Category Archives: Reviews – Good Reads

THE GOD OF SKIING

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The God of Skiing by Peter Kray is a reverent, ribald, realistic mixture of fact, fiction and fantasy about what some refer to as the sport of skiing but which high priests and devoted acolytes alike know as a way of life. Peter Kray is a beautiful, insightful and devoted writer, and what I can’t resist thinking of as The Book of Kray is among the very best books about the spirit and practice of skiing as a way of life ever written.
At this writing, just days after two U.S.S.A. developmental team members were killed in an avalanche in Soelden, Austria it struck me that Kray wrote the introduction to the book in Soelden in 2013 and concludes it thus: “In order to tell what’s true, I made up a couple of things. But only to balance out what I’m still afraid of telling. And I present the events as much by year as I do by season, which means you can call it a novel if that makes it easier to understand. Or a documentary. Or skiing’s double album. It is the celebration of a sport made of cold and clouds and the anticipation that the white water will come to wash us clean again. It’s the explanation of why Tack Strau told the reporter in Alaska, “Skiing is made of gravity and speed. It’s dying all the time.”
Yes, and being born all the time in many forms, including literature as good as “The God of Skiing.” Those of a certain age and familiar with a certain time and place of skiing who know about Fritz Stammberger will be drawn to the book simply because a photo of Fritz is on the cover. Those who don’t know of Stammberger will stop to look because the photo and the title fit together as perfectly as the line only you can see through the trees on the best powder day of the season.
Yes, skiing is a way of life made of the freedoms to be found in gravity and speed and the skills acquired playing with them in the snow and cold and mountains in which we live. Kray’s book includes his time in Jackson Hole at the base of the Grand Tetons (which in French means big nipples but in the vernacular describes what they are attached to). In that time he met Bill Briggs, the first to ski from the summit of the Grand Teton, about which he writes, “Once you have seen those peaks, the photographic evidence of Bill Briggs’ epic ski descent down the face of the Grand Teton in 1971 looks like a nude, a weather bleached church on a moon-bathed hill. His thin ski tracks down the peak are the black and white prototype of something bare and yet to be seen, as stark and unimaginable as a lunar landing, as if they were the footprints in the sand of a man trying to sprint off the edge of the world.”
But even the most hard ass skier can only ski 5 or 6 hours a day and “The God of Skiing” does not leave out the remaining 18 or 19 hours. For instance, of “The Stewardess” he writes, “In the morning I could watch her perfect round ass in the lightbulb above the loft like a poor man’s mirror. Everything was beautiful and round about her—her blonde bangs, brown eyes and perfect boobs—like Bambi in the fields with the sweet smell of flowers. Like I was a big Texas cowboy drilling for oil.”
In the section titled “The Grievous Angel,” Kray writes, ‘Gravity’s the only thing that matters,’ Tack said…….’The sky is all in your mind…..It’s just an illusion to create a feeling of distance—an imaginary barrier.’
“After the third joint it didn’t matter. My hands finally stopped shaking and I could marvel at the energy and electricity and how his blue eyes burned like twin planets seen from space, ablaze and unexplored.”
That gives you an idea. “The God of Skiing” is a must read for all skiers. You can find it here for $13.95: http://www.mirabooksmart.com/The-God-of-Skiing_p_584.html

SIERRA STARLIGHT: The astrophotography of Tony Rowell

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Until recently astrophotography was a word I don’t remember hearing or reading and if I had it vanished into the vast depths of unconsciousness like a shooting star. Too bad for me. There is in astrophotography astonishing beauty and subtle and sheer reminders of the connections between all things in the universe. When I read and viewed “Sierra Starlight,” the fine book of astrophotography by Tony Rowell I was treated to some of the best of that beauty as well as moving reminders of those connections, in this case some of them personal.
Tony’s father, Galen Rowell, one of the world’s finest mountain/outdoor/adventure photographers, was a close friend and I knew and liked Tony as a bright, energetic boy and young man but never maintained an adult connection. After Galen was killed in a plane crash in 2002 Tony and I had no contact. I heard he was pursuing photography but didn’t follow his career. When I learned Tony had published a book with such an intriguing title for one like me who has spent much of his life in the Sierra (some of it with Galen) I decided to catch up on Tony’s calling. I ordered his book.
It blew my mind.
Astrophotography, according to Wikipedia, “…is a large sub-discipline in amateur astronomy where it is usually used to record aesthetically pleasing images, rather than for scientific research, with a whole range of equipment and techniques dedicated to the activity.” The whole range of equipment and techniques is as complex and demanding as the images they produce are intriguing and nourishing, and the discipline is not for the impatient, inattentive, unadventurous or fragile. Almost every image of astrophotography is taken with a long exposure which accumulates the small amount of light photons that reach the earth from distant stars. Urban areas as well as some not so urban ones produce light pollution (thus the Dark Sky Ordinances of the towns of the Wood River Valley where I live) which makes seeing or photographing the night time sky a sullied experience.
The Sierra Nevada Mountains of California and Nevada (also known as Sierra Nevadas and Sierra) is a pristine environment for Tony Rowell’s work. He has written, “I joke with my friends that I’m putting in 9-5 days but my hours are 9 p.m. to 5 a.m.” I have spent countless days and nights in those mountains, including many hours of inspiring, nourishing, healing contemplation of its nighttime stars, but “Sierra Starlight” showed me a completely new dimension and perspective of some of my favorite places, Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, Mammoth Mountain and Mono Lake, among others.
The foreword is written by Kenneth Brower and includes, “Malcolm Margolin, our publisher, is smitten by Tony’s astrophotography, seeing it as a new way of looking at the Sierra. So it is, and yet at the same time it is very old. If there is nothing new under the sun, then there is also nothing new under the stars.” I, too, am smitten, and if there is nothing new under the stars we are all still learning (we hope) and in addition to Rowell’s images I learned two new words, astrophotography and moonbow.
Check them out.

SECOND SUNS: A Book About Vision

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Everyone reading this who has had cataract surgery appreciates the second chance at vision that surgery provided, and they as well as readers with the good fortune of good eyesight cherish the opportunity to see goodness in the world. That’s one of several reasons why “Second Suns,” a book by David Oliver Relin is a nourishing read for everyone who endeavors to see the world more clearly. The world as it is, with more than seven billion imperfect humans struggling to survive on a planet that cannot and a human community that will not sustain them (us) in dignity, equality and good health, is a better and more inspiring place because of David Relin and the two central men of this story, Sanduk Ruit and Geoffrey Tabin.
Ruit was born into poverty in a remote mountain village of Nepal, a week’s walk away from the nearest school. Ruit’s obvious intelligence as a young boy inspired his family to arrange for him to be schooled in India, an education they could not afford without help and that began with an arduous 15 day walk with his father from his village to be left alone in a foreign land. He chose medicine as a field of study because of three siblings whose early deaths could have been prevented with access to medical care in developed countries, and within a few years of becoming an ophthalmologist Ruit had revolutionized cataract surgery in the poorest countries on earth.
Tabin, an American, is Professor of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences at the Moran Eye Center at the University of Utah. He graduated from Yale where he was captain and a star player on the tennis team, earned a Masters in Philosophy at Oxford and received his MD from Harvard. He is a well known and highly accomplished climber and the 4th person to have climbed the seven summits, the highest points on each continent, including, of course, Everest. He dropped out of medical school several times to go on climbing expeditions and somehow managed to get back in, and, according to Relin, “…tended to dance along the border of socially acceptable behavior.” He once recited an obscene poem to a group of medical school students, and his life experience, culture, personality, athleticism, opportunities and private life are as different from Ruit’s as, say, Kathmandu is from Cambridge.
Still, the two of them managed to team up (Ruit as mentor, Tabin as acolyte) to change and redefine the meaning and possibilities of modern medicine in the undeveloped countries of the world. Nepal, one of the world’s poorest countries has one of its highest rates of cataracts, and since Ruit opened the Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology in Kathmandu in 1994 nearly 200,000 (mostly) destitute Nepalese have had their eyesight restored. Ruit and Tabin have trained hundreds of ophthalmologists and established centers in India, China, Tibet, Bhutan and Africa and thereby restored sight (and hope, smiles and life itself) to hundreds of thousands of people.
“Second Suns” informs, inspires and resonates for several reasons at multiple levels, including the examples of two doctors and the writer who tells their story of living according to the human ethic of how much they are able to contribute to the world rather than the material standard of how much they can extract from it.

NOBODY HOME

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This alone from “Nobody Home: writing, Buddhism, and living in places” by Gary Snyder in conversation with Julia Martin is worth the price of the book and the pleasure of the read:

“Snyder: Part of the actualization of Buddhist ethics is, in a sense, to be a deep ecologist. The actualization of Buddhist insights gives us a Buddhist economics not based on greed but on need, an ethic of adequacy but simplicity, a valuation of personal insight and personal experience over possessions. What I like most about Buddhism really is its fearlessness. So much of what warps people is fear of death and fear of impermanence. So much of what we do is simply strategies to try and hold back death, trying to buy time with material things. So at its best Buddhism provides people with a way of seeing their own frailty: you need less in the way of material objects and fortresses around yourself.”

As always with Snyder, there is more. Born in 1930 he was a founding father of the “Beat Generation,” a cultural/literary movement of the 1950s with an outsized influence on the consciousness of America. It was never large in numbers, but its early members included Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, John Clellon Holmes, Neal Cassidy, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs, while later adherents included Richard Brautigan and Ken Kesey. The Beats viewed the accepted mores of the establishment as constrictive to the human spirit, destructive to social equality and a sell-out of the best of humanity. Whether or not one embraced (I did and do) or rejected it (many did and do), the message of the Beat Generation lives on, nowhere moreso than in the work and life of its last standing founding father whose book Turtle Island earned the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1975.
This latest book began in 1984 when a young South African graduate student, Julia Martin, wrote Snyder a letter with questions about his writings. She writes, “It started as an intellectual exchange and became an exploration of practice. As a young person living in a society demarcated by the paranoid logic of apartheid, it was refreshing to meet the spaciousness of Gary’s way of seeing. His delight in wildness…the truly radical realization that things are not things but process, nodes in the jeweled net… a tendency to walk out of the narrow prison of dualistic thought.” Nobody Home is a compilation of some of their correspondence and interviews of nearly 30 years and shows, among other things, how the beat of the Beats is still keeping time. From opposite sides of the world they illuminate the connectedness of all things, times, places and people‑‑‑apartheid and a valuation of personal insight and personal experience over possessions, Snyder’s comment to Julia that “…you can hope that your country never becomes a superpower because that’s a huge drag” and the book’s closing lines from HH Dalai Lama, “Compassion, love, and forgiveness, however, are not luxuries. They are fundamental for our survival.”
The Beats go on.

 

DESKTOP REMINDERS

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Every person is well-served by continuous reminders of the consistent and larger story within the various and variable smaller stories that we all tell and hear. Such ethical/intellectual prompts help keep the story rooted in reality and the story teller entrenched in the awareness that humans have always lived by stories and that those stories help shape the world. On the tiny desk in my office on which I write are three such reminders, two poems and a platform. Their size and significance are too large for this small space, but I encourage the reader to track them down for contemplation and, if inspired, action.
The first plank in The Deep Ecology Platform reads, “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.”
Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem, “Please call Me By My True Name” includes,
“I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons
to Uganda.”
And in “…Not Man Apart…” Robinson Jeffers writes,
“In the white of the fire…how can I express the excellence
…I have found, that has no color but clearness;”
These are reminders that everything is connected in the natural (real) world, that the material well-being of the ‘developed’ nations is built upon the poverty of what the Cold War termed “Third World Countries” but modern PC labels “Less Developed Countries,” and that the task of the story teller is to continue to express life’s inexpressible excellence that has no color but clearness.
My desktop reminders are not random.
Deep Ecology is a term (and now a foundation) introduced in 1973 by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess to differentiate between two different but not necessarily incompatible forms of environmentalism—deep ecology, which involves deep questioning, addresses root causes and calls for changes in basic values and practices of industrial civilization’s “business as usual,” and shallow ecology (think Sierra Club), which favors short term often technological fixes to the earth’s human caused environmental crises. That is, the shallow environmentalism of recycling, fuel efficient automobiles, organic farming and other worthy practices are beneficial but do not go far enough or sufficiently include values independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.
Thich Nhat Hanh is likely the best known Buddhist alive besides HH Dalai Lama. He was born in Viet Nam in 1926 and now lives in France. He is a Zen master, writer and poet and a world leader in peace activism. When war came to his native country he founded the engaged Buddhism movement which encouraged both laymen and monks to apply the personal insights of meditation practice to the larger social, political, environmental and economic and injustice issues of the world. Martin Luther King called him “An Apostle of peace and nonviolence.” Thich Nhat Hanh is a constant reminder that we are all connected to and part of both the starving child in Africa and the profiteering merchant of deadly weapons which, in turn, are connected to each other.
Robinson Jeffers is one of America’s great poets and was rightfully recognized as such during the 1920s and 30s, including being on the cover of “Time” magazine in 1932. He was always controversial and expanded both the form and content of American literature in the tradition of Walt Whitman. He studied medicine, forestry and literature and graduated from college at the age of 18 by which time he had determined that poetry was his passion. Jeffers developed a philosophy which he termed “inhumanism.” He explained it as “…a shifting of emphasis from man to not man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence… It offers a reasonable detachment as a rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy.” His work fell out of favor in the popular media during the 1940s in large part because of his opposition to America’s entry into WWII. One of his books included a publisher’s warning about the potentially “unpatriotic” poems found inside. In 1965, three years after Jeffers died, the Sierra Club, at the time under David Brower, published a book of photos of the Big Sur coast interspersed with Jeffers’ poetry. The book’s title “Not Man Apart” is from these Jeffers lines:
“…the greatest beauty is organic wholeness
the wholeness of life and things.
the divine beauty of the universe.
Love that, not man apart from that…”
That’s the best reminder of all.

REMINDERS FROM YOKO

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During the winter of 1963-64 I worked as a bartender/pizza cook at the Sun Valley’s employees bar in the Quonset hut behind the Challenger Inn that later became the laundry. Called the Holiday Hut, it had a full service bar, pizza, ping pong tables, sofas and a television and was in business to discourage off duty Sun Valley employees from hanging around the guest bars in the lodge and inn. My old friend and boss, the wonderful Ned Bell, had set me up with this job that included room and board, a lift pass, some spending money and enough time to ski and train at the gentle levels required to recover from recent surgery and sickness.
Thanks in part to Ned it was an enjoyable, unusually relaxed winter and period in my personal life, a vacation from the concentration of competitive skiing, allowing room and energy for the contemplation of larger issues. And it was a strange and unsettling time in American culture when such issues encouraged contemplation, reassessment and personal connection to and responsibility for them. Just a few months before, President John Kennedy had been assassinated. A year earlier, George Wallace’s inaugural address as Governor of Alabama included, “…segregation now; segregation tomorrow; segregation forever!” Six months after Wallace’s shameful (and shameless) racist polemic, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. And the obscene disaster that a few months later would become known as the Viet Nam War was already underway under the radar but being felt and heard like the distant thunder of an imminent shift in and expansion of the consciousness of the unsettled American culture.
A milestone in my own awareness of and participation in that shift and expansion happened in the Holiday Hut one February 1964 night, the 9th to be precise.
Usually the Holiday Hut had about 10—15 customers doing the things young people do in such places after work, but early that evening the place unexpectedly filled up. I had never been so busy making pizzas, serving drinks and trying to keep customers happy. I asked someone what was going on and was properly chastised for being clueless. The Beatles were appearing on the Ed Sullivan show that night and the Holiday Hut had the available TV. Since I had been out of the country for most of the previous year I didn’t even know who the Beatles were.
I, along with 73 million other people who watched Ed’s show that night, soon found out.
And the Beatles were more than fine musicians and pop stars. They embodied, inspired and gave literal voice to both shift and expansion in the culture’s consciousness, at least for those not too mired to shift or/and too tight to expand. The Beatles were the right people in the right place in the right time to be the literal and musical voice of an era. It was an era of change for many, but even many of those who couldn’t embrace, for instance, peace and love as a mantra for social organization or getting America out of Viet Nam as a political goal, incorporated the Beatles music into their lives. The Beatles’ personal and professional lives were part of the cultural fabric, not because they were celebrities but because they were the public face of shifts in perspective and thinking of a significant part of the culture. The lyrics of their songs were studied and oft repeated. “All You Need is Love,” “Good Day, Sunshine, “Let It Be” and, later, “Imagine” made far more sense for all people than, say the systems analysis thinking of people like Robert McNamara who orchestrated the Viet Nam War and for whom some people were more disposable than others. I mean, anyone with half or less a brain knows that Gandhi is a better role model than Attila.
So, even though life moved on and the Beatles broke up and went separate ways the music and the message lived on. Even when John Lennon joined Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and thousands of lesser known oblations to the gods of America’s gun culture the music of the Beatles endures with lyrics like:

“But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is brother you have to wait”
And then just the other day a book called “Acorn” by Yoko Ono, Lennon’s widow, showed up. She calls it a book of ‘conceptual instructions’ and notes, “I’m riding a time machine that’s going back to the good old ways. Great!”
Among Yoko’s instructions:

“Mend an object
When you go through the process of mending
You mend something inside your soul as well.”

and
“Take your pants off

before you fight.”
The beat goes on.

Zen Lunatics

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

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

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

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

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

Downhill Slide

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Every person who lives in or near or who visits any ski town in America has cause to read “Downhill Slide” by Hal Clifford. Every person interested in the effects of the corporate bottom line on the daily life of common people and the larger (and common) environment has cause to read this book. Every American mountain town citizen who has not been disconnected from the world around him or her by greed or become brain-dead and frozen-hearted from the cumulative effects of looking at life from the ostrich position has cause to read this book. Even the latter have cause to read “Downhill Slide,” but their reaction to it will be different than those whose love of skiing, mountains, elk, deer, lynx, wolves, eagles, clear running streams, authentic experience, the natural world, and community as something more, and more valuable, than political and economic power is deeper than, say, a latte topping, a copper roof on a 50,000 square foot house lived in two weeks a year, or the relationship between, say, the President of Vail Resorts and the Latino population of the trailer parks of Leadville, described by Clifford as, “hardworking, foreign-born, often semiliterate laborers, many of them illegal, who commute long distances to work the menial jobs that keep four-season ski resorts functioning.”

This book is properly described as “an impassioned expose” of how America’s ski corporations “are gutting ski towns, the natural environment, and skiing itself in a largely futile search for short term profits.” Most people who have spent their lives in ski towns know this at some level, but “Downhill Slide” is the first time that all the relevant history, the pertinent facts, the well researched documentation and such an informed insight has been gathered in one place so that the big picture can be seen by the little people. Clifford has done a masterful job of journalism, and the ski towns of America and everyone who loves skiing and the mountains should be (and, I believe, will be) grateful to him. For he not only describes the uninviting, destructive and inauthentic social and environmental landscape of corporate American skiing, he suggests a genuine option to the predominant theme park culture and business of today’s Ski Town USA. That alternative is nothing more radical or complicated than shifting control of local businesses away from absentee and usually corporate ownership to local control. It is a concept as authentic and American as Mom, apple pie, the town hall meeting, self reliance and self determination.

“Downhill Slide” is full of lines like “One does not have to be a hard-core environmental activist to question the wisdom of letting corporations develop public land in order to service their debt and boost shareholders’ profits without materially advancing the public good.” Clifford dispels any illusion the uninformed or the naïve may have that the U.S. Forest Service is able to protect publicly owned lands for the public good. He writes, “There are plenty of individuals in the forest Service who recognize their agency is falling down on the job and who wish things were different. But so long as the agency is obliged by Congress to find its funding in places beyond Capitol Hill, it is going to be compromised in its stewardship of America’s public lands. Those who pay the highest price for this co-opting reside in the communities, both natural and human, situated near ski resorts.” The key phrase is “both natural and human.”

It is evident and well documented, but not well enough publicized that Clifford is accurate when he writes, “The development and expansion of large ski resorts on public lands degrades the natural environment in ways that are as pervasive, far reaching, and difficult to remediate as those caused by excessive logging, grazing and mining. Around ski resorts, these consequences are effectively permanent.”

Clifford describes several instances of the impact of ski resorts, directly or indirectly, on the migration paths and calving habitat and, therefore, survival of elk, including a herd in the Roaring Fork Valley of Aspen and Snowmass. Local residents have long been critical of the Aspen Skiing Company, the U.S. Forest Service and local government’s ineffectiveness in protecting these elk. Many years ago a high ranking official of the Aspen Skiing Company (which today has the best environmental policies and record of any American ski resort) said to me in reference to this very herd, “Fuck the elk. They’re going to die anyway. We might as well get it over with and get on with it.” By “it” he meant progress, development, the fattening of the bottom line. Though this particular official would publicly and hypocritically deny his own statement, just as corporate ski executives and ski town developers all over America would distance themselves from the attitude behind it, “Fuck the elk” (and the water, and the environment, and the people who commute 100 miles a day and more to work for less than $10 an hour) is the modus operandi of the corporate ski world of America. Clifford describes this world with insight, facts, and unflinching honesty.

He touches on the philosophical/theological schism in western consciousness about the proper use of land, particularly public land. He asks, with a touch of irony, “Is nature a warehouse or a temple? (Albeit perhaps a temple with a gym attached.)”

And Clifford does not leave unscathed the warehousers and the novus rex of Ski Town USA. “The conceit,” he writes, “Is that money can get for you what you gave up. The implicit message in the marketing of the modern skiing lifestyle, and especially of the real estate associated with it, is that although the buyer chose at an early age not to drop out and live an alternative life on the edge, but instead to stay on track with his or her nose to the grindstone—that despite this fact, with enough money, the buyer supposedly can go and purchase the alternative life he or she did not choose. Stated like that, such as assertion seems patently false.”

Yes it does because it is, but there is nothing false about “Downhill Slide” or the assertion behind it. Hal Clifford has performed an invaluable service for the ski towns of America. His book is a cautionary tale, and, more, what it describes can be viewed as a microcosm of the effects of corporate ownership on mountain communities, their citizens, wildlife, and the environment throughout the world. “Downhill Slide” is a reminder of some of the consequences of ignoring John Muir’s insight of 1869: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

“Downhill Slide” is hitched to all our lives and is a great read.

 

Bargaining for Eden

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“Greed is all right, by the way… I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”
Ivan Boesky
“Money doesn’t talk, it swears…”
Bob Dylan

Every so often a book is published that brings the larger world into clear focus through a well-polished, high-quality lens directed at one small part of that world. “Bargaining for Eden” is such a book, and everyone who is interested in the human condition and the natural environment and their connections to and effects on each other will be well served by reading it. Stephen Trimble’s skills and perseverance as an investigative reporter honors the craft of writing and serves its readers by bringing integrity, honesty, intelligence, humility and hope to a story that is about their antonyms.
The larger story here is that of the diminishing and degraded landscape and environment of the American west and the reasons it has gotten that way. The smaller part of the world Trimble focuses upon is the Snowbasin Ski Area in Utah and the machinations by which its owner, Earl Holding, used the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, political influence, obscene amounts of money, abuse of public trust, ruthless and imperious determination and implacable secrecy to expand his financial empire at the expense of the common good and the environmental health of the landscape.
Holding, who is 81 years old and worth approximately $4.6 billion and listed as the 59th wealthiest American by Forbes, also owns Sinclair Oil, Grand America Hotel, Westgate Hotel, Little America, 400,000 acres of ‘working cattle’ land in Wyoming and Montana, as well as Sun Valley. He is a self made man whose financial success in life is the stuff of capitalist legend, material excess and human shortcoming. The ski lodges at Holding’s resorts are unrivaled anywhere in the world for luxurious fixtures and expensive décor, including marble selected personally by Holding and his wife from the “finest materials from around the world” for the bathrooms. One long-time Holding employee who for obvious reasons must remain anonymous said, “If Earl Holding treated his employees half as well as he treats his bathrooms this would be a better world.” As America is a capitalist country and as each of us represents its value systems, “Bargaining for Eden” can be viewed as a morality play and, perhaps, an object lesson for each citizen. Greed, like its companions, lust, gluttony, sloth, wrath, envy and pride, are part of the human condition and no human is exempt from them. Trimble certainly does not spare himself and he makes the case (a weak one in my opinion because Earl’s transgressions against the ideals of perfect morality, environmental consciousness and the common good deserve more weight than Trimble gives them) that his own empire-building, self-serving maneuvers in constructing a small house in the desert of southern Utah makes him not so different from Holding.
As metaphor, however, by connecting his own abuse in developing, owning and thereby unalterably changing the landscape to the demonstrably much larger abuse of Earl Holding’s, Trimble encourages the reader to examine what former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson terms “…our values, our commitment to action, and our sense of connection with place, community, and the essence of who we are as inhabitants of this wondrous planet.”
As metaphor, the development of Snowbasin from local ski area to luxurious development spun behind the smoke and mirrors of hosting a couple of the Olympic events on Ogden Mountain above the “idyllic Ogden Valley” which contains a Trappist monastery and its fastest growing community, Eden, could not be better. Trimble writes, “The seven thousand citizens of the valley, monastic and nonmonastic alike, relish a sense of living in a private paradise. They harbor a fierce love for the place, and the names they give to their towns capture these feelings: just down the road from Eden is its satellite village, Liberty.”
As the title, “Bargaining for Eden: The fight for the last open spaces in America,” indicates this is a sordid tale with a few bright spots (and people) of integrity and hope, most notably (perhaps heroically) in the persons of Greg Parrish and Mac Livingston who own a business called the Flower Patch in Salt Lake City on property Holding wanted for his Grand America Hotel. The Flower Patch wasn’t for sale and, despite his best efforts, political influence, wealth and imperious persistence, perhaps for the first time in his business career Holding couldn’t buy what he wanted. Trimble describes the final negotiation: “On March 20 Mac and his allies had their one and only meeting with Earl….Earl was ten minutes late. When he arrived, everyone rose to greet him except Mac, who remained seated…Earl answered most questions himself. A query about cost led him off into a long monologue about engineering, earthquake protection, and Salt Lake Valley geology…As he left, all once again stood—all except Mac Livingston. He wanted to force Earl Holding to reach far across the conference table to shake his hand, and he told me that he had never seen quite so much hatred in anyone’s eyes as in the glare Earl turned on him.”
If the fight for the last open spaces in America uses hatred as a weapon, it will, like its nuclear counterpart, destroy the landscape and all that live upon it. Stephen Trimble has offered us a way beyond hatred with a great and shocking story of the past and a template for the future in “Credo: The People’s West” which ends the book. The last paragraph reads, “We call it paradise, this land of ours. We call it home. Like our nation, the West is in the middle of its arc. We must remain both vigilant and tender if we wish to preserve its authenticity. We can do this. We are not yet too old, too greedy, or too cynical to take wise action together.”
The first action to take is to buy Trimble’s book, read it, study the credo and act accordingly.

 

 

Desert of the Heart

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“There are deserts in every life, and the desert must be depicted if we are to give a fair and complete idea of the country.”
Andre Maurois
Karen Chamberlain was a longtime dear friend, a Colorado-based poet/writer who died in 2010 and whose well crafted work has long been respected and cherished in small circles that continue to expand. Karen was the poetry editor of Mountain Gazette for the first five years of its resurrection and her book Desert of the Heart, published in 2006, is an astonishingly well written and beautiful memoir. Like Walden, Desert Solitaire and Sand County Almanac, Chamberlain’s Desert of the Heart is an important narrative about humans’ and the earth’s present situation. It is a natural history of a person, a time, the environment and ecology of a place and of that history’s timeless connection to and unbreakable relationship with all people in every place.
One definition of natural history is that it is “…an umbrella term for what are now usually viewed as a number of distinct scientific disciplines. Most definitions include the study of living things (e.g. biology, including botany and zoology); other definitions extend the topic to include paleontology, ecology or biochemistry, as well as parts of geology and physics and even meteorology.” While Chamberlain was a poet/writer flesh and pumping blood woman, not a cold, fact laden scientist, her depiction of the four and a half years she spent as the sole caregiver of Horsethief Ranch, an isolated oasis in the Utah desert, is natural history of an American Odyssey of spirit and heart. And every oasis, every human heart and the only earth we will ever have a chance to care for are both fragile and enduring and as related as cause and effect.
Desert of the Heart is a study of the interconnection of living things (some of them already dead in the corporeal/material realm but alive and present in others) in a stark environment that to the caring eye and intelligent effort of its author is as lush and life-sustaining as the mythological Garden of Eden. But Horsethief Ranch, Karen Chamberlain and what she experienced, accomplished, learned, left behind and brought back to all of us in the form of stunningly beautiful, soulful prose is not myth; it is evolutionary adventure and fine literature.
Chamberlain did what nearly every person of spirit and imagination dreams of doing without ever doing it: she ran away from home. She ran not to escape but to expand, not to retreat from the world and its illusions but to embrace its primordial realities. She sold her condo and left a comfortable and not unenviable life of friends, culture and social involvement in Aspen, Colorado, which epitomizes the apex of modern materialism, American culture and success according to western values. Without directly posing the question, Chamberlain’s story answers the question of why she would exchange Aspen for Horsethief, where there was no electricity, no phone, and no neighbors. Also without directly posing the questions, her story reveals the costs and the rewards of her great adventure in the desert.
What a story it is. It includes love, sorrow, death by loco weed, suicide, laughter, a (barely) harmless sexually addicted fool, fear, joy, unlikely friends, wise friends, new friends and old ones, and the space and time to think, write, experience and evolve.
Her companions are her dog, Koa, her horses, occasional and usually but not always welcome human visitors, a wild landscape—and solitude. Her immediate world is an oasis used by humans for centuries, nursed by her hands, effort and skills into a desert garden; and her own mind, unencumbered by the material signposts of western values. She falls in love with an eccentric, reclusive man as wary of relationship as she is of a lack of what she terms “unmolested landscape.” That man’s love, enmeshed with extended doses of solitude and daily and nightly encounters with unmolested landscape bring Chamberlain closer to what Buddhism terms Bodhichitta, “awakened mind.” Close enough that she is able to write of encountering a bighorn ram only ten yards away, “The ram stood still as a statue, head high, legs poised, gazing at us with neither fear nor arrogance nor interest. His presence, his wildness, his life defined in his own mysterious terms, was so overwhelming that he made everything else disappear, including ourselves.”
Chamberlain began writing Desert of the Heart: Sojourn in a Community of Solitudes during her second year at the ranch, and completed it after she left Horsethief. It is a stopover on the journey of life to treasure, and it speaks to us all. Don’t miss it.