Memoirs Of A Curve Loving Man.

Today's title comes to me indirectly from a book that I read forty something years ago. It was Siegfried Sassoon's “Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man,” the first installment of his recollections of WWI. I have also read his George Sherston books including Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. While I won't go into detail about the books and Sassoon, over the past week or so I thought about the books and it has proved a sort of catalyst for me regarding why I love the open road and the sense of adventure that it brings.

My father Bob, yes we always called him Bob, and he would get very mad if you called him Dad or father, or anything else. Most of my friends growing up, have told me that my parent's were the first of their friend's parents that they called by name. Bob was not interested in sports in any way shape or form. I never hit a baseball with him, never shot hoops, and it was even a neighbor who taught he how to ride a bicycle . It was only swimming that he ever did with me or my sister's and although there was a family rite of passage, whereby it was a test to see when you could swim two lengths of our swimming pool faster than Bob, with his fins on, I never saw him swim without them. This was really the only physical thing he did with us. He would horseplay a little bit in the pool, and I can remember at least at a pretty young age, of hanging on to him, but he was not usually a very physical parent. Because of this, I never really got interested in any sport, I was probably the last round pick on a kids baseball team, and although I got the uniform, that was the year, 1958 that we went to Mexico for the whole summer and I never tried out again for any kind of team till high school swimming and most of my teammates had been swimming in competition for years. Bob would on occasion chase us around the house in a scary voice, that at normal sounded like rubbing something over gravel. To this day, I am almost completely ignorant of the rules, positions or the point of baseball, football or basketball. My daughter and I suspect most of my nieces know a lot more about organized sports that I do. The Only subject I know less about than sports is the Bible.

So that I could spend as much one on one time with Bob as possible as a young child, my mother got the idea of Bob taking me on errands. So I went on errands with Bob from the time I was probably four or five. It isn't so much the errands that we went on, as the fact that I had Bob to myself, and didn't need to compete with my three older and two younger sister's for his attention. One of the things that Bob did with me, that I repeated with Caitlin, is that Bob would pretend he didn't know the way home, that he had forgotten and that he would rely on me to get us home. Because of this I developed a good sense of direction and an always open to the adventure of what may be down the next block or half way across the continent. Bob made even routine errands to Ketchum's Builders Supply or to Granite Meat or anywhere else seem fun. My late sister Cynthia at times of stress or consternation or even boredom, would sometimes say, “Think of it as an adventure,” and I think this sprang a little from Bob as well. Some times on the spur of the moment we would come home with some strange animal. A bunch of ducks or rabbits and Louise would try and not act surprised or concerned. Many years later on a lark he bought my sister Michele a horse.

During the 1950's we spent a lot of weekends and longer trips piled into a station wagon going all over the State's of Utah, Wyoming, Nevada and Colorado. Although at this time it had been ten years or so since the end of WWII, southern Utah still seemed to be a product of and kind of stuck, in mostly a good way, the forties. Bob built the first power line over Boulder Mountain and he maintained that the people in that region did not even know that there had been a depression. Although much has remained the same at Bryce, Zions and Capitol, Reef, when it was a National Monument, not a Park and the town of Fruita still remained, we use to stay at the Green Motel, not far from the iconic Barn that you see in the pictures of Capitol Reef. The thing that has changed so much, is the crowds of people, you didn't see the vast number of tourists that you see now, and I am grateful for that. On some of these trips I got to sit at least part of the time between Bob and Louise in the front seat and I would watch Bob's hands as he drove for hours, or at least until the next rest or gas stop, when it was someone else's turn to sit up front.

On my long solitary bike trips, I always try to imagine as I head down a desert highway, what would interest Bob in the surroundings.I also try and imagine his hands under the gloves on the handlebars.  I have told some people that I see Louise's world though Bob's eyes or vice versa. I have been thinking about both Bob and Louise a lot lately, but I think about them on a regular basis anyway. I am now almost a half a decade older than Bob was when he died. His 95^th. Birthday will be this week and on June 1^st of this year it will have been 30 years since Louise died. Caitlin has been a part of my life longer than Bob was.

So this now brings me to my riding plans for this year. My goal is to go on shorter rides around the State of Utah. Two day trips to Monument Valley, Moon Lake and several other places I am still thinking about. At least one weekend a month thru October. While I don't think this will me my last time visiting these places, a part of me wants to try, at least one more time, to have a sort of Proustian recapture of the past. To imagine the sense of childish wonder at Monument Valley, Bryce, or wherever I may end up going. I also plan on updating this blog more frequently and sharing it. I haven't been to an organized BMW rally since 2009 but may try and go to the 49er Rally over this Memorial Day weekend in Mariposa California and my almost yearly ride through Tioga pass and Yosemite and my beloved highway 6 in Nevada.

As far as reading this very mild winter, I have been reading a lot of Dickens. I have my maternal Grandfather's set of Dickens and have re-read Great Expectations, Bleak House for the second time, Old Curiosity Shop and am now reading Our Mutual Friend. In non-fiction or history, in anticipation of this coming October's 50^th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I have been re-reading several books about it including Michael Beschloss' “The Crisis Years” Robert Kennedy's “17 Days” and Michael Dobbs “One Minute to Midnight”. I am thinking about writing something about the Cuban Missile Crisis from how a 12 year old viewed this. This week will also bring my copy of the last installment of Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson, with the last volume, “The Passage of Power.”

"The Frost Performs Its Secret Ministry"

This is a quote from Samuel Coleridge that I recently ran across and I have been thinking about it these last few weeks. Up until last weekend I was still riding my BMW on a daily basis. Whenever I stop for whatever reason and remove my helmet and start to take of my many layers of clothing, people always ask me aren't you cold. I then explain that my heated Gerbings jacket is like wearing around an electric blanket, thermostat and all, and I go on to explain that I also have heated grips on the bike, heated gloves, that plug into my jacket and if it is gets even colder, I have heated socks as well. My Gerbings jacket liner warms up very quickly and I am, by the time I get going as snug as a bug in a rug. I have a balaclava under my helmet and with everything zipped tight I am ready for either a quick zip around town, to a six hundred + mile ride. There have been some years when I have gone as long as seven or eight months without driving a car, and while there is nothing wrong with cars, I know I have owned a lot of them, they are to paraphrase Robert Louis Stevenson, a “Damn poor substitute for a bike.”

Many years ago, camping out with lots of friends, we somehow got on the subject of what it would have been like if Motorcycle's instead of being an alternative means of transportation, viewed essentially as a hobby, had instead become the dominant form of transportation. Everything from the camber of roads, to the shape of the typical nuclear family would have been different. While you could certainly put two small children in a side car, as they grew up, at some point, another motorcycle would have to be part of the picture. From that spark we went on for the rest of the evening imaging this society, were all 4 wheel deliveries would be relegated to the night-time hours, where parking lots could be half the size and roads would by their very nature, meander more than the wide and cumbersome network of roadways we have today. Even in Salt Lake City, with out usual distinct four seasons, if I lived downtown, I could get by without driving a car at all, and either walking or bicycling around for most of my errands, and then have a bike for what I couldn't or didn't want to do via either bicycle or walking or public transportation.

I have written before about riding to Death Valley for the Martin Luther King holiday weekend and also Death Valley in February and I have certainly ridden back to Zion in a snow storm and worried about getting over Scipio summit. Its not the snow, at least on an interstate that's the problem, its the slush and most of all ice that is not any fun at all. Motorcycle's don't handle very well on ice, unless they have spikes in their tires.

So for at least the next few weeks I am relegated to four-wheel transportation. In some years, I have gone from March till the following December on two wheels. Besides the fact that I love riding a motorcycle, over 500,000 miles and 6 BMW's, I feel a sense of grace on a motorcycle that I don't feel any where else. I am talking about physical grace, not grace in the religious sense.

While I tend to read books on a year round basis, I even have been known to read matchbook covers, and I don't smoke, I tend to read more between September and May, then I do during the summer. So far this fall-winter I have re-read Bleak House, The Golden Bowl, and just finished reading Chris Matthew's book about Kennedy. While there were some new antidotes in the book, what is brought out the most is how compartmentalized JFK kept his life. I have known a couple of people that are the same way and I have always wondered what prompted them to do this. Is it for psychic protection, or just because it makes life interesting and enables you to function in some sense, from a somewhat detached point of view. Viewing your own life as an involved but somewhat removed observer. As far as I go, I am not compartmentalized at all, I think I am pretty much the same with everyone, a pretty open book with at least, I hope, a modicum of interest to those observing and interacting with me.

There are several books that I read during my formative school years, that I have read again as an adult and although I certainly remember the plot and the major characters from the first reading, I notice all sorts of things that just living life, have given me an appreciation for. When Caitlin was growing up, from second grade through high school she read the book “The Giver” three times. That's quite an age span to read the same book. Either the curriculum in the second grade was advanced, or in middle school and high school it was parochial .

I inherited, probably by default, my maternal grandfather's complete set of Charles Dickens, and just like his library of Shakespeare, that I also have, I find notes written at the beginning of the book and in some chapters as well. I never met my grandfather Val, he died about three years before I was born, and although I heard a lot about him from my mother Louise, I have gained a glimpse, a mere one, of what he must have been like, by reading these notes. I don't know who will have these books, when I have departed this mortal coil, but I hope that they enjoy reading them, notes and all as much as I have. So I am now knee deep in reading for the second or maybe third time Great Expectations and I plan on reading over the next couple of years at least three Dickens books a year. Dickens was probably the first international celebrity, he packed audiences on both sides of the Atlantic and paved the way for James, Twain, Wilde and Dylan Thomas among others to giving public lectures on both sides of the pond.

While I look forward to spring's first furtive glance, I will stay warm and dry and occupied for the rest of this winter, that really has just started in my beloved valley's of the great basin.

"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.”



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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