MEN OF REASON AND THE KNOT ON THE ROPE OF WAR

I want to thank my sister Valerie and her husband Larry for helping me write this. Not in the sense that any of the words are theirs, but for providing me with our weekly Sunday motorcycle rides. I always feel very creative on motorcycle rides and over these past few weeks, the part of my mind that is not preoccupied with shifting, counter steering and watching traffic and scenery, is able to go back through my mind and remember from books read decades ago.

Both parts of the title of today's blog are quotes from Nikita Khrushchev, the first part from his memoirs and the second from a line he used in one of his letters to President Kennedy, about if either of them pulled too tight on the rope of war, the knot would be almost impossible to untie. If either of them had been men of less reason and gravitas, I think that it would have proved to have been the nuclear Armageddon we all were fearing during the cold war. Tom Lehrer's “Will all burn together when we burn, there's no need to stand and wait your turn,” would have proved true. Also, supposedly during this time period, Bob Dylan wrote his song, “ A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall.”

The first election that I had any interest in was the 1960 Presidential race. I was ten years old. I remember watching the debates and discussing the merits of both candidates with my friend then and now Tom Gorey, who has always been very politically astute and knowledgeable, He taught me about the electoral college and the Know Nothing Party and the Whigs and the Federalist. I remember a kid down the street who told me that if Kennedy won the Presidency the Pope would run the Country. Would anyone today make the same comment if Mitt Romney should win the White house this November., that the country would be run by Thomas Monson. I had also read both “Seven Days in May,” and “Fail Safe.

I remember the discussion of Matsu and Quemoy and the Missile Gap, that later we would learn, yes there was a missile gap, but it was so much in our favor, that it was almost pathetic. This among other things, had a direct bearing on the relations between Russia and the United States from Kennedy's Inauguration to this Death. Eisenhower had always been very circumspect in discussing this topic, was peeved with Kennedy, for using it, for from briefings JFK knew that we had many times the number of missiles,etc than the Russians had. Never tell the emperor he is naked, there is no way he will take it well. The Bay of Pigs made Kennedy look weak and Khrushchev was convinced that we would mount another invasion of Cuba and that this second attempt would probably be successful. We did plan “Operation Mongoose,” that Bobby Kennedy was very involved in the various plans that were considered . Kennedy had not done well at his Summit in Vienna with Khrushchev, his personal charm was lost on Khrushchev and Khrushchev grumbled that he couldn't relate to Kennedy who was younger that his own son.

I remember as if it was yesterday the excitement surrounding the inauguration ;The torch is passed to a new generation of American, in college I would write a paper, that I may do a blog about next year on the 50^th anniversary of Kennedy's Death, in which I quoted someone, I forget with out looking now, that wonderfully worded and delivered speech was “jingoistic, a Monroe Doctrine for the World. “ My uncle Ranch Kimball was involved with the democratic party in Utah and had been invited to the inauguration. Then I didn't know that thousands of people are always invited, and I borrowed from my Aunt ,and took to school to exhibit with pride, the invitation.

In September of 1962, as the mid terms elections were on the horizon, I remember the charges made by the Senator from New York, Kenneth Ketting, who Robert Kennedy would defeat in the 1964 election, surrounding the military building up on Cuba and also another republican senator Homer Capehart who made similar charges. He would be defeated in the midterm elections. In response to this Kennedy made a speech in September of 1962, that during the crisis he regretted making, about what would be the consequences of the Russians putting any offensive weapons on Cuban Soil. Never before, unlike the United States, had Russian put nuclear weapons outside its own boarders.

In the earlier part of October, my family had taken what would turn out to be our final road trip to Taos and our friends who lived in Taos came back part way with us and we took them to Monument Valley and the Goose necks of the San Juan and I remember saying goodbye to them at the bottom of the Mokie dugway. I try to visit this same area every few years, and I always have a genuine Proustian moment at this same junction. I remember thinking about this weekend during the crisis itself, the last collected normalcy, while worrying about what may happen and realizing probably for the first time, that there were things in the world, that my parent's couldn't protect me from.

Athough the Public announcement and JFK speech regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis did not take place until the 22^nd of October, JFK first saw the grainy pictures on the morning of October 16^th 1962 by McGeorge Bundy, and his first response was that he guessed we would have to bomb them. And that Kenneth Ketting would be elected President in 1964. To deal with this crisis a sub committee, called Excom was established, from both member's of the National Security Council and others and after the crisis had ended. Kennedy or a representative for him contacted the jeweler Cartier about doing a simple little block with the month of October and those thirteen days in bold highlights. Cartier, suggested it be done in silver and supposedly did it for nothing. There were 33 of these made and besides the Excom people both Kennedy's secretary Evelyn Lincoln and Jackie received one.

Very early in the proceeding two things became very evident to the President, it was fast devolving in to Hawks and Doves, Bobby Kennedy at one point turned to someone and said, “Now I know how Tojo felt,” and that his presence in all the meetings, inhibited the exchange of views. Also, from everything I have read about JFK, many books and articles, I don't think he had a long attention span. He always had to have things going on, as many highly compartmentalized people do, and I think his mind would have maybe started to wander if he had had to sit through all those meetings. Kennedy after and because of the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs, had a healthy skepticism of military intelligence and I also think that because of his many health problems and brushes with death, he had enough empathy to put himself not only in Khrushchev place, but to imagine how this appeared to the rest of the world. It was ludicrous to think that two people could decide the fate of mankind. Kennedy was told that even if we eliminated 80 to 90 percent of the missiles in Cuba, upwards of 700 thousand Americans would loose their life if the remaining missiles on Cuba were unleashed during an attack on the United States. That is more people than died in the American Civil War. Western Europe had lived for years with the close proximity of missiles aimed at them, and in the event of war, it really would not matter whether the missile was fired from Russia, or from 90 miles away. It really didn't change the strategic balance at all. It would take the best of both of these leader's and their adviser's, to prevent the knot on the rope of war from becoming too tight to undo. Kennedy was a student of history, had read his Herodotus and Thucydides and had read and had all his aides, as well as several generals and the joint chiefs of staff read Barbara Tuchman's “The Guns of August,” dealing with the mistakes in decision making, etc. that lead up to the First World War.

Now for a break, what I actually remember, I remember his speech on the 22^nd, which came out of the blue, even though by then I tried to watch the Huntley Brinkley report, which then was 15 minutes long, with my father every late afternoon. I remember the tenseness during the rest of the week, and I was actually at a friend's house, Kim Fuller, who had a very nice and elegant mother, for Adali Stevenson’s UN presentation and his hell freezing over and the world court of public opinion pronouncements and I remember feeling that she was deeply scared and worried, although she tried to pretend that nothing was going on. And yet, I still needed to be home by 5:30pm, we still ate as a family and my father still cut out that evening's television schedule from the Salt Lake Tribune with his pocketknife.

The President and his adviser's looked at either destroying the missiles or a quarantine and Ted Sorenson, the words-man of the New Frontier, actually worked on two draft's the one which was presented for the quarantine, which supposedly sounded less harsh than blockade, and one announcing that the president had approved taking out the missiles and the invasion by 150,000 plus of US servicemen of the island nation of Cuba. There was discussion about needing a government to run Cuba after our invasion and someone suggested Bobby as Mayor of Havana. That second draft is now on public display and it is chilling to read.

One of the best books I have read on the Cuban Missile Crisis is called, “One Minute to Midnight”, by Michael Dobbs, who by doing his own research of photos taken at the time, but not ever really looked at, but available for research at the National Archives, he actually found where the nuclear warheads, were stored and that the number of soviet Military personnel on the island of Cuba was much greater than we knew, 42,000+ and that in addition to the LRBM and MRBM, there were tactical nuclear weapons called Frogs and even some nuclear tipped shells for tanks and that Guantanamo,was a prime military target for the Cuban's and the Soviet soldiers. Even thought this was not known at the time, all the wives and most of the American support people at Guantanamo had been air lifted out earlier in the week. After the crisis had passed, Castro lobbied to retain ownership of the nuclear tipped shells that we didn't know about, but the Russians wisely took all the weapons out, although it probably took another month after the public resolution of this crisis.

The penultimate days of the crisis were late Friday October 26^th and all of October 27^th , referred to by those involved on the American side as 'Black Saturday,' it was then, late Friday, that the President received the first of two letters from Khrushchev. The first was a reasonable one and after they had started to think about responding to that one.  (This letter was fairly close to the final agreement, that we would agree to not invade Cuba, which had been one of the Russian reasons for putting the missiles there in the first place, and that privately we would agree at some point to remove the obsolete Jupiter Missiles from Turkey.) A much harsher and more belligerent second letter was read over Radio Moscow. They assumed that the first letter was written by Khrushchev alone, and the second letter was done by the politburo as a group. In those days, there was no direct line between our governments, that grew out of the Cuban Crisis, and to send a telegraph to Moscow, the Washington Soviet embassy had to call Western Union who would send over an elderly African American  on a bicycle, who would pick up the message and peddle back to Western union. How to deal with these two letter's took up much of the debate during those two days. Also, on Saturday a U2 was shot down, the pilot had been the same one that took the first photos. A Rudolph Anderson Jr. and he ended up being the only American who directly lost his life as a result of the crisis. A Russian sub was forced to surface as a result of some depth charges being sent their way and the Captain of the Sub wanted to fire his nuclear torpedo, but a Russian Admiral, (Vasili Arkhipov) on board prevented him from doing this. He is certainly an unsung hero of this epic. Another man of reason. During this time the United States went to level  Defcon 2, just one removed from actual all out nuclear war. If  this torpedo had been fired, it would have been very hard to contain the escalation of events. Several people finally suggested that the President respond to the first private letter and to ignore the second public letter. Also on the 27^th Bobby Kennedy met secretly with Andrei Gromyko to go over all of this. Another person of reason in this ordeal. There had also been prior meetings between a KGB agent and a newspaper man John Scali. The Military felt, that the shooting down of the U2 was sufficient grounds to attack the Russians, that the blockade had done nothing, except for public relations purposes. Kennedy was smart enough to view this as an accident, the U2 downing, and not a premeditated act on the part of the Russians to escalate the situation.

President Kennedy was uncomfortable with those that were gloating that we had beat the Russians and when this was over, he said to Bobby, that it would be a great night to go to the theater. Bobby said he would go with him. Kennedy felt that this, the Cuban Missile Crisis, would be what he would be remembered for, but I like to think that the Peace Corp, the Test Ban Treaty and putting men on the Moon are the most lasting tribute, that and the groundwork, that LBJ would complete of the Civil Rights act of 1964.

I have thought about how would all of this play out today, when it is impossible to keep a secret and with the pressure of Twitter and Facebook. Does the President still have the bag man in close proximity for the launch codes for a nuclear attack, or is there a smart phone app for that. Does the red phone still exist, or does the President have leaders on speed dial on his blackberry and are they Facebook friends.

My biggest surprise in looking back at all of this, is that 50 years later, Fidel, although not the day to day head of Cuba is still around. He weathered all of our misplaced efforts to displace him, to assinate him, or to make his beard fall out and the embargo of Cuba, while being detrimental to the people of Cuba, has not changed their form of government. On that same “Black Saturday” Fidel wrote a letter to Khrushchev suggesting that the Russian do a preemptive attack on the United States, even though it would have for sure caused the destruction of Cuba and its people. Thank goodness men or reason prevailed.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy certainly learned from this experience as his speech in June of 1963 his so called Peace Speech, his commencement address at American University. “In the final analysis, our most common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.”

When I was in high school I wrote in a play that won a Scholastic Magazine National Award, the following is a couple of lines from it and it sum's up my feelings as well today as it did then.

“The Men make bombs, but they buy paintings, they throw sulfur into the atmosphere, but they plant beautiful and even rows of wheat.”

The Bunker at Battlerock

I was invited this last weekend to visit an old friend from college who lives in McElmo Canyon, which is a canyon that is a little South and West of Cortez Colorado. Her house is about 12 miles East of the Utah border and McElmo has a river that runs all year long and is home to old Mormon Orchards and farms and has several bed and breakfast's and a couple of vineyards. I haven't visited her in a few years although we talk on the phone about once a month. Since my last visit she sold her old house, which at one time was a stage-coach stop between the Utah Colorado border and Cortez and the stage then went on to Bluff. She sold her old house to the BLM and then had a new house built on the acreage where she keeps her horses. She has a complete unit in the basement complete with kitchen that she rents out to people who are either hiking or taking horses in to Land of the Ancients National Monument which borders her property and she even has a gate that leads directly into it. It would also make a nice over-nite spot for people touring the southwest on motorcycles. Directly across the highway from her house is both a vineyard run by an arrogant, I am told, Welshman, and behind that the Battlerock Mountain.

My favorite way to get from Salt Lake City to McElmo is instead of going through Moab, to turn just before Green River and head West on I-70 and then turn off on highway 24 towards Hanksville. This is what I did last Thursday the 19^th of July. I have always thought highway 95 between Hanksville and Blanding is a fantastic motorcycle road, second maybe to Highway 12 for one of my favorite roads in Utah. There was very little traffic after getting to Hanksville a little after 9:00 am and I had originally thought about taking the Mokie Dugway to Mexican Hat and then backtracking back up to Bluff and then heading to Aneth. Instead I continued to and got gas and a strawberry shake in Blanding.

Just before Aneth there is a junction that picks up the road that runs between there and Cortez. From the Cortez side it is road G and is also a scenic byway and part of the Land of the Ancients Byway. My friend Susan is the coördinator for the Land of the Ancients byway. It wasn't long until I saw her new house perched on the side of the hill and did not ride my bike till my return on the 24^th.

Why is is that we tend to notice the sky, sunsets and day break with more vivid eyes than we do at home. While I do always try to notice the sun setting over the Great Salt Lake, I have to admit there was a vividness to these in McElmo, that I don't think I recognize on a daily basis. Its like the comment that is always made about the beautiful sunsets in Venice. It we all opened our eyes in our normal lives to the extent we do while in a new place, I think for the most part life would seem so much more magical.

Susan has 3 dogs, two of which she had when I was there last and they seemed to remember me. She also has 2 cats and 4 horses and several acres of irrigated pasture. Susan had a quick trip to Chicago for a surprise birthday party on Saturday so early Saturday morning I drove her in her new Fiat 500 to Durango and dropped her off at the airport. I had agreed to take care of things while she was gone and to pick her up at the airport on Monday Afternoon. For many years I had cows to feed on a daily basis, and we had several horses, and lots of birds and at one time over 40 peacocks. I had forgotten that nice feeling of being tied to the earth that one experiences when one has some time of physical activity that needs to be repeated several times a day. Susan has a watering system that pumps water out of an irrigation canal and the she has risers and about five sets of hand lines that can be moved around the pasture. There are valves to be turned and separate diets for both the dogs and the horses.

I thoroughly enjoyed doing all of this, and in the off time, I read lots of magazines that I don't normally look at, read some books and watch several movies that I had not seen either before or in years. On Saturday and Sunday afternoon there were brief rain showers and by Sunday morning the place was looking green and well cared for. Thank you mother nature.

Susan has a beautiful new house, filled with Navajo rugs and Indian pottery and family heirlooms including an old bed that was brought by buggy from New York to the then new territory of Ohio in the early 1800's.

I picked her up at the Durango airport which is about 20 miles away from Durango and  near Ignacio. It was a torrential rain storm just when I got to the airport and rained off an on until about half way to Mancos. I had driven another one of her cars down to pick her up, because her youngest dog had her obedience class that evening in Dolores and so by the time we made it back to McElmo it was a little after 8:00 pm.

I left early the next morning and did go down to Mexican Hat where I gassed up and then did head up the Mokie dugway and proceeded up highway 95 and again got gas and a strawberry shake in Hanksville. I had thought about heading towards Capitol Reef and Torrey and then thought I would take SR72 towards Emery but instead I headed back towards Green river to head toward highway 6 and Price. Instead at the junction of SR24 and I-70 I headed West on I-70, which really is a beautiful if desolate stretch of road, my favorite kind, and did turn off on SR10 towards Emery and Huntington. Just before I turn off on SR10 there had been a roll over on eastbound 70 and the ambulance was a head of me towards Emery and Ferron, where it seems that moved the people from one ambulance to another and just about the time I was getting gas in Huntington the ambulance with lights a blazing was heading towards Price.

At Huntington I turned off on SR31 that takes you from Huntington to Fairview, the road has washed out because of some flash flooding and the fires in that part of the canyon and although it was open there was a lot of muck at the side of the road and there was the smell of burned wood in the air. There was not much traffic on my whole return trip, until I got to the mouth of Spanish Fork canyon and its junction with I-15 and after running the gauntlet of the Utah County I-15 rebuild I was soon back to the land of Zion on its most special day. My Great Great Grandfather Erastus Snow had actually been one of the first three pioneers to enter the valley on the 22^nd of July.

It was a nice 5 days to have relaxed in a beautiful desert environment and I look forward to my next adventure in the American West.

I am ending this installment with a quote from Stephen Vincent Benet

“I have fallen in love with American names, The sharp names that never get fat.

The snakeskin titles of mining claims. The plumed war bonnet of Medicine Hat, Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.”

"Live all you can; its a mistake not to.

The whole quote from the Ambassadors by Henry James is as follows: “Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't really matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. It you haven't had that, what have you had. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. The right time is any time that one is still so luck as to have .... Live!

I have always loved that quote from Henry James since I first read it in college. I have been thinking a lot to today about life and the past, for today June 1^st, 2012 is the 30^th anniversary of my Mother Louise's death. Last night I had been replaying my mental tape of that last night before she died early the next morning with all of her children, with the exception of my sister Kathy, present and so I wanted to do something to commemorate the day. And so it should come as no surprise that I went for a motorcycle ride that I had been planning for a couple of weeks.

My mother never really understood my passion for motorcycles and riding. I remember the night before I was leaving for a trip on my BMW R90S. This would have been about 1978 or maybe 1979 and she asked me didn't I really want to take a car instead. I explained no, I did not and even joked about it for weeks after I returned. I am sure she always worried when I was on one of these trips, just as several of my sister's and Caitlin do now. I choose to honor and think about her by going on a ride, because I would be alone with my thoughts and as much as possible I wanted to try to look at the world through my interpretation of her sensibilities. To further that, I decided I would not listen to any music and would just let that part of my mind and memory that long rides release and any music that I heard would be from me hearing it in my mind. Before I started to ride with an Ipod this is what I did for music and I also wanted to see if I could recall from memory several pieces of music that she dearly loved. I can report that in my mind I did hear and mostly heard correctly, when I listened to it after I returned home, the Promenade from Mussorgsky's “Pictures at an Exhibition and I did also hear on the ride one of Eric Satie's “Gymnopedie's No2.

I thought about what she had missed by dying so long ago and while none of us have more than a minute to minute contract with life, I thought about the 5 grandchildren she never new about. Several son in laws the she never grew to love and adore. I also came up with a list of things that I know she would have liked to know about:She would have loved the pictures from the Hubble Space Craft, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and I think she would have understood and have grown to appreciate the world wide web She would have been so excited about the Olympics in 2002 and seeing the Olympic circles lit up on the face of her beloved Emigration Canyon.

I did come up with a list of things I am glad she did not have to witness: Various assassinations in other parts of the world, genocide several places, the death of my cousin Jonathan from aids in 1993 and the death of Jon Kennedy, for he would have always been Jon Jon in her eyes. The death of my beloved sister Cynthia in 2001, 9/11. The impugning of a liberal arts degree. I talked with Louise many times about my goal of becoming an ignorant person on more topics than anyone else. A liberal arts degree is in my opinion the best basis for understanding how little one really knows. A smattering of ignorance is all we can really hope for.

In talking with my sister Julie I told her some things that I think my Mother would not understand and Julie felt that was unfair, because it deprived Louise of the ability to have evolved. But we know that death deprives us of everything related to life. I have written elsewhere that it is only through the living that the dead are dead . That and history. Needless to say I conceded Julie's point and will forgo sharing with anybody what I think Louise would not understand.

I left the Salt Lake Valley a little before 9:00 Am and headed up I-80 via Parley's Canyon. I then got off the highway 40 exit and headed toward the exit for Kamas. At Kamas I headed to Francis and then up Wolf Creek pass to Hanna. From Hanna I headed to Tabiona, in a relatively green oasis of irrigated pastures and even felt a little moisture in the air. At Duchesne I got on Highway 40 again and proceeded to Vernal. At Vernal I gassed up and then turned on to Highway191. This ride was going to be with the backdrop of the Uinta Mountains. Although I have camped several places in the high Uinta's I decided after today, that I want to try and do some camping somewhere along the route I took. I am going to see if I can get some of my riding friend's to do an informal overnight in some state park. I saw several on the ride, that I really don't know much about.

Vernal is booming from the Oil and Gas play in the area and house's are being built, new roads paved and this has happened before and then it went kind of belly up. Between Duchesne and Roosevelt I saw what at first looked like a carnival being set up, but turned out to be some sort of place where old carnival equipment goes to die and rust out.

Heading on 191 North you are in the familiar shale of Southern Utah, but the colors are much more subdued, my route would take me toward Flaming Gorge, which was dedicated in about 1962 and I remember seeing a White House ceremony where President Kennedy flipped a switch which caused the valves to open so that power could be generated by the new dam. He joked about he hoped that in flipping the switch nothing would blow up any where in the world. At Manilla Utah I headed west towards the Wyoming border and just after Fort Bridger I would then get on Interstate again for the ride to Evanston. While this ride was legally taken place in two states in my mind Wyoming, or at least that part of Wyoming is still behind the Zion Curtain, Think of it as a sort of cultural Anschluss. The LDS church did eventually buy Fort Bridger from Jim. Part of the ride took me past Burn Fork Wyoming which was the site, more or less, for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company's 1825 Rendezvous. One of the most famous of the William Ashley Rendezvous' and the first one that Jim Bridger as a young green kid attended. It is reported that the furs that William Ashley returned to St. Louis with later that fall were worth over $50,000.00 in 1925 dollars which would have had the purchasing power of several million dollars. The wind knows no geography and yet I noticed that as soon as I crossed the Wyoming boarder the wind picked up. As I wended my way North from Fort Bridger and picked up I-80 I realized that it has been many years since I had been up in that area and I was unprepared for all the wind farms from just West of Fort Bridger until a little east of Evanston. I thought that they would be turning faster but with the length of those blades, I guess it doesn't take a very brisk revolution to generate power.

As I have commented before I make little wagers with myself as I travel and the one today was, that if I got to Evanston by 3:15 PM instead of staying on I-80 the whole way, I would turn North to Woodruff and then take the road over Monte Cristo to the Ogden Valley, another place that trapper's spent a lot of time in and even wintered, and then over Trapper's Loop and then after picking up I-84 for just a few miles I would turn on to Highway 89 for the then brief ride back to the Valley of the Saints. The total ride as I turned off the GPS was 450 miles.

It was nice looking at the world as much as possible from Louise's eyes and it did bring back wonderful, powerful and poignant memories. To end this, the following is from a poem by my highly regarded creative writing teacher at East High School, the late Jack Christensen who in the copy of this book that this poem is in; The Deep Song, signed it for me with the dedication to his “Prize Rebel.”

AN IMAGE OF THE HEART:

“The morning meets her eyes beyond the flow Of time, beyond the April wind and summer showers_

Beyond the memory of “God” we miss her so: Ah, God, it was too soon for her to go.”

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.