In Search of Lost Time

I am reading all of Proust for the second time, somehow that sounds better than saying I am re-reading Proust. The first time I read Proust; it almost sounds like something one would have done at Oxford, with Proctors and tutors, and a nearsighted professor who probably was unsure what decade it was. I was in my mid to late twenties. During that time my family kept a sail boat on the Great Salt Lake which I named Swans Way after the first book. The books, which I still have, were under the title of “Remembrances of Things Past” and was based on quote, the definite translation by
C.K. Scott Moncrieff. I could say something about be weary of somebody with too many names, but I will not. Since then, a new Proust has come out, and although it is still based mostly on the same translation, Terence Kilmartin, a solid British name, and a D.J. Enright have also been involved and the whole thing is now called IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME.

In this series, I actually read the last book first, Time Regained, and am now reading Swann's Way again. I suspect this whole undertaking will probably take me at least a year and a half, I am not just reading Proust, I find I need to think about it as I read it. The new books for whatever reason seem more readable to me, that and the fact that I have had decades of experience in my own life to bring to this undertaking. My heart has been broken, at least once or twice and repaired , at least medically with stents, I have suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. So maybe one should not read Proust before they are either of a certain age or have suffered and experienced life.

I have always been interested in time and memory and certainly Proust deals with both of these in extreme detail. I read a wonderful book a couple of years ago called Proust was a Neuroscientist, it pointed out that modern science and brain chemistry has confirmed several of Proust's precepts about memory and the fallibility thereof, almost a century after his death. Proust was always rewriting, and never did see his complete books in print, on the day he died, he dictated changes having to do with the death of somebody in the book, because as he was dying, he suddenly was aware of things he had not known before.

Another interesting book is My Year of reading Proust. It follows the author in the rest of her life, as she reads Proust and how she brings or tries to bring Proust to bear in dealing with other people in her life and their needs, wants and frustrations.

I use to joke that I was probably one of a few people who read Proust and ride motorcycles, but once I did a Google search of Motorcycles and Proust and was amazed at the number of references I found relating the two.

To Proust there are two types of memory, the more common memory, is just remembering something, the more advanced and more important are those things we remember because of some sort of stimulus, whether it being food in the famous Madeleine Cookie, or catching your foot on a brick, but alas not a cattle guard. Both of these happened in the books that make up in Search of Lost Time.

Many times on Motorcycle trips in different parts of the west, something has triggered this Proustian memory, Suddenly remembering the smell of the night air in a motel in West Yellowstone when I was about seven Stopping several miles from the Mokie dug way in southern Utah as we said good bye to some friends who were artists in Taos in 1963. Because these memory examples were triggered by an emotional response, they were vivid and alive in a much different way than mere memory. How a person who spent the last few years of his life, almost completely bed-ridden in a cork lined room, could glean all of this knowledge about life and the motivation of people, etc. is beyond me.

A Voyage of Discovery

“The Real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes”, This quote from Proust, of course, brings to mind one of the things I love about motorcycling. The complete sensory bombardment that takes place. Each ride is like riding for the first time, you notice things, feel the changes in temperature and the smell of the land. When my daughter was young and use to go on trips with me, I used to quiz her on gas and lunch stops on what had caught her eye, etc on the ride. I would like to think it helped her not only with her powers of observation but also her ability to describe. Driving a car is like being in a cocoon, protected from the environment around us, by steel, seats, crush zones and air bags, side curtain and all. On a bike you are completely out there and even with helmets and protective gear and gloves, vulnerable. As I well know. I try to ride defensively in traffic, and once on the open road, I try to ride with as little traffic as possible around me. I have also read that riding a motorcycle is a good way to free up your analytical mind. Need to decide something, take a bike ride. I am sure that riding a bicycle long distances is probably the same. I find my memory and ability to recall the past are much sharper during and after a ride.

I wanted to go on a ride this past Sunday, my first in over five weeks, and since my usual riding partners, were busy, I just went on my own I checked the usual suspects on the bike and the air pressure in the tires and mounted my Gps and Valentine One radar detector. I should have enough gas to get to Heber City. Valentine is the best radar detector money can buy, and besides Valentine was one of my grandfathers name. . For many years I have ridden with custom made ear plugs that have speakers in them. Its only recently that I have taken to riding with an I pod and I just have a simple shuffle, I set it and forget it and what comes on comes on, the last thing I want to be doing is pressing any more buttons than I have to. If the detector goes off, it partially mutes the sound from the I pod. I had pretty much decided where I wanted to go. I have all ready done Wolf Creek and Monticristo and am saving Fairview to Huntington for later in the summer or early fall. I headed south on I-15 to just past the point of the Mountain and headed East towards Alpine and the Alpine Loop. There is usually a fair amount of traffic on this road, especially around the parking lot for the cave, so wicking it up, is not a very viable option. Most of the corners are fairly tight and somewhat blind and with that knowledge, that beyond any corner, there maybe a big SVU or truck pulling a pop up trailer and taking most of the road, all you can really do is pay very close attention to what is going on. It is a beautiful area and the backside of Mount Timpanogos is majestic and earns the mantra along with Midway and the Heber Valley of Utah's Switzerland. I camped out in this area as a boy scout in the 1960's and remember something just off the main road called 'Mother Nature's Ice Box', since this is going to be a fairly short ride, I didn't bring any water with me, and I find this cold spring and the water was a cold as my memory remembered. Years ago, before I really knew better, I once rode almost eight hundred miles and only stopped, other than for gas, for two cokes, a snickers and a hostess turnover. Needless to say, today, I would have water with me and if I bought anything on the road, it would be probably a muffin of some type and possibly a Hershey bar. There is an adage in motorcycling about those that ride to eat and those that eat to ride. I eat to ride, which means food is never really that important to me. I grew up in a house where food was important and my sisters and daughter are all very good and accomplished cooks. They would shutter at the thought that if modern science came up with a way where you could get all your nourishment through a pill of some kind, I would probably do it, except of course for any kind of berry pie and or ice cream.

Once I was on top and just deciding where I truly was headed, my fuel light clicked on and although thanks to the GPS I knew I had enough fuel to get to Heber City the long way, through Provo Canyon up around Deer Creek, I instead turned towards Cascade Springs. There were a lot of cars in the parking lot at Cascade, so I opted not to stop. That meant to get to Midway, I would have to ride on a dirt road for five or six miles, but it was dry and has been graded at sometime in the last few years and I had no problem. ,Each time I ride to the Heber Valley I am shocked by the growth, where do all these people work, to be able to afford these massive homes. After gassing up in Midway, I headed towards Highway 40 and its junction with I-80 and all the exits between there and the ride down Parleys canyon. By the time I arrived home the GPS showed 118 miles since I had set it earlier in the morning.

Names on the Land

Ever wondered how a place got its name! There is a great resource book that talks about it. Its Called “Names on the Land” by George R.Stewart and was published in 1945. It took me a while to find a copy through second hand book dealers. I bought it about twelve years ago and have gone through it several times. My copy was originally bought by a Mrs Arthur E Horton in Paultney, Vermont. I have signed it below her with my particulars and I hope if anyone owns it after me, they do they same. Mr. Stewart wrote several other books including a biography of Brett Harte. On the Publisher's page there is the following Notation: “It is manufactured under emergency conditions and complies with the government's request to conserve essential materials in every way possible.

While the book is wonderful to go through from front to back, I have sometimes gone to the index first and find a place I am interested in and then go to the page to find out how the place was named.

The older a town is, the more likely it has a name relating to some sort of English or even French Royalty. Georgia is a Latinized version of George for King George, and Saint Louis is name after one of the Louis Kings of France. There are whole towns and counties in Connecticut that have the same name as English Counties! If a lake has Lake before the name, it either was named by someone with French Heritage or is a Major Lake. Cincinnati is named after the Roman Legislator Cincinnatus. Utica New York was named after a city of Ancient North Africa and Troy New York, was named after the battle thereof.

Up Until Congress was discussing the Utah Territory, it had always accepted local wishes in naming a territory or State. The power that was in Utah, Brigham Young suggested Deseret, this was not acceptable to Congress and it was at the instigation of Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who was also the father in law of John C. Fremont, that we became the Territory of and later the State of Utah. John C. Fremont also named the Golden Gate in California. California comes from the Spanish as do most of the names of Coastal cities and missions in the golden state. In some cases Mr. Stewart even provides the name of the person who actually decided on this or that name.

After that, members of Congress on a powerful committee were responsible for deciding the names of states, The first proposed name for Nevada was Washoe, and while they didn't get it for the state it is one of the large Counties. Many counties in this country are also named for President's, generals and other well know personages. Even though the Oregon Territory was adopted long before they petitioned to become a state, there were some that wanted to called it Lincoln. Some proposed Columbia for what later became Washington State, at which time it was decided that there would not be another state named after a President. My two favorite examples of Congress acting, is where Wyoming was named Wyoming because someone liked how it sounded, and on hearing the suggested name for a state, one congressman, yelled up the stairs to his wife, do you know what Montana means, she answered that it was a mountainous place, and that was good enough for him. When the New Mexico territory was petitioning to be a state they wanted Nuevo Mexico, and even Montezuma was suggested, but someone else suggested Acoma so that it would come in the alphabet before Alabama.
Finally New Mexico was agreed upon, although there were protests that people would think it is part of Mexico. Five weeks later Arizona was admitted as a state and all the lower forty eight had been named and admitted by 1912. I certainly remember when Alaska and Hawaii were admitted as states in 1959. Alaska was admitted on January 3rd and Hawaii was admitted on August 21st.

In a country as large as ours, there is a lot of repetition, If I plug Eureka into by Garmin GPS I find many towns named Eureka, as well as Virginia and Silver City, and I haven't been to either Eureka Kansas, or Eureka Arkansas and have always wanted to go to Silver City, New Mexico!

One interesting place I have gone to is the Trinity Site in White Sands New Mexico. It is the site where the atomic bomb was first detonated in 1945 and was named by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the 'father of the atomic bomb; based on a poem by John Donne. The site is only open to the public two days a year. The first Saturday in October and April . In 2005 I rode there with my friend DeVern on our Bmw motorcycles. Over the last twenty years I have probably ridden over 150,000 miles on motorcycle trips wit DeVern. Before we went, I re-read “The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes and after going there I read the Biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Marin J. Sherwin called, “American Prometheus.”

The Trinity site is somewhat distant from Los Alamos, which was the name of the Boys School that predated the installation they built there. When the Government was looking for a site for the Manhattan Project, one of the suggest sites was Oak City Canyon and Oak City, near Delta Utah. They ran into a problem securing the necessary water rights. Oppenheimer had spent summers on some property his family owned in the desert of New Mexico and remembered the defunct boys school. In about 1955 I remember going to Los Alamos with my family to visit some friends of my parents. It was still a closed city, and we had to check in and out of security when we arrived and I learned years later that my parents friends had to submit our names, etc weeks prior to the trip to have us go through the approval process.

Today for the Trinity site, we just rode through a security gate and followed the markers to the site. All that is really left it part of the metal from one of the legs of the tower. A plaque marks the spot and gives the time 5:29:45 and the date, July 16, 1945. The McDonald ranch house where the bomb was assembled has been virtually wrapped in plastic and is a bus ride away from the site. We met people there who come year after year, and most of the motel where we stayed the night before in Socorro were also heading out to the site.

I would like to tell you that I sensed a profound sense of something at the site. I have been to some important historical sights and the invasion beaches in France, and did fell the profundity of something. At Trinity there was nothing, and part of me wondered why they just didn't build a replica near the highway so that tourists could visit it anytime. Maybe my sense of feeling nothing was in part because I did remember what Oppenheimer said after the first blast, He remembered a line from the BHAGAVAD-GITA, where Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him he takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am Death the Destroyer of Worlds.”

I am not sure I would go to the Trinity site again, but there are certainly other sites of historical importance I would like to visit.

24th. Of July

The Title of this Blog, The Smell of Distance comes from a definition Wallace Stegner made in a forward to a book, describing Western Non- fiction writing. He argued, in the best sense of the word, that because of the land, the scale of the west and it aridness, that the smell of distance was a fitting description! I most certainly agree. I come from old Mormon stock and am proud of it. When my daughter Caitlin; who in addition to my pioneer ancestors, is a direct descendant of Brigham Young, was little, and I first took her up to This is the Place Monument, I told her that she had two ancestors on the monument and which two did she think they were. She first pointed to one of the Indians, and I laughed and said, that any Indian tribe would be more than happy to claim her. One of my Great Great Grandfather's was Erastus Snow. Snow Canyon near Saint George is named after him. He was one of the original colonizer's of Saint George. He spent a great deal of time among the Indians of Southern Utah, Northern Arizona and New Mexico. He also did some work for the church in acquiring land in Mexico. He had four wives and fathered about 35 children. He apparently got along well with the different tribes For most of his life he was referred to as “The Late Erastus Snow,” because he was always late for meetings, church, etc. He was once late for a meeting with Brigham Young in Cedar City and Brigham said something like “ Give a sermon and put the people to sleep,” supposedly he gave one of the best speeches several people had ever heard. In 1849 he became an Apostle of the church and served in that capacity till his death in 1888.

On July 21, 1846, Erastus Snow and Orson Pratt, entered the Salt Lake Valley from Emigration Canyon, along the Donner Reed Trail. Almost every time I come out of Emigration Canyon on a motorcycle or in a car, I try to imagine what this Valley must have looked like empty. By transporting my mind to one of the many empty valleys I have crossed in Nevada, I think I can pretty well imagine what it looked like. Jim Bridger had drawn a map for Brigham Young, so they knew all the canyons that entered the Valley and where water was, etc. So they did not end up planting the first crops just north of the site of the City and County Building, fairly close to where the old Center Theater was located., by happenstance.

While Wallace Stegner was not born in Utah, he spent his formative years here, graduated from East High school, went to the University of Utah, and when he was a teacher's assistant at the University of Utah, he taught my mother Louise in an undergraduate course. He was also a life long friend of David L. Freed, the uncle of my childhood friend Howard. Howard's uncle Dave, is a character in several of Stegner's fictions works that were centered here. Those two works were “Remembering Laughter,” and “Recapitulation.” I attended a lecture of Wallace Stegner at Kingsbury Hall in the mid nineteen seventy's. I think it was after the release of his book, “The Uneasy Chair,” which was a biography of another and important Utahan Bernard DeVoto. My favorite novel of Stegner's is “Angle of Repose,” which won a Pulitzer prize.

Bernard DeVoto wrote some excellent books on Western Expansion and Manifest Destiny. If you are at all interested in learning more about the west I would suggest the following books of Bernard DeVoto, “The Course of Empire,” “Across the Wide Missouri,” dealing with the fur trade and last but not least, “The Year of Decision 1846,” which not only has a good chronology of the Mormon trek west, but also a great one of the Donner Party. He also wrote for years, a monthly column in Harper's called, The Uneasy Chair. Both DeVoto and Stegner have helped in a positive way, shape the conservation movement in this country.

Happy 24th of July Weekend to Everyone.

Free Range Childlhood and the Business of Life

Several Months ago, my sister Julie, in a facebook posting, suggested some titles for a personal essay about her childhood that she was thinking of writing. She suggested to some of us in the family that we come up with titles ourselves, and this is one I came up. I have been thinking for quite some time about the relative freedom that I grew up with, compared to how I was able to raise my daughter, and how my friends and sisters raised their children and I definitely think, that the era that I grew up in granted children more autonomy than we allow children today. I think that the main difference is that when I was a child, the percentage of working mothers, was very low, not that the world is a much more dangerous place. While this may not have been the case for all economic levels it was true for the majority of the children I grew up with. Daycare has become an imperative today, and consequently children are more time and observation oriented. If you have thirty minutes to get a child to X or Y, you can't be hunting all over the neighborhood looking for them ! I also think that the relative freedom that I was allowed as a child is part and parcel of why Baby Boomer's are not aging in the same ways as previous generations. This so called refusal to grow up, is really a refusal to stop doing things we have been doing since childhood. Loud Rock and Roll, to our shattered eardrums, sounds just as radical as it did forty to fifty years ago.

The three main rules in my family's house were, you had to be dressed, except for shoes, to come downstairs, no running by the pool and you had to be home by 5:30 PM. We generally had dinner between then and 6:00 PM. Other than that, you were on you own! Given the fact that we had a swimming pool, we of course spent a great deal of time there, but we also explored with friends and by ourselves, all over the avenues. Generally from the old Primary Children's Hospital on 11th. Avenue to the mountains above and east of the old Shrine r's Hospital. There were times when neither of my parents had any idea where, in the neighborhood I was, and as I grew up there were even a few times, when my parents didn't know if I was or was not even in the state. Several times in my teenage years I drove with others to Wendover, had a piece of pie and a cup of coffee and drove back. I don't think we even thought about trying to gamble. This sense of relative freedom was true of my sisters as well. When I was almost three my sister Kathy carried me on her back up almost to the base of Black Mountain. She did of course tell my mother , when we returned, where we had been. She also drove an old Jeep all over the mountains above the avenues way before she had a driver's license and drove the pink Jeep to East High School without a top.

I can remember exploring the area above the Old Veteran's hospital, that had once been a garden, for hours and days on end, with other kids in the neighborhood and we built huts and forts all over the place. My memory of the difference of a hut and fort is size, but there may have been more! I had a mother, that if you told her you wanted to run away, which I told her a couple of times, instead of packing you off for tests and counseling, she packed me a lunch, told me she would miss me, and I was off. The first time I did this, I took off on my three speed bike, with a lunch, including homemade turkey soup in a mason jar. I ended up riding over to City Creek Canyon, and probably going up the canyon a mile or so. I pulled off the paved road to a shady spot and ate my lunch and then after riding up the canyon a little way, headed back down and back home. I was probably about ten years old. Could I imagine allowing my daughter when she was the same age doing something like that, no way! While I don't think our society is producing more perverts and deviants than it did when I was young, just the mere increase in population means that there are greater chances for ill will today, than fifty years ago. Another time, I think my little sisters had been reading the Box Car Children, the three of us, ran away , complete with another lunch lovingly packed by my Mother and we went up above the power station above G street and found a round hole to sit and eat our lunch and think about how we were going to survive on our own. We were probably all told, gone for less that two hours and of course Louise was happy to have us back.

I read an essay several years ago that said something to the effect, that the reason some of
our children are marking their bodies with piercings and tattoos, is that their parents are still generally wearing in their casual attire, the same clothes they wore as teenagers. So if you can't differentiate yourself with clothing, what is left? It will be interesting to see how our grandchildren turn out.

While this is not the serious essay the subject warrants, it is what I am able to write this hot weekend in July.


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The Chaos of the Sun

“We live in an old chaos of the sun, or old dependency of day and night.” This quote from a poem of Wallace Stevens seems to fit my mood, this hot zero summer day. I thought earlier in the day about Wallace Stevens because he has written some delightful Aphorisms, and I adore aphorism and probably have, even before I knew that there was a fancy word for maxim's and proverbs. The English language in filled with Aphorisms which we hear on a daily basis. On a less hot day, I might be willing to debate with you on the possible difference between Aphorisms and Proverbs but today, its almost too hot to do any serious thinking.

Since I can't go for a motorcycle ride, to slightly alleviate the heat and the possible onset of boredom, I had to find something to occupy my mind. When I was a child and I went to my Mother, Louise and told her I was bored, she always answered something to the effect that, “No one is responsible for your boredom but you,” In our house boredom was almost a personal defect, or flaw, like forgetting I before E except after C. I can remember that one way I found to find something to do, was to peruse books, later on the encyclopedia and dictionary's and when I started to become of literary age, in the proper sense of the word, Bartlett's familiar Quotations. Thus over the last fifty or so years, I have spent countless hours during the gray days of November and dreary winters storms, as well as the dog days of summer, reading what other people have thought.

Almost all cultures and languages have an aphoristic tradition and some of my favorite Taoists, Confucian, and Zen Koans certainly fit that mold of aphorisms. On doing a quick Wikipedia search on Aphorisms I found many examples I have not read before, Which I will share with you a Polish writer Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, who wrote a book of aphorism, which I plan to read: The following is a quick down and dirty, not in the lewd sense, rambling of Aphorisms:

The Good or ill of man lies, within his own will. Epictetus
In the long run the truth does not matter. Wallace Stevens
Only that which always existed can be eternal. G Antuan Suarez
A mystic hangs a fig leaf on a eunuch. Sanislaw Jerzy Lee, (The Polish Writer)
You can play a shoestring if you're sincere. John Coltrane
That which does not destroy us makes us stronger. Friedrich Nietzsche
They who give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither
liberty or safety. Ben Franklin
The first ape who became a man thus committed treason against his own kind. Mikhail Turovsky
Wrong Life cannot be lived rightly. Theodor Adorno
It is not uncommon to commiserate with a stranger's misfortune, but it takes a really fine nature to appreciate a friend's success.
Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result. Winston Churchill
Empathy is lost when ever it is most needed. Arturo Mendivil
Believe nothing you hear, and only half of what you see. Mark Twain.
Vanity play lurid tricks with our memory. Joseph Conrad
The fatal futility of Fact. Henry James

Thus my thoughts on this hot July Day!

The Journey Begins

"To Travel hopefully, is a better thing than to arrive" That quote from Robert Louis Stevenson is on my Garmin GPS, which I see every time it powers on. It very readily defines my feelings about traveling. It is the journey that I put most of the emphasis on. Whether I am traveling on my BMW motorcycle or in a car, I notice the surroundings, and since I have traveled all over the west, both as a child and even more as an adult, I also bring the capacity of memory to bear on these outings. I am laid up this summer after some rotator cuff surgery and will not be able to ride a motorcycle for a couple of months, This blog, which I have been thinking about for a long time, will be a substitute for being able to hit the open road. Two years ago, after my last leg fixing operation, stemming from a motorcycle accident almost three years ago, I was not supposed to ride for several months, I cheated after about a month, and on one 300 mile day trip, by myself, I found myself, after having stopped for water and a restroom break, having to ask someone at the service station in Huntington, Utah, to help me get my bike off the side stand, because I didn't have the strength in my left leg. I asked if he would help an old man and explained that I wasn't supposed to be riding yet, but that I had to get out on the road! He laughed, and helped me and I was soon starting up highway 31 from Huntington to Fairview. This year, I am going to wait, I hope, until my surgeon, a BMW rider, tells me it is okay to ride again.

What I propose or suppose this blog is mainly going to be about, is the thoughts, feelings and observations I have gleaned on my travels over the highways and byways of the American West during my life. The sensory bombardment I feel while I am traveling is sometimes very palpable, and I will suddenly be an a stretch of road going somewhere, and remember being on the same road as a child with the whole family and remember what was going on at that point in time, It has made me realize that time really just is the space between events!

I will end this first post with another quote of Robert Louis Stevenson, "For My part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."

Happy Trails!