"Are Books A Substitue For Life?"

“Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life”

I have always taken umbrage at this statement by Robert Louis Stevenson, who after all spent a great deal of time both writing and reading books in his fairly brief life. As a child I certainly enjoyed reading my father's copies of both Kidnapped and Treasure Island and a Child's Garden of Verse. I have also read some of his letters both to and from Henry James. This is the same man who also said “Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catching words.

I adore books and reading they have added so much and continue to add so much to my life that I almost take it for granted. This is kind of strange, for my first attempts at learning to read were anything but fortuitous. I had trouble learning how to read. I did not develop a predominant handedness till I was in about first grade and to this day, even though I sign my name with my left hand, there are things that I can do as well or better with my right hand. Many power tools and intricate things I prefer to use my right hand for. When I started to learn to read in earnest, not the memorizing of stories that had been read to you, where it appears to be that you are reading, but reading in earnest, my brain wanted to go from right to left on the printed page. If I had been born into another culture or alphabet system this would have been fine, but alas, I was not. They ran all sorts of test on me, including IQ and even an ink blot test and could not find anything developmentally wrong. Finally my mother arranged for me to have reading lessons after school from a woman who lived across the street from the old Ensign school on 9^th avenue. It was not rocket science that helped me over come my problem, it was a small piece of card board with a cutout that made me read one word at a time. Thus I would read with her starting on the left side of the page and read the one word at a time. This went on for a relatively small time, until my brain was trained to read from left to right. Once this happened my reading progressed very rapidly, although even to this day, if I am very tired, and am writing something in my terrible handwriting, I will on occasion invert a letter or two. The first chapter book; something my daughter Caitlin was much concerned with when she was learning to read, that I remember reading was a book about a dog named patches. In junior high school I had this same woman as a teacher and she taught the class a speed reading technique I still use to this day. I am not sure if it is the same system , Evelyn Wood, that was much hyped when John F. Kennedy was President.

In addition to whatever books we were reading in school, I had all the books that my parents had in their library. The Iliad and the Odyssey and of course when I was a small child either my mother or one of my sisters read stories to me from the Rudyard Kipling book, “Just So Stories.” I was never told that I couldn't read such and such a book, although I was for the most part not permitted to read comic books, although I could read Mad Magazine. It wasn't till I was away at college that I started reading both Spider Man and Zap comics, One of these books from home got me in trouble when I was in fifth grade. We were allowed and encouraged to bring a book from home to read in the school library once a week. I had picked up 1984 on my way to school , my mother saw it and her only comment was, I am not sure you will enjoy reading it yet. Later that day at school during the quiet reading period I had just barely started to read it when the librarian came by. As soon as she saw the title, she took it from me and said that she was going to call my mother and that the book would not be given back until she had spoken with her. I heard later from my mother her side of the conversation. The librarian, although on some level meant well, she approached my mother like I had done something wrong. This rather upset my mother as well and finally after listing for a awhile my mother, who almost never used a swear word, said to the Librarian, “who the hell do you think gave him the book in the first place.” Late in the afternoon the librarian came in to my class room, slammed the book down on my desk and said don't you ever bring that book back. Of course all the kids wanted to know what I was reading, and it would be interesting to know, if any of them read the book because of that.

My parent's had an eclectic mix of books. I read my father's copies of both Kidnapped and Treasure Island and his favorite book growing up, Smoky, by Will James. We also had Memoirs of a Midget, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan and of course Ulysses which I tried to read when I was about fourteen but did not enjoy at all. I have previously written about having and having read and re-read my mother's copy of Look Homeward Angel and having my Grandfather's editions of Shakespeare. When I was about twelve I was reading the book by Frank Harris “My Life and Loves,” and one of my sister's pointed it out to my mother and all she said was 'that's nice.' When I picked it up I didn't know it was a 'sex' book from 1922 that had once been banned both in Boston and most of the country. By the time I read Tropic of Cancer no one was paying any attention to my reading habits.

I try to read at least several books, new and previously read a week. Reading a book for a second time is like visiting and old friend who has neither email or a current phone. One of the books or stories I have read countless times was first given to me by my mother when I was about twelve. She said that she had read somewhere that you should re-read this story about every ten years. I have been more than committed to that adage and I probably read Joseph Con rad’s “Heart of Darkness, “ about every five years. I have read all almost all of Conrad and my favorite is another of his books that uses Mar low as his narrator, a book called “Chance”. Besides my project of re-reading all of Proust, I have read all the Pynchon books at least three or four times and still take delight in catatonic expressionism and the whole sick crew. When I was in college I up graded my father's compulsive paper back reading to include not only his science fiction and detective mysteries to included Vonnegut and Pynchon. He quite enjoyed V, my favorite of the Pynchon books and I wished he had been alive to read Gravity's Rainbow.

Books have added so much to my life and happiness. Whether it was re-reading the “History of the Atomic Bomb,” before my motorcycle trip to the trinity site, or reading a biography of Oppenheimer upon my return, books are the value added which is so important. We may talk in Utah about Life elevated, but to me it is the reading of books that elevate life. I have never turned down a social situation, or a chance to ride a motorcycle up a canyon because I had to get back to Plutarch's Lives, but I am certainly glad that I have read Plutarch. He who has read the most books, has indeed lived a rich life indeed.

There's A there, there!

I know, the actual Gertrude Stein quote is “There's no, there there,” about her upbringing; privileged as it was, in Oakland California. Compared to Paris at the turn of the 1900's, few places in the world had a there like Paris did. A few years later we would have Eliot in a poem commenting on his buried life and Paris in the spring. Back to Gertrude! I have been thinking about that in terms of The Great Basin, and to me; with my privileged upbringing, the Great Basin is filled with there! True, its of the wide open kind but the vast expanse between Salt Lake City on the eastern edge, and Reno at the foot of the Sierra's is filled with an immense sense of there. I have also read that this basin is, after Afghanistan the second most mountainous area in the world. Not the highest peaks, but the most numerous. It includes the largest alpine lake, (Lake Tahoe), its longest river is the Bear @ 350 miles and the largest single watershed is the Humboldt river drainage of about 17,000 square miles. It also includes the lowest elevation in the nation at Badwater Basin in Death Valley National Park and the highest point of the contiguous United States, the summit of Mount Whitney at 14,505 feet. Within this basin there are other physiographic sections that include large sections of the Colorado River watershed, which include Las Vegas and the northwest corner of Arizona.

The watershed within this area is what is called endorheic, because if flows within the confines of the basin. In one of his reports John C. Fremont mentions about it having “No outlet to the sea.”

Lately I have been reading books about the sea and even though the sea, or ocean is much different than the desert I have grown up in, reading about one makes me think about the other. In the last couple of months I have read the classic “Two Years before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana, Jr. , Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum and last but not least, re-read Lila by Robert M Pirsig, author of course of, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. That book came out about the time I purchased my first BMW motorcycle and R-90S and started to think about long distance motorcycle touring.

I had a chance to experience this there, first hand during the last couple of weeks. I left on May 14^th for a couple of weeks in Fresno and decided that even though most of the mountain passes over the high Sierra were closed, I wanted to go via central Nevada, rather than taking I-15 to Las Vegas and then turning off at Barstow and eventually getting to Fresno. The route I choose is about 150 miles farther than my normal route via Tioga and Yosemite, so I decided to do it in two days.

For a change, instead of going to Wendover and then heading towards Ely via 93-A, I went south from Tooele and took highway 50 toward Delta, and after that toward Ely. Its about 40 miles farther from Salt Lake City to Ely via this route, than it is going by way of Wendover, but I had not gone this way for several years. My original plan was to ride to Tonopah Nevada and spending the night there. I suddenly thought of a variation on Eliot and said to myself about a 'buried life and Tonopah in the Spring.'

It was so early by the time I got to Tonopah, that I decided to keep traveling, the bike ran the whole trip like the proverbial Swiss watch. I headed southeast from Tonopah to about 30 miles south of Goldfield and turned on to state highway 266 to Lida Nevada. I had ridden this way before back in 2005 on my way toward a short visit with my sister in Fresno and on my way to a BMW rally in Sonoma, California. If you take out the major population centers of Reno and Salt Lake City, from what I think about encompassing my traditional sense of the Great Basin, it has to have as low a population density as almost any area in the world. I thought several times about the walk Jediah Strong Smith made across this area in 1827. Peter Skene Ogden explored both the Great Salt Lake and the Humboldt River regions in the late 1820's and Benjamin Bonneville explored the northeast portion of The Great Basin in 1832. In 2004 to settle an Indian Claims case from 1951 Congress passed legislation to pay 117 million dollars to the Western Shoshone Indians for 39,000 square miles of territory.

Once I crossed into California I turned on Highway 168 which takes you over a high-mountain pass and then through a forest of Bristle Cone Pine. (Pinus longaeva) . What they call the Methuselah tree is over 5,000 years old. At Big Pine California, I opted to stop and got a motel room for the night. After a good night's sleep and some decent fried chicken for dinner, I headed south on California Highway 395 and the turnoff in Indian Wells Valley for Highway 178 for Weldon, Lake Isabella and Bakersfield. At Bakersfield I turned North on Highway 99 for the ride up through Delano, Tulare Visalia, and Hanford. I joked with my sister Kathy, that in her legal career she has had murder cases in all of those towns, and several more for the remaining distance to Fresno. It ended up being 893 miles from the City of Salt to my sister's drive-way in Fresno.

After having spent almost two weeks of nothing but reading through documents of almost every description, and also seeing evidence of man's inhumanity towards others, I was ready to once again burn daylight. Just before I left, we brought up a website showing the opening and closing dates of Tioga Pass over the last twenty five years. The Sierra's have had record snow fall this year, and it will be interesting to see when Tioga actually opens. The latest to date has been July 1^st.

I had decided based on a friend who had come the other way on his BMW earlier in the week, that I would come back via Carson Pass, Highway 88. I thought of the throngs of people who headed towards the California Gold Fields via Carson Pass in 1848. When I checked road conditions on that Wednesday they advised snow-tires and chains, and had received fresh snow. By the time I left early Saturday morning May 28^th there were no adverse conditions, and after turning off at Stockton I started on the road to the summit of Carson Pass. I had neglected to bring my heated gear, and just a few miles before I got to the summit of the pass, I had to stop and put on some additional layers of clothing under my riding jacket. I had the heated grips on full the whole day, and once I had the extra layer on , I felt comfy and warm, and that was how I felt, when it started to snow. It hadn't started to stick yet, and I didn't need to really slow down, but I was happy that before long I was out of the mountains (In the Mountain, there you feel free,) another line from Eliot, and heading towards Carson City. It was windy and a little chilly, and it would rain from time to time, but I decided that for the time being I would stick to my original plan of heading towards Fallon and taking Highway 50 back to Ely and then North towards Wendover on highway 93.

There's an old motorcycle adage that when you come to a junction, usually they way you had planned on going, will look more threatening, than the other direction. This proved to be the case and not wanting to get stuck in the mountains between Fallon and Ely, and there only being a few places to stay, miles apart, it getting later on in the day, and it being a holiday weekend, I decided to instead head towards I-80 and to take the slab the rest of the way home. I turned up highway 95 towards I-80 and thought that I would at least get to Elko for the night. Just passed Lovelock, it started to rain in earnest and by the time I got to Winnemucca, I was tired, wet and hungry, I hadn't eaten since breakfast in Fresno.

After a late lunch in Winnemucca of Liver and Onions, something I eat about once a year at the most, I got a motel room and tried to figure out what the weather would be like the next day. It rained the whole way home, and in addition it was much colder, I ended up layering up from head to toe, and in my sleek riding suit, with all the extra layers, I looked more like the Dough Boy, than a lean mean riding machine. I cursed myself for not having brought my heated gear, and actually stopped in Battle Mountain and bought some small gloves to wear as inserts in my summer weight gloves. Just before Carlin Nevada, there is a tunnel which in additional to being the way through a mountain, is where two tectonic plates meet. I think about the constant pressure they apply to each other, where on the surface of the earth, all appears to be relatively calm. Although below the level of the outer shell of my suit and its wonderful gortex, I remained dry, my suit was certainly heavier and my boots did a little squish when I got off the bike for the final time at home. It has been about 840 miles home via this convoluted route.

It was great to be out on the open road and I can't wait until my next opportunity to burn daylight and to use limited amounts of fossil fuels at sometimes prodigious rates of speed.

The Zero Summer

“Where is the summer, the unimaginable Zero Summer” That line from the little Gidding section of the Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot popped into my mind this morning. It hasn't gotten above freezing; until today, in Salt Lake since about the 29th of December. Although I know it will just be a short hop, skip and a jump, in calendar and the speed of life, until it will be summer hot, it seems like a life time away. I am not a winter hater, I can not imagine not living in an area without the four seasons, but these seemingly long cold winter days, make me even more melancholy than I usually am, and I am not sure that is all that healthy for me. The past is a country I inhabited, the future is a place I am investigating.

I certainly have, in earlier years been able to go on short motorcycle rides and trips in January. Back in 2005 when I was breaking in my then new K1200RS, I ventured up to Snowville and then took the loop into Park Valley and Montello, then back to Wendover and home about the second or third week of January. That same month I rode South from Tooele , down to Eureka and then home via the West side of Utah Lake. One year I even ventured to Death Valley in January for a get together. Usually I have gone to Death Valley in February. I remember that I rode home alone, and instead of re-tracing my steps back up the slab of I-15, I instead wended my way up to Tonopah and traversed in Winter Highway 6 back to Ely, and then from Ely to Wendover and back on I-80. I have friends who will trailer their bike to Mesquite and ride from there, but I have never tried that and have always had mixed feelings about hauling bikes to X or Y and then riding from there.

With Winter gear of heated coat, heated gloves, I wasn't cold to speak off, although because of this I have written a cold song, which I would only repeat to a few people and never in polite company. The only real thing that I vividly remember from this trek, which would have been about 8 years ago, was that between Ely and Wendover, about White Horse Pass, I passed a Nevada Highway Patrolman, coming from Wendover, I was speeding, and he certainly could have given me a ticket, but I have always suspected, that just possibly he might have not believed his eyes, a sole motorcycle in the middle of January! It had started to snow on this stretch of road, but was not at that point sticking to the road.

By the time I got to Wendover, it had turned to rain, and I had a tail wind the rest of the way back to the Salt Lake Valley. My treks to Death Valley in February, the President's day weekend, have had some dicey weather, both coming and going, and one year, after riding in the snow, all the way from Nephi home, it was on my dirt road, that I ended up having trouble, and having to get help to get my bike out of a snow bank and back to the garage. I am not sure that I will ever try to leave Salt Lake in January or February for Death Valley on a motorcycle again.

I happened to be channel surfing last weekend; I don't have cable or satellite, I have never seen Big Love, Sister Wives, Sex in the City, Mad Men or the Sopranos, so its just local stations and I ran across a program on channel 9, part of the Utah Education Network, it was a program about the Great Basin and chronicled several characters of the desert. It was a fascinating program and offered similar feelings about the Great Basin that I feel and have voiced on this blog. There was a character who for years lived at the Wendover Dump, a man who built a shrine and raised a family almost right off the freeway, and the world's shortest hitchhiker, who was a double amputee and walked, after a fashion with crutches and swinging his legs and using his knees as feet. He was once picked up by the then Governor of Nevada Paul Laxalt and after the Governor, bought the hitchhiker a six pack of beer, he had his driver, drive the hitchhiker any where in the State he wanted to go. It ended with a segment surrounding the black rock desert where they hold the burning man festival and a man who had placed signs all over the desert near the Playa of Gerlach.

I am waiting till it warms up a little to fix my bike. I have the heli coil parts and some instructions down loaded from the Internet on how to re-drill and tap for the insert, and after I have done that, it will just take me putting in the new spark plug and I will be back to chasing western sunsets around the Great Basin and the Mountain States.