During the drought years of the mid-1970s I taught skiing in Squaw Valley, California. One consequence of the drought was that there was no snow on the bottom of the mountain. At the end of the day’s skiing everyone rode the 120 passenger tram back down the mountain. It was always packed. On one of those rides during Christmas vacation 1975 I wound up eyeball to eyeball with a pleasant, balding, distinguished looking gentleman who I had never seen but whose self-assurance was both evident and appealing. We began chatting and he said his name was Alan. I noticed we were being monitored by several people around us, something I attributed to the incongruity of our respective appearances—a distinguished looking gentleman and a ski instructor with shoulder length hair and a beard to mid-chest. I later surmised that I was the only person in the car who didn’t know who he was. When we reached the bottom we were enjoying our conversation and did not want to end it. He asked what I was doing. I was going to the sauna, a favorite practice after a cold day on the mountain. He asked if it would be alright to join me and of course it was.
We sweated and talked of many things for quite some time before I got around to asking what he did for a living. “I’m a United States Senator,” he replied with the gleeful smile of one who enjoys a good sandbag. He was Alan Cranston, U.S. Senator from California. To say I was surprised is an understatement and we had a good laugh at my expense. Cranston turned out to be one of those rare political animals more interested in people than in having people interested in him. He was curious about me and how I managed a non-mainstream lifestyle light years different than his. At the time I was a single father raising my four year old son Jason, earning our living by teaching and coaching skiing, guiding climbing, occasionally selling a piece of writing, giving slide shows of various outdoor adventures and, when desperate, the occasional construction stint. He said he wanted to know how and where I lived and he invited himself to dinner at my house, to which I happily agreed. He showed up the next night, took off his shoes, stretched out on the floor in front of the Franklin stove and made himself at home. We ate and drank wine and talked until late that night and began a friendship that greatly enriched my life and gave me some perspective on the world of power and high end politics, and, therefore, more tools with which to live my own American life. A few nights later he came to dinner again with his son Kim and a friend, Ginger Harmon (who later was one of the founders of the great environmental activist group Great Old Broads For Wilderness). Once again we ate, drank wine and talked about many things until late in the night.
Cranston had been an outstanding track and field athlete at Stanford University from which he graduated with a degree in journalism. (At the age of 55 he set a world record for his age in the 100 yard dash, and he kept himself fit and healthy until his death at the age of 86 on the last day of 2000.) We remained friends until he died. Sometime around 1990 he came to Aspen where I was working. We skied and dined and conversed together as always, but I had made some significant changes in my life—–I had shaved and cut my hair and had quit a lifetime practice (habit) of drinking and drugging to excess, and at dinners Alan drank wine and I drank water. At one dinner he said, “Dick, in many ways it’s hard for me to recognize you without all that hair……..until you start talking, and then it’s the same person.” He worked as a journalist in Ethiopia and Italy in the years before World War II. Because he believed Americans did not properly understand what Adolph Hitler was really about, Cranston translated and, with William Hearst’s help, published Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” into English, an act for which he was successfully sued by Hitler for copyright infringement and was forced to stop publishing, but not before the book had sold half a million copies. He also incurred the wrath of Mussolini for his journalism, which in itself is a good indication that his work was accurate. He entered politics because, as he put it, “I wanted to be in the middle of the action and not just writing about it.”
It takes a certain sort of person to relish the middle of the action in the political world, and Alan was that kind of man. Born to the trade, one might say. In my opinion Cranston was a superb politician because he was a fine man of integrity and an intelligent, independent thinker. I don’t say this because I agreed with his worldview and his politics, which I did (and do). I think John McCain, for instance, was a fine politician, as is Liz Cheney (unlike her despicable father), whose politics and worldviews I do not embrace. Politics in a democracy is rough, unsanitary and, according to Alan Cranston, self-regulating. I often think of a couple of things he told me about the political world, and, despite the Charles Keating scandal which tarnished the end of his political career, I think he had it mostly right.
He said that a good politician “always aims here,” pointing to the level of his head, “knowing in advance he’ll only get here,” pointing to his waist,” or, maybe, with luck, here,” pointing to mid-chest height, “but if he doesn’t try for here,” pointing again to his head, “he’ll wind up with here,” pointing to his ankles.”
Cranston viewed politics as the art of compromise in pursuit of the middle path that most benefits the most people, not to benefit the few at the expense of the many.
He perceived political power in America as a pendulum. That is, it is a mistake, folly really, for political power to get too far to the right or too far to the left because, he said, it always eventually swings back just as far in the opposite direction and that such extreme oscillation is unstable and dangerous to both the citizenry and its government. He had that right.
Alan’s pendulum analogy is apt in today’s far (one might reasonably even say far a field) right political policies that are destabilizing America. It’s worth considering what caused it to swing so far to the right in the first place, for (one can hope) it’s about to start its inevitable move to the left any election now. At the time I met Alan I had grown disheartened with America’s politics and, among other things, the Viet Nam war and had not voted in the past couple of elections. After knowing him and talking over a few late night dinners I re-registered to vote and have done so ever since.
One of my jobs in those days was working for Squaw Valley’s Jean Pierre (J.P.) Pascal as a ski racing coach at a camp in Bariloche, Argentina for the month of August, summer in the northern hemisphere, winter in the south. The job paid well and I always made extra cash selling used skis for more than they were worth because of the Argentine tariffs on imported skis. However, in February of 1975 with the help of the United States and the Gerald Ford administration, particularly the CIA and Henry Kissinger, the democratically elected government headed by Isabel Peron was overthrown in a coup d’etat and replaced by a military dictatorship governed by Jorge Rafael Videla. By then my country had, with the active involvement of the CIA, Kissinger and the U.S. Ambassador to Chile Nathaniel Davis, already disgraced itself and the concept of democracy by staging the overthrow of the democratically elected government headed by Jorge Allende in Chile, replacing it with the military government of Augusto Pinochet. The two military dictatorships were among the most brutal and murderous regimes in modern history, and my country created them. Think of that. And read Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine.”
I first visited Chile at the age of 19 in 1958 and in the ensuing years had spent considerable time in both Chile and Argentina and had many friends in both countries which felt like second homes. That the U.S. had turned both these fine nations into military dictatorships was a nightmare for its citizens, hundreds of thousands of whom simply ‘disappeared’, many of them unloaded while alive from airplanes above the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The arrest, public torture and brutal assassination of Chile’s most popular and beloved folk singer Victor Jara as well as the suspected murder (it has never been proven) of Nobel Prize winner poet Pablo Neruda, galvanized the world in opposition to Pinochet. So…..it was frightening and disheartening when my country orchestrated Videla’s vicious dictatorial takeover of Argentina’s democracy.
And some of the consequences were immediately evident when six months later we stepped off the plane in Buenos Aires on our way to Bariloche to ski. Teen-aged boys in military costume holding automatic weapons, their eyes and faces filled with hatred, anger and fear, were scattered throughout the Buenos Aires airport and, after we had changed planes, in Bariloche, both at the airport and in town. Not surprisingly, though at first I was surprised, those of us with long hair and beards were immediate objects of focus, for all that hair represented to both soldiers and hairy ones…………personal and social freedom, threats to dictators and their lackeys.
This from my journal of August 8, 1975:
Hotel Los Pinos—Bariloche. My old room #7. Night after dinner. Jackson Browne on the sound box, Kenny (Kenny Corrock an old friend and fellow coach at the camp was my roommate) cruising around. A very different feeling than last year. I am very happy.
Last night an amazing thing happened. After dinner I worked on the coyote piece and talked with Helene. Then Kenny, Ryan (Meldrum, a ski racer from Salt Lake) and I went down to the Munich where I used to sit and write in 1968 to have a beer. We had one stein of beer, and Ryan had a hamburger. About midnight we walked outside to go home. Two police cars, a meat wagon and about 20 police with loaded machine guns were cruising down the streets. Like flaming ass-holes with toadstools for brains we stood on the corner to see what was up, instead of going back in and hiding in the last booth. The pigs asked us for our documents, which, of course, we didn’t have. So we were herded into the meat wagon, one of them letting me have it in the kidneys with his night stick.
Four others in the wagon, a large, barred jail on wheels with a bench along each side, a window at the back, one into the driver’s compartment and one on each side—all able to be slid open. One pig with a machine gun stayed inside with us. He was about 20 to 25 years old, smooth skinned, Indian descent; flat, cold, black eyes and a cigarette hanging from his fat lips. He smoked constantly, but allowed no one else to smoke. No one was allowed to talk, but he tried to be friendly with his charges; and, sad to say, a few motherfuckers tried to kiss his ass, expecting I know not what in return. His buddies stopped people in the street and went into the cafes and bars frequented by the poor and the workers; they didn’t, I couldn’t help notice, go into any of the ‘higher’ class establishments; the fuckers only hassled poor buggers with no power. We cruised down Mitre and the lads with the machine guns picked up many people along the way—including 3 young girls (17-18) who were in Bariloche on vacation with a Catholic Girls school. One spoke English and had been to N.Y. 3 times. They were scared. The macho with cigarette and machine gun played on their fear. One of the guys outside had a cigarette in his mouth the entire time—-unlit.
As soon as the night stick was repeatedly jabbed into my kidneys I knew I would have to tread lightly to avoid having the shit kicked out of me. I did, but I pushed it as hard as I could feel it was possible to get away with. (I did not include it in my journal, but I pissed blood for 3 days and nights afterwards, which indicated that the night stick’s holder had been well-trained.)
Kenny was worried. My appearance almost asks for shit, and we have talked about it. He thought we might be in for a bad time.
I thought about the bullshit involved; and about justice; and the military mind; and I thought a bit about ignorance and stupidity, for the men with the guns and uniforms were as stupid and ignorant as any I have ever seen. Men whose bodies have been deprived of proper protein all their lives, their brains shorted on ideas or education or imagination or confidence; their spirits beaten by a system they will never understand—potential Einsteins and Beethovens and Picassos and Gandhi reduced to cretins by—-what?—-their brother human beings. And so, at the same time I am in a rage about what they are doing to us; at their stupidness; their blind power games; their insensitiveness to their own danger; I know their helplessness—they are victims, not the motivating force. They are more used than those of us in the meat wagon. Still, I am in a rage and doing whatever to vibe them into shame with themselves.
But none of that means shit. The owner of the Munich Bar with whom we had been talking saw us get busted. He ran out and yelled to us that he would go to Los Pinos. So, while the machos arrested people criminal enough not to carry identification we cruised down Mitre in the meat wagon.
—-(The next day)
We knew we were okay, so long as we didn’t make any silly moves as we were surely tempted to do. But, still, you can never be too sure, and those fuckers with the machine guns had all the cards. Makes me appreciate and sympathize more than ever with the Jews in Germany, the Blacks and Chicanos in America and any leftist left in Chile.
Before we were half way down Mitre Jean Pierre was outside—grinning, waving and yelling encouragement to us. He had our passports but they had to take us to jail. So we made friends with the 3 scared girls and laid our best vibe on the shitheads and watched very carefully.
The shithead got on my case when I talked to J.P. through the window.
When we got to the jail across from the P.O., all thirty of us, we were herded into a tiny room where the only one of the pigs who knew how to read and write took our names into an enormous black book filled with names. A pissed off nun came to take the 3 girls away. (I didn’t include it in my journal but one of my all time fun experiences was watching the officer in charge being verbally abused and clearly chastened by that nun in a very loud and aggressive voice and manner for arresting teen aged girls. The officer had no response except an obvious shame, and I was both proud and some envious of the nun.) Several of us were herded into a courtyard under the stars and told to wait. I made friends with an Argentine who spoke French and we both agreed the whole matter was ‘degolas,’ that word I learned so long ago in St. Tropez from Nicole.
Finally we got called in for a conference with the chief pig, J.P. and the owner of the Munich. After much babbling in Spanish which I didn’t bother to follow—being into laying down the vibe—they let us go.
J.P. had threatened to call the French and U.S. Embassies and to create an international incident over it. He also told them I was a famous writer and would be sure to write about it. So we were free at 2 a.m. with nothing lost except a little sleep and a great deal of awareness gained. The Munich owner drove us home. He owns a solid block of tourist downtown Bariloche, and he implored me not to ‘write anything bad about us.’ He has said the same thing each time he sees me. Yesterday he bought my ski boots and he said it again. He doesn’t know that I know he’s an ex-cop. So fuck him. Fuck him anyway.
What I think is that the country is just about to come apart. The U.S. $ is worth 80 pesos right now (as compared to 18 a year ago), and the people are ready for a change. The military/police would like to be in charge of that change, which looks like it will be soon. The trip we got involved in was a move to show power and instill fear, the classic way of the pig.
At any rate, now we go downtown with passports. This country is very weird right now, and not likely to get any better for awhile. But the skiing is wonderful.
In 1968 I had another experience of looking in the eye of another angry young soldier filled with hatred and fear who was pointing a machine gun at me while I was in a sleeping bag on the ground. I described it in my book “Night Driving”:
Cartagena—the heroic city, yesterday’s queen of the sea is farther north than Panama. A sad, interesting place, full of memories and history and the vibes of the Spanish lust and greed that founded Cartagena, the same that made short work of the Inca and Aztec civilizations. We spent part of a day walking around, waiting for the car to be brought up from the bowels of the ship; as soon as the car was on the dock we got on the road, and we didn’t want to stop until we reached a place called Playas, in Ecuador, where Chouinard, the surfing expert, informed us Mike Doyle had reported excellent surfing and sympathetic surfing people.
And so it came to be; but not without a more-than-fifty-hour grind, making only the minimum necessary human and mechanical pit stops of life on the road. There were two reasons for our haste: first, we wanted the Pacific surf; and, second, in those days the reputations of the bandits who lived in roving bands in the mountains of Columbia did not instill confidence in the peaceful, unarmed traveler. Indeed, a week after we passed through a bus on the same road was stopped by one of these bands, and more than twenty people were reported shot. Not too long before that drive, we had been surrounded by an army patrol in the hills near Antigua, Guatemala; the soldiers kept us covered with submachine guns and vibes that could turn blood to ice, especially those from one fellow who had the aim on Yvon and I—the first human being I had ever seen who l knew wanted badly, deeply and truly, to kill me.
“Did you see that dude’s eyes?” Yvon asked me after they had left.
“Yup, sure did.”
They’d kept us wondering if we had driven our last mile until we could convince them that we were only tourists, not “revolutionaries” (i.e. CIA) and, for sure, only passing through. Two weeks after this incident, the U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala was machine gunned to death in his limousine in downtown Guatemala City while on his way home for lunch. We had heard other stories, including the one about my old schoolmate, Bob ‘Spade’ Moran, who, as it turned out, was a CIA agent and died as a consequence; he met his end with two shotgun blasts in the back while walking down the main street of a tiny Guatemalan town, from two local fellows who did the job for a hundred dollars. So we knew that insanity was real, and we suspected a full measure of it existed in the mountains of Columbia. That was our feeling, anyway, and one measure of saneness is the ability to listen to the music of the gut twanging away on the central nervous system.
I am reminded of the great writer Salmon Rushdie in his book “Languages of Truth”, written half a century after my journal entries, commenting on Kurt Vonnegut’s book “Slaughter House-Five”: “Vonnegut’s novel is about the inevitability of human violence, and what it does to the not-particularly violent human beings who get caught up in it. He knows that most human beings are not particularly violent. Or not more violent than children are. Give a child a machine gun and he may well use it. Which does not mean that children are particularly violent.
“World War II, as Vonnegut reminds us, was a children’s crusade.”
One of my dearest friends in Bariloche was a woman I’ll call Maria who we had met in 1968. She was the divorced mother of two sons and we had stayed in close touch in the intervening years. During our annual ski camp visits Maria hosted one or two or three dinner parties at her house which included gringo ski campers, family, Barilocheites and others who wandered into her orbit. There were often 10 to 15 people present for her feasts which were accompanied by fine Argentine wine and lasted late. We discussed many things, including the disaster of the military government and the daily challenges it presented to Argentine citizens in general and to those present in particular. Maria also sometimes accompanied us on our nighttime visits to the downtown bars. That is, she was publicly and clearly our friend.
Not long after we returned to the U.S. Maria was unexpectedly arrested, taken from her home and immediately confined to one of the notoriously harsh military prisons in Argentina as a threat to the nation because of her association with us. A month or two later she managed to smuggle a letter out of the prison telling me about her situation which I had not yet heard. She did not include details of anything, including how she managed to get the letter out, but she said it was really bad, she was really frightened and asked if there was there anything I might be able to do to help her. I immediately contacted Amnesty International for advice. They responded with the astute observation that the very worst thing would be to have my friend’s name associated with Amnesty International because, as with the echelons of power in every other military dictatorship in the world, Amnesty International was taboo. AI recommended that I contact my state representatives to the U.S. government. As it was, I had some direct connection to Senator Paul Laxalt, including being friends with his brother, the fine writer Bob Laxalt as well as with one of the senator’s personal assistants who was an old schoolmate. The disheartening response from the senator was to the effect that he could not interfere in the affairs of Argentina concerning an Argentine citizen who had broken Argentine law. Laxalt was among the most conservative senators in Washington during the administration that created the military dictatorship of Argentina, so I should not have been surprised. But I was.
During the 1975 Christmas vacation Alan Cranston visited as usual. We skied together and I told him about my jail time in Bariloche and about Maria, and, as usual, he came to my house for dinner and wine and conversation. He asked to see Maria’s letter. He read it and took some notes and said he’d look into the matter, and so he did. As near as I was able to determine the timing, about 12 hours after he returned to Washington, D.C. Maria was unexpectedly and without explanation released from prison and had a visa for the U.S. She soon was in the U.S. working in California.
All because a drought in the Sierra caused me to be in a crowded tram car face to face with Alan Cranston, who became my friend and is among the finest human beings I’ve known in a long life (84 years) of cherishing those friends. Thanks Alan.
