THE LAST LEAD

Posted on by
Reply

It had to happen. The signs leading (sic) up to the last lead had been clear and chronic for several years, but with a mind fueled by denial that was stronger than an aging body trapped in reality, I had been somewhat able to ignore one of life’s more stubborn realities so poetically expressed by Robert Frost: “The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.” Though I was nearly 30 before I started to climb, climbing immediately became and then remained integral to my life for the next 40-plus years—vital as personal endeavor, as a profession, as inspiration for my writing and vital because it let me be part of a culture in which I was comfortable, at home and a member of the tribe. Every climber with a decade or three of significant time spent moving up and down rock and ice and snow features—20 to 29,000 feet high—will recognize the attraction (addiction?) of this lifestyle, known to be sometimes fatal.
Though never—in morning or afternoon—able to climb at the technical standard of, say, my old climbing partner Hermann Goellner (who always took the harder leads), I climbed as well as I ever could into my 50s before signs of ‘afternoon’ began to appear. The first sign was major back surgery for a disease physically unrelated to climbing (though it’s possible that disease was picked up in Tibet or China or elsewhere while climbing). The second sign, shortly afterwards, was when my shoulders ached and wouldn’t work properly, an irritation solved by a horse liniment called DMSO, illegal for human use at the time but readily available, like so many illegal substances, to those who need them.
Then, on Memorial Day, when I was 60, I tore my Achilles tendon without completely severing it. I avoided surgery, just barely, but was on crutches with a removable Velcro cast for several weeks. I hired a physical therapist and followed her regimen to the letter, pumped iron, and worked out in a gym nearly every day, all summer long. The somewhat ironic result was that by Labor Day when I returned to the stone, my aging body was in the best climbing shape it had enjoyed in several years, and my climbing improved. Another consequence of the injury and long rehab was that I was unable to work at my long-time summer job as a climbing guide for Exum Mountain Guides in the Teton mountains, a significant financial hit somewhat softened by working as a newspaper reporter. There’s nothing like recovering from an injury to make one better appreciate the delights of physical activity, and that autumn’s rock climbing, the next winter’s ice climbing and the ‘afternoon’ knowledge of now being in my 60s convinced me that whatever time remained would be better spent pursuing the personal satisfactions of climbing for myself rather than the illusory security and real satisfaction of being paid to take other people climbing. As a Buddhist, I tried to find the middle way and just work as a guide part-time, but only full-time guides can live on Guides’ Hill in the Tetons. And that meant either spending most of my part-time guiding wages for rent in the ridiculously inflated Jackson Hole rental market or embracing a dirt-bag, car-dwelling lifestyle that I knew all too well from earlier climbing days. Dirt-bagging for climbing had been both acceptable and enjoyable for me, but for guiding it was neither. My guiding days were over.
For the next ten years into my early 70s I climbed hard and made some of the most enjoyable climbs of my life, both on the crags and in the mountains. During those years my hands gradually began to look and feel even older than the rest of my body as the signature curlicues and protuberances and aches and pains of Dupuytren’s contracture arrived. Its contributing factors include Dutch ancestry, drinking alcohol, and simple aging, each of which describes me even though I’ve not had a drink or other recreational drug in 30 years. But before that it was a different story. As it became gradually impossible to straighten my fingers or place a hand flat against a smooth surface, I adapted. The old hands continued to climb a bit less than as well as ever . . . until one day when I was 72 and leading a route I’d done many times—Kevin Pogue’s typically well-bolted (some say over-bolted), beautiful 5.10b Mantle Dynamics at Idaho’s Castle Rocks—the strangest thing happened. As I was mantling the crux move and inspiration for the route’s name, with my body and brain filled as usual with the bliss molecule anandamide (the human hormone equivalent of tetrahydrocannabinol or THC—see “The Alchemy of Action” by Doug Robinson) and completely enjoying the present moment of the climb, both hands suddenly quit functioning, and feeling in my right hand completely vanished. In that instant both my hands changed from tools of controlled precision to claws of insensitive clumsiness. I managed to make the move and, after a rest and vigorous shake out, finish the climb. At the top I was unable to make a fist, but, as so often happens in life, habit obscured clear evaluation of a new reality and I began the rappel down. Fortunately, only another old habit and practice of NEVER rappelling without a Prusik saved me (and my climbing partner) from a potentially ugly incident. As I started to rappel, my right and lower hand could no longer grip the rope with sufficient strength to exert enough friction on the ATC (Air Traffic Controller) to ensure a safe landing, and I began to move faster than was comfortable. Adrenaline quickly flooded what was left of my anandamide oasis and I immediately cinched the Prusik above me with my left hand and stopped. When my heart slowed down and both anandamide and adrenaline went home for naps my mind cleared a bit and I wrapped the rope around my leg a couple of times, creating enough friction that my clumsy claw was able to grip strongly enough to get me to the ground in one piece. I was grateful to end up with both feet on the earth in the upright position.
For the last couple days of that trip my hands hurt too much to consider climbing and I didn’t trust my grip enough to belay with an ATC, so I took morning hikes around the beautiful City of Rocks while my friends climbed; pondered with ‘afternoon’ wisdom my new reality; and soaked in Durfee’s Hot Springs in nearby Almo each evening. Upon returning home I consulted the local hand specialist physician—an interesting encounter with the frustrations of reality. After many questions, much prodding and manipulating of the hands and the mandatory X-rays she asked me, “When did you break your right hand?” “I never broke my hand,” I replied. “Oh, yes you did,” she said, showing me the X-ray proof of her assertion that at some point my hand had been broken and my denial-fueled mind had carried on as if reality was of secondary concern. I doubt I am the only climber who ever treated reality in such a cavalier way, but these thoughts offer neither comfort nor justification. She also recommended against surgery, politely and with circumspection hinting that at my age surgery could create more problems than it might cure and that I should consider a life without climbing.
Naturally, I sought a second opinion with a hand surgeon in a different state who, for an exorbitant fee told me he completely agreed with the first physician’s conclusion. Since my overall physical health and capabilities are better than many my age, he had little empathy with my desire to continue climbing and told me, “I suggest you take an Aleve a day and get on with life without climbing.”
I don’t like what Aleve does to my system and I continued with the climbing life by dropping the grade standard a couple of notches, pushing the standard a bit on days when my hands felt good and backing off when they didn’t, and learning to belay with a Grigri. That worked well enough and climbing continued to be a satisfying adventure, though climbing partners were harder to find. My former partners (most of them 15 to 30 years younger) only became available when they were desperate for a belay slave or when their good will towards an elder, the pleasures of companionship, or basic kindness overcame their personal climbing ambitions for a day or a pitch. At the age of 74, in the company of the kind and patient Scott Smith, I made what is surely my last ascent of one my favorite pieces of rock, Idaho’s Elephant’s Perch, by the standard Mountaineer’s Route. When we finished the route I felt a deep gratitude for a long life in beautiful mountains, none more beautiful than the Perch. I continue to be called upon to belay my partner, Jeannie Wall, who climbs 5.12 on good days and who climbed Fitz Roy in Patagonia nearly 50 years after I did, but I often can’t get off the ground on the routes she picks.
And then, a month before my 78th birthday, I was climbing for the first time in Bear Canyon near Bozeman, Montana, with my friend Jason Thompson, the fine photographer. I was leading what the guide book rated a well-protected 5.8, presumably within my comfort zone (I had put out of mind the reality that Montana is well known among cognoscenti as the rating sandbag capital of American climbing). I don’t remember ever falling before without some warning that the fall was coming, but this time I was unexpectedly and suddenly in the air. About 20 feet later I stopped with a rope-stretch bounce. I was completely surprised, more stunned than scared and not at all injured. “Holy shit,” Jason said, “what happened?” I didn’t know, but I climbed back up to the point of the fall and discovered that I was unable to complete the lead. It was simply too hard. I retreated and let Jason finish. Then I did it with a top rope and barely made the crux moves even with that top rope. We climbed a couple more routes before calling it a day. And I spent the next several days contemplating that fall from the perspective of the late afternoon of a long, good life, lived as well as I have been able, and came to a decision that I consider better than some others I have made: leading was immediately off my list of options as a climber.
It was the last lead.
I continue to climb, filled with top-rope courage and gratitude to still be able to do something I love, so satisfying to body, mind and soul. Yes, there is noticeably less anandamide (and adrenaline) coursing through my system, but I’ve recently discovered that CBD hemp oil helps my hands and every day I better appreciate Robert Frost’s wisdom.

THE COURAGE OF THE CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR

Posted on by
Reply

(This was written many years ago before the democratic draft ended and all able-bodied American males were required to serve in the U.S. military. It was replaced by a voluntary system attractive to those young men and women for whom life in the military is a better option than the life they are living and looking forward to as civilians. I put it here as a reminder that the courage of people like Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden is a continuation of the valor of the conscientious objector of old.)

Tom was older and never a close friend but he was a friend I admired and enjoyed in part because he lived a long and rich life of his own choosing. I mean, he was his own man. Tom was the first conscientious objector I ever knew. Actually, he was the first CO or “conscie” I ever knew about. Before him I had not heard the term or realized that one could honorably oppose the majority’s viewpoint of the day or maintain personal integrity by standing one’s ground against the sycophantic if passionate flow of social conformity.
Tom had been a CO during World War II, a time and war when that status was accorded less merit and social respectability than it later acquired. During World War II more than 5000 people went to prison for their CO beliefs, though Tom served in a non-combative role. I first met him when I was a high school student in Reno, Nevada in the mid 1950s, a time of Eisenhower blandness, McCarthyinsm, atomic bombs being detonated in the Nevada desert, uniformity, conformity, consumerism and a national fear of communism not too unlike the current fear of terrorism. It was a time, like now, when questioning authority was unlikely to result in rational discourse. Tom was older, an artist by nature, an English teacher in my high school by trade, and a fellow skier. He never talked with me about being a CO, but we all knew he had served in a non-combative role during WWII, and we knew he wasn’t afraid of authority, unpopularity, non-conformity or the dictates of his own conscience, which, it always seemed to me, was both clean and courageous.
Since the time of the Colonies, before there was a Constitution, the conscientious objector has had rights in this country. Subsequent U.S. law does not “require any person to be subject to combatant training and service in the armed forces of the U.S. who, by reason of religious training and belief, is conscientiously opposed to participation in war in any form.” However, the law states that “the term ‘religious training and belief’ does not include essentially political, sociological or philosophical views, or a merely personal moral code.” But in 1965 and in 1970 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the words “religious training and belief” must now be interpreted to include personal moral and ethical values that have the same force in people’s lives as traditional religious beliefs. That is, sincere personal moral and ethical beliefs in opposition to personal participation in war has the same legal standing as does believing in the authority and teachings of an organized and established religion. The operative word in the last sentence is ‘sincere,’ and for a CO to establish such sincerity is not an always easy task.
During the Viet Nam War (known as the American War in Viet Nam), the two best known of thousands of American conscientious objectors were Muhammad Ali, the boxer, and David Harris, the political and environmental activist and writer. Harris, who was married to Joan Baez at the time, went to jail for his beliefs. Ali, who was stripped of his world heavyweight boxing title because of his beliefs, fought in the courts for five years until he won in the U.S. Supreme Court. After this victory, Ali returned to the ring and won back his heavyweight title. His 1966 explanation for refusing to be drafted into the U.S. military has been much quoted and said it all: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” He also said, “No Viet Cong ever called me ‘nigger.’” While Harris and Ali were well known and received a great deal of publicity in the mainstream media (most of it negative), the courage they exhibited and the price they paid for living according to their beliefs was no greater (and certainly no less) than that of many others. No one who ever saw him fight (much less those who got in the ring with him) could justify questioning Ali’s courage or calling him a coward, the usual knee-jerk reaction to the conscience in action of a conscientious objector.
Some believe they should and would fight in a war for a just cause, but insist that they be allowed to refuse to fight wars they think are wrong. These people are called “selective conscientious objectors,” but under U.S. law one cannot pick and choose between the “just” and “unjust” war. The current statute states that CO claimants must object to “participation in war in any form.” How to differentiate or define a “just” and an “unjust” war is an interesting if probably unanswerable problem, but some selective Cos believed that the conditions for a “just war” cannot be met in modern times.
A CO need not believe in the principle of nonviolence or to be opposed to all forms of violence, the use of force, police powers or even the taking of human life. The law requires only that a person be conscientiously opposed to the planned and organized killing of combatant and non-combatant alike that takes place in warfare. One can be a CO and still be willing to use violence against another individual in order to protect yourself or your friends.
People don’t, and don’t like to, talk about the CO. The topic raises a myriad of uncomfortable issues, most notably for Christians the fifth commandment, but also such tangential issues as whether the state exists for the sake of the people or the people for the sake of the state (or, even, whether they both exist for the sake of the corporation), the influence of the military-industrial-complex on American economic and foreign policy and individual responsibility for personal conscience.
He was hardly the first, but Tom was the first person I knew who confronted these issues, stood against the impetus to war, and had the courage to abide by his conscience and his conviction that there has to be a better way.

(And all these years later we are still searching for it.)

VOICES RISING INTO THE MYTH

Posted on by
1

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”
Winston Churchill

“The ‘white race’ thus becomes the chief victim of its own myth.”
Harry Edwards

1968 was a pivotal year in American history. It was also the year I received a powerful, disturbing and disheartening lesson about American journalism and the effect it has on the society it serves. I know, I know, many reading this are tired of and impatient with cultural relativism rants from old farts that came of age in the ‘60s, but sit down and listen. 2016 was also a pivotal year in American history, and that same disturbing lesson of mine from 50 years ago has been in the forefront of the news every day for the past couple of years. I refer, of course, to the unexpected, unbelievable, powerful and disturbing campaign and election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. So far, the words, actions, personnel and stated intentions of the Trump administration are terrifying for those who care about the whole of humanity, the environment of Earth, social justice, compassion, common decency and freedom. The affects Trump and cadre will ultimately have on the world are, at this writing, undetermined. It can be safely assumed they will make the influence of Agent Orange on the flora and fauna (including those humans who happened to be present) in Viet Nam in the ‘60s seem like benign organic fertilizers used in the backyard home gardens of today.
I was 29 years old in the spring of 1968, a recent graduate school dropout, who, like others of my social/political/psychedelic persuasions, was adrift and searching to find a suitable place even on the fringe of the mainstream. One of my varied sources of income was writing a column for the major newspaper of a western city of some 70,000 souls. The column was well received and I enjoyed free rein to write about whatever I thought appropriate until I wrote a column that I thought pertinent, timely and socially relevant to every American. That column changed my perception of America and my life, though it was never published.
The column was about Harry Edwards, a sociology professor at San Jose State University, and the movement he was leading called the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR). The intention of Edwards and OPHR was to organize an African American boycott of the upcoming 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City to expose the racist policies and practices of America and the hypocrisy of the white washed image of itself America presented to the world, in opposition to its reality perhaps best explicated by the great American writer James Baldwin: “The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.” In addition, OPHR had four demands: Restore Muhammad Ali’s heavyweight boxing title; remove Avery Brundage from his long time position as head of the International Olympic Committee (IOC); hire more African American coaches for the nation’s athletic teams; and bar South Africa and Rhodesia from the Olympics because of their racist policies.
OPHR and Edwards seemed to me timely topics just months before the Olympic Games in Mexico City and their message to American society significant. I put my best efforts into writing a good column and turned it in. The editor refused to publish it, though he conceded it was well written and its message relevant. His reason for not publishing it was simple and direct and I’ve never forgotten it: “This community is not ready to hear this message,” he said. I disagreed and said so and it ended my relationship with the newspaper and altered my relationship with the editor, an old friend. Less than six months later Edwards and OPHR had not accomplished all their goals, but they did raise their voices into the collection of myths to which white America clings. OPHR and Edwards were responsible for the most significant and published athletic photo of the 20th century which stripped those myths to naked, porous, racist bone: Tommie Smith and John Carlos, black American runners who finished 1st (in world record time) and 3rd respectively in the 1968 Olympic 200 meter race on the podium after receiving their medals raising their black-gloved fists in the air, their heads bowed, their feet bare. Their friend and silver medalist, Australian Peter Norman, wore an OPHR badge on his chest in support and solidarity. Smith and Carlos were shoeless to protest black poverty as well as beads and scarves to protest lynching. Their gesture was reported all over the world as a “Black Power Salute” though Smith, Carlos and Edwards referred to it as a “Human Rights Salute.”
At the time my editor told me the reason my column wouldn’t be used I attributed my disappointment to his personal flaws, a journalist’s moral/professional failure of public trust and public service. But after the photo was published all over the world it became evident that both failure and flaw were much larger than one editor. It was a failure of the (almost) entire profession and industry of American journalism, not just one editor. The Los Angeles Times described Smith and Carlos’ gesture as a “Nazi-like salute,” apparently unaware of the irony that IOC head Brundage had, in 1936, defended and approved of German athletes raising their arms on the podium in the real Nazi salute to the real Fuhrer in the real capital of Nazism, Berlin. Time magazine put the Olympic logo on its cover, replacing the motto “Faster, Higher, Stronger” with “Angrier, Nastier, Uglier.” The Chicago Tribune termed Smith and Carlos “renegades,” and called their gesture “contemptuous of the United States” and “an insult to their countrymen.” And a young reporter for the Chicago American who later became an iconic sportscaster, Brent Musburger, described the two Olympic medal winners as“…a pair of black-skinned storm troopers.”
It would seem that most of mainstream American journalism agreed with my editor and for several years after 1968 I believed that American journalism as a whole was failing the community. That was and is true, but gradually so gradually–it became clear that the “collection of myths to which white Americans cling” clouded the perception of American journalism itself for the simple reason that it clung to and was part of those myths. As a white American male, my upbringing was within those myths and clouded my own perceptions, though even as a boy and young man it was clear that many of the myths were simply not true. Some of the voices of the 1960s and 70s rising into the myths—Dalton Trumbo, Martin Luther King, The March on Selma, Rosa Parks, Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Jane Fonda, Dennis Banks, Russell Means, Leonard Peltier, Ken Kesey, Dick Gregory, Gloria Steinem, Tom Hayden, Stephen Gaskin and many others—created enough heat and energy to help dissipate more of them. Like every sincere critical thinker who knows that all things are connected and that changing the world starts with each person (you and me), I’m still working on separating the collection of myths and alternative facts from the organic reality that America is and always has been a racist, sexist, misogynist, imperialist nation built on the genocide of its indigenous peoples, the backs of slaves and the institution of slavery, all justified by the religious delusion that white males are God’s chosen people and superior to all other races as well as the females of their own race.
Harsh words, yes, but they are rooted in a long and venerable tradition of voices both harsh and maternally kind rising into the myth. One of the first was from abolitionist Thomas Day in 1776 commenting on the Declaration of Independence, just written by Thomas Jefferson. The second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence reads, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” (The first draft of the Declaration was worded “…all free men are created equal…” and the removal of the word ‘free,’ a message the fathers of the constitution apparently were not ready to hear, or, at least, did not think the community was ready to hear, was the beginning of the myths.) Jefferson and George Washington were among slave owner fathers of the constitution (Jefferson also fathered children with his slaves) and Day responded to their hypocrisy: “If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.”
The myths were built into the Constitution from the beginning. The voices rising into the myths were present at the beginning as well, and they have been and continue to be the home of hope for America and the only reason the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence creeps ever so slowly out of myth towards reality. It took nearly a hundred years before the Civil War ended slavery and in theory gave slaves freedom and the right to vote, but in reality it was not until the 1964 Civil Rights Act made it possible for the descendants of slaves to vote in America. Native Americans were not granted citizenship by Congress until 1924 but in many states could not vote until 1957. Even white women could not vote until 1920 when the 19th amendment to the Constitution was passed after 70 years of the voices of organized women’s groups led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony and others (and, it seems likely, individual pillow talk voices) created enough heat and energy to dissipate the fog of myths enough so that even the morally challenged couldn’t hide within them. As everyone reading this knows, the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in America are not the same for white males, black people, native Americans, people of any shade of color, females, those who believe in the wrong religion or private sexual preferences that tweak the image of the world’s most direct and virile men and pure women. Still, over the past 50 years the volume of rising voices and the pace, slow as it is, to bring these inalienable rights to all the equal people of America have raised dramatically compared to the previous 200 years. That is, there is hope and there has been progress and human rights are better in America than they were 100 years ago. That snail pace came to a screeching (literally) stop with the election of Donald Trump, but the voices rising into the myths have never been louder, higher or hotter. Nor have they ever been more necessary or grateful for each new voice.
Which leads to an issue that many Americans, starting with Donald Trump, believe the community is not ready to hear: Since two of the last three Presidents of the United States lost the popular vote and still became President, democracy itself is another in the collection of myths America tells itself and anyone else who will listen. The Electoral College circumvents the democratic process of voting rights and, like slavery, racism, sexism, bigotry, misogyny and religious intolerance, destroys equality in the name of the nation it mocks which needs voices rising into the myths of its usefulness as a tool of democracy.
As self-encouragement to raise your own voice, take some time to contemplate how different our country and the world would be if Al Gore instead of George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton instead of Donald Trump had become President as the population had voted them to be, if democracy of the people, for the people and by the people had prevailed instead of the myths of the slightly mad victims of our own brainwashing.
Raise your voice, friends and fellow citizens. Raise your voice. Loudly. Clearly. Respectfully. Truthfully. In the venerable tradition of Thomas Day and those who came before and the many who followed. Raise your voice. Dissipate the myths. Make your Mother proud.

THE OLD TEA SELLER

Posted on by
1

In 1724 the Japanese Zen Buddhist monk Gekkai Gensho left the temple where he had lived and served for nearly 40 years since he was a child. He was not yet 50 years old. He became a wandering monk who lived in the traditional manner—that is, from the charity of the lay community and, when times were tough, begging. At the age of 60 he quit wandering and began living in a small dwelling on the banks of the Kamo River in the town of Kyoto, some 500 miles from the temple where he had spent most of his life.
He opened a shop in that dwelling and began selling a new type of tea called sencha. He adopted the name Baisao, “the Old Tea Seller.” In addition to selling tea from his shop, Baisao took his tea equipment in large portable bamboo wicker-baskets balanced on the ends of a carrying pole to gathering spots in town and in the surrounding hills. He became a familiar and popular figure among the general populace, including many of the leading poets, writers, painters, calligraphers and scholars of the time, some of whom became his friends and remained so until he died at the age of 87 in 1763. Though he never took on the mantle of teacher or master, a visit to his tea shop and a conversation was considered a religious experience by many of his clientele.
Baisao was an accomplished poet, writer and thinker and has been described as “an inspirational and unconventional figure in a culturally rich time in Kyoto.” Though selling quality tea to the general public might not seem radical behavior, Baisao was breaking the mold. In that time and place most tea sellers were elderly men from the uneducated, lowest levels of Japanese society. Buddhist priests were among the best educated, most cultured citizens of the society, and it was unheard of for one of them to live such an itinerant life. More, he was violating a precept prohibiting members of the priesthood from earning a living. According to the precept monks could only maintain purity of mind when they begged for food, a concept with which the Old Tea Seller reluctantly took issue.
It is worth pointing out that Baisao’s path in life was revolutionary, not reactionary, with mental clarity, not material acquisition, the goal. He not only made a meager living selling tea, but he did not charge a set fee, allowing his clients to pay what they felt his product and service was worth. If a client didn’t pay, the tea was free.
In “A Statement of Views in Response to a Customer’s Questions” Baisao explained his perspective after a customer called him out for violating the precept.
His answer included, “I am well aware of the objection you raise…..Remember what Confucius replied upon once being asked to explain a desire he had expressed to go and live among the uncivilized tribes of the east. ‘If men of superior attainment went and dwelt among such people,’ he said, ‘they would not remain uncivilized.’”
Baisao continued, quoting an old, Japanese verse:

“Though a contented mind brings physical
contentment with it,
Physical contentment also may occur when the
mind is ill at ease.
When the mind is truly at peace, wherever you are
Is pleasant,
Whether you live in a marketplace or in a mountain
Hermitage.

That is, the mind at peace is more valuable than the spoils of the marketplace or the solitude of hermitages. Baisao saw that exaggerating the virtues of priesthood to obtain the devotion and charity of lay followers corrupted both. He wrote that the relationship caused priests “…to seek greedily in every way and at every opportunity to obtain donations from followers. When they are successful they toady to their new benefactors, wagging their tails and showing them more respect and devotion than they do their teachers or own parents.
“Donors, for their part, pride themselves on their virtue, and on the strength of a small donation fancy the recipient now owes them a deep debt of gratitude. They end up regarding the priest with contempt.”
This dynamic, of course, encompasses a much wider range of circumstances and people than those involving religious institutions and donors.
Baisao, the Old Tea Seller, found a mind truly at peace by nothing more complicated (or complex) than selling a quality product to ordinary people in exchange for whatever those people felt it was worth to them. A key ingredient of the product was the mind at peace of the seller which could not but have some small or large effect on the buyer, who, in some small or large way, could not help but pass on to others.
Like all true revolutionaries for the common good, the Old Tea Seller sold a timeless product that never loses its flavor, is always in demand and quenches a multitude of thirsts.

SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN WHEN YOU LET GO

Posted on by
2

SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN WHEN YOU LET GO
(From a book in progress)
“You do not have to change to awaken, you need only awaken to change.”
Adyashanti

‘Awaken to change’ is a useful thought to keep in mind as every instant of our lives change appears. We are not always aware of those changes, and, all too often, not being awake to change causes suffering. Expecting things not to change is what Buddhists know as attachment. One way to express the dilemma of our relationship to change is the quip: “Let go or be dragged.”
The dharma is not going to stop because of change. Change is the dharma, and the more awake we can be to change the less suffering there will be. Those who are awake to the change from pleasure to pain, happiness to sadness, health to sickness, youth to old age without trying to hang on to pleasure/happiness/health/youth are awake to changing. From one perspective, our practice began about 2500 years ago when Buddha decided to sit under a bodhi tree until he got it right, whatever ‘it’ was. There have been a lot of changes, suffering and awakening between Buddha’s sitting under the bodhi tree and our most recent sitting, and even that significant event more than 2000 years ago was not the beginning. It was part of the change.
From another, much closer perspective, each of our individual practices, whether began a day or fifty years ago, has been filled with change, both ignored and awakened to. All of it is part of the dharma, part of the awakening. During that time some people dropped out of the practice, others expanded theirs’ both within the sangha and on their own, though, of course, even solitary monks and nuns in the caves of remote mountains are never entirely on their own as they awaken to change.
My old friend Lito Tejada Flores has written a lovely book titled: Four Noble Truths, Almost Buddhist Poems, which ends with this:

Four Noble Truths – OK, I think I get it, but
why noble? Why not four simple truths?
They do seem pretty basic, don’t they?
Who can argue with the Buddha? Not me,

not you. Buddhism came afterward, didn’t it?
Noble came afterward. Four simple truths
that (maybe) add up to one. Pogo said it,
I think the Buddha would have agreed:

“We have seen the enemy, and he is us.”
We are the source of our own suffering,
our discontent. The harder we cling

to what we think we want, the worse
we feel, the harder it is to let go.
Four simple truths in one? Let go?

A PAPER THIN ENVIRONMENT

Posted on by
Reply

“Waste is worse than loss. The time is coming when every person who lays claim to ability will keep the question of waste before him constantly. The scope of thrift is limitless.”
Thomas Edison

First, full disclosure: I, too, just like you, am a paper consumer. Among other things I buy, keep, and stack on shelves and in boxes as many or more books, magazines, newspapers and catalogues made of paper as any other American. More, my writing appears in some of these paper products and (I hope) contributes to their raison d’être and that you read them. When colds or allergies strike I go through tissue paper with abandon, though I remember as a boy carrying a handkerchief and blowing my nose into it until even a young boy’s sensitivities were offended and it was washed and reused. For reasons of convenience that practice has been abandoned.
Like most Americans I consume a certain share of paper cups, plates, envelopes, cardboard containers, calendars, notebooks, paper towels and toilet paper. Like most Americans, each week I receive in the mail in the form of catalogues, promotions, advertisements and the like far more bulk paper that I discard (recycle if possible) than mail that is actually part of my life. That paper and all the energy and labor and pollution and, most importantly, trees that contributed to its production are completely wasted. William Monson said, “Waste is not grandeur.”
America is the most wasteful phenomenon in earth’s history, and we are all complicit in its abundant poverty of spirit and care for the earth’s paper thin environment.
The average American uses 300 kilograms (660 lbs) of paper a year. In India it is 4 kilos. The U.N. estimates that 30 to 40 kilos will meet basic literacy and communication needs for each person on earth. Paper was first invented (by Ts’ai Lun in China nearly 2000 years ago from rags, discarded fishing nets, hemp and grass—no trees) as a communication tool. The Gutenberg Bible, the first two drafts of the U.S. Constitution and Mark Twain’s original works were all printed on hemp based paper without a single fiber of a single tree. While there is about as much chance of America restoring its once thriving hemp industry to make paper as there is of its current government abiding by the tenets of its Constitution or respecting its mandated separation of powers, to do so would benefit the social, democratic, cultural, psychological and biological environment of the world.
About 40% of the municipal solid waste of the world is paper. More than 90% of paper comes from trees. A fifth of the world’s timber harvest is for producing paper, and while the paper industry refers to trees as a “renewable resource” that is disingenuous at best. There are such things as “tree farms” where trees are grown somewhat the same way chickens and hogs are grown as product, not living organism, but they are destructive to the environment, not an integral part of it. A tree farm is not a forest. Trees from both forest and farm supply about 55 percent of the paper of the world. Thirty-eight percent comes from re-cycled paper, and 7 percent is from non-tree sources. Three tons of trees are required to produce one ton of paper, and the pulp and paper industry, the fifth largest industrial energy consumer, uses more water to produce a ton of product than any other industry. About 12,000 square miles of forest are consumed each year by U.S. pulp mills.
Recycled paper production creates 74 percent less air pollution and 38 percent less water pollution than paper created from “virgin fiber.” There are different levels and standards of recycled paper. That is, some recycled paper product is more recycled than others. In our world, which is the only world we have or ever will have, the environment on which all life depends is as thin as a sheet of paper, and it is being torn apart by the excesses of man. One factoid illustrates a larger reality: The group Environmental Defense estimates that if the entire U.S. catalog industry switched its publications to just 10-percent recycled content paper, the savings in wood alone would be enough to stretch a 1.8-meter-high fence across the United States seven times. With a few enlightened exceptions—Patagonia is the leader in this endeavor (check here https://www.patagonia.com/on/demandware.static/Sites-patagonia-us-Site/Library-Sites-PatagoniaShared/en_US/PDF-US/Paper_Procurement_Policy_EN_051116.pdf) ¬¬¬¬—they will not do so unless their customers (consumers) demand it.
Who in their right mind would want to stretch a 1.8 meter high fence across the United States seven times, or a 30 foot high wall across the border with Mexico once? But paying for either of these absurdities by catalogue companies switching to using recycled paper makes far more sense than shutting down the government for a paper thin emergency by a President who is the antithesis of paper thin except in his claim to ability.

RUMINATIONS ON THE WRITING OF NIGHT DRIVING

Posted on by
1

Night Driving was written in an unrelenting, focused burst of energy in three months at the end of 1974. Writing, like skiing and climbing, has always helped keep me on track, particularly in times when the track is icy, rough and hard to see. 1974 was a particularly unsettling, unsettled, difficult, confusing and, at the same time, joyous and satisfying time living in Bear Valley, Squaw Valley, Jackson Hole, San Carlos de Bariloche, Yosemite and points in between. Some of those peripatetic times were spent living and traveling around western America in my 1938 Chevrolet pickup with the redwood camper on the back in the company of my three year old son, Jason.
Both of us needed a bit more stability, routine, creature comforts and space than life in the old Chevy allowed, so that fall we left the road and moved into a small cabin on Montreal Road between Truckee and Squaw Valley in the Tahoe Sierra where we would live for the next five years. Getting off the road and removing one’s hands from the steering wheel opens up a great deal more time, energy and creativity (and hands) for the solitary road of writing. I started out the dynamics of daily (and nightly) life on Montreal Road by writing Night Driving, most of it, appropriately enough, written at night. The first draft was written in longhand in a spiral bound 8 ½ by 11 inch notebook. Then I rewrote it in another notebook and finally transferred it to the typewritten page via my Royal portable typewriter given to me by my father for my 15th birthday and which I used for nearly 40 years until its spirit was broken by the invasion of the computer which banished it to the closet reservation where it passed away of old age.
All writing, particularly the memoir, is or should be at least as mentally, spiritually and emotionally nutritious to the author as it is to the reader. The process of writing Night Driving forced me to delve into events and aspects of my life and times that were richer and more significant than they might appear on the surface. The work of the story teller helps light up the road of life, including long nights of racing from one crisis to another, from one war to another and from one ideology to the next. Telling stories encourages every driver to take it easy and pay attention to the present moment because it contains all the past and determines all the future and is the only moment we really have.
When I had a 100 page manuscript ready I sent it to Mike Moore, the good editor of Mountain Gazette, in hopes that he might see fit to publish it in three or four installments, as most submissions were in the 10 to 20 page range. Mike chose to devote most of the February 1975 issue to Night Driving, with a shorter, sterling piece by Ed Abbey, Desert Driving, filling up the rest. It was thrilling to have my name on that Bob Chamberlain cover photograph along with one of my literary (and cultural) heroes, Ed Abbey.
Since then Night Driving has taken on a life of its own, which is all one can ask of any story ever told by every man, woman and child attempting to light up and stay on the road of civilization and discover what sort of human we are, and why, and how.

AROUND THE WORLD ON SUN VALLEY’S BALD MOUNTAIN WITH DANO

Posted on by
Reply

Dan ‘Dano’ Hawley has skied at least 25,000 vertical miles on Baldy since he first visited Sun Valley in the mid-1950s. He has most likely skied more, and he’s only 69. The circumference of Earth is 24,901 miles and is still spinning and so is he.
Dano is a true Idahoan, born to ski Sun Valley. His great-grandfather, James H. Hawley, was the ninth Governor of Idaho from 1911 to 1913 and Mayor of Boise from 1903 to 1905. Both his father and mother (though they hadn’t yet met) and their siblings skied Sun Valley in 1936. Dano has a photo of his mother skiing on Lolo Pass in 1929. His father was working as a physician in Hailey where he planned to stay when WWII began, but when the war ended Dr. Hawley returned to Boise where Dano was born, raised and schooled. The Hawley family often visited Sun Valley and introduced Dano to skiing Dollar Mt. when he was 5. Within a year the boy was on Baldy.
After high school Dano attended the College of Idaho in Caldwell where he earned a BA in Economics. Skiing interrupted education when he took one year off college to move to France to ski, which he considers a ‘great experience.’ He graduated in 1972 and immediately moved to Ketchum where he has lived ever since. He makes his living plowing snow in winter (Hawley Snow Removal) and working as a river guide for Solitude River Trips on the Middle fork of the Salmon River in summer and Barker River Trips on the Jarbridge, Bruneau and Owyhee Rivers in spring. He is quoted on the Solitude website as saying, “I love seeing little kids grow up and come back with their own kids.” He worked as a heli-ski guide for 25 years and as a ski coach for the Hailey Ski Team for 12 years. He is an avid mountain biker between ski seasons and rides his bike most days when he’s not on the river. He says that in the late 60s, before there were mountain bikes, “I would ride my French road racing bike through the backcountry to all the high mountain lakes.”
Physical activity and personal interaction with others are intrinsic to Dano’s life. A typical winter day when it has snowed begins at 2 a.m. when he goes to work plowing until about 8 a.m. After that he shovels out the iconic Irving’s Red Hots hot dog stand on Picabo Street across from the Warm Springs Lodge. He has completed this chore for owner Jill Rubin for the 40 years her landmark business has operated. According to Dano, 150 winter mornings he walks a quarter mile to the Warm Springs lift by 8:30 a.m. where he socializes, is on one of the early chairs (never—except on certain powder days—competing for the first chair) and begins his Baldy day of skiing. Dano says of his passion for skiing, “Each time I go skiing I have more fun that the time before.”
Dano skis at least 10 runs every day, sometimes more, often with friends and periodically alone, interspersed with tea and social time at Lookout Lodge on top of Baldy. For Dano, “It’s home. There’s a lack of crowds. It’s our own private Idaho.” He skis the bowls, the groomers, the bumps and the cat tracks with an inimitable style and relaxed demeanor, and he is a reliable source of finding the best skiing of the day on Baldy. After all, few know it better.

WINTER WORD RIFFS

Posted on by
1

“One kind word can warm three winter months.”
Japanese proverb

Yes, and a hard one can freeze three in summer. A dishonest one can keep the flowers from blooming in spring. And an ignorant one can take the colors out of the most vibrant autumn.
Words matter on both the obvious plane and in the private psyche of each person. It is important to get them right, whether speaking, hearing, writing or reading. Though I have seen it attributed to both Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, the maxim “The difference between the right word and the just right word is the difference between the firefly and the fire” reiterates the power of the word.
Words are used to justify war, in pursuit of love, to sell automobiles and hamburgers, to describe the mechanics and consequences of governments and nuclear reactors and to make understandable to laymen the work of brain surgeons and philosophers. The job of words is to tell a story, and, keeping in mind that a word is not the thing described in the same way that a map is not the terrain itself, words do their job, though often the story told is not the one the story teller intended.
U.S. Presidents have been masters of the word telling the unintended story. None, perhaps, have surpassed Bill Clinton’s near Haiku “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” though George W. Bush made up in quantity of unintended stories what he lacked in quality, though his “You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on,” is pretty good by any standard. But American politicians get picked on and picked apart all too often and easily for the words they use and misuse and misspeak and can’t recall. Catching politicians and other public figures telling the unintended story is, as the old idiom has it, “Like shooting fish in a barrel,” which might be necessary and can be fun but it kills the fish. And in a democracy the metaphorical fish and the shooter are not separate, a point deserving of more contemplation than, in my view, it appears to be getting. The current President of the U.S., Donald Trump, is a fish in a barrel all his own, one that has no room for any others.
Each person—you, me and the nearly eight billion people and growing by more than 160,000 a day on this earth—has far bigger fish to fry, so to speak, than the politicians of the day in his sights. As one who writes, it seems to me that choosing one’s own words while at the same time noting those of others carefully is a good place to start…..anything.
Keeping in mind Rita Mae Brown’s observation that “In America the word ‘revolution’ is used to sell pantyhose,” the just right word(s) have the capacity to start more traditional revolutions, even personal ones.
The phrase ‘Say what you mean and mean what you say’ is an excellent modus operandi when speaking or writing, assuming, of course, that reality and meaning are somehow connected and that all involved acknowledge and understand things like irony, satire, understatement, exaggeration and nuance. Also assuming that you have the courage of your words and are not hiding under the coward’s cloak of anonymity and being mean rather than saying what you mean.
A few years ago an American citizen was murdered by pirates while jet skiing on Falcon Lake on the Texas/Mexico border. People had been robbed on Falcon Lake before, but this was the first murder. Not long after this event I wrote a column in praise of a politician I admire but who is not admired by all. What politician is? One of the comments to the on line version of the column from someone who called him or her self Taco, suggested the politician and her husband should both jet ski to Mexico.” In other words (sic), what this writer means is that they should be murdered because the words they use are not in accord with Taco’s worldview, or, at the least, political persuasion. I, personally, professionally, philosophically and politically am not in favor of murder in any circumstance, but advocating it for exercising a citizen’s rights (and, in my view, duties) as spelled out in the words of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution courageously accompanied by the authors’ real signatures, including George Washington and Ben Franklin, is troubling.
To be kind, perhaps Taco just had a bit too much hot sauce and sees humor in spewing easy if thoughtless, anonymous words about hard realities. Taco wouldn’t be the first and isn’t the last.
Emily Post advised never discussing politics or religion at the dinner table. That’s a good guideline at most but certainly not all dinner tables. It can sometimes be easier on everybody to not let food for the body be compromised and upset by food for thought.
But if there’s no way around discussing politics a good set of words to stick with is the Bill of Rights, particularly the first Amendment which, in my view, is composed of kind words of the tough love variety. The First Amendment will warm the coldest winter.
And if religion arises remember the Dalai Lama’s words: “My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.”
Words to take and freely speak and write through a long, cold winter: My religion is kindness.

BOBBIE BURNS, the first hotdogger

Posted on by
4

A few years ago Sun Valley’s Bobbie Burns received an unexpected phone call. Scott Sports of Switzerland was checking in to ask if Burns was interested in collaborating with Scott to re-make and re-introduce to the market The Ski, Burns’ revolutionary freeskiing ski that had been out of production for more than two decades. Burns said “yes” and The Ski came back to action. Burns himself at the age of 80 had never been out of action and enjoying life with a smile. That Scott has reintroduced The Ski is entirely appropriate, as the Late Ed Scott, who started the company, and Burns are icons of both Sun Valley and the larger world of skiing.
Bobbie Burns’ impact on the history of freeskiing, the evolution of making skis and the skiing culture of Sun Valley is enormous. Born in Idaho, raised in Ogden and Salt Lake City, Burns did not grow up skiing. His younger years were spent mastering tap dancing, ballet, gymnastics and platform diving, skills he put to unorthodox use when he began skiing in his early 20s and moved to Sun Valley. That was in the mid 1950s. Since then Burns has skied all over the world and Sun Valley is still his favorite place to ski. Burns enjoyed skiing bumps and discovered he seemed to have a higher balance point than skiers of more traditional techniques and could absorb bumps better by holding his hands and arms above his head rather than in front of his torso. He has said of his skiing in those years, “I was an accident waiting for a place. The only thing I had was a lot of guts, balance, and the ability to have fun.”
Accent on having fun.
By the mid 1960s he was revolutionizing the techniques of bump skiing, the concept of freeskiing and the possibilities of steel thighs, noodle knees, balance and showmanship in skiing. With his long, blonde hair, unorthodox technique, unbelievable athleticism and huge smile Burns changed the world of performance skiing, in some ways simply because he was having more fun than everyone else. He has described his skiing style as “…different because I had large cojones but no ability.” All mogul skiers, from that time to the very best of today’s freestylers, are beholden to him.
Dick Barrymore saw Bobbie skiing bumps in Sun Valley and remembered, “The sight changed my life as a filmmaker. Burns’ style was not like any I had seen before….Burns attacked a field of moguls like Errol Flynn attacking a band of pirates. When he skied bumps, he sat down in a permanent toilet-seat position, with his arms high over his head holding 60 inch long ski poles….Bob Burns was, in 1969, the first hot dogger.”
Modern freestyle skiing would be very different if not unimaginable without Bobbie Burns, but it can be argued that his greatest contribution to skiing was not in way he made the ski turn but, rather, in making The Ski.
Like all ski aficionados (also known as ‘addicts’ and ‘bums’) Burns had to make a living and he took whatever jobs kept him on skis, including tuning skis. In the mid-‘60s Chuck Ferries, one of America’s great ski racers had retired from racing and was coaching the U.S. Women’s Ski Team and invited Burns to help him, more for his knowledge of skis and people than for his expertise in racing. Burns has said, “Racing was never for me. What possible fun is it to run gates? You have to slow down to do it!” They formed a working relationship such that in 1968 when Ferries retired from coaching and a job with Head Skis and went to work for K2 Skis he convinced Burns to come with him to make skis. Burns says, “I didn’t know shit about skis,” but, then, there had been a time when he knew nothing about skiing.
He moved to Seattle, signed up to get a graduate degree in chemical engineering at UW and began to learn how to make skis for K2. He and Ferries studied the construction of the best European skis of the time, particularly the Dynamic VR7, and began making skis for American racers, including Marilyn and Bob Cochran, Mike Lafferty and Spider Sabich. The first skis, according to Burns, “…were the worst ever skied upon. Everybody hated them, except Marilyn.” They must have learned quickly, because in 1969 Marilyn Cochran became the first American to win a world cup title (in giant slalom), and Lafferty, Sabich and Bob Cochran (among several others) went on to successful ski racing careers on skis made by Bobbie Burns.
But Burns wanted to make skis for himself and the way he liked to ski, not for racing. He explained, perhaps having as much fun with the world as he was having on skis: “I came up with The Ski when I was driving back to Sun Valley, Idaho. I saw all the sagebrush along the highways, and I started thinking I’d build a ski out of it. If you’ve ever tried to stomp or pull sagebrush out of the ground—in those days skis broke easily—you know you can never break the stuff. I also wanted to make it soft so I could ski bumps really fast, and I wanted to put artwork on the top and do blocks of color. That was way back in the ’70s.”
In 1974 Burns returned to Sun Valley and began making The Ski, the first ski, according to Burns, ever made in the Wood River Valley. The rest, as they say, is history. The Ski revolutionized free skiing for the masses in much the same way as Bobbie Burns revolutionized free skiing for elite athletes of performance skiing. The Ski was soft lengthwise and stiff torsionally with simple blocks of color for artwork unlike anything seen in skiing before. In the mid-80s Burns sold his company. Since then he has continued to make skis for select customers, designed clothes, taught skiing, worked as a consultant, raised his children and, of course, skied. And then Scott Sports asked Bobbie if he was interested in re-creating The Ski. He was and Burns says, “It was kind of like being born again. I really believe The Ski by Scott is a rebirth, and everything has gotten better.”
That is, you can’t have too much fun. Just ask Bobbie Burns.