"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.

“This is not the saddest story I have ever heard, but it is the one I know best, and I seem to need to tell it one more time.”

That is the last line of the preface to the novel I have worked on and off for several decades. I have decided that it is time to release it, warts and all. You might have wondered over the last few postings why I am releasing long ago writing projects to the virtual world. It is really just a form of house keeping, call it a sort of bucket-list of past creativity. I need to finally clean out the old stories so that I can hopefully, imagine, articulate, and tell some new ones.

“The Good Comrade” is based on events that actually happened to a friend of my parents, and my parents, and sister Kathy, were involved as well. My Mothers cousin was intimately involved and it was because of a betrayal of my mother, that the girl who was taken, was at a public place and could be taken by her mother and several other people. It involves the taking of a child, by one parent, from the other. This was during the McCarthy era, and it so happened that the Mother, although she was born and raised in Farmington, Utah, had become during her college years, the mid to late 1930's, at the University of Utah; a communist and later, after she had been married to my parents friend, and later divorced, she married an African-American. Remember this was in the early 1950's before Rosa Parks famous bus ride, and long before meaningful civil rights legislation. In several states miscegenation was still against the law.

The novel although based on these real events, is a work of fiction. I have no way of knowing how anybody, other than maybe my mother, father and sister Kathy, felt about all of this, but I did hear the story many times, and my father's point of view varied from telling to telling. There are characters that I have made up, to help, in my opinion; the narrative, and there are others that just let me, in the frame-work of the story, describe somethings about the landscape of the West, that have meaning to me.

I hope that some of you will find this interesting enough to read the book. I would be more than happy to discuss any of it, with anybody, at any time. It is available directly from createspace, or through Amazon and Also through the Kindle Store.

Now that this is done, in the sense of being released by me so that completely uninterested parties may read it, if interested, I find that a kind of burden has been lifted, my sense of holding this, has been expiated and I can go on and maybe write, tell and think about some new stories.

The line referring to the saddest story I have ever heard, comes from one of my favorite Novels. “The Good Soldier,” by Ford Maddox Ford. The first line of this novel, which some critics have said is the finest French Novel ever written in English, is “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”



https://tsw.createspace.com/title/3466557 or through Amazon or the Kindle Store

THE BUS DON'T STOP HERE ANYMORE, HARDLY EVER

Believe it or not, I actually had someone say that to me once and today's thoughts relate to that. In the summer of 1968, with my childhood friend Steve Hatsis, we started out for Northern California in my sister Cynthia's Sunbeam Alpine in late July. I don't remember exactly what we intended, but as we made our way West on the old Interstate 80 the world seemed young and filled with possibilities. In those days, the Interstate, at least in Nevada, ended just before you got to a town, and then started back up at the other end of town. This meant that you actually had to go through each town. I am sure we had the top down, and the car was pretty windy inside and you really couldn't go that fast. I think we intended to go to at least Reno the first day and I do remember vividly, going through the old tunnel West of Elko. The reason I remember this is that years later I would read, that just above the tunnel, or the tunnel itself, marked the place where two tectonic plates meet. I think we also picked up some food to eat and something to drink in Elko.

At Battle Mountain, with its giant BM on the mountainside, which I remember laughing about as a young kid on a road trip to San Francisco years before, we got gas and I checked the oil. All was fine. Then as I was driving along about 15-20 miles west of Battle Mountain, the engine blew with the tell tell noise that only a bad cylinder produces. I coasted off the highway and into a run down service station. Next door there was a café as well, and a small post office and the most dilapidated Motel I have ever seen, including third world countries. Steve worked in a service station and new a lot more about engines then I did. He thought it was a bad rod. The engine was still running, but not well. Here I am, a just turned 18-year-old kid and it seemed like the world had ended.

I went into the café and asked about a mechanic, etc. and got no real response. I then asked about when the bus stopped on its way back to Salt Lake, etc. That's when the scary waitress said the line about the bus not stopping. I was in a panic about what to do next, and called my parent's back in Salt Lake. After the first call, I then went over to the Post Office which was next door but part of the complex in Valmy Nevada. It was run, as was the service station and the café by a man named Gene. The Cafe was called Genes Golden Grill. About two decades later, on NBC Nightly news they would feature a little segment about Valmy and Gene who owned it all, ran the Post Office and drove the local school bus. A man for all seasons. He quickly told me that he could make a call, but probably the best he could do for us, would be to get us on the first bus back to Salt Lake City, sometime the next morning. Also, for some strange reason I remember that we had to pre-pay to him the bus fare back . I called my parents back and told them what the game plan was and that with luck in the late afternoon of the following day we would be back and we would figure out what to do about the car.

Here it was, just a little after 1:00 PM in the afternoon, Pacific time and we were stuck in this place with nothing to do. We were too young to drink and I am not sure they served alcohol, although they did sell beer in the general store. There was a broken down pickup at the side of the station and Gene told us we could put our sleeping bags in the back of the pickup and sleep there or rent one of the rooms. We choose the pick-up.

We then went back to where the car was parked, got some of our stuff and tried to figure out what to do until morning. Time slowed more than it ever has for anything I have ever done, I was convinced the hours had passed and I would look at my watch and it was fifteen minutes from my last check.

Steve, since he worked in a service station back in Salt Lake City, spoke the language of service stations and this scary sounding guy, who was probably only in his early twenties, but all ready seemed burned out started talking with us. To this day, I remember him telling us that if we ever found ourselves in this certain part of Sacramento, it was Rio Linda, to use his name, which I have forgotten, ever since then, I have never felt very comfortable in Sacramento as a result of the fact that he kept saying about this particular area, “It's easy to get in, but hard to get out”. What ended up happening was that we got the bus the next morning and arrived in Salt Lake fairly late in the afternoon. We took my father's car, which had a trailer hitch down to the service station where Steve worked and borrowed a tow bar that hooked to a car with chains on the front bumper. I wanted to leave that night for the trek back to the car, but Louise would not hear of it. Steve did not even let his parents know what had happened.

The next morning we left at O-dark-thirty as we say on motorcycle trips drove out, got the car and came back in one marathon day. In the meantime, Louise had got us airline tickets on Western Airlines for early afternoon of the next day to LA.

Steve and I ended up spending about a week in Southern California, besides swimming in the ocean, eating all of our meals at Taco Bell, where you could get 5 tacos for a buck, we attended the Newport Pop festival August 3rd and 4th, 1968 and saw Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Iron Butterfly, Steppenwolf, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe and the Fish, and The Animals. I can still remember hearing “Born to be Wild”. This was one of the first festivals to have over 100,000 people show up. The smell of grass permeated the air before, during and after the concert.

Talk about country bumpkins, it was a real eye opener and it is also really the only time in my life I have done any serious hitchhiking which was pretty scary. We hitched down to San Diego and when we were ready to come home, and probably almost broke, we took a bus back up to the Los Angeles airport for the flight home.

The episode in Valmy stuck with me and in my creative writing class at East High School one day I wrote a story called “The Bus Don't Stop Here Anymore, Hardly Ever” that drew a bit on the real events but much more on some perceptions from the experience. Remember in the spring of 1968 the assassination of Martin Luther King and in June Bobby Kennedy. I then typed the story up and gave it to Jack Christensen, who was a great and gifted teacher. I thought he was going to tell me that it was the best thing I had ever written, instead in his handwriting it said “Nice Plot, NOW WRITE THE STORY.”

Fast forward to the fall of 1972, I am finishing up my academic work at Prescott College and am meeting with my faculty adviser. His name was Dr. A. Wilber Stevens and over my years at Prescott I had taken classes from him, had done many independent study projects with him and been to many dinner parties at his house and was even on a first name basis with his wife Marjorie. He was also for a time the Provost of Prescott College. We use to also make jokes about Wilber and pronounced it like the horse in the television show Mister Ed. WILLBUUR!

What we were discussing was the thesis I needed to do to full fill my graduation requirement. I thought about doing a major paper on some completely academic subject such as Taoist and Buddhist thought in the poetry of T.S. Eliot, (paralyzed force, gesture without motion,) or something along that line, but what I really wanted to do was to write a short Novel or Novella as we say in French, not that I speak French, although I wish that I could read French. Wow, that's a lot for very few words. My major was English Literature, almost a standard in my family, and my minor was Chinese History and I had even taken a year and a half of Mandarin. I also read hundreds of Novels of every description and would stay up late at night debating whether based on Aristotle's definition of tragedy, modern tragedy was possible or if Ezra Pound should receive a pardon for his war-time speeches. Since Prescott College was not a big school. (less than 400 Students in those days,) It was sometimes hard to find anyone else who had read the Magic Mountain or Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man, and I could only discuss them with Professors and I have really only met a couple of women who enjoyed talking about Hans Castorp and his seven years on the mountain. To get credit for the Magic Mountain, all Dr. Stevens asked me to do was to sum up in as few words as possible what I had gleaned from the Magic Mountain. What I ended up quoting in a short paper was a couple of thoughts from a section or chapter of the book entitled “Snow.” I used these same quotes at the graveside service we had for Bob in December 1974. “ Man is the lord of counter-positions, they can be only through him, and thus he is more aristocratic than they. Man is more aristocratic than death, too aristocratic for death,, that is the freedom of his mind. Man is more aristocratic than life, too aristocratic for life, and this is the piety in his heart. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.”

I ended up writing one section of the proposed thesis that fall, also I took a last class in Asian History and a class called Stable Management, where I learned about bits and bidding and how to age a horse and other useful things. The draft of the segment I gave him, met with his approval, it was somewhat based on a desert outing in my dune buggy during my second year of college, and the only thing he said when I left for the Christmas break, was that he needed my finished manuscript by about April 15th, to give him time to read it before the graduation ceremony in mid May. This meant that since I had finished all the necessary classes, the only added fee due to Prescott was about $150.00 for the reading of the thesis and that I had effectively finished college in 3.5 years. This pleased my father very much.

I ended up writing a short novella that I was not entirely pleased with and the ending seemed forced and it was, because I ran out of time. I found that without the day-to-day accountability that school provided I was fairly lazy, I still am, and I was also very involved with some projects with Bob having to do with cows, and real estate.

When I got down to Prescott a few days before graduation, I discussed my thesis with Dr. Stevens. I was quite surprised when he told me that he had accepted a new Professorship at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and was leaving Prescott at the end of May, and had not had time to really write-up anything for me, and promised that he would, but that he had shown the thesis to several other professors at Prescott and that I was going to get an Honors mark for it. At graduation, with no advanced warning I was also awarded the first, and to my knowledge the only Prescott College Award in Literature, which was really just a copy of ANNALS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 1475-1950 with an inscription documenting the award.

I never did receive any of the promised written feed back about the thesis. I did hear from Dr. Stevens about his new life in Las Vegas and about show girls coming to class straight from performance; presumably with their pasties still attached, to talk about Chaucer, but he never sent me anything. I should have written him and asked and I am not sure why I never did. He ended up retiring from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and for many years he was the drama critic for one of the Vegas Papers and is in the hall of fame of Nevada Poets. I read about all this in his obituary.

I thought that I had lost the manuscript of this several years ago, I had a draft copy and had thought about trying to recreate it, but several months ago I found a copy of my submission from 1973. I have given it a new name and have made some minor changes. The main idea stems from the episode from 1968 in Valmy, Nevada. I wish that I had also given a copy of this to Jack Christensen.

I first read about this new division of Amazon, (Create-space) in the Wall Street Journal several months ago. I have also given some thought to writing the other half of this story, but have decided that since I am not the same person that I was back then, or am I, it would be somewhat contrived. And maybe there really is not any more to say. For any of you who may be interested, this can be ordered through the following link at createspace and Amazon directly and The Kindle Store.

So for what it may be worth. I present for men, women and precocious children of all ages, The Valmy Diaries! The following quote comes from the original short story I wrote in the fall of 1968.


“ THE DREAMING OF A YOUNG MAN, LIKE THE RECOLLECTIONS OF AN OLD ONE, INCOHERENT AND UNRELATED, BUT PART OF A LARGER PATTERN, FORMULATED, LATER ABANDONED, THE MAJESTY OF IT ALL”

www.createspace.com/3479183

TIME PRESENT AND TIME PAST ARE BOTH PERHAPS PRESENT IN TIME FUTURE.

To bring all of you up to date. Since my bike problems and the trek back to the Great Basin in a U haul truck, I turned around the next week in my car and drove back to Fresno, via the same route I had intended on my bike to Fresno; via Yosemite and spent about 10 days in Fresno with my sister Kathy. I was reminded of the first time I drove this same route in a car which was 1970, after my first year of college, when I still had a full head of hair and could 'wipe a comb across my head,' when I drove Kathy and my then young (4year old) niece and someone Kathy knew back to Fresno. We took my mother's Blue Lincoln Continental which had a 462 cubic inch engine that put out 400 plus horses, in a car that weighed about 2.5 tons. It had an in-dash eight track tape player and Kathy vividly recalls listening to Tommy by the Who several times. In addition I know that I had some Buffalo Springfield, Leonard Cohen, the Who's Live at Leeds and probably Blind faith and of course my favorite Neil Young. This is the same music I still listen to, and although on this trip I didn't have Tommy, I did have Who's Next, Live at Leeds, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, Leonard Cohen , Neil Young and most of Bob Dylan's early records on CD's. It brought back memories of that trip. Suffice it to say, on the straight stretches of road, in the blue Lincoln, I probably easily drove over 100 MPH. Today, I know, that getting arrested at anything over 100 mph is go to jail, do not pass go, speed, but that was an easier age. Years ago, someone I know was arrested in Nevada at way over 100 mph and the Sheriff as he lead him off to Jail and the Justice of the peace said to him, “Son you are going to make a sizable contribution to the welfare of the people of Winnemucca.” I stayed in Fresno, that trip for about a week helping Kathy and her first husband, Andy, install a watering system for their home in the country near Fresno. For some reason I don't recall, I drove home via Reno and I-80.

Last summer (2009) when the government to try and help save the auto industry in this country, and to stimulate the economy instigated the Cash for Clunker's program, I decided, actually on the last day of the program existing, that I was spending to much money on upkeep on my then ancient 535I BMW. I tend to drive cars till they are completely broken and motorcycles until they wear out or at least one time, when I total them in a crash. I knew what kind of car I wanted to get. In the late 1970's I had a Mercedes 300CD diesel which was the most maintenance free car I have ever owned. I didn't want to shell out what a new Mercedes diesel costs, but I had read a fair amount about the Volkswagen TDI and one of the local dealer's was still accepting cars under Cash for Clunkers and had a new 2010 TDI they had just received over that weekend. I wanted a 6 speed manual transmission and the one they had was a Salsa Red, and so armed with the maximum government stipend under that program, I picked up a cute little Turbo Diesel TDI. Its a pocket rocket, front wheel drive and I have averaged city/highway driving almost 42 miles per gallon. Thank you, all of the Tax payers in this country and the foreigners that buy Treasury Bills!

So on my drive toward Fresno, I wanted to see what kind of mileage I could get with just a long highway trip. I have tracked my mileage on this car since I first got it, online on a website called www. fuelly.com and I also joined the TDI club online for driving tips, etc. There are people on this website that actually brew their own fuel from wood chips, etc and who routinely pick up old frying oil from cholesterol gulch type cafes. I also picked up this neat little gadget called a scan gauge the works on any car made after 1998 and plugs into the OBD port, that by Federal law, is located under the dash. From the TDI club I received some codes, the scan gauge is programmable, for turbo boost, actual water temp, vs the fake gauge on the car and I even programmed some obscure gauges for air/fuel mixture, and engine load. On about six gauges can be viewed at one time, but you can scroll through them. On Fuelly.com you have to name your car, I have never before named either my car on any of my bikes, but for this website I came up with a name for both. The car is Benny Profane, and my current bike is Pig Bodine. I would be very surprised if any of my reader's recognize either of those names, but they are both, characters from the book V by Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon, to say the very least, is a very acquired taste and I have read all of his book's several times. V is still my favorite Pynchon book. Someday, I will devote a whole essay to Pynchon, but suffice it to say that very little is known about Pynchon, compared to him, the late J.D. Salinger was a social gadfly. The only picture of him ever released is his graduate picture from either his high school or Cornell in the mid 1950's. He is in his late 70's roughly the same age as Philip Roth.

Suffice it to say, that although I had planned on driving virtually the whole way to Fresno on one tank of diesel, I ended up topping up in Tonopah, it took a little over 9 gallons, because I needed a break from driving. On the stretch of road from SLC to Tonopah, NV I averaged almost 44 miles per gallon, at slightly more than the posted highway speed. Just as I hit the Nevada-California border near Benton Station, I saw three of Tom Gorey's wild horses and as I looked up at Boundary Peak, the highest peak in Nevada at 13,143, which is about 385 feet less than Utah's own Kings Peak, I felt slightly cheated. With all the beautiful names for different ranges in Nevada, why couldn't they come up with a name other than Boundary Peak for this, their highest peak.

The traffic in Yosemite was not that bad and I ended up driving from Salt Lake City to my sister Kathy's house in Fresno, 715 miles portal to portal, in 11.5 hours of driving time. I turn off my GPS when I stop for fuel, etc and I also turned it off when I got a speeding ticket near Coarsegold about 45 or so miles from Fresno. I had crested a hill and was in 6th gear on the down slope, when you don't have your foot on the pedal, the car doesn't use any fuel, the car started to creep up in speed and by the time my valentine went off, it was too late. I was doing about 10 over the speed limit and as of yet, I haven't got the ticket to see how much it will cost me. All of you have heard the famous comedy routine of who's on first. I have thought several times about trying a variation of this routine involving the Rock Group the Who. In it, the policeman would ask me why I was speeding and I would say Who, he would then say, no why were you speeding and I would say “Magic Bus!” . It would finally come out that I was driving too fast because I was listening to the Who and on the ticket it would be written that I was driving under the influence of the Who. Then when I went to court, the Judge, who would be about my same age, would nod his head, say he completely understood and would dismiss the ticket. Of course, while this was slightly funny to me, in reality, I would of course not try it and I didn't even remember it until after he had completed the ticket and I had left the scene. It' is my first speeding ticket since they set up a road block for me between Silverton and Ouray in Colorado in 1992. But that's a story for another time.

I have visited Kathy over the years on every BMW Motorcycle I have owned. After she moved in to the house she still lives in I visited in 1979 on my first BMW bike an R90-S. I had just finished taking a ten day off shore sailing course around the channel Islands near Santa Barbara and spent a day or two with Kathy and her second Husband Bill and at the time their young daughter Alison and her sister Erika. Just before I got to Fresno, as I was riding along highway 99, a small portion of a recap tire on a truck in front of me came flying back, I swerved and almost missed it completely, but it ended up hitting me on my right shoulder. It hurt and when I took off my shirt later that night, I was black and blue. If the recap had hit me full on in the center of my chest, I am sure I would have gone down on highway 99.

Kathy is a noted Criminal and Labor Law attorney in Fresno, and she also does a fair amount of Appeal work as well. She has served as President of the Fresno Bar and has been editor several times of the local bar newsletter. Several times a year a various bar functions she will be featured as part of the evening playing improvisational jazz piano. She has my Mothers Steinway in her house and I always try and sit near the piano for a few minutes, it always brings back lots of memories. When I was about two and a half, Kathy carried me piggy back almost to the top of Black Mountain. We have always gotten a long well and I enjoy her company a lot. She also writes very funny articles for this newsletter on her travels all over the world. She has been to China, I was going out of habit to say Red China, about three times in the last year and a half. She also is an avid hiker and has gone on Sierra club outings all over the world.

Several times over the last two decades, when she has had very complex cases, and I haven't been as busy as I like to be doing other things, I have gone down to Fresno to assist her in the discovery phase of some of these cases. Have Intellect will Travel. It has always been very easy for me to read things with a good deal of comprehension, and retention, and to figure out how different parts of the puzzle of documents fit together. At age five I took apart my first electric train, just to see how it worked! The first case I worked on in late 1992 was a Federal Criminal Fraud and Conspiracy case involving a defunct Savings and Loan. This was after the Savings and loan Crisis of the late 1980's and was a result of the ill fated Garn St. Germain act and the deregulation of the Savings and Loan Industry. It always takes several years for criminal cases to come to fruition and there is usually years of discovery, etc. There was actually a Savings and Loan in California that invested all of their deposits in franchise locations of Wendy's restaurants! In the case that Kathy had, there were thousands of pages of documents, and I read through the bulk of them and sort of laid out a time line of who said and did what to whom, at any given point in time. I also let her know what documents I thought the Prosecution would probably use when it came to trial. I actually found the work to be very intellectually challenging. (Part of me would have loved to have been a historian and to have perused firsthand through historical documents.) I was also familiar with such terms as core deposit intangible and my favorite term of all disintermedation , which is the flow of money from low to higher interest rates. I have joked with her that if you can understand all of the different characters in the Iliad or the Odyssey and have read Bleak House, or War and Peace, or have completely read Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, then understanding how A relates to B, is not that daunting. Back in 2000, I actually went down for the trial part of a case and got to watch Kathy in Federal court. This case involved phony lease deals which defrauded both some lending institutions and some investors. Not only was I very impressed watching her, it made me realize how much court, in the best sense of the word, is high drama, and like a great actor or actress, you don't see the hours and hours of preparation, only, so to speak, the performance that takes place in front of the other players in the court room. Kathy spends a great deal of time in both Federal and State Courts. She also, so to speak, rides the circuit of courts in the small towns dotted along the roads of the San Joaquin Valley.

So from time to time, I have gone down for this or that case. Most of the cases I have read for her over the years have been Federal Criminal cases involving fraud of one kind or another. Last summer (2009) I went down on another Fraud case having to do with a couple who were using fake trusts, which they had formed based on the advice of a third party entity that went all over the United States selling this tax avoidance scheme at seminars for Doctor's and other high income professionals. These trusts were formed at great expense, to get out of paying income taxes, etc. In addition to the trusts, the couple and the entity they purchased them through, came at if from a particular political view as well and it was interesting reading all this wacko stuff about “Straw Men” and how our currency is somehow illegal, and meaningless, because of this or that, that didn't happen when the United States went off the Gold Standard during the early 1930's. There were even echoes of William Jennings Bryan and his famous “Cross of Gold Speech.” Also they tried to pay the amount of taxes assessed by the IRS, after ignoring deficiency notices for years, with phony credit vehicles. There was also an undercurrent of antisemitism, complete with strange theories about the founding and ownership of the Federal Reserve and even a reference or two to that strange and completely discredited document the Protocols of Zion.

I won't go into any details on this current case, its a Capital Case and this will be an additional appeal on what is referred to as Habeas Issues, but suffice it to say that the transcript of the trial itself, is about 7,500 pages and there are literally 10 boxes of documents. Based on the work I did, we know what we don't know, or what information that had previously been available or called for, that has not made it to Kathy for this additional appeal to the Supreme Court of California. So for about 8.5 to 9 hours per day, I would peruse these records and work on indexes that tell you where this or that is located, both in the boxes and the digital record of documents.

In discovery, all documents are stamped either literally or in the case of PDP document's by electronic stamp with a number referred to as its bates number. I told Kathy years ago that I thought that Bates sounded like a good name for some obscure Civil War general that General Grant despised and in the case I looked at in Fresno this year, I learned about what is called a Batson Wheeler Motion. After reading about this motion, I decided that Batson Wheeler sound like a British historian of obscure WWI battles in France. Instead, just like our Miranda Warning, the naming of these motions, come from the names of real people who were involved in real litigation with sometimes their life at stake. We all make and laugh at Lawyer jokes, but on the Trial and Appellant level the law is about as serious as life gets, and it also on that level at least to me, it; the law is, as intellectually challenging and profound as anything having to do with ideas, and high reason can be.

On Monday the 18th of October, we drove up to San Francisco for a seminar on current trends in Capital Cases. It started at 9:00 am, so it meant that we had to leave Fresno for the drive up about 4:00 am and suffice it to say that we hit Bay area traffic at the worst possible time going up and coming back. Kathy was very funny describing the different pockets of traffic and we did indeed hit the belly of the beast, The only things close to colliding in Livermore was traffic, but we made it with about forty-five minutes to spare. On the return trip at one point it took one hour to go six miles because of a massive accident. On the way home, in additional to listening to a bay area Jazz station, we recited different poems of T.S. Eliot, who was idolized by my Mother when we were growing up and I can remember reciting the Hollow Men at Ensign School in about the 3rd or 4th grade and I knew the line about “ Mistah Kurtz-- he dead,” from Eliot, many years before I actually read Heart of Darkness. There are also parts of Little Gidding that were recited by all of the siblings at the graveside service when my mother Louise died in 1982.

On the return trip, after again fueling up in Tonopah, I turned off of highway 6 onto highway 376 for the 108 mile jog up to Highway 50. I had been on this remote road once before many years ago on a bike and I wanted a change from highway 6 back to Ely. This to me is a strange place for a golf course, and the only town is something called Carver's Round Mountain. At the junction with Highway 50 there was a sign about the cave drawings in Toiyabe cave and I would like to visit the cave sometime. Going home this way added about 70 or so more miles on the return trip, compared to the trip down, and when I filled the car up the next day after returning home I had averaged over 46 miles per gallon on the whole trip. That is actually pretty close to what I probably would have averaged on my motorcycle.. The pass through Yosemite, over Tioga closed a day or two after I drove through it for the season and hopefully will be open by Memorial day next year and my planned motorcycle trip to the 49er rally in Mariposa.

*The opening line from Burnt Norton, the first section from the Four Quartet's of T.S. Eliot

"AND ALL THE MICE ARE IN CHAINS"

This week's blog was supposed to fill in the blanks on the conceptual ride I wrote about several months ago. The ride through the Great Basin to Tonopah and Lee Vining and then after Yosemite to see my sister Kathy in Fresno. I attempted, and that is the operative word, this ride this past Sunday and needless to say, the events of the day were not what I expected when I left the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. This week I was also going to discuss Eugene O'Neill, the American Playwright I know best, I have almost all of his plays in written form and two of them on DVD's and another one somewhere, on an old VHS tape.

But so much for the best of plans and intentions and as the day broke down, in every sense of the word, including terrific rain and lightning and at the end of the day hail, I remembered a line from one of Henry Jame's early novels, the American, where the doomed but beautiful woman; actually a fairly common literary convention, especially to Jame's, says to Christopher Newsome, the rich and lonely protagonist of the Tale, “And All The Mice Are In Chains.”

Apparently, when I last replaced Spark plugs in my bike, I either cross threaded one of them, or it was not tightened enough. As I was wending my way on my beloved Highway 6, about sixty miles from Tonopah, the spark plug unwound itself and shot out the side of the right hand cylinder. This bike has a compression ratio of 12.5 to 1 and even with Ear Plugs and music going, the noise was severe. The Engine died and I pulled in the clutch and looked for a place to get off the road. As I got off the bike about 15 feet away was what I first thought to be a dog, but it turned out it was a coyote and it was very surprised by me being there and took off rather rudely. On my old R1100RS I always carried a couple of spark plugs with me, but on this bike I hadn't really even thought of doing that. From now on, I am always going to have at least one spare spark plug with me. I restarted the engine and began to ride with one fully functioning cylinder and the other one with little compression but with one spark still working. Each of the two cylinders on this bike, have two spark plugs. The bike had very little torque at low RP M's and I really couldn't ride in any gear above about 4th. But, I was at least heading toward Tonopah. This BMW has a count down display for gas, rather than a gauge. From now on I will always believe what it says, for indeed I did run out of gas when it told me I would. By this time the slight drizzle of rain was replaced by thunder, lightning and just before I ran out of gas the second time, hail.

Normally my bike gets somewhere in the upper forties to sometimes well over 50 miles per gallon. But in the configuration I was riding in I wasn't even getting half that. I ran out of gas. The first person who stopped was on a BMW Bike and was heading home to Ely. He didn't have any spare gas and neither one of us could raise a signal on our cell phones. After he left two young guys with a trailer full of ATV'S stopped and they had plenty of extra gas, They gave me about two gallons of gas and offered me more and also would not take any money for the gas, they said it was their good deed for the day. I should have taken them up on the additional gas, for I ran out about 3 miles from Tonopah, as the computer told me I would and this time 3 guys on KTM's stopped and from their off road riding they had extra gas, This got me into Tonopah.

I have stayed in Tonopah on several times, and once when I was with someone, stayed in the Clown Motel. I hate Clown's big time and I dreaded the first time I took Caitlin to the circus. It turns out that she thought clown were weird and one of the first things I asked her about Dan, her future husband, after she became involved with him, was what he thought about Clown's. I also stayed years ago in the Old Mitzpah Hotel, which is now closed and for sale. It was 1975 and I was on my way from Las Vegas, where my then girlfriend was from and we were in her Opel GT, it did not have enough head room for me, and in addition she had her pet raccoon in a cage and it never liked me at all. We were on our way to the UC Davis campus to look at the Vet tech program for her. But I digress and should get back to my most recent stay in the great town of Tonopah.

I stayed at a Motel my good friend's stayed at in May on their way to the 49er rally in Mariposa. They mentioned their was a Mexican restaurant across the street and I hadn't eaten since Oat meal early Sunday morning. So I had dinner there as well. I was hopeful that once I got a new spark plug I would be back on the road. I had decided that even though I was closer to Fresno than SLC, I would return to SLC on the bike and then leave again for Fresno, in my diesel TDI. I couldn't go to NAPA until after 8:00 AM PDT the next morning. I tried to get a good night's sleep.

Suffice it to say, the threads of the cylinder head are shot and I ended up having to rent a U haul Truck. In all the year's I have been riding this is the first time I have been stranded out of State with a bike and only the second time, not counting my accident, that I haven't returned home on my bike.

I am going to take some time to figure out the best way to fix the thread problems on the bike. I suspect I am done riding for this season. I will leave my discourse on O'Neill for another time. But just for a moment think about what it would have been like to know that it was because of your birth that your mother became a morphine addict, that if another child hadn't died, you might not have been born and add to that Irish Catholic Guilt and you have the seeds of in my opinion the Greatest American Playwright. His father was the great actor James O'Neill and he appeared as the Count of Monticristo over 6 thousand times.