The Smell of Distance

2021-09-22T11:49:00.001-06:00

ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH

The BMW Club of Colorado each year does a 100,000 foot ride, where over the course of a long day you end up going over mountain Passes that have a cumulative total of over 100,000 feet. I have always wanted to do this ride. Several years ago Jeff Stokes and Ed Rosco did it and I was envious at the time and even thought about crashing their ride but did not. 2020 was such a bust because of locking down for the continuing Covid mess, that I was determined to try and ride as much as possible over my beloved Great Basin and the West as a whole. So far this riding season I have gone to Yosemite via two passes, Southern Utah on the Ducati with DeVern and Ed Rosco on his S1000RR, the MOA rally in Great Falls, and Paonia with DeVern and the last time I checked I have ridden my three motorcycles a tad less than 12,000 miles with at least two months, weather permitting, of the riding season left.

DeVern and I, along with our friend who lives in Gunnison, David K Haedt, decided to do this ride and made plans to meet him in Meeker Colorado on Thursday August 5^th, so that we would do the ride to the start of this adventure in two days. He had stayed in Meeker at a nice motel and we made reservations there. Several weeks previous to this, when we went to Paonia, we had gone by Way of Meeker, had lunch at the Meeker Cafe and then down to Glenwood Springs, so on leaving Salt Lake early Thursday morning, we met as we usually do at the Conoco Station in Kamas and then proceeded over Wolf Creek to Duchesne and then Highway 40 to Dinosaur Colorado where we would turn down to Rangeley and then East to Meeker. We decided to save the Meeker Cafe, which is in an old historic hotel, for breakfast the next morning so we ate at another place along the main highway.

This was my second outing on my 2021 Tiger 900 Pro GT, bought for a long trip that DeVern and I have signed up for on the Routa 40 in Chile and Argentina in January of next year, where you take your own bike, which will be shipped from Houston and after the 33 day ride, returned to Houston in the Spring. Unfortunately at this juncture it looks like Covid will postpone it for 2022. The Tiger is a great handling and very smooth and quiet engine and gets fantastic gas mileage and holding 5.3 gallons a range so that DeVern doesn't have to stop sooner than he needs to because either my Ducati or BMW RS needs fuel. On one stretch of this trip I got over 62 mpg.

The Tiger has an off-road mode and we had decided to do a stretch of about 80 miles on dirt, a few miles East of Meeker (Country Road 8) that ends up near Phippsburg and from there we would wend our way on Friday afternoon to the maelstrom of traffic in Denver, we planned on stopping by BMW of Denver to get some last minute instructions on the ride that would leave from there on Saturday Morning about 7. DeVern's wife Cathy is a wiz at making reservations and found us a nice Hotel near BMW of Denver which is actually located in Centennial Colorado.

The dirt ride was through some really beautiful scenery even with smoke in the air for much of the weekend and we stopped for a rest on the dirt part and there was an informational plaque with information on the surrounding topography .

Earlier on Friday the 6^th my newest grandson was born and I told both DeVern and David K I wanted to take them out to dinner to celebrate and we ended up taking an expensive Uber ride both ways, the place we went to was close enough so that David could walk over, but after the dinner, we gave him a ride back on our way to the Hotel.

BMW of Denver was a madhouse Saturday morning with a 180+ motorcycles getting ready for this ride. We completed the registration, got our Tee Shirts and found someone with a file for the GPS that they transferred to DeVern's GPS and he then transferred it to both David's and Mine and just before 7 am we left Denver and did not return till about 5:30 in the afternoon to Prospect Park where the end of the ride and dinner and the prize drawing were held. The only bad thing about the GPS file is that it was turn by turn and not Waypoints, and if you missed a turn you had your GPS, till you adjusted it repeatedly telling you to make a U turn, at one point this went on for 25+ minutes and I finally turned off my Sena Unit just to gain some sanity. You would think that with 180 bikes, it would almost be a mass group ride, but honestly they got spaced out a lot and some people who had done this before, did the ride in reverse, once in a while we would see a fair number of bikes either a head or slightly behind, but most of the time it was just the three of us.

David K lives in Gunnison and he had promised us lunch when we got to his house, but low and behold no one was home and instead we had coffee, and tea for me and left after about 15 minutes for the next mountain pass. After Gunnison we did Cottonwood Pass which is over 12,000 feet, but the road was great with beautiful scenery. I know I should stop more and take pictures, but being a very verbal person I take mental notes of the surroundings. We ended up loosing sight of David just before Buena Vista and didn't see him till Sunday morning, when he dropped by our hotel for the continental breakfast in the lobby area, before we took off for the ride home to Salt Lake.

In my youth, when I had a full head of hair, I had the opportunity to drive vehicles one summer in London, Paris, Rome, Athens, the Mulsanne Straight at LeMan's and along the Amalfi Coast and I will tell you here and now, I have never driven or ridden in worst traffic than just before and through Leadville Colorado, more than bumper to bumper , even the sidewalks were completely inundated with people, a large part of the way, I just pulled in the clutch and move both feet to move the bike 2 or 3 feet until traffic stopped again. Several of the small towns we drove through in Colorado had a lot of tourist traffic and it didn't help that the mud slide around Glenn Wood Springs had recently transpired and the road was still closed.

Some of these passes, I have ridden before on previous trips to Colorado or on my way to New Mexico and Santa Fe, my favorite's of the new passes, were the last couple of passes, Juniper and Squaw Pass. In this politically correct era, for good and bad that we live in, I am surprised it has not be renamed, liked several areas in Utah and California. Thinking of Mollie's Nipple and Squaw Valley. Squaw pass was up at the top near Mt. Evans the highest peak in Colorado and had wonderful twisties for much of its length, a tad less than ten thousand feet in height. I always think of a quote from the John McFee from Basin and Range. “Basin and Range, Basin and Range, A mile in height between Basin and Range”. All you need to know to find your way around the Western United States.

From there, as the early evening started its approach we headed to Prospect Park and the meal provided by BMW of Denver and the drawing for prizes. David K was behind us, and elected to head back to his hotel and did not stop at the dinner.

I would certainly consider doing this ride again, and supposedly they vary it slightly for year to year.

The next day we returned on highway 40 the whole way to the Wasatch front so that I could meet my newest Grandson. I ended up from Thursday to Sunday riding almost 1,800 miles.

The Next of Kin to The Wayward Wind

2018-11-23T10:54:00.001-07:00

The Next of Kin to the Wayward Wind

I was telling my sister Kathy in response to an article on a backpacking trip she wrote for the Fresno Bar Newsletter, that when I was a little boy I thought that the wind spoke to everyone, and it was only as I got older that I discovered that was not the case. The wind has and still does speak to me, it is one of the things I love about my long motorcycle treks around the West. Its sound is muted between the ear plugs I wear, the buffer of the helmet and the blue tooth music, radar and GPS but none the less it is there.

We took a lot of car trips as a family in the 1950's and early 60's with all of us piled into a massive station wagon, and much later a VW Micro Bus, we were a lot smaller then, but none of these vehicles had air conditioning and I remember a massive burlap canteen strapped to the front for drinking water. All of us still have world class bladders, for you can imagine the lack of progress with 8 people in a car if rest stops were not well planned in advance. In the summers of 1958 and 1960 we spent the whole summer traveling by car throughout Mexico and we drove all the way to Yucatan where in some areas, the road was not only not paved, it didn't actually exist and I have a fond memory of our then white Station wagon crossing a river on a crude ferry made up of a couple of row boats with planks for the car. Also on that same trip the gas tank fell off in the middle of the Jungle and the car had to be towed hundreds of miles to where it could be refastened to the car. In 1967 my Parents took my two younger sisters and me to Europe for the summer and I did all the driving throughout England, Scotland, France, Switzerland, Italy, the ferry to Corfu and then to Greece where we left the car and took a cruise to several Greek Islands. And then returned to France and the flight home. My sister Julie who was studying in Europe was with us as well and she chastises me to this day for staying in the car to talk with my father rather than to go in to see the Bayeux Tapestry. I knew I would have another chance to see it in my life and also knew I would not always be able to talk with my father Bob. We grew up calling both parents by their name, it was something my father Bob insisted on, although we did lapse with my Mother and she was both Mother and Louise. Seven years later Bob died in my arms and I did go back to see the tapestry, after I had read Churchill's “History of the English Speaking Peoples.”

My father from his business of building Power transmission lines around the West had an encyclopedic knowledge of roads in the West and laid out for all of us how mountain passes differed from State to State.

It has been almost a year since my awesome fast BMW S1000RR was totaled when a woman who was late picking up her children at school turned in front of me with no time to stop and totaled the bike. Eighteen days later, still black and blue all over from the accident I replaced it with a less extreme BMW and in that time period mainly over 7 weekends long and otherwise, I have put over ten thousand miles on it. It is a wonderful and comfortable touring bike and while it is not a breathtakingly fast as the RR, few bikes are, it handles extremely well and almost brakes as well and is more suited to long trips. I now ride with a Helite air bag vest, and all the gear all the time and so over the last year I have tended to ride my bike less day to day and instead have focused on out of town trips. I don't feel comfortable not being in full riding gear no matter how short the ride.

I ended up riding this year to five BMW rallies around the West in five Different States, and to Long Beach for the motorcycle show, years ago it would have been possible to spend every weekend going to a BMW rally somewhere in the country, but as baby boomers and motorcycle riders are aging, the numbers are lower and in the next five years I suspect more and more rallies will disappear because there aren't enough people attending to cover the cost of putting it on. Most of these rallies I went to I have previously attended, but not for many years.

For only one of the rallies did I ride to it alone, and even that at that rally I knew I would see friends once I got there. I also rode with new people and there is a learning process when riding with new people and you quickly learn the shorthand of how they organize their riding in the morning and how often if at all they like to stop for myriad reasons. I try to be an easy person to ride with and really over the decades have not had too many complaints and no one has refused to ride with me a second time.

Chief Joseph Rally in John Day Oregon.

I have been to the Chief Joseph several times over the years but never since they moved it to John Day. I rode alone and this rally has the most Interstate miles and although you can make good time on the Slab, it isn't always the most challenging way to get to a rally or anywhere, and only after I left I84 and go into Oregon itself was I on secondary roads with corners that actively call for being at one with the bike. Numbers wise, the Chief Joseph was the largest rally I attended and while there I upgraded my Sena Helmet Blue tooth device to a new model and got an adapter to convert the output from my Valentine Radar detector to direct noise in my helmet. I rode the little over 500 plus miles back from John Day in one day and in time to pick up my Great Pyrenees at the kennel. This season I spent more on boarding her at the kennel over these weekends than I did on gas.

Top of the Rockies

The Top of the Rockies has been in Paonia Colorado since 1989, I attended that first year and for years I went to this rally every year, but had not attended the rally in Paonia for at least twelve to fourteen years, On the spur of the moment or almost, I decided to go with my long time riding friend DeVern, it had been years since he went as well. We met in Kamas Utah , he lives near Logan Utah, and after a brisk ride over Wolf Creek we finally go onto highway 40 for the ride to Vernal and eventually Rangeley Colorado, where we turns South over Douglas Pass to get down to Grand Junction. Earlier this summer DeVern rode an R100GS he had purchased well past the Article Circle and all the way to the coast of the Arctic Ocean and back. On this trip he was on his K1300GT and it was well over 105degrees by the time we got to Grand Junction. We then headed for the ride over Grand Mesa so that so far very little of this ride was on the Slab. For some strange reason, his bike started to overheat and we ended up once we got to Paonia, in pulling off the fairing adding some coolant and even then the bike continued to overheat. Since then DeVern removed and flushed the radiator, and checked the valves and it appears to be fine now. The rally was smaller than the last time I attended and I would certainly consider go back next year. While there we met a man who was born and raised in Salt Lake but has lived most of his adult life on the East Coast and now resides in Gunnison Colorado. I suggested to David that he may want to go to the Stanley Stomp and some other rallies and he did. He also ended up riding with me from Salt Lake City to the Beemer Bash in Quincy in September.

Stanley Stomp

This is the third year in a row that I have attended the Stanley Stomp in Gran Jean Idaho, a destination rally, off the grid where they feed you well each day and on Saturday night there is a feast of Steak, bake potato, corn on the cob and various other sundries. I went for many years at the previous site. There are hot springs in all this area and there is also a pool at the small lodge at Grand-Jean, which is at the end of about a seven mile dirt road. The lodge has a generator for power, but you are completely off the grid. As usual I had a nice time. DeVern's father in law died a few days before so he was not able to attend, but I rode up with Alberto who had never been up in that direction and we ended up stopping at EBR1, the site of the first nuclear reactor to generate electricity. My father's company did the transmission wiring from the EBR1 to Atomic City and most of his Crew had stayed around Arco during the construction. It was fun stopping again and also riding up with someone new to the area. The control room of the reactor looks like something out of an early 50's science fiction movie. We turned off at Arco and headed towards Craters of the Moon which does indeed have an other world look to it. The traffic was fairly heavy the closer we got to Sun Valley but was not too bad going over the pass and we stopped briefly in Stanley before heading to Grand Jean. My friend David from Gunnison was there for part of the rally, he had to leave early and fly out of Boise for a meeting somewhere and informed me that he would be heading to the Beartooth rally the next weekend and I told him I would see him there.

Bear tooth Rally

I haven't been to the Beartooth rally, which is held near Red Lodge Montana and gives you the opportunity of riding over the Beartooth Pass since 2014. I rode up with DeVern who we met in Logan and my longtime friend John Merrick and we purposely rode as little freeway as possible, at least once we turned off from I-15 at Brigham City for the ride over Sardine Canyon to Logan. I had a chance with both of them to ride some passes and ride through some towns that 15 or 20 years ago I use to visit almost every summer. At West Yellowstone we entered the park and there were places in the park where the traffic was horrendous and we were worried about getting to the rally before they stopped serving dinner for Thursday night. There was construction on the Beartooth and we had to wait a few minutes waiting for a pilot car. The ride of the balance of the Pass was spirited to say the least and there were still snow fields to the side of the road at the summit, and we ended up getting there about fifteen minutes after they stop serving dinner, but they did have some still fairly warm leftovers and since we were staying in cabins instead of tenting, we could relax for the rest of the evening. The next day we rode into Red Lodge and then to Absaroka where we we stopped for Coffee and internet access and then returned back to the rally site later in the day. It rained for much of the day on Saturday and John Merrick decided to go back a different way so it was just DeVern and me who rode back over the Bear tooth pass on Sunday morning and back through the park. We arrived at West Yellowstone just after Twelve noon and I was home by around 5PM, but most of the ride back was on I-15

Beemer Bash

The last time I attended the Beemer Bash in Quincy California was 2009. My new friend David was in town for his 50^th High School reunion and we had arranged to meet up on a Thursday morning for a ride to Fallon Nevada. The first part of the ride was the slab to Wendover, where after gassing up we headed South on 93A to Ely Nevada where we would pick up Highway 50 for the ride to Fallon. I have ridden 93A probably 25 to 30 times over the last 40+ years but still enjoy it. We stopped for a late lunch in Austin Nevada and in Fallon we met up with my friend Jan Peterson who had ridden a different route for part of the ride from Logan. Friday morning after breakfast we headed towards Reno and the Truckee Turn off for secondary roads up through the forest primeval to Quincy. David was heading towards Tonopah on Sunday morning and eventually visiting family in the St George area so after he turned off it was just Jan and me on I-80 East Bound. I ended up riding back to Salt Lake in one day on the slab a total of about 598 miles. The Beemer Bash was substantially smaller than in 2009 and its future are in doubt, last year the club that put it on, lost money doing it and if they didn't break even this year, were seriously considering dropping the rally. This is going to start happening more and more as riders cease going to rally's and are not being replaced with younger people. Thirty years ago, when I first started going to BMW rallies, the people who took me where a tad younger than I am now and I was in my mid to late thirties. I know no motorcycle riding people to take to a rally that are in their thirties at all.

Long Beach Motorcycle Show

Two years ago DeVern and I rode down to Long Beach California for the Motorcycle Show and a Long distance riding community meet at Pink's Hot Dogs on LaBrea Avenue and we decided to go again. It was Freeway till we got to Mesquite on I-15 and was cold enough on Thursday morning that we both had our heated gear on. On getting up Friday morning it was warm enough that we jettisoned the warm gear and a few miles South on I-15 we turned off of I-15 for Overton, Valley of Fire and eventually Lake Mead Boulevard to Henderson, so we were able to avoid Los Vegas completely. The ride through the Mojave Desert from here to just west of Palm Springs was on Secondary roads and we decided Saturday that we would return the same way. The dryness and emptiness on the horizon was mesmerizing, my favorite type of riding and we went long distances with almost no traffic, We had to wait for a train to pass at Kelso Junction and then after the deserted town of Amboy, we turned towards Twenty NinePalms and West from there we hit the maelstrom of California traffic. We stopped briefly in TwentyninePalms for a snack and a few miles down the road from there, one of DeVern's saddlebags opened up and the contents hit the road. I stopped as quickly and safely as I could and was able to retrieve his bag liner and all of his things. I have barely secured them to my bike, when he returned, after having to hunt for a place to turn around on the divided highway. Later on we got separated in traffic, it was late afternoon and he was more daring in lane splitting in heavy traffic that I was, and somehow I ended up getting to the Motel before he did by about 5 minutes or so. We spent most of Saturday at the Long Beach Motorcycle Show and saw many new models of bikes. It is so refreshing to see all ages of people and families at the show, instead of the over 60 and mostly male people that I see at BMW rallies and the Utah BMW club activities. We didn't go to Long Beach last year and at this year's get together at Pink's there were 54 riders from all over the US. About 23 were on various BMW's and there was one other person I had not met from Utah that was on a hybrid 3 wheel Honda. We retraced our route back to Twenty Nine Palms, Amboy, Kelso junction etc. A few miles West of Searchlight Nevada, Nevada Power has three giant towers that are actually solar converters for power generation they look like something out of either Star Wars or Close encounters of the third kind and I kept hearing the musical refrain from Close Encounters. We got to Mesquite around 5pm , staying at the same hotel we had stayed on Thursday night. The rest of the ride home on Monday would be interstate and it was a little colder than the ride down on Thursday had been. That will probably be the last trip for me this season. We have discussed going to Death Valley for a get together in February, but depending on the weather we may end up loading the bikes on DeVern's trailer to Mesquite and then off loading them there for the weekend. We have also started looking a motorcycle trips in other parts of the world and talked to a touring company that is doing a 42 day tour in 2020 from Central America all the way to Patagonia. I would need to purchase an off road bike to do it, but if I am healthy enough in two years, I am sorely tempted. Motorcycle guided tours all over the world are a growth industry with lots of different tour company. DeVern and his wife went on one in September to Eastern Europe and we have talked about doing one in the Alps, South America and even Viet Nam. I would also like to do one in Greece and in France.

2018-03-16T09:34:00.001-06:00

Catenary Curve

Since my last posting in September 2017, several things have happened. On the afternoon of October 24^th. in anticipation of going on a much longer ride the next day, I decided to ride my S1000RR to a service station not far away and to fuel up for the next day's ride. I had been going on mid week rides to ride the various mountain passes that would soon be closed for the season. There is a lot of construction going on down the road from my house, and the road was closed so I headed North on a country lane that then turns East, crosses the Jordan River and then at the next major intersection allows me to go North or South. I noticed a fair amount of oncoming traffic so I did not increase my speed after crossing the bridge over the Jordan river. There were a fair amount of vehicles turning into a charter school. I got about 25 feet before the driveway to the charter school and a woman suddenly turned in front of me in a big SUV and I had neither time or distance to stop. Luckily, I did not go over the hood of her SUV and instead went to the side and was almost immediately up. My bike had hit between her front fender and the quarter panel near the passenger door. I knew nothing was broken and that I would be very sore the next day. After checking that she was okay, I asked an onlooker to call the Police and sat down on the curb. I had a cut on my right hand, and got up and grabbed the small medical kit I carry in my tail bag. I also took off my helmet, knowing that my neck was fine. The police came and also the Paramedics. They took my blood pressure, listened to my heart and offered to take me to a hospital. I told them there was no need that I could see. A tow truck had been called for both my bike and her SUV. Insurance information was exchanged and I called my insurance company to report the accident and notified my family of the accident and that I was okay. A kind woman at the school, the headmistress I was later told, offered to drive me back to my house which was less than two miles away.

I later went online and found out that the other driver had been cited for failure to yield. At first I was not sure how bad the bike had been damaged, but it didn't take long for the insurance company to total it. They did let me remove the after market exhaust and heated seat. That first night I really started to hurt all over and got a little worried that I might be bleeding internally, so the next morning I ended up going to the Emergency room of a major area hospital. I was black and blue everywhere and that continued for the next couple of weeks, but there was no internal damage or bleeding.

At first I thought that I would wait to replace the bike till next spring, that I would consider buying my bike and having the repairs done by someone qualified or that I would immediately replace the bike with another S1000RR. The dealer were going to make me a very attractive offer on a brand new 17 model because they were just starting to receive the 18 models and there were no major changes. There will be major changes with the 2019 model. After several weeks I decided to test ride a couple of other models at the BMW dealer and even thought about buying a used MV Augusta that I saw at a repair shop. The S1000RR is an incredible bike, but after putting on 22,000 Miles and having replaced one chain and had an expensive 18,000 mile check up, I realized that I didn't need and never really used all that power and the insurance premium on the bike was incredible. I ended up purchasing a 2016 R1200RS with a little over a thousand miles on it, that someone had traded in after owning it and never really riding it . While it is not quite as fast at the RR, it handles very well and really is a beautiful and well appointed bike with all the bells and whistles. I have put over a thousand miles on it since I got it in Mid November and will be taking my first trip in the next couple of weeks. It came with hard bags and I have added a nice Tank Bag and it came with a factory mounted GPS. While it will not do 0 to 180 in eighteen seconds like the RR, it will certainly do zero to 140 or fifty in a respectable amount of time should I choose to do that. It also has ESA suspension , clutch less shifting and cruise control and key less ignition.

The insurance is a lot less and I took the savings on the insurance and purchased a Helite Air Bag Vest.

It has a lanyard that hooks on to the vest and the bike and if I were to go off the bike , the vest would inflate and protect my head , neck and backbone from damage. A friend of mine from the BMW club was in an accident about a month after mine, and ended up dying a month later. He had been President of the BMW club and it was a blow to everyone who knew him.

My sister who lives in Fresno and who I rode down to visit on the 1000RR in September flew up for the weekend to visit me and her two sisters who live in Salt Lake. At dinner on that Saturday day night in response to a conversation regarding a niece's current job, my sister divulged a remembrance from childhood that I did not know. . She is about eight years older than me. My father Bob until about mid 1957 had been a power line contractor and built transmission lines all over the Western United States. Kathy recalled road trips during this period when Bob would comment that on this or that power line that we were driving by they either had or had not got the Catenary Curve or the dangle of the line correct. Being much younger I did not remember this. I do remember playing at the yard where his neat equipment was kept, he had half-tracks and big trucks and the symbol on his trucks was a bolt of lightning . Bob died almost 44 years ago and yes we grew up calling our father by his first name he insisted on it and most of my childhood friends have told me that my father was the first adult they called by name.

2017-09-20T09:50:00.002-06:00

The Great Basin

Since I was unable to make this year's BMW 49er Rally in Mariposa because of snow in the Sierra's I decided a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to make a ride across The Great Basin through Nevada to Tonopah and then onto Lee Vining and then over Tioga Pass into Yosemite and then on to Fresno California to visit my sister Kathy. After checking with her that she would be home and would welcome a visit, I picked my weekend. I actually rode this same route last year, except I ended up at the 49er Rally in Mariposa and I rode with friends. I have ridden this route many times and up to about five or six years ago I was till riding the 767 miles from Salt Lake to Fresno in one day. The last few years and indeed last year, I rode from Salt Lake to Tonopah, spent the night there and then the rest of the way the next morning and partial afternoon.

I left on Thursday morning and made the somewhat boring Interstate ride on I-80 from Salt Lake to Wendover Utah where I then turned off on highway 93A. After gassing up in Wendover it was nice to be on a two lane road with little traffic. I looked for wild horses on White Horse pass, but was not lucky enough to see any this year. Just before I got to the junction point between 93A and the main Highway93 there was a sign about road construction. They were chip sealing the road, and also for a distance of several miles there was a pilot car, there ended up being two pilot cars on the ride to Tonopah on this Thursday. After the pilot car , I picked up speed, passed the several cars ahead of me and then proceeded for the rest of the ride to Ely, my next gas stop. After gassing up in Ely, I turned onto Highway 6, one of my favorite roads and the 167 mile ride to Tonopah. At this juncture I was all ready 240 or so miles from home. I have developed a habit of oiling the chain at every other gas stop on a trip. Highway 6 runs roughly 20 to 30 Miles South of the Route that the Trapper and Explorer Jedediah Smith took in the late 1820's when he was the first White person to walk from California through the Great Basin to Utah. Hard to imagine what I pass through in a couple of hours taking days and days and not knowing if and where you would find water and other sustenance.

I have always considered the Great Basin to be my backyard and as I looked forward to playing in my back yard and the enumerable Mountain ranges on either side of me for as far as you can see on the horizon. There is something about the vast emptiness of this landscape and the tenacity with which the flora and fauna of the area cling to life that is thrilling to this other wise secular soul. In the 167 mile ride I see about 4 cars heading the opposite direct and pass about 3 cars. I carried a gallon of extra gas with me, because I have been traveling about 85 to 90, but the bike makes no tell tale notion of running out of gas, even though the computer tells me I have zero miles left. I have ridden my S1000rr a little over two hundred miles on a single tank of gas, but that was at a constant 80 mph for almost the whole way and included heading down the Virgin River Gorge to Mesquite. After filing up my bike, and checking in to the Motel for the night, I head up back up into the center of town of Tonopah and have a quick dinner at a Mexican Restaurant and settle in for the night.

I had planned on having the continental breakfast at the motel the next morning, but they were not ready or open by the time I was ready to leave and since I was burning daylight, I opted to hit the open road for the ride to the California State border and to pick up highway 120 at Benton and the roller coaster road and ride to Lee Vining. Lee Vining always has the most expensive gas on almost any ride I take and at over $4.59 a gallon is certainly did not disappoint . I had a nice breakfast at Nicely's cafe, where I have eaten many times and headed East the couple of miles to the turn off for Tioga Pass and Yosemite.

Tioga this year did not open up till after the first of July and it seemed like the end of the season and certain services never opened up this year. The traffic was not particularly bad, but the lower I got and the closer I got to El Portal, the more smoky it became. I normally at Mariposa, turn to take highway 41 to Oakhurst and then on to Fresno, but that road was closed and I kept going to Merced and then got onto highway 99 for the ride to Fresno and my sisters house. Highway 99 has always seemed like an overused but unloved thoroughfare to me, it really hasn't changed much over the last 40 some years I have been riding it in one direction or another. I have owned 7 BMW's over the last 41 years and I have ridden each of them to my sisters house in Fresno at some time or another for a visit.

I had a nice visit with my sister, met her newest granddaughter and saw all of her daughter's but one. I left early Sunday morning, and the road from Oakhurst to Mariposa, had opened on Saturday afternoon so I headed that way rather than returning to Merced and then up the hill. The closer I got to El Portal and the entrance to Yosemite, the more traffic there was and it ended up being almost bumper to bumper traffic till I was in the Park and made the to get back to Crane Flat and the turnoff going the other way to Tioga. Once I got to Crane Flat there was much less traffic and I made decent time through Tioga to the gate and then the ride down the spectacular pass to again Lee Vining, where I once again filled up the bike with expensive gas.

By the time I got back to Tonopah on Sunday it was a little after 1pm and I had all ready decided that I would at least ride to Ely, which would leave me a mere 240 Mile ride on Monday morning to get home. After checking in to a motel in Ely, my plan was to change out of my riding gear, and walk to the nearest restaurant for dinner, what I ended up doing was lying down to have a quick nap and instead I fell asleep and never did have anything to eat. I have always preferred riding a little hungry. I did have some juice and a sweet roll the next morning before leaving Ely.

I left Ely the next morning for the ride back on Highway 93 and 93A to Wendover and then the sprint ride from there to Salt Lake City and was home by 11:00 am on Monday the 11^th. It had ended up being a ride of a little more than 1,534 miles.

I may end up doing an additional ride somewhere before the season formally ends, and probably by the time I take the next ride, I will be using some of my heated gear and will have also turned on my heated seat. Last Year in November I rode to Long Beach and the Motorcycle show with a friend and we met some other Long Distance Motorcycle rider's, at Pink's Hot Dogs in Hollywood, my friend has ridden the Iron Butt several times and this year did the Three Flag's Rally in his sidecar rig with his wife.

2016 Rides

2016-12-23T11:05:00.001-07:00

In 2016, in addition to my Sunday morning rides, for the most part with my sister and brother in law, in a different canyon each week and a good hearty breakfast, I did go on three trips. In years past I used to go on a lot more trips and although my current bike a BMW S1000rr is not a touring bike in any sense of the word, it did just fine and although I am unable to pack as much as I could on previous bikes, I had what I needed. The first trip in April I rode down to Mexican Hat via highway 6 and then on to Hanksville, and highway 95 and after the turn off I rode the Mokie Dug-way down to Mexican Hat where I spent the next two days. On Saturday, I spent the windy day, touring Monument Valley. I took a tour in a jeep with a family from Israel, and finally after the guide telling us the names of all the formations in Monument Valley, I asked him what they were called in Navajo, and after that he would tell us the Indian name as well, I think he enjoyed that. I was very windy and tough with contact lenses. I had a hearty meal at the San Juan Inn that evening left the next morning for the ride back to the Wasatch Front. Very little traffic on Highway 95 and I went very fast by anyone's standards on several sections of the road.

My second trip of the season was to the 49er Rally in Mariposa California over the Memorial Day weekend, I went with my good friend DeVern and his wife Cathy. They have a side-car rig and over the last couple of years they have done a fair amount of traveling and participated in the 2015 Three Flag's rally. We met Wednesday morning on the on-ramp near my house and proceeded West on I-80 to Wendover where we got off of the slab and rode towards Ely Nevada on 93A. They can run about 75-80 and still get decent mileage so I just tucked in behind them and enjoyed the scenery. At Ely, we gassed up, had a snack and proceeded on one of my favorite roads in Nevada, Highway 6 towards Tonopah and our days end. It is a 167 mile stretch with very little traffic and mountains, mountains, mountains, wherever you look. This part of the Great Basin is after Afghanistan the second most mountainous area in the world, with peaks that have still probably not been climbed. I find something new each and every time I have ridden this road. We had reservations for the night at Tonopah Station. After a breakfast the next morning at Tonopah Station, we continued West on Highway 6 till we turned off towards Benton Station and the California border. From there is the roller coaster road to Lee Vining, where before turning off for the ride through Yosemite Park, we had a lunch at Nicely's Cafe which has been around since about 1954.

I have ridden from Lee Vining through Yosemite countless times on every BMW motorcycle I have owned, it never gets old and the scenery is all ways breath taking. This was on a Thursday and the holiday traffic was not bad and it didn't take all that long until we were fast approaching the fairground in Mariposa and the site of the 49er Rally. This rally was the first BMW rally I ever attended back in 1989 and its site was Mariposa back then. It has always been one of my favorite rally sites. The crowd was lot grayer than the last time I attended a rally and somewhat smaller but I did have a nice time. My sister who lives in Fresno and is an attorney drove up after appearing in court in Merced, abut 45 miles away and we had lunch the next day. On Saturday we road up into the mountains and had lunch and then I didn't ride my bike again till early Monday morning as we left for the ride back through the park. Thankfully most of the traffic was going out of instead of into the park. We again ate at Nicely's and instead of spending the night in Tonopah again, we road back across the Great Basin to Ely Nevada. It was nice to go to a familiar rally and to be out on the open road .

In August, again with DeVern, but not Cathy, I met DeVern at the Utah Idaho boarder off of I-15 on the ride to around Stanley Idaho and this year's Stanley Stomp. I have been to this rally many times, but this was the first at this location and the first one in many years. The resort where it was held is at the end of a seven mile dirt road. The Stanley Stomp is noted for its good food and coupled with a spring fed hot swimming pool and hot springs at the side of the river, it was a nice and relaxing time. We stopped in McKay Idaho on Sunday morning for breakfast, which took forever, and had a windy hot ride all the way back to Zion.

On November 18^th I met DeVern at BMW of Utah , for a ride to Victorville California. We had a quick ride through the Virgin River gorge , and I made it to Mesquite, on even less than fumes, the computer showed no miles left in the tank, but it did not sputter. After putting more gas in the tank than I ever have before, even more than it supposedly holds, and after a brief lunch, we started the ride to Las Vegas and the worst traffic you could imagine, it took us 45 minutes in Vegas traffic to go less than about 25 miles, We ended up getting to Victorville, with gaining an hour with pacific time, a little after 8 pm and the room at the La Quinta inn was a welcome site. We had tickets to the Long Beach Motorcycle show on Saturday and also a commitment, and the reason for the trip, at Pink's Hot Dog emporium for 10pm Saturday evening and an annual get together of Long distance riders. I had never been to a motorcycle show and it was slightly over whelming with not only all the vendors but the mass of people. We parked in about a 4 acres parking lot completely filled with motorcycles of every make and description. After that we rode back to Victorville, a mistake and a chance to rest, before heading back to the Los Angeles basin for the get together at Pink's . During these jaunts around LA, we did our share of lane splitting and although I picked up the hang of it, I always was a little daunted by it, which was probably a good thing.

I did not know any of the people we met a Pink's, DeVern from DeVern's long distance riding and several Iron Butt's, about 38 people showed up ,and after having a famous Pink's Hot dog, smothered in chili, and a Lemonade, after DeVern said his good bye's we started the ride back to Victorville, We arrived at the La Quinta about 1 am in the morning and were on the road for the ride back to Salt Lake by 8 am.

DeVern is an easy person to travel with; I hope he says the same about me, and after 27 years we have ridden thousand of miles together. The tank on his K1300GT is larger than on my bike, but he was very good about filing up on my timetable rather than his. It got cold, once we were in Utah on that Sunday morning and I was glad to have my heated gear, seat and heated grips.

I am pleased with the bike and its touring potential and have a lot more trips planned for 2017. I purchased some Hebco Becker hard bags for the bike, and also to accommodate the bag on the exhaust side, I purchased a new exhaust system and up graded the lighting on the bike by buying LED lights for all the turn indicators. I can't wait to take my first trip next spring.

2015-06-23T12:42:00.001-06:00

An Old Man's BMW

A lot has happened since my last posting, after coming home from the BMW Rally in New Mexico.

About a week after my return, on my way home from the Beehive Beemers club breakfast, after coming over Trapper's loop, my bike all of a sudden started running poorly and would not idle. I thought that maybe it was because I was possibly low on fuel, the light had come on and also I knew that the spark plugs were old. I stopped at a Chevron Station on highway 89 and it was really hard to get the bike to start again. Needless to say, I spent the next couple of weeks trying to figure out why the bike was running so poorly, replaced the spark plugs, bought a bunch of diagnosis equipment, cleaned my K&N air filter and even bought new cap coils, after reading on line that it could be part of the problem. Finally on a ride home in mid October, about two miles from home, the engine made a big pop and there was a solid oil sheen coming out of the exhaust. I decided to ride the bike as far as I could and was able to get to my front gate, before, having to stop to open the gate, I was unable to keep it running or to get it started again and had to push my bike the half mile or so to the garage where I park it. For the first time with any motorcycle, it appeared that I had a major engine problem.

Over the next little bit, I determined that it was one cylinder causing the problem and my the time I tore the engine apart, I determined that the bike had sucked an intake valve on the right side and done major damage to that piston. I decided I would take the bike apart and once I got to the technical part , I would have someone else actually put new valves in a new head and do the piston work etc. This was going to be my winter project and I was not in any hurry to get it done, just wanted to get it done right.

In late December I caught cold and nothing I did, seemed to get me over the cold. I finally went to the Doctor's in early January, and he put me on some antibiotics to kill whatever I had, but after the first round of those, it made no difference. I didn't feel well, was tired all the time and was loosing weight.

We tried another round of antibiotics, some even stronger ones, and that made no difference. Needless to say, the last thing I wanted to do was to spend hours in a cold shop, taking a motorcycle apart.

My Doctor got me an appointment in several weeks to see a lung expert, but I questioned whether I could last that long and finally went to an emergency medical clinic and the observant Doctor there within 5 minutes figured out it was a heart issue and not a lung issue.

In the next several weeks after that I had every heart test you can thing of and even had angioplasty again and was sad to find out that the stents I had in 2005 had become all clogged up and I have some fairly major heart issues to deal with from now on.

Even before all the tests were in , I knew I did not have the energy to deal with a broken motorcycle and started to look at my options, and I even questioned whether it was time to put my helmet away for good. I found a place that would give me X for the bike as it sat, and at the same time I put an ad on the Internet BMW riders forum and ended up selling the bike as is to a man in Kansas, who has the know how and time to rebuild it.

I am feeling much better now, thanks to modern medicine and ace inhibitors and beta blockers etc. and decided in late April that I did feel well enough to think about another bike. Even before then I had been lusting after a new BMW S1000rr and I ended up ordering one and picking it up on the 20^th of May. It is the sportiest BMW I have ever owned and the fastest by far. With almost two hundred horsepower, 450 lbs and clutch less shifting both up and down it is incredible to ride.

So far I have only ventured on rides in the surrounding canyons, but if I continue to feel well, I may plan a getaway to either Southern Utah or somewhere North. Its nice to have a new cutting edge bike to ride. I am also going to take a refresher riding course from the Motorcycle Safety foundation. In my fuelly account for the new bike, where I store my gas stops, and keep track of my mileage, I have named this new bike Lord Acton, because absolute power corrupts.

From Cell service at the Little Bighorn to the Festival at Santa Fe.

2014-09-18T15:57:00.002-06:00

For many reasons it has been four to five years since I last went to a BMW Motorcycle rally somewhere in the continental United States. I decided earlier this summer that I would try and make at lease two rallies in 2014 and I did. This is a far cry from a decade or so ago when I would routinely go to four to six rallies each summer, starting with the 49'ER in California and usually ending up with either the New Mexico rally the weekend after Labor day or the Autumn Beemer bash somewhere in California the second or third week of September. In 2004, I went from the New Mexico Rally at Sipapu one weekend to the Beemer Bash in Mariposa California the next week. I doubt I will ever do back to back weekend rallies again. I remember I got home from Sipapu on a Sunday evening. Went to work the next couple of days and left Thursday morning for the ride across the Great Basin to Mariposa and returned the following Sunday night. It ended up being somewhere between 2,500 and 2,800 hundred miles in those two weeks. That is of course, a far cry from what I am thinking about doing next spring sometime, which is to try and ride the Iron Butt Association's 10-48 where I would ride through 48 states in 10 days. That would be well over 8,000+ miles.

The two rallies I ultimately decided to attend this year were the Bear Tooth Rally near Red Lodge Montana and the Sipapu Bavarian Mountain Weekend near Taos. It would mark about my fourth time attending the Bear Tooth and my 10^th or 11^th time attending the Sipapu rally.

The Bear Tooth Rally started August 14^th. I asked my sister Valerie and her husband Larry if they wanted to go with me, and while Valerie bowed out, Larry said he would like to go. It would be his first motorcycle rally. We left Thursday morning and proceeded to spend most of the morning on the Interstate riding North until we turned off of it for the ride to Island Park where we had lunch. After that it was a short ride to West Yellowstone where we both bought our geezer passes for National Parks, an incredible deal at $10 a forever pass to get you into any National Park. Just as we pulled through the gates of the Park, the promenade from “Pictures at an Exhibition” started playing on my I pod. What a beginning for the ride through the park to its exit at Cook City Montana. From there is was a short ride to the beginning of the Bear Tooth Pass. Larry found the pass a little over whelming with its decreasing radius turns and I slowed down several times for him to catch up to me. The site of the rally is an Old Boys Camp that is currently used during the summer for outings for Special Needs Children. Rather than camp we had elected to pay an additional $10 a night to have a bunk in one of the many cabins that dot the hillside.

The next morning we rode via another road to Cody Wyoming and spend a couple of hours, far to brief a time at the Buffalo Bill Center for the American West. We only ended up getting to go through two of the wings of the museum and I plan on going back and doing two more. Our original plan was to ride back towards Red Lodge, but to turn off and take the Chief Joseph Highway to where it meets the beginning of the Bear Tooth so that Larry could ride it again, and we agreed we would stop so he could take some pictures. There are some incredible views from the Bear-tooth . When we were about 20 or some miles from this junction , it started to look pretty black and bleak on the pass , and we decided to turn back. We hit a brisk rain on this return ride and by the time we got back to the original junction , I was low on gas and had to actually ride in to Cody again to fill up.

I have always wanted to visit the Little Bighorn Battlefield and it is only about 120 to 130 miles from Red Lodge. We mentioned our intention of going there on Saturday to the other person in the bunk and he asked if he could ride with us. His name is Paul and he has houses in both Colorado Springs and in North Carolina and he spends his winters in his cutter rigged sail boat in the Caribbean. We left the next morning and had a nice ride to the Battlefield. It is very much like what I have read about and viewed in books, but somehow the fact that there is cell service at the battlefield and its only a couple of miles off an interstate exit, I found difficult to wrap my head around. We elected, on advice from an old fried of mine to take the Indian Bus tour of the battlefield. I felt the story that the guide told was very balanced, much more than if I had been telling it, I have always thought the Custer was a complete blow-hard and egoist. Because his Indian guides told him the truth, rather than what he wanted to hear, he and several hundred other men were slaughtered in a brief period of time by a large group of braves. The cemetery like all military cemeteries was peaceful, but most of the soldiers have long since been removed and reburied somewhere else with Custer's being at West Point.

On the return trip to Salt Lake , rather than going back through the park, we again rode to Cody and then from there to Mettesse, Thermopolis, Lander and then through historic South Pass and Atlantic City , which served as a crossroads from roughly 1828 to the coming of the rail road in 1869. It is the most gradual slope from east to west on the continental divide, and you almost had to cross it and it was only after that, that you realized you were now heading down a gentle slope. After Kemmer we ended up picking up the Interstate just before Evanston, but when we got to Echo, rather than heading towards I-80; construction meant one lane from Wanship to the junction with highway 40 to Heber City, we headed down Weber Canyon, turned off at Henefer and came over East Canyon into the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. It was a fitting way to end this trek filled with beautiful and historic places. I enjoyed thoroughly riding in some different environments and was looking forward to the ride to New Mexico .

My sister Valerie has been to the New Mexico BMW Bavarian Mountain weekend three times before and we have talked about going again, and while she did not accompany us to the Bear tooth, she did go with us to New Mexico. We actually left Wednesday afternoon and rode to Monticello, rather than doing the whole 625+ mile ride in one day, at least on the way down. Our typical Sunday morning ride runs roughly between 125 to 175 miles by the time we return home. We ended up having dinner in Moab and arrived in Monticello, on fumes and just at Sunset. The next morning, after a good breakfast at the Peace Tree Cafe, we proceeded to the Utah/Colorado boarder and wended our way towards Dove Creek and Cortez. Just before Cortez we took a short cut I have taken before, that lets you avoid the traffic on the main street of Cortez, there was some road construction on this route, and I am not sure that we save any time. Actually on this trip, we ran into a fair amount of construction but the delays did not amount to a great deal of time. After gassing up in Pagosa Springs, we turned South towards Chama. I mentioned to Valerie at the gas stop about Dulce and the Mud people and she had her daughter do a web search concerning that. Once you turn of the main road from Chama to Santa Fe, the road gets interesting, although much of Northern New Mexico has absolutely beautiful vistas and beautiful skies, and I noticed on this twisty and climbing road that the pass was over 10,000 feet. There was some gravel but all in all the air was crisp, there was very little traffic and after a little over 9 hours and 45 minutes of riding time from Salt Lake, we arrived in Taos and checked in to the motel we had reservations for. I have mentioned before, that as a child, we visited Taos and Santa Fe several times, my parents had friends that owned an ran an art gallery in Taos and life long friends that worked Los Alamos, I remember as a young kid, visiting Los Alamos when it was still a closed city and we had to go through Security and that my parents had to apply for the visit a month or so in advance. Even then, it was not as bad, as the security we sometimes now are subject to when we fly.

After checking in and relaxing for a while, we rode , with Val on the back of Larry's R1200RT up to the Sipapu Snow and Summer resort where the New Mexico BMW club has held this rally for 30 Years. I first when to the rally in 1994, which means I was at the 10^th anniversary. The week before they had a fire at the main lodge building and part of it was blocked off and they put up a large outdoor tent for some of the rally activities. There was not much going on at the rally that did not really start until Friday and after riding back to Taos, we had a nice dinner at a restaurant close to where we were staying. Our plan was to go down to Santa Fe on Friday Morning. That weekend was when they have the annual Festival in Santa Fe, and every-time that Val has gone to Sipapu, we have gone down to Santa Fe and spent some time walking around, looking in shops and having a nice and fairly expensive lunch before heading back up towards Taos and Sipapu. We did all of those things, and Valerie and Larry decided to just head back to Taos, I elected to turn off from the main highway and to take a secondary road back to the Rally. I registered and got my pin and spent a few minutes talking with Paul, who we had shared a cabin with at the Bear tooth. He had actually volunteered to help at the rally in exchange for a free room Friday and Saturday night.

When I first started going to these BMW rallies it was about 25 years ago and I was in my late 30's. The people I rode with where for the most part in their late fifties. I have observed at both the Bear tooth Rally and Sipapu, that all you now see at these rallies are people from their 60's to 70's and I am not seeing younger people. This does not bode well for the continuation of these yearly events or for that matter for the motorcycle industry as a whole. I would like to think that I may purchase at least one more new BMW before I hang up my helmet and gear for good. Rally s that once had x number of people come every year are getting smaller and smaller, because people are either ceasing to ride, or dying off. Not camping or staying at a rally is a lot different than I am used to and after careful thought we decided instead of doing some day trips on Saturday around the area, we would start home the next day and if Valerie was up to it, we would ride all the way home on Saturday, if not, we would probably again stay in Monticello.

Valerie got her sea legs back and we ended up riding the 600+ miles back to Salt Lake. We rode back the same way we came, but somehow we lost her husband Larry, who made a wrong turn in Cortez and ended up almost to Shiprock before he stopped. We ended up getting back to Salt Lake a couple of hours before his return. As a joke, I bought him a map of the Western United States and a compass.

While I will still ride my bike both during the week and on our Sunday rides for at least a month or more, this is probably it for any distance rides. Next year I hope to do a few more rallies and to once again spend at least a couple of weeks during the summer in a tent.

2013-11-22T11:27:00.001-07:00

“The Summer of his Years ”

I had planned to publish a paper I wrote on Kennedy in College, called “My Tarnished Camelot”, but I

have not been able to find it. I know I have seen it in the last five years. So instead, some thoughts

from November, 22, 1963 and the weekend that followed:

To my Mother who was born in 1918 the pivotal event in her early life was not Pearl Harbor, by then she had graduated from college and been married almost 9 months, but instead was the year 1936 when she was 18 and of course the event was the abdication of the British throne by George the 8^th (The Duke of Windsor,) over Wallace Simpson his future wife. To my mother it was the most romantic thing possible, and she told me she cried at the time, it was a visceral event for her. ( From my reading of history, it is a good thing for all of us that this shallow and vain man and was not the King of England and had any kind of British Bully pulpit prior to and during World War II.) She was 18 and in College at the University of Utah.

To me a confirmed member of the baby boomer generation, the pivotal event in my life, is of course November 22, 1963 and the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. That fall I had just started my first year of what we then called Junior High School and they now refer to as Middle School, at Bryant Junior High School. I had just finished what was called first lunch and was just settling down in my Spanish Class, when I heard a loud uproar from other parts of the building. A few minutes later, although it seemed to be an eternity, an eternity with out knowing what was happening, remember there were no smart phones, no texts, email or twitter, and no one had entered the room from outside and said anything. I did notice that the teacher Miss Ohme seemed sad and removed, after awhile an announcement came on the classroom speaker and told us that the President had been killed and that school was ending. Normally we had a bus that took us back up the hill to the avenues, but no arrangement had been made to have the bus there, much earlier that day, so I started to walk up I street.

I soon ran into my cousin through marriage Jon Roylance. His mother had recently married my Uncle Ranch Kimball, whose second wife Helen had died in 1962. Helen was my mother's only and older sister. We were not entirely quiet on the walk up the hill, but we did not spend very much time discussing the events of that day. At the corner of I street and 13^th Avenue I said good bye to Jon and walked over to H street and on the corner my families home.

My mother was in tears and like most American's we spent the rest of Friday , Saturday , Sunday and the funeral Monday watching the television coverage. I will add at this point in time, that my family for whatever reason was an NBC family. My Aunt Pat Fontaine, one of my father's sisters, in the early sixties had been part of the cast on the Today Show. . I watched almost religiously the nighty Huntley Brinkley report and although my father and I would watch Walter Cronkite on the 20^th Century Series, we were not for the most part a CBS following family, other than for dramatic programs.

There are so many poignant memories I have from that weekend, but they probably would not differ that much from most people, John John's salute, Caroline putting her hand under the flag to touch the coffin directly, A magnificent eulogy from Senator Mike Mansfield, “she took the ring from her finger and placed it in his hand”, Black Jack the riderless horse, The black watch bagpiper's, the demeanor of Charles De Gaulle, the outfit of Haile Selassie, the funeral cortege , people walking during various parts of the procession and the haunted figure of Robert Kennedy. . And the throng's of people beyond a number I could understand, standing in line to walk by the coffin in the rotunda of the Capitol. With my father, Bob, I watched the first televised murder on Sunday of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby and I can remember as if it was last week, Tom Pettit's comments, “He's been shot!, He's been Shot! , Lee Oswald has been shot!”

Like many American's we purchased the “Torch Is Passed”, book on the Kennedy's, I remember when they came out reading Jim Bishop's book on Kennedy and I have read many times and still have the original family copy of William Manchester's ,”Death of a President.” Over the ensuing decades I have read every major biography of John F. Kennedy, a lot, but not all of the conspiracy theory books, and Norman Mailer's Pulitzer wining Oswald Tale and Vincent Lugosi’s “Reclaiming History.” Just recently I have watched the PBS special's devoted to JFK and Nova's investigation. And yes, I have watched Oliver Stone's JFK several times, although it make me mad each time I have seen it.

I have never fully understood why a majority of American's still doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald was

a lone gunman and that Oswald acted alone. I suspect that it stems from the fact that how could some

one so regal in the good sense of the word, as John F. Kennedy was , be taken out by such a

non-entity. The scales just do not seem to balance in any way shape or form. Of course the fact that

Oswald was never able to explain his actions, has added to the question marks.

If I have learned and come to understand anything from these countless book and biographies I have read, it is was what a compartmentalized person JFK was, how fragile for most of his life, his health was, how his friends tried to arrange things so that he was virtually never alone, I guess all those countless hours in the infirmary at Choate and the time he spent at the Mayo Clinic, took their toll, and that although Lee Harvey Oswald suffered from dyslexia, he was not stupid, in any sense of the word.I also can't forget Lee Harvey Oswald's mother Marguerite . And still feel sorry for his brother Robert who's life was for ever changed and who had done nothing wrong.

I think about November 22^nd. Each year, and with this being the 50^th there has of course been much public discussion. I am not sure that this country has ever really gotten over the assassination of President Kennedy and although it was the first of a number of senseless murders, I always seem to link JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and RFK and finishing up with Kent State as being a line of horrible transgressions on our collective psyche . I remember saying to myself that I would be in my sixties when the 50^th anniversary came around and it seemed a life time in the future. It has been a life time and in mostly good ways this country has changed a lot.

Today's title comes from a song just after the Assassination, the recording I first heard was on the NBC program with David Frost, “That Was the Week That Was,” which was broadcast on November 23^rd, 1963. and was sung by someone name Millicent Martin. The song was actually written by Connie Francis. I can still remember the whole song from memory. “Forget I can't, I still recall his eyes.”

2013-11-11T10:23:00.000-07:00

With next week marking the 50^th. Anniversary on the 22^nd. Of the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. The watershed event of most baby boomers I thought I would share a sonnet I wrote in High School.

I plan next week to also share a paper I wrote about Kennedy from Prescott College.

THE CARDINAL

The Cardinal in Red a complex man.

Drones across the grave his nasal tears.

Speaking the words distilled two thousand years.

Does as he always does the best he can.

Do you remember how it all began.

Our understanding flags there's no such plan.

And thus we've had commissions talks and books.

And tried to make an elegance of grief.

We've tried interpretations on for size,

But cried inside recalling boyish looks.

Though young, though old, its shaken our belief.

Forget we can't, I still recall his eyes.

"Long Days Journey into Light"

2013-04-19T13:59:00.002-06:00

I have to admit that I have used this same title for an article I wrote several decades ago, about a Motorcycle ride to California for the Stinger, the monthly newsletter of the Beehive Beemers, BMW Motorcycle Club of Utah. I used to write articles fairly frequently and served as the editor of the newsletter for several stints.. The title of course is a re-phrasing of the Eugene O'Neill masterpiece, “Long Day's Journey Into Night, a play that I have seen several times, have on disc with Katherine Hepburn , Sir Ralph Richardson, a young Jason Robards and Dean Stockwell, and and have read several times. In an interview once O'Neill was quoted as saying “ Happiness, I will write about happiness if I ever see it.” I have always been partially drawn to that brooding Irish and Northern climate countenance, but equally drawn towards much of T. S. Eliot's poetry such as this line from Portrait of a Lady, :” I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world to be wonderful and youthful, after all.” Now back to the journey

This is the earliest in the year that I have ever ridden from Salt Lake City through the Great Basin, my great good keep, to California. In mid-March I flew down to Fresno for a week to assist my sister Kathy in preparing a HABEAS petition on behalf of a death row inmate. We talked about me coming back to help her finish it up, but the difference in flying between buying the ticket two weeks in advance, rather than a month was a couple of hundred dollars and I told her I would ride my BMW instead

Originally, I was planning on leaving the morning of April 6^th. But in looking at the weather, and in seeing that it would be Conference weekend for the LDS Church, and probable rain, I decided, on the spur of the moment to leave the afternoon of Thursday the 4^th of April and my plan was to ride to Tonopah where I would spend the night. In the morning I rode Frontrunner to my office at Thanksgiving Point, did office type things for awhile and I caught the 12:16 train back to Salt Lake Central. On arriving home, I quickly loaded the bike, Saddlebags were practically packed for my anticipated Saturday departure and by about 1:45 in the afternoon I was heading West on I-80 and my turnoff at Wendover for highway 93A to Ely. It was a very windy day, don't know what it was on the Beaufort scale, but it was maybe a notch or two below the issuing of a high-wind warning between Salt Lake City and Wendover. So with new tires, new riding boots and fresh spark-plugs and the remains of the day before the candle that lights the sky would disappear on the horizon, I started the wend towards California. On a motorcycle trip, I am always like a small boy, gregarious and eager to experience everything going around me at the same time. Milking the day for all its worth.

I have written many times, about how much I love this type of desert riding, I always feel tucked in and look forward to the isolation, being surrounded by world class performer's on my i pod and the chance to let my mind go where it wants to go. I have long conversations in my head, with someone I have known as long as I can remember, which is back to when I was about two and a half years old. Most of my sisters have memories going back to about the same age, so it must be a genetic thing. The last time I rode almost this almost same route to California was in May of 2011, and I had opted to wear my lighter, but more stylish riding suit and did not take my heated jacket or gloves. This year I took both and wore my winter, heavier and not very flattering, but warm suit. I looked like a cross between the Michelin man and the Pillsbury dough boy. At Wendover, after gassing up, I turned the thermostat, for my jacket and gloves to almost the lowest setting and looked toward White Horse Pass and the unfolding of my afternoon jaunt. The first time I remember being on this road was when I was five or six and I went with my father to McGill Nevada. The mine was still open then, and my father's company had done some sort of electrical job there and he needed to go out for a brief meeting. My then good friend John Mooney went with us and we went out and back in a long day. I always think about that as I ride through McGill, it was much more robust 55 years ago than it is today.

At Ely, after gassing up again, I turned on to the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, what a nice sounding name, so much better than Bangerter Highway. This is of course, Highway 6 and I would be on it, till its junction with California Highway 395 at Bishop California.

As always I think about Jediah Smith and the other early explorer's of the American West and the Mountain Peaks in the distance, that may to this point in time, not have been climbed by anyone. The Great Basin at its most extreme. I thought as I rode along, the hum of the bike giving me an OMMM sound and whatever music was playing about the majesty of the Great American Desert. The little outposts along the way, where people have tried and usually failed to etch out a living and live a life. I pulled into Tonopah a little after 6:00 pm Pacific Daylight Savings time and got the last room at the Tonopah Motel where I have stayed a couple of times.

When I got up the next morning at O-dark thirty, there was ice on my bike and sheepskin cover for my seat. After gassing up at the Chevron in Tonopah, and eating a muffin and drinking some grapefruit juice, I have always preferred traveling, feeling a little hungry, I headed West out of Tonopah towards Boundary Peak and the California border just before Benton and then on to Bishop, Big Pine, Lone Pine and eventually the junction with 178 through Lake Isabella, which has some fairly sharp corners, listed 25mph turns, that I take at 35 or 40 and eventually towards its junction with Highway 99.

Highway 99, I have decided is an unloved major artery in the San Joaquin Valley of California. There are places that have new pavement, but much of it is I am sure the same road that I rode my BMW R90S on in the late 1970's on my way to Fresno. Instead of listing railway stops as Eliot did in a poem I go over from way-points on my GPS , Delano, Pixley, Tipton and Tulare, but can't come up with a good or decent rhyme.

Once I had parked my bike at my sister's house, I did not pay any attention to it at all, except to move it into her garage, that she does not use, because in my haste in leaving SLC I neglected to pack my motorcycle cover.

The next eight days were 12 to 14 hours a day seven days a week on the Habeas Appeal. Imagine if you can, working on the most complex jigsaw puzzle you could imagine, and not having the benefit of looking at the cover to see what it will look like. That is pretty much what it was. Thanks goodness for a search-able trial file and hard copies as well, looking for this and that. You tell a story relating to the subject of the appeal and almost every other sentence you have to reference either a defense chronology done by an expert, witness interviews, which need to be redacted; what an ominous word, it conjurers up visions of secret records kept by seldom mentioned governmental departments, and the trial transcript itself. It ended up being about 1500 pages of exhibits and the HABEAS Appeal is another 400 or so pages. This all needed to be bound with red covers and margins of X and 9 copies prepared. All the other major courts in California to my knowledge, accept electronic submissions on cases, but the Supreme Court Of California does not, although they did want a CD of the exhibits.

I left early Monday morning on the 15^th of the month for my ride back. A friend called me and said that I should consider delaying my departure because of storms both in Salt Lake City and Nevada. I quickly pulled up the Weather Channel on my phone and Tonopah was still warm, but windy and I headed towards there. I told myself, that if I got to Tonopah before 3:30 in the afternoon, I would continue on the additional 170 miles back to Ely. At Boundary peak the pass is called Montgomery Pass and it reminded me of my friend Randy Montgomery who died in a freak motorcycle accident in Wolf Creak about 14 or so years ago. He had been involved in planning for the Olympics, and more importantly he had young children he did not get to see grow up. Such a pity.

Needless to say, I got to Tonopah a little after 3:00 pm,but before 3:30 and started back towards Ely knowing that I would probably run into rain before I got there. Eliot again, “Time and the bell have buried the day the black cloud carries the sun away.”

Just before I got to Ely is started to rain and just as I got to a motel in Ely it started snowing. Not a good omen, for Tuesday morning.

My bike was completely covered in snow, and I had to chip ice around the ignition so that my key would go in and do the same with the gas cap, so that I could fuel the bike. I decided to wear my glasses, rather than contacts and had planned on eating a hearty breakfast, to building up fodder to keep me warm, at a cafe in Ely, but the one I usually go to, is out of business. Again a muffin and juice at the Shell Station. I turned the heat up, for it was cold in the mid twenties and after talking with some people in the service station decided that I would still head back on 93and 93A to Wendover, rather than the longer route to Delta. It was snowing lightly when I left Ely, but it was not really sticking to the roads. Just North of McGill the snow picked up and my face shield was fogging and icing up. That means that I had to crack it enough to be able to see, but then my glasses got covered with snow and actually froze. There were several places where I could only go about 25 to 30 mph and I thought once or twice about turning back, but was worried about going down in the ice, if I tried to turn around. The bike made a couple of fish tale motions and I found I was better off riding in a lower gear towards the top of the rpm band, than trying to up-shift and keep the rpm low. I promised Pig Bodine, that’s my bike's name. Its the name of a character from a Thomas Pynchon novel, that if it got me through, I would instead of my annual coating of Zymol wax, I would do it twice this year. That seemed to do the trick and a ride that usually takes a little less than two hours, ended up taking almost three. White Horse pass that I had been dreading the whole ride from Ely was completely clear and Wendover was windy, but not too cold. At the Wendover Chevron station, I rewarded myself for having withstood the ordeal with a snickers. My boyish demand for a daily dose of excitement, temporarily satisfied I contemplated the rest of the ride home.

To make up for the slow time between Ely and Wendover, I rode the 120 miles home from Wendover to Salt Lake City at 85-to 90, figuring after my harrowing morning, a speeding ticket would be a small price to pay, but I was fine, the radar detector chirped a couple of times and it was windy, but I was toasty warm.

Pig looked unloved, uncared for and somewhat abused, and after unpacking, my somewhat wet gear, I gave him a bath.

MEN OF REASON AND THE KNOT ON THE ROPE OF WAR

2012-10-16T10:16:00.001-06:00

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

2012-07-25T10:15:00.005-06:00

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.

2012-06-01T20:45:00.000-06:00

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.

2012-05-05T17:30:00.000-06:00

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"

2012-01-14T09:26:00.000-07:00

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?"

2011-09-05T13:37:00.000-06:00

“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!

2011-06-02T11:01:00.001-06:00

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

2011-01-14T17:12:00.000-07:00

“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.”

2010-12-22T10:01:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE BUS DON'T STOP HERE ANYMORE, HARDLY EVER

2010-11-27T14:22:00.002-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.createspace.com/3479183

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

2010-11-02T16:06:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"AND ALL THE MICE ARE IN CHAINS"

2010-10-05T12:02:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Fear no More The Heat of The Sun"

2010-09-27T11:58:00.000-06:00

The first weekend ride of Autumn, I had some choices this last weekend, I could have gone to Zions National Park with the BMW club of Utah, we haven't had a camp out in Zions since about 1991 or 1992. I have been a member of the Beehive Beemers since about 1988 and have been President, Vice-President, and editor of the Stinger, the monthly newsletter,;twice,for about four years total, and was the rally master for the Red Rock Rendezvous the first three years we put on the rally. O r I could have gone to Hagerman Idaho for the yearly camp out with the Idaho BMW club,. It used to be held the first weekend in October, but they moved it back a week a few years ago. Years ago it was held at a run down mineral bath resort called Sliger's and one year Caitlin when she was about 6 or 7 went with me. That Saturday evening they had a drawing for both free camping for the weekend and a membership in the Idaho club for the next year, they asked Caitlin to do the drawing and just as she started to draw the winning number, I blurted out, “if you don't draw my name, you will have to walk home.” I was the most surprised when she did in fact draw my name, and I offered to have her draw again, but everyone agreed there was no way she could have drawn my name, other than chance.

In the years when I was riding fifteen to twenty thousand miles a year, I would routinely end up spending about twenty to twenty five nights a year in a tent, and although I probably will never get up to that level again, I am sure next year I will start doing a little more camping. Weather permitting I want to ride to Death Valley in February and of course to Mariposa at the end of May. Valerie has all ready voiced her desire to go to New Mexico next fall for the Sipapu rally. I also have a trip planned for the ' Going to the Sun Highway' in Montana.

Valerie and Larry called me about a ride for Sunday morning and I was at their house just before 9:00 AM. I let Valerie pick where we were going to ride and she decided she wanted to ride to Chris's restaurant near Huntsville via the Trapper's Loop road. Today's ride will be on the short side, hardly more than 100 miles round trip, but Trapper's is a beautiful road, you could blink and you could be in the Alps somewhere. During the Olympics I remember seeing the view of the back of Mount Ogden on TV several times, and it was so startling to see this same view and it was almost a little disconcerting, it seemed to be magnified as if on steroids, so to speak.

The wind is always blowing down the Canyon, as you hit the mouth of Weber Canyon from Highway 89, its about the usual velocity and as I make the turn onto the on ramp of I-84 the Joni Mitchell song “Urge To Go” comes on my IPOD shuffle, “When the sun turns traitor cold and shivering trees are standing in a naked row, I get the urge for going, but I never seem to go.” Its a very good end of summer, slightly reflective song and even though we are experiencing above normal temperatures, it seems so fitting. There is a sheriff posted at the bottom of Trapper's Loop and I make sure I am going exactly 55, as I go past him. Once he is out of view, I wick it up and just as I step off my bike at Chris's Valerie pulls into the parking lot. Larry was a couple of seconds behind me.

Chris's has always had mediocre service, once years ago, on a ride to Woodruff and back, that Val and I took with a family friend from Park City, I had posted something on the Beehive Beemer message exchange that we were planning a ride and if anyone wanted to come with us, we would be at the mouth of Trapper's Loop at 9:00 AM. It was surprising when about 8 other people showed up. This was about Valerie's first year on her first BMW and when we returned to Chris's for lunch, one of the party asked her how she had pretty much kept up with me, she answered, that she just kept riding to remain about five to six seconds behind me and didn't even look at how fast she was going. Anyway, at this particular lunch, Chris's actually lost the order for our friend from Park City and after he finally got served, to add insult to injury, on the return ride on Trapper's he got pulled over for speeding. He was a pilot at that point in time and this presented some problems with the FAA. It was quite a long time till he rode with us again. Today's meal was uneventful and the service was okay.

I let Larry lead on the way back and as I tuck in behind Valerie, leaving a good margin so that while I can ride at the speed I want, I will not pass her, I watch her ride up Trapper's to the turn off for Snow Basin, she takes every turn at almost the perfect line and she seems to be riding a little quicker today that she tends to on longer rides. Its not cold but even the warm air, seems to have a crispness to it. I'm thinking Jonathan Apples. Larry is so far ahead of us, that I decide that I will ride with Val back to her house. Until Val and Larry married a few years ago, I would always ride back to Val's house with her, to make sure she got home okay, etc. Since she and Larry have been married, sometimes I just turn off at x point and then call later to go over the ride etc. We always share visual and textural perceptions from the ride.

As we turn off of Trapper's Loop and head toward Mt. Green and the I-84 on ramp, I see a little boy on a bicycle, dressed in his church clothes, riding from the church back to his house, behind him are his father and little sister walking, and it reminds me slightly of the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz, he is pedaling very fast, but not really going very fast. I also can picture my Grandson Winston, riding a bike in a few years. As I hit the on ramp, Tom Rush comes on my IPOD singing his version of the same Joni Mitchell song, I have always preferred his version of “Urge To Go,” it is at a much slower tempo, last about 45 seconds more and maybe because I think of Tom Rush as being a slightly haunted human being, it is much more about loss, missed opportunities, regret and aging. I am sure this relates to my brooding northern temperament and my ancestors from Denmark.

Autumn is my favorite time of year, but it tends to make me reflective and slightly nostalgic. I tend to these proclivities anyway, and this time of year seems to make my feelings that more pronounced. I read recently that memory maybe the greatest form of lust there is. I will have to spend some time thinking about that. This past week I re-read Thomas Wolfe's “Look Homeward Angel, A Story of the Buried Life,” Its my Mother's copy with her initial and handwriting Louise Snow August 1936, probably a couple of months before she met my father. She was eighteen years old, I have a picture of her at about this same time period and it has always made me think, how did this young girl become the person I knew and loved so very much and continue to miss on almost a daily basis. Louise long before she became a mother or wife. I first read this book the first winter after Bob died, almost 36 years ago, and I remember as I read of Gant, bursting into tears, Bob had so many Gantian qualities, but maybe all Father's are larger than life, maybe that's the template. Some critic has said of Thomas Wolfe, that he was either “ Talent without Genius, or Genius without talent.” While there is a slightly dated quality to him, and to me a pronounced racists quality to his writing, the use of the N word is prolific, he does have some memorable phrases. I don't think in my whole life I have thought as much about food as he does in almost every chapter. According to the biography I read of him, his mother was not nearly as bad as his fictional mother Eliza.

Today's title comes from the Shakespeare's Play Cymbeline. It is one of the few plays of Shakespeare I don't think I have read. I plan to read it this week. I have my Grandfather's copy of the Falstaff Edition of The Works. I have rather enjoyed seeing Val's notes in some of the plays. Grandfather Val died several years before I was born, and if there was a way to go back and meet some ancestors, he would be first on my list.

"I GOT THE CAMPFIRE BLUES UNDER NEATH THE SKY OF OLD WYOMING"

2010-09-20T15:06:00.000-06:00

It has been a few years since I have ridden the Mirror Lake highway from Kamas to Evanston, Wyoming and with the return of hot weather, I wanted to ride someplace that would be as cool as possible. I even removed the lining from my coat and re-opened all the vents. I also took some water with me. As I ride up Parley's Canyon I am reminded that riding in heavy traffic on a motorcycle is a little like playing a giant game of chess. I plan my moves and passing and pick and choose empty pockets of traffic and in no time at all, I am again on the highway 40 exit from I-80 and heading toward the turn off for Kamas.

I decide at Kamas that I have enough fuel to get to Evanston and start up the canyon from Kamas. I am heading on highway150 through the area of the highest elevation in Utah and of course I will see King's peak, the highest point in Utah at 13, 528 off to the not so distant right. Fall is very noticeable, leaves turning and an abruptness to the cooler air. Most of the campgrounds I pass on this road have all ready closed for the season. The traffic is light in both directions and I try to ride not over 10 to 15 miles an hour of the posted limit. The lower part of this canyon is open grazing and there are still some cows that haven't been moved in anticipation of winter.

My sister Cynthia use to do some camping with her children in this area, and I am reminded by the name of several campgrounds she enjoyed., Soapstone and Christmas Meadows. I decide at Mirror Lake, not to turn off, on this road, if you stop you are supposed to pay a fee and also there is a part of me who has believed to one level or another that when you visit some places, you help destroy the very reason you wanted to go there in the first place. But the lake is very clear and I have memories from previous stops with others to suffice for today. Looking down at the GPS I see that I am over ten thousand feet above the level of the sea and as I behold the glacial spread of the Unita's, the only East-West Mountain chain in the Continental United States. I think about the process of glaciation and that leads me to suddenly thinking that Terminal Moraine, would make an interesting name for a female character in a short story. Now, all I need to do, is to come up with a plot line to fit the character's name. She would of course, besides being beautiful and smelling of both homemade bread and sage, be part French and I would try and find some fancy spelling of her first name, to make it sound more alluring. But the road beckons and as I get down to a lower Altitude and get closer to the Wyoming boarder, I am reminded of other things, and Termi-nal, ceases to occupy any part of my thinking.

The big flat valley in Wyoming between just beyond the boarder and just before you get to Evanston, is called Hillard, and although I can't tell you where Hillard proper starts or stops, I did in the mid 1970's spend many weekends in this area, moving cattle from the back of a horse. My family started running cows on some land north of the airport, as either a lark, or a fun weekend hobby, but like a lot of things my father did, it soon grew and took on a life of its own. The two main adages I remember from my days in the cattle industry were as follows: It doesn't take fancy barns and white fences to put fat on cattle, it only takes grass and water, and my favorite. The way to earn a small fortune in cattle is to start out with a large one! We decided in the fall of 1973 that we would increase the number of mother cows we were running during the next year. That also would mark the first summer that we would sub-lease some summer ranged near Croydon ,up Weber Canyon towards Lost Creek, from a neighbor. I remember that Bob, my father and that is what I called him my whole life, made me do up a business plan on this increase of cows and the leasing of summer range and I learned a lot in doing it. The first year I under estimated the weight gain of the calves and under estimated the overall expense of checking on the cows, and on the number of calves that we lost during the grazing period. We bought cows through the Producer's Livestock auction in North Salt Lake and had even joined the Coop. Bob knew one of the head people at Producer's , Van Moss, who had even passed out in a bathtub at one of my parent's parties in the 1950's. Van's son Russ was just a couple of years older than me, and was also one of the Auctioneer's at the Monday and Wednesday Auction. The term used to describe what an auctioneer does is Crying. He cries the auction. Van and Russ had some yearling heifers for sale and I went up to Hillard to look at them. We ended up buying about sixty five or seventy five of them with the stipulation that we wouldn't take possession of them until late October or early November of 1974. I don't remember Bob looking at them before I bought them, and I had agreed that I would help take care of them during the upcoming summer, the land up there is mostly irrigated meadows, courtesy of the Bear River and I went up many times that summer with Russ, and using a borrowed horse, I didn't at that time have a decent horse trailer, helped move the cattle, got a good feeling of the land up there and stayed several nights at a big ranch there owned by a man named Dick McGraw. The next year, because of a divorce, that place would be for sale, but things had changed by then. Bob and I also spent the summer looking to buy a ranch somewhere. I also ended up late in September in driving to beyond Dallas Texas to pick up a 20 foot Goose necked trailer to help in hauling cattle and calves. The ride to and from Athens Texas is a tale in and of its self. My good friend Robert Weyher went with me and boy was it a long trip back. I ended up bringing back all of the parts to make a 16 foot goose neck trailer for Ken Garff and coming back over Eisenhower pass on Interstate 70 my mileage dropped to about six miles per gallon. Thank goodness I had a main and two saddle tanks on the truck and gas was relatively cheap!

When we took delivery of the cows, it was time to brand, and to check for pregnancy, etc. In those days some of the best cattle equipment was made by a company called Powder River, this was way before I even knew where the Powder River was located and they had a manufacturing facility in Provo. We ended up getting a parcel of their movable and interlocking 16foot panels, a cattle chute, a squeeze chute, complete with preg gate, and of course a calf table. We had both electric branding irons and a propane burner to heat up a metal wand to help de-horn calves, this was after giving them shots, castrating them if necessary and branding them as well. I have been kicked by both calves and cows so many times. We had a registered brand NT for Northpoint Towers and I even wore a Stetson hat, and listened to Charlie Daniels. I paid for the balance of the cows upon delivery and they were to start calving in mid February. Bob and I had a trip planned in January to look at ranch land in Costa Rica. One of my nieces and one of my nephews; brother and sister, and children of my deceased sister Cynthia, have both purchased property in Costa Rica. Bob loved both Costa Rica and Guatemala and I was looking forward to the trip, although I had mixed feelings about potentially living part of the year out of the US. We continued to look around Utah, Idaho and Wyoming at ranch land and I have always wondered where I might be today if we had purchased a ranch somewhere in the West. In early December of 1974, Bob dropped dead one evening.

The calving of these new mothers was bittersweet. I ended up having to aid a fairly large amount of these births by pulling the calf, and I would come out of the barn where I was calving them at two in the morning, the snow coming down, with my hands and arms still drenched in amniotic fluid, and suddenly remember that I could help a calf being born, but my CPR on my father had not worked. The next fall I spent several weekends traveling with Russ Moss in Nevada and Wyoming on cattle buying trips These were trips to established clients of Producer's to weigh and sort the cattle. I learned a great deal and met some very interesting hard core ranch people. I even got a chance to load cattle into rail road cars and by this time I was a veteran at loading semis with cows. Later in the fall of 1975 I attended a week long seminar at the famous Graham School for Cattlemen in Garnett Kansas. During that hands on week, I learned how to test a cow for pregnancy , which involves putting on a giant glove, and putting your hand up a part of a cow where the sun wasn't meant to shine, and then you push down on top of the uterus. If there is a calf there, it will bounce up against your hand. I also learned a great deal about herd management and artificial insemination. I also in 1976 attended the annual Livestock Show in Denver Colorado. Russ still is a cattle buyer for a large company and lives near Greeley Colorado.

We continued to run cattle until about 1984 and at the same time I was doing some real estate things, but would start out every morning and end up every evening feeding and checking on cows. It was a good balance to more cerebral undertakings and gave me a good balance in life.
I was pleased to see that the Hillard area is still very much farm and ranch country and there did not appear to be many new houses, and where there were, it was a case of probably building a bigger house, or a second house for another generation. There are a lot of gas wells around this area, and that has certainly helped in the stability of ownership. At Evanston I gassed up and then headed toward the boarder and the ride through Echo Canyon via I-80, this section of the road is called the Eisenhower Highway. In 1919 Ike was part of a military convoy that drove across the United States from coast to coast. It tested the feasibility and problems of doing this and it took 61 days to go from Washington D.C. To San Francisco. In 2009 a John Ryan rode a Big Honda from Pruhdoe Bay Alaska to Key West Florida, 5, 641 miles, in 86 hours and 31 minutes. The prior record was held by Salt Laker Gary Eagan at 96 hours and 1 minute. This is straight through with in reality, no sleep, and you would me a complete zombie by the time you were done. In 1945 on his first visits to Germany, Ike was impressed by the Autobahns and during his Presidency the Interstate Highway Act was passed. Ike was very proud of this legislation. Part of its financing was Pentagon related, to help get it passed, and that is why there is a small amount of Interstate Highway in Hawaii. I seem to remember that one of the last sections of the original Interstate to be finished was a section of I-70 between Green River and Salina, Utah.

I don't know why Echo Canyon has never been one of my favorite rides, certainly there are red rock canyons and one gets a sense of what it must have been like for the pioneers but it has always lacked something to me. Its always windy and since I have tended to ride it in summer, hot. At Echo I head towards I-84 and when I had stopped for fuel in Evanston I had clicked my way point for home and was pleased to see that it had me turning off at Henefer, which even without a GPS I had decided to take, and coming into the valley via East Canyon and Big Mountain. The water level of East Canyon, Little Dell and Mountain Dell reservoirs were all noticeably lower than earlier this summer. I elect not to continue to Emigration Canyon and spend the few miles until the mouth of Parley's once again playing the game of traffic chess. The ride was 217 miles.

MY SISTER WEARS COMBAT BOOTS*

2010-09-13T16:54:00.000-06:00

After getting home from last week's ride, and washing the bike, I saw a site you never want to see, a small section of the rear tire, was showing the first tell-tale notion of steel cords. I knew I was going to shortly need a new tire, had even ordered one over the web, and was awaiting its arrival, so until it came, and could be mounted, it was park the bike, do not pass go, etc.

The sum total of the front and rear tire of a bike, that is touching the ground at any point in time, is referred to as the contact patch. This small amount of rubber, has to adjust to all of the demands put upon it by the road, and the rider. The traction pie is only so big, and the more contradictory demands a rider makes at any point in time, the less that is available to respond to any one of them. This is why good tires are a necessity. My bike, is a kind of sports-touring bike, and this bike puts more emphasis on the sport than touring. I usually get about 8 thousand miles out of a rear tire and about 10 thousand out of the front. It costs roughly about $275 for a pair of tires and several years ago I use to go through about 2.5 sets per year. Now I am going through about one pair per year. I also track my MPG and can tell you how much gas I have consumed in the previous year and that on average I gas up every 165 miles. The actual range on the bike is probably about two hundred to two twenty five max. In 2010 I have spent around $185.00 for gas. The physics of riding are fascinating, and the two books I have highlighted are very informative and thought provoking.

I had thought about where I wanted to ride this weekend, the Mirror lake road to Evanston, when I got a call from my brother-in- law Larry to see if I wanted to take a ride on Sunday morning with both he, and my sister Valerie. We haven't ridden together for several months and of course I said yes. Valerie has been riding for about twelve or so years, Larry since he and Valerie married a few years ago. I have watched Valerie; from the day she picked up her first new bike, after taking a Motorcycle Foundation Safety class, It seemed to take hours that first day for her to ride her bike, a Yamaha with shaft drive, to her house. And after the first ride to Magna, I wondered if she had not make a mistake in buying a bike. I figured out that the best way to help build her confidence was to ride someplace with as little of stop and go riding as possible. Ride to Tooele, stop for lunch, and ride back. This seemed to do wonders. The rides got longer and longer. Needless to say, she got better and better and she is both graceful and proficient on her bike. She outgrew her first bike in her first year of riding. She has had 3 BMWS. Larry is on his second BMW. It means an awful lot to me to be able to share my passion for riding motorcycles with a member of my family. She also speaks Swaner, a dialect spoken and on some levels only understood by my sisters. I can make reference to things that happened when we were children and that will explain to any of my family present, just what I am feeling about a given event. It is nice and comforting to be around family and I usually speak will all or most of my sisters at least once or twice a week.

Valerie has gone on trips with me to both California and several times to one of my favorite motorcycle rallies just out side of Taos, New Mexico. It is possible to attend a BMW rally somewhere in this country every weekend from about the middle of April till the end of October. Utah's rally the Red Rock Rendezvous which I helped found, and named, is held the third week of June in Panguitch. I used to go to about six to eight of these rallies each year. This year I have not been to any and this is also the first year since about 1988 that I have not camped out in a tent. The first rally Val went to with her own bike, other than a BMW club camp out in Southern Utah, was the memorial day weekend rally which was then in Quincy California. I arranged for Val's bike to be taken in an enclosed trailer to Quincy, and after I had been there a day or two, I rode down to Reno and Picked Valerie up at the airport on the Friday of the long weekend. We then rode on my bike back to Quincy. Just up from Truckee there is a beautiful expanse of forest that really is the forest prime evil. It rained the whole weekend of and on, and although we did do some riding around the area, I didn't get to show her all of the beautiful places around Quincy. We came back on highway 50 with some friends and I was rather surprised on the return leg, when at one point, Valerie suddenly passed me at over 100 mph. It turned out that she had been thinking about it the whole way home and had even discussed it with my friends. It was a riding rite of passage for her and she did it in a straight section of road with little traffic.

Valerie has gone with me to the rally in Sipapu about three times. Sipapu is about 35 miles south east of Taos, New Mexico up in the mountains. I have attended this rally about twelve times. Its about 675 miles from Salt Lake City and we usually ride it in one day, both ways. Sipapu, which to the Pueblo Indians is the entrance from below ground to our world, in Kiva's it is a small indentation in the floor of the Kiva which symbolizes this portal through which their ancestors first emerged in to the present world. Sipapu New Mexico, is the site of a mom and pop Forest service ski resort. The rally takes over the whole facility and there is first come first serve free rooms in the lodge. Valerie does not like to camp, so I would always take my tent, and Valerie would carve out some space in a room in the lodge. Making it into a woman's only dorm. We always made it part of the weekend to ride down to Santa Fe, for a few hours on Saturday. We have also been up to Angle Fire and have visited the breath taking Vietnam Memorial which is located there. It was started as a father's memorial to his son who died fighting in the war. We have stopped at many old churches on the way to Santa Fe, that always make me think of the Willa Cather book, “Death comes for the Archbishop.” I always figure out a back roads route out of the mountains and we ride through small Villages where the dogs still bark in Spanish. It was always festival weekend in Santa Fe, the weekend after Labor day, and the few blocks around the Palace of Governor's is always closed to traffic. After walking around, doing a little shopping, Valerie likes silver jewelery and fancy belts, and maybe going to a couple of museum's we would pick an upscale place for lunch, and then head back to Siapu. The first year she went we had lunch at the Pink Adobe, where we had lunch several times when we were kids. It is now famous for having been famous, although we did share for desert, a piece of their signature Apple Pie. Santa Fe is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the United States. It was the first Foreign Capitol, invaded by the United States in 1846, and the natives at first, welcomed the invasion. We spent a great deal of time in New Mexico on family trips, and it does remind me of the exploring that Valerie and I did on these trips as kids.

Valerie is a real trooper, except for unpaved roads, or sections of gravel, she is game for most situations, and in rain, sleet or even hail, she maintains her position, in most circumstances, a comfortable distance behind me. Larry likes to hang back far enough on his bike, that he can virtually ride at any speed he wants. Larry was with me three years ago when I was viciously attached by two deer near the Jeremy Ranch exit of of I-80. He called Valerie who wasn't with us, and she called everyone else, so that by the time I arrived at the hospital, all of my family, living in Salt Lake City, were all ready there.

On this day, we rode up Parley's Canyon past Park City, to the turn off on Highway 40 toward Heber City, Our destination was Kamas for breakfast, at Pasillas. We ended up having to ride to the junction with Highway 32, because of a closed exit ramp, Then it was up to Francis, and then North a couple of miles to Kamas. After breakfast we headed to Wanship and the ride back on I-80 to Salt Lake. My gas light came on, I had not filled the bike before we left, and I turned off at the Jeremy Ranch exit, and gassed up and drove the remaining way home by myself.

Weather permitting we will probably ride every weekend till late October. I have certainly in some years continued to ride my bike into December and a couple of years ago, I rode to Arizona in early December to visit some friends who winter there. I had to cut short my trip, because of an expected snow storm in Utah and had barely returned home when the first massive snow storm of the season arrived. I have also made trips to Death Valley in both January and February.

Todays ride was about 125 miles and there is more of a hint of autumn in the mountains than there was last week. I was glad I had re-inserted the lining in my coat and closed the vents in both my jacket and pants. *She doesn't really wear combat boots, but she does have stylish boots and even sometimes wears a pink motorcycle jacket and currently, a black Arai helmet.