning’ stuff, but in traveling between supply caches, or climbing a mountain, or paddling a long river in a short summer, Time takes on fundamental importance—it cannot be ignored. It is the approach of dusk at day’s end, the looming onset of winter in mid-September, the final sack of feed rationed out to a hungry team. Like it or not, folks, the clock is ticking, even ‘way out here’ in la-la land, Today, though, sitting just 75 miles from home, I am long on time. I can rest, and walk, and watch the day go by. Muir and Thoreau would be happy for me.”
We should all be happy for Dave Olesen who has the skills, discipline and insight to make every reader happy he and she took the time from the ticking clock to read “Kinds of Winter.”

THE ESSENTIAL IMPORTANCE OF ZAZEN

Posted on by
1

“To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things. To be enlightened by all things is to remove the barriers between one’s self and others.”

Dogen Zenji, 13th century

Dogen is the founder of Soto Zen and he considered zazen to be the heart of the practice of Buddhism. It is definitely the heart of Soto Zen practice, and Zen Buddhists are sometimes known as the “meditation Buddhists.” Without going into the history of Buddhism, when Dogen returned to Japan from his studies in China the first thing he wrote was the Fukanzazengi, the universal recommendation for the practice of zazen. That is, zazen is not just for monks; it is for all people, men and women, old and young, rich and poor. In referring to zazen, Dōgen is referring specifically to shikantaza roughly translatable as “nothing but precisely sitting”, which is a kind of sitting meditation in which the meditator sits “in a state of brightly alert attention that is free of thoughts, directed to no object, and attached to no particular content.”

The importance Dogen attached to zazen is encapsulated in these quotes from his writings: “Therefore even if only one person sits for a short time, because this zazen is one with all existence and completely permeates all time, it performs everlasting Buddha guidance within the inexhaustible dharma world in the past, present and future. Zazen is equally the same practice and same enlightenment for both the person sitting and all dharmas.”

And:

“You should know that even if all the Buddhas in the ten directions, as numerous as the sands of the Ganges River, together engage the full power of the Buddha wisdom, they could never reach the limit or measure or comprehension or virtue of one person’s zazen.”

In other words, zazen is where it’s at in the practice of Soto Zen Buddhism. It is at the heart of the study of the way and of the self. It brings together what sometimes seem to be the separate entities of the body, breath and mind into one reality. Since the body has a way of communicating outwardly to the world and inwardly to the self, the position of the body while sitting zazen has a lot to do with what happens to the breath and mind. There are very specific techniques of sitting zazen that are integral to Soto Zen tradition handed down from Dogen 800 years ago. Whether one sits zazen in a full lotus, half lotus, seiza position or in a chair, it is crucial that the back is straight so that the diaphragm can move freely while breathing. In zazen we focus on the breath. Breath is life. Breath is the vital force, the central activity of our bodies, and mind and breath are one reality. When a person is agitated, breathing is agitated. When a person is nervous breathing is quick and shallow. When the mind is at rest the breath is deep, easy and effortless. Zazen gives the mind a rest from its incessant chatter, movement and attachment to the self.

One zazen instruction reads: “In the process of working with the breath, the thoughts that come up, for the most part, will be just noise, just random thoughts. Sometimes, however, when you’re in a crisis or involved in something important in your life, you’ll find that the thought, when you let it go, will recur. You let it go, but it comes back……Sometimes that needs to happen. Don’t treat it as a failure; treat it as another way to practice. Don’t use zazen to suppress thoughts or issues that need to come up…..Just be with the breath. Just be the breath. Let the breath breathe itself. That’s the beginning of the falling away of body and mind…..And it’s that power of concentration that ultimately leads to what we call samadhi, or single-pointedness of mind”

And it is there that one can begin to study the Way and study the self.

 

MATRIMONIAL MUSINGS

Posted on by
Reply

“Marriage is a gamble, let’s be honest.”
Yoko Ono

“A divorce is like an amputation; you survive it, but there’s less of you.”
Margaret Atwood

“’E.T.’ began with me trying to write a story about my parents’ divorce.”
Steven Spielberg

 

A marriage is frequently among the most happy, celebratory and festive of social gatherings, an event in which two people formally join their lives into one unit in which to live happily ever after. Wedding ceremonies, whether grandiose or humble, are infused with hope for the well being of those being wedded as well as for the larger society.

Every day in America approximately 5800 couples are married. That’s a lot of happiness, celebration, festivity and gatherings of clans and friends. Not surprisingly, most people love to talk about weddings and how happy the newlyweds look and act. Whether the ceremony involves the couple being married by a Justice of the Peace in a City Hall with a couple of strangers called in as witnesses, a ‘proper’ wedding in a church before a man of the cloth, a gathering of the tribe in a mountain meadow presided over by a relative or close friend or a lavish formal procedure costing hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) at a posh resort, marriage is big business.

As, of course, is divorce, but, not surprisingly, most people don’t love talking about divorces and how miserable recent divorcees look and, sometimes, act. Statistics reveal that every day in America approximately 2400 divorces take place. That’s an average of 100 an hour. Nearly 50 percent of all marriages in America end in divorce. 41 percent of first marriages end in divorce. 60 percent of second marriages end in divorce. 73 percent of third marriages end in divorce. After the third marriage, even statisticians no longer bother to keep track, turning away from Einstein’s observation that “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.” Einstein is best known for his theory of special relativity expressed as E=MC2, but before giving the world that description of itself he won the Nobel Prize for physics for his theory of general relativity. Despite his many outrageous accomplishments and his assurance that the world is comprehensible, so far as is known, he did not leave us with a comprehensible theory of marriage and divorce. Einstein was married twice and part of the agreement of divorcing his first wife was that he gave her all the money he received for winning the Nobel Prize for physics in 1921.

That is, divorce, too, is big business.

In all cultures and societies the rite of marriage is the culmination of the emotional/practical/legal obligations the two people involved intend (or at least are rolling the dice) to honor, enjoy, share and live happily ever after within. When it doesn’t work out, as it doesn’t about half the time, the rite of divorce is the culmination of a different set of emotional/practical/legal obligations, and we all know people who have been enriched by marriage and impoverished by divorce, and, of course, vice-versa. If Einstein had left us a formula it likely would show that it all balances out in the end.

GRIZZLY LESSONS FROM PEACOCK

Posted on by
2

 

Last year a man was killed and partially eaten by a grizzly in Yellowstone. That same year an American dentist, a member of the trophy hunting organization Safari Club International with at least 43 trophy kills including caribou, moose, deer, buffalo, polar bear and mountain lion on his resume, illegally killed a celebrity lion, Cecil, in Zimbabwe

Which inspires more hope for the future of earth, a predator that kills for food or a predator that kills for a trophy on the wall?

When I think of hope, Doug Peacock, author, grizzly bear and bison expert, wild lands activist and character model for Hayduke in Ed Abbey’s novel “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” comes to mind. He went to Southeast Asia in the 1960s a warrior/patriot/true believer ready to fight and kill and die for his country. He accomplished the first two but returned from Viet Nam with no more hope than the tattered remains of a road map to Montana, “to remind him of both beloved country and mythical place,” in the words of Jack Turner. Peacock went into the wilderness alone because he loved the place and was guided by its myth. He found hope (and healing) by living for long periods in close proximity to grizzly bears. Peacock lived his hope. In his book “Grizzly Years” he describes it in terms of power and mystery when he encounters a grizzly in the woods and chooses not to shoot the bear:

“I peered down the gun barrel into the dull red eyes of the huge grizzly. He gnashed his jaws and lowered his ears. The hair on his hump stood up. We stared at each other for what might have been seconds but felt like hours. I knew once again that I was not going to pull the trigger. My shooting days were over. I lowered the pistol. The giant bear flicked his ears and looked off to the side. I took a step backwards and turned my head toward the trees. I felt something pass between us. The grizzly slowly turned away from me with grace and dignity and swung into the timber at the end of the meadow…I felt my life had been touched by enormous power and mystery.”

Those are breathtaking words. There is more raw beauty and hope for planet earth in the relationship and moment they describe than, say, in photographs of the birth of galaxies and the death of stars and suns the size of our solar system or, needless to say, in the raving braggadocio of many of the sneering, self-admiring, bunker living cowboys riding the current campaign trail.

Peacock found hope in the courage it took to lower his pistol in the face of a creature above him in the food chain, choosing life over another round of killing. Something passed between the bear and Peacock, and the bear turned away with a noted grace and dignity as powerful and mysterious as Peacock’s courage of hope. The bear was an active participant. It is neither unreasonable nor difficult to imagine the bear conscious of and changed by the passing. What was exchanged between the man and the bear is encompassed by the living meaning of the word “hope.”

 

 

THOREAU THOUGHTS

Posted on by
3

Like most Americans of the last 150 years whose interests include writing, literature, nature, the environment, philosophy and the plethora of customs, laws, ideologies, hopes and fears loosely holding together American society, Henry David Thoreau has been a constant presence in my life. That does not imply detailed knowledge, extensive study or emulation, but, rather, a trustworthy influence in the lifelong process of exploring “…the capabilities of this world.”

At his funeral in 1862 (he died at 44 from tuberculosis) his friend, mentor, patron, employer and admirer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said of Thoreau, “The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost.… His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.”

And so he has. Still, Thoreau has always inspired critics both vile and legitimate, picking apart the man and his work’s human contradictions and imperfections until organic knowledge, virtue and beauty are reduced to a sterilized, manageable order fitting the critic’s preconceptions of tidiness, hierarchy and decree. He was in his time and continues to be a thorn in the ass of proper, conformist, mainstream, capitalist society and a mirror to the intolerance and narrowness of convention smothering creativity. Emerson, a well-known and beloved American man of letters and philosopher, allowed Thoreau to build a small cabin on some land he owned on the shore of Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. He had two purposes in moving to Walden: write his first book “A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers,” and experiment with reversing the Puritan ethic and Yankee habit of working six days a week and resting one. Instead of following the Puritan model, Thoreau worked one day a week at various jobs and spent the others six searching for answers to the questions he asked, “Who are we? Where are we?”

As he wrote in Walden, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived….I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

He was never entirely forgiven by some for living deliberately and for his true account of what he learned and experienced of the essential facts of life. One of them is among my favorite Thoreau quotes: “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

 

THE INTELLECTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE OF DEEP ECOLOGY

Posted on by
Reply

“Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.”
Robert M. Pirsig, author of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”

“An intellectual is a man who doesn’t know how to park a bike.”
Spiro T. Agnew, 39th Vice President of the United States

A fine film concerning the environment of Planet Earth, “COWSPIRACY: The Sustainability Secret” is recommended to anyone who cares about……well, anything. One gentleman interviewed in the film, Howard F. Lyman, a lifetime Montana cattle rancher and author of “The Mad Cowboy” commented that “75% of Americans consider themselves environmentalists,” a surprising assertion. It seems to me that if that statement were true the air, water, soil, flora and fauna, of America would certainly be healthier than they in fact are, but some research reveals that Lyman is correct. Most Americans consider themselves environmentalists, though a Gallop Poll puts the percentage at 61%.
Whether Lyman or Gallup are closer to the truth, most people reading this consider themselves environmentalists and will be interested in one of the best environmental activist organizations in America—The Foundation For Deep Ecology, based in San Francisco and found on line at www.deepecology.org. It also suggests a disconnect between those environmentalists and their direct experience of the environment. That is, the perceptions of intellect and the consequential realities of action are not in accord. The Foundation For Deep Ecology addresses this disconnect in several ways, including its efforts “…to helping build the intellectual infrastructure of the conservation movement… Since its inception the foundation has invested in a wide variety of such efforts, supporting numerous journals (Wild Earth, Resurgence, Plain, and AdBusters to name a few), books (The Case Against the Global Economy, Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, Turning Away from Technology), conferences and symposia, and advertising campaigns. FDE-sponsored gatherings of leading thinkers led to the formation of several independent organizations including the International Forum on Globalization, the Jacque Ellul Society, and the Wildlands Project. The foundation has also operated an innovative book publishing program that has produced numerous award-winning titles on conservation issues.”

Deep Ecology is a term coined in 1973 by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess whose environmental thinking had been greatly influenced by Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.” He viewed much of the environmental thinking of the time as ‘shallow’ because it did not address the deeper root causes of environmental problems. Thus, Deep Ecology, which has an eight point platform. The first is “The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: inherent worth, intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.” The eighth is “Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to participate in the attempt to implement the necessary changes.”
That is, between 61% and 75% of Americans have an obligation to participate in the attempt to implement the necessary changes, and the necessary intellectual infrastructure to do so is already in place. Check it out.

AN EARLY ADVENTURE

Posted on by
1

“If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”

Henry David Thoreau

 

Like every adult, I have come to realize that certain of my childhood experiences changed everything and defined and directed all that followed. I had the astonishing good fortune to grow up in the mountains surrounding Lake Tahoe in a time that the perspective of age sees as idyllic and that from any perspective was simpler for children and adults alike. Because my parents worked long hours in the Tahoe tourist summer season, I was largely unsupervised for three months a year. Some might (and did) consider such parenting as ‘benign neglect,’ but I think of it as an invaluable gift.

While the concept of “adventure” was unknown to a young boy, the impetus to explore, to follow curiosity, to reach and see beyond the edge of the familiar and acceptable is innate, though such stimulus is sometimes threatening to and feared by the cautious, invested and powerful, and it can be both trained and bludgeoned into conformity, incuriosity and blind faith. One summer day in 1950 or, perhaps, 1951 my buddy John Robinson and I had a day in the mountains that changed something‑‑perspective, scale, possibility or maybe direction‑‑inside. I knew it then and remember it now, and I never see that area of the Sierra without smiling.

The day stays in mind because it was the biggest of its kind in that pre-teenage Tahoe time when summer rules and parental supervision started and ended with the admonition to be home for dinner. Whether it was trust and confidence in our basic instincts and capabilities or uncaring neglect of the duties of parenthood, the children of Tahoe in the post WWII era had a lot of latitude and a great deal of personal freedom, many years before I knew the difference between Mahatma Gandhi’s practicality‑‑“The greater our innocence, the greater our strength and the swifter our victory.”, and William Blake’s spirituality, “To see the world in a grain of sand, And heaven in a wild flower: Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.”

My folks probably thought I’d gone to the beach the day John and I headed to what we called Eagle Rock, a remote, romantic, mysterious outcrop visible high above and to the northeast of Kingsbury Grade, which went over the Sierra to Genoa, Nevada’s first community. It seemed unreachable until we decided to reach it, and then it became a huge goal that gladdened our hearts from the moment we embarked. I was 11 or 12, John a year older, when we set off from south shore along Highway 50 and up the narrow dirt road of Kingsbury, filled with our quest and the self-sufficient knowledge, even glee, that no one in the world knew where we were or what was our goal. After a couple of hours we veered off Kingsbury into unknown terrain of pine, fir, aspen and manzanita, the evergreen shrub, sprouting out of the sandy soil of the great Sierra Nevada under a clear mountain sky. We were guided by a general sense of direction and the pure joy of going where we had never gone before, secure in the knowledge that even as we plodded up, always up, with fatigue taking its toll on body and motivation, turning around and going down would eventually get us back to Tahoe, the familiar, home, dinner.

My friend John was big for his age, strong, athletic and a fine skier. We encouraged each other to continue in those times when we could see neither Eagle Rock nor Tahoe and the dominant constants were the upward slope, the downward slide of our energies, our companionship and that ineffable something that had started us in the first place. We went on for hours and then late in the day we gained the ridge and scrambled up Eagle Rock on top of our world, the backyard of my childhood, the Sierra Nevada. To the east lay the Carson Valley and the high desert mountains of Nevada. To the west was the Tahoe Basin holding the Lake of the Sky, nature’s own bassinette, and being on and looking around from the summit of Eagle Rock was the most exciting and wonderful thing I had ever done. We went back down and I made it home for dinner and I never told my parents where we had gone. After that day I always knew solace and meaning were mine for the taking, always there to be explored and experienced in my own backyard, just one step away from the highways and byways of civilization, no matter where I may be. It would be many years before I discovered in the writings of Muir, Thoreau, Abbey and others that I was a member of a tribe, not a hermit of the spirit.