24th. Of July

The Title of this Blog, The Smell of Distance comes from a definition Wallace Stegner made in a forward to a book, describing Western Non- fiction writing. He argued, in the best sense of the word, that because of the land, the scale of the west and it aridness, that the smell of distance was a fitting description! I most certainly agree. I come from old Mormon stock and am proud of it. When my daughter Caitlin; who in addition to my pioneer ancestors, is a direct descendant of Brigham Young, was little, and I first took her up to This is the Place Monument, I told her that she had two ancestors on the monument and which two did she think they were. She first pointed to one of the Indians, and I laughed and said, that any Indian tribe would be more than happy to claim her. One of my Great Great Grandfather's was Erastus Snow. Snow Canyon near Saint George is named after him. He was one of the original colonizer's of Saint George. He spent a great deal of time among the Indians of Southern Utah, Northern Arizona and New Mexico. He also did some work for the church in acquiring land in Mexico. He had four wives and fathered about 35 children. He apparently got along well with the different tribes For most of his life he was referred to as “The Late Erastus Snow,” because he was always late for meetings, church, etc. He was once late for a meeting with Brigham Young in Cedar City and Brigham said something like “ Give a sermon and put the people to sleep,” supposedly he gave one of the best speeches several people had ever heard. In 1849 he became an Apostle of the church and served in that capacity till his death in 1888.

On July 21, 1846, Erastus Snow and Orson Pratt, entered the Salt Lake Valley from Emigration Canyon, along the Donner Reed Trail. Almost every time I come out of Emigration Canyon on a motorcycle or in a car, I try to imagine what this Valley must have looked like empty. By transporting my mind to one of the many empty valleys I have crossed in Nevada, I think I can pretty well imagine what it looked like. Jim Bridger had drawn a map for Brigham Young, so they knew all the canyons that entered the Valley and where water was, etc. So they did not end up planting the first crops just north of the site of the City and County Building, fairly close to where the old Center Theater was located., by happenstance.

While Wallace Stegner was not born in Utah, he spent his formative years here, graduated from East High school, went to the University of Utah, and when he was a teacher's assistant at the University of Utah, he taught my mother Louise in an undergraduate course. He was also a life long friend of David L. Freed, the uncle of my childhood friend Howard. Howard's uncle Dave, is a character in several of Stegner's fictions works that were centered here. Those two works were “Remembering Laughter,” and “Recapitulation.” I attended a lecture of Wallace Stegner at Kingsbury Hall in the mid nineteen seventy's. I think it was after the release of his book, “The Uneasy Chair,” which was a biography of another and important Utahan Bernard DeVoto. My favorite novel of Stegner's is “Angle of Repose,” which won a Pulitzer prize.

Bernard DeVoto wrote some excellent books on Western Expansion and Manifest Destiny. If you are at all interested in learning more about the west I would suggest the following books of Bernard DeVoto, “The Course of Empire,” “Across the Wide Missouri,” dealing with the fur trade and last but not least, “The Year of Decision 1846,” which not only has a good chronology of the Mormon trek west, but also a great one of the Donner Party. He also wrote for years, a monthly column in Harper's called, The Uneasy Chair. Both DeVoto and Stegner have helped in a positive way, shape the conservation movement in this country.

Happy 24th of July Weekend to Everyone.

Free Range Childlhood and the Business of Life

Several Months ago, my sister Julie, in a facebook posting, suggested some titles for a personal essay about her childhood that she was thinking of writing. She suggested to some of us in the family that we come up with titles ourselves, and this is one I came up. I have been thinking for quite some time about the relative freedom that I grew up with, compared to how I was able to raise my daughter, and how my friends and sisters raised their children and I definitely think, that the era that I grew up in granted children more autonomy than we allow children today. I think that the main difference is that when I was a child, the percentage of working mothers, was very low, not that the world is a much more dangerous place. While this may not have been the case for all economic levels it was true for the majority of the children I grew up with. Daycare has become an imperative today, and consequently children are more time and observation oriented. If you have thirty minutes to get a child to X or Y, you can't be hunting all over the neighborhood looking for them ! I also think that the relative freedom that I was allowed as a child is part and parcel of why Baby Boomer's are not aging in the same ways as previous generations. This so called refusal to grow up, is really a refusal to stop doing things we have been doing since childhood. Loud Rock and Roll, to our shattered eardrums, sounds just as radical as it did forty to fifty years ago.

The three main rules in my family's house were, you had to be dressed, except for shoes, to come downstairs, no running by the pool and you had to be home by 5:30 PM. We generally had dinner between then and 6:00 PM. Other than that, you were on you own! Given the fact that we had a swimming pool, we of course spent a great deal of time there, but we also explored with friends and by ourselves, all over the avenues. Generally from the old Primary Children's Hospital on 11th. Avenue to the mountains above and east of the old Shrine r's Hospital. There were times when neither of my parents had any idea where, in the neighborhood I was, and as I grew up there were even a few times, when my parents didn't know if I was or was not even in the state. Several times in my teenage years I drove with others to Wendover, had a piece of pie and a cup of coffee and drove back. I don't think we even thought about trying to gamble. This sense of relative freedom was true of my sisters as well. When I was almost three my sister Kathy carried me on her back up almost to the base of Black Mountain. She did of course tell my mother , when we returned, where we had been. She also drove an old Jeep all over the mountains above the avenues way before she had a driver's license and drove the pink Jeep to East High School without a top.

I can remember exploring the area above the Old Veteran's hospital, that had once been a garden, for hours and days on end, with other kids in the neighborhood and we built huts and forts all over the place. My memory of the difference of a hut and fort is size, but there may have been more! I had a mother, that if you told her you wanted to run away, which I told her a couple of times, instead of packing you off for tests and counseling, she packed me a lunch, told me she would miss me, and I was off. The first time I did this, I took off on my three speed bike, with a lunch, including homemade turkey soup in a mason jar. I ended up riding over to City Creek Canyon, and probably going up the canyon a mile or so. I pulled off the paved road to a shady spot and ate my lunch and then after riding up the canyon a little way, headed back down and back home. I was probably about ten years old. Could I imagine allowing my daughter when she was the same age doing something like that, no way! While I don't think our society is producing more perverts and deviants than it did when I was young, just the mere increase in population means that there are greater chances for ill will today, than fifty years ago. Another time, I think my little sisters had been reading the Box Car Children, the three of us, ran away , complete with another lunch lovingly packed by my Mother and we went up above the power station above G street and found a round hole to sit and eat our lunch and think about how we were going to survive on our own. We were probably all told, gone for less that two hours and of course Louise was happy to have us back.

I read an essay several years ago that said something to the effect, that the reason some of
our children are marking their bodies with piercings and tattoos, is that their parents are still generally wearing in their casual attire, the same clothes they wore as teenagers. So if you can't differentiate yourself with clothing, what is left? It will be interesting to see how our grandchildren turn out.

While this is not the serious essay the subject warrants, it is what I am able to write this hot weekend in July.


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The Chaos of the Sun

“We live in an old chaos of the sun, or old dependency of day and night.” This quote from a poem of Wallace Stevens seems to fit my mood, this hot zero summer day. I thought earlier in the day about Wallace Stevens because he has written some delightful Aphorisms, and I adore aphorism and probably have, even before I knew that there was a fancy word for maxim's and proverbs. The English language in filled with Aphorisms which we hear on a daily basis. On a less hot day, I might be willing to debate with you on the possible difference between Aphorisms and Proverbs but today, its almost too hot to do any serious thinking.

Since I can't go for a motorcycle ride, to slightly alleviate the heat and the possible onset of boredom, I had to find something to occupy my mind. When I was a child and I went to my Mother, Louise and told her I was bored, she always answered something to the effect that, “No one is responsible for your boredom but you,” In our house boredom was almost a personal defect, or flaw, like forgetting I before E except after C. I can remember that one way I found to find something to do, was to peruse books, later on the encyclopedia and dictionary's and when I started to become of literary age, in the proper sense of the word, Bartlett's familiar Quotations. Thus over the last fifty or so years, I have spent countless hours during the gray days of November and dreary winters storms, as well as the dog days of summer, reading what other people have thought.

Almost all cultures and languages have an aphoristic tradition and some of my favorite Taoists, Confucian, and Zen Koans certainly fit that mold of aphorisms. On doing a quick Wikipedia search on Aphorisms I found many examples I have not read before, Which I will share with you a Polish writer Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, who wrote a book of aphorism, which I plan to read: The following is a quick down and dirty, not in the lewd sense, rambling of Aphorisms:

The Good or ill of man lies, within his own will. Epictetus
In the long run the truth does not matter. Wallace Stevens
Only that which always existed can be eternal. G Antuan Suarez
A mystic hangs a fig leaf on a eunuch. Sanislaw Jerzy Lee, (The Polish Writer)
You can play a shoestring if you're sincere. John Coltrane
That which does not destroy us makes us stronger. Friedrich Nietzsche
They who give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither
liberty or safety. Ben Franklin
The first ape who became a man thus committed treason against his own kind. Mikhail Turovsky
Wrong Life cannot be lived rightly. Theodor Adorno
It is not uncommon to commiserate with a stranger's misfortune, but it takes a really fine nature to appreciate a friend's success.
Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result. Winston Churchill
Empathy is lost when ever it is most needed. Arturo Mendivil
Believe nothing you hear, and only half of what you see. Mark Twain.
Vanity play lurid tricks with our memory. Joseph Conrad
The fatal futility of Fact. Henry James

Thus my thoughts on this hot July Day!