The whole quote from the Ambassadors by Henry James is as follows: “Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't really matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. It you haven't had that, what have you had. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. The right time is any time that one is still so luck as to have .... Live!
I have always loved that quote from Henry James since I first read it in college. I have been thinking a lot to today about life and the past, for today June 1st, 2012 is the 30th anniversary of my Mother Louise's death. Last night I had been replaying my mental tape of that last night before she died early the next morning with all of her children, with the exception of my sister Kathy, present and so I wanted to do something to commemorate the day. And so it should come as no surprise that I went for a motorcycle ride that I had been planning for a couple of weeks.
My mother never really understood my passion for motorcycles and riding. I remember the night before I was leaving for a trip on my BMW R90S. This would have been about 1978 or maybe 1979 and she asked me didn't I really want to take a car instead. I explained no, I did not and even joked about it for weeks after I returned. I am sure she always worried when I was on one of these trips, just as several of my sister's and Caitlin do now. I choose to honor and think about her by going on a ride, because I would be alone with my thoughts and as much as possible I wanted to try to look at the world through my interpretation of her sensibilities. To further that, I decided I would not listen to any music and would just let that part of my mind and memory that long rides release and any music that I heard would be from me hearing it in my mind. Before I started to ride with an Ipod this is what I did for music and I also wanted to see if I could recall from memory several pieces of music that she dearly loved. I can report that in my mind I did hear and mostly heard correctly, when I listened to it after I returned home, the Promenade from Mussorgsky's “Pictures at an Exhibition and I did also hear on the ride one of Eric Satie's “Gymnopedie's No2.
I thought about what she had missed by dying so long ago and while none of us have more than a minute to minute contract with life, I thought about the 5 grandchildren she never new about. Several son in laws the she never grew to love and adore. I also came up with a list of things that I know she would have liked to know about:She would have loved the pictures from the Hubble Space Craft, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and I think she would have understood and have grown to appreciate the world wide web She would have been so excited about the Olympics in 2002 and seeing the Olympic circles lit up on the face of her beloved Emigration Canyon.
I did come up with a list of things I am glad she did not have to witness: Various assassinations in other parts of the world, genocide several places, the death of my cousin Jonathan from aids in 1993 and the death of Jon Kennedy, for he would have always been Jon Jon in her eyes. The death of my beloved sister Cynthia in 2001, 9/11. The impugning of a liberal arts degree. I talked with Louise many times about my goal of becoming an ignorant person on more topics than anyone else. A liberal arts degree is in my opinion the best basis for understanding how little one really knows. A smattering of ignorance is all we can really hope for.
In talking with my sister Julie I told her some things that I think my Mother would not understand and Julie felt that was unfair, because it deprived Louise of the ability to have evolved. But we know that death deprives us of everything related to life. I have written elsewhere that it is only through the living that the dead are dead . That and history. Needless to say I conceded Julie's point and will forgo sharing with anybody what I think Louise would not understand.
I left the Salt Lake Valley a little before 9:00 Am and headed up I-80 via Parley's Canyon. I then got off the highway 40 exit and headed toward the exit for Kamas. At Kamas I headed to Francis and then up Wolf Creek pass to Hanna. From Hanna I headed to Tabiona, in a relatively green oasis of irrigated pastures and even felt a little moisture in the air. At Duchesne I got on Highway 40 again and proceeded to Vernal. At Vernal I gassed up and then turned on to Highway191. This ride was going to be with the backdrop of the Uinta Mountains. Although I have camped several places in the high Uinta's I decided after today, that I want to try and do some camping somewhere along the route I took. I am going to see if I can get some of my riding friend's to do an informal overnight in some state park. I saw several on the ride, that I really don't know much about.
Vernal is booming from the Oil and Gas play in the area and house's are being built, new roads paved and this has happened before and then it went kind of belly up. Between Duchesne and Roosevelt I saw what at first looked like a carnival being set up, but turned out to be some sort of place where old carnival equipment goes to die and rust out.
Heading on 191 North you are in the familiar shale of Southern Utah, but the colors are much more subdued, my route would take me toward Flaming Gorge, which was dedicated in about 1962 and I remember seeing a White House ceremony where President Kennedy flipped a switch which caused the valves to open so that power could be generated by the new dam. He joked about he hoped that in flipping the switch nothing would blow up any where in the world. At Manilla Utah I headed west towards the Wyoming border and just after Fort Bridger I would then get on Interstate again for the ride to Evanston. While this ride was legally taken place in two states in my mind Wyoming, or at least that part of Wyoming is still behind the Zion Curtain, Think of it as a sort of cultural Anschluss. The LDS church did eventually buy Fort Bridger from Jim. Part of the ride took me past Burn Fork Wyoming which was the site, more or less, for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company's 1825 Rendezvous. One of the most famous of the William Ashley Rendezvous' and the first one that Jim Bridger as a young green kid attended. It is reported that the furs that William Ashley returned to St. Louis with later that fall were worth over $50,000.00 in 1925 dollars which would have had the purchasing power of several million dollars. The wind knows no geography and yet I noticed that as soon as I crossed the Wyoming boarder the wind picked up. As I wended my way North from Fort Bridger and picked up I-80 I realized that it has been many years since I had been up in that area and I was unprepared for all the wind farms from just West of Fort Bridger until a little east of Evanston. I thought that they would be turning faster but with the length of those blades, I guess it doesn't take a very brisk revolution to generate power.
As I have commented before I make little wagers with myself as I travel and the one today was, that if I got to Evanston by 3:15 PM instead of staying on I-80 the whole way, I would turn North to Woodruff and then take the road over Monte Cristo to the Ogden Valley, another place that trapper's spent a lot of time in and even wintered, and then over Trapper's Loop and then after picking up I-84 for just a few miles I would turn on to Highway 89 for the then brief ride back to the Valley of the Saints. The total ride as I turned off the GPS was 450 miles.
It was nice looking at the world as much as possible from Louise's eyes and it did bring back wonderful, powerful and poignant memories. To end this, the following is from a poem by my highly regarded creative writing teacher at East High School, the late Jack Christensen who in the copy of this book that this poem is in; The Deep Song, signed it for me with the dedication to his “Prize Rebel.”
AN IMAGE OF THE HEART:
“The morning meets her eyes beyond the flow Of time, beyond the April wind and summer showers_
Beyond the memory of “God” we miss her so: Ah, God, it was too soon for her to go.”
