May 2020



Books read:

  •         A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
  •         Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig
  •         Between the World and Me by Ta’Nehisi Coates
  •         Escalante’s Dream: On the Trail of the Spanish Discovery of the Southwest by David Roberts
  •         The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin


Trails walked:
  •          Tom’s Thumb in the McDowells (Various)
  •          Sidewinder/Ocotillo loop in the Phoenix Sonoran Preserve (May 20th)


Song of the month:






 Last month I wrote about my wife’s parents living with us during the pandemic lock-down.  We will always cherish this time we had together.  My father-in-law passed away peacefully in our home on May 15th surrounded by his family.  He had suffered for years with various cancers due to the nuclear radiation exposure he suffered at his work in government weapons labs during the 60s and 70s.  This past year was especially tough for him, but now he is pain free.  As difficult as it was to experience this, it was also beautiful to see how much love there was in the room as the family visited every day for the last week of his life.  The gentleness shown by his wife as she cared for him these past weeks was so loving and tender.  Cycle of life was revealed to us this year, with our first grandson born in January to this.  He was able to see his great-grandson via Zoom video a few times before he passed; it brought such a big smile to his face “See my handsome great-grandson!”  He was a strong man with strong convictions.  I still remember how afraid of him I was as a 20-year-old, dating his daughter.  That changed as we got to know each other, but he had a big presence.  He hand-built his dream house in northwest New Mexico during the 80s and 90s and the family spent many fun long weekends at that place.  He was forced to sell in 2014 due to his illness and the 7,000 feet elevation.   He will be missed.

Obviously, this month was different from most, so I was really only able to get in one big hike, but I also wrote a description about one of my other workout hikes in the valley.  I did read a lot though, including, coincidentally a memoir about a man losing both parents to different cancers in the same year, a classic philosophy book on motorcycle maintenance, an incredible letter from a black father to his 15-year-old son, a book about the Spanish Lewis and Clark, and a classic science fiction book that’s been on my list for a while.  

 NOTE:  I've added Google Sheets links that list all the hikes, books, and songs I've mentioned in this blog since November of 2018.  It's on the left column on desktop views and in the drop down menu on smart phone views under Google Sheet Archive Lists. Enjoy!  

Song of the month – Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond:  I picked this song because it was a favorite of my father-in-law's.  We actually played it just after he passed, including the fist-pumping “bom, bom, bom” part, but with lots of tears.   The song was written 51 years ago in 1969 by Neil Diamond who once said he wrote it after seeing a photo of a 5-year-old Caroline Kennedy riding a horse, but later recanted and said it was for his wife, Marcia, whose name he couldn't fit in the rhyme.  It was a top 10 song that year.  In 1997 the Boston Red Sox adopted the song as part of a sing along with the fans and since 2002 it is played in the 8th inning of all Red Sox games.  The movie Fever Pitch features the song prominently. The day after the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013 Neil Diamond sung it live at Fenway Park in Boston for an emotionally charged crowd.  The YouTube link above is a live version performed by Diamond at the Greek Theater in 1971; little did he know that this song would become a cult classic as you can see below:



 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers:  This memoir was a Pulitzer prize finalist and ended up on many “best of” book lists in 2000.  It is the author’s recollected story of the tragic deaths of his parents, five months apart, from different cancers while he was a senior in college.  He quits college and ends up raising his 8-year-old brother (with help from his sister Beth) and moving away from Chicago to Berkley.  There is so much going on in this memoir that it’s hard to keep up with the frenetic pace.  His really beautiful relationship with his young brother is juxtaposed with a person in their 20's who wants/needs to experience a life without such commitments.   The struggle to find work, friends, and meaning is, well, staggering and heartbreaking.  And I found myself laughing out loud several times, especially as he exposed his vivid imagining of terrible things happening to his brother and himself due to questionable decisions he may have been making.  And I have to say from experience that his description of the pain when he had a kidney stone is spot on.  

 As I was reading the book, I couldn’t help thinking of how it reminded me of a David Foster Wallace novel.  There seem to be several articles linking the two which I haven’t read, but they both write with a combined sense of humor and tragedy, along with pointing out social injustice and the frailty of humans.   It’s a great read and I devoured the 400 plus page book in less than a week (while painting my exterior doors blue and helping to care for my ailing father-in-law, and hiking, and cooking and cleaning….so no, I didn’t just read the entire time).


Tom’s Thumb in the McDowell Mountains:  In March I finally got around to posting about my standard workout hike on Piestewa (aka Squaw) Peak.  Since my big hikes have been limited this month, I thought I would talk a bit about my secondary workout hike which is Tom’s Thumb.  The trailhead is 30 minutes from my house vs. 15 minutes for Piestewa Peak.   It’s not as tough as Piestewa Peak (1,200 feet in 1.2 miles), but the 900-foot gain in 1.2 miles to Vulture View Scenic Point is still a pretty good workout.  When I’m just here for the workout I stop at Vulture View as it provides the most bang for the buck.  It’s another mile to the base of Tom’s Thumb but you gain less than 200 feet of elevation.  That mile is a really nice hike though, through rock mazes with great views.  Halfway between Vulture View and Tom’s Thumb is a trail junction for the East End trail (a very steep and rocky trail that I wrote about in my February 2019 blog).  If you hike down the East End trail for about a quarter mile you get tremendous views of the Superstition Mountains.  This past month or so I’ve seen the Tom’s Thumb area go from wildflower blooms to cactus blooms and then to Palo Verde tree blooms.  I also saw my second ever Gila monster in the wild on this trail during the last week of April which means that of the two Gila monsters I’ve seen in the wild in the past 40 years, both of them occurred this spring (one at Tom’s Thumb and one at Spur Cross Conservation area).  It’s truly been a strange year…..


Signs of the times


Purple thistle with nice view north

Prickly pear cactus blooms with a view



Cholla Cactus blooms with Tom's Thumb in the background

A rock whale? swimming towards Tom's Thumb

Flowers bordering the trail

Bright yellow prickly pear blossoms
Blooming Palo Verde trees near the entrance, with Tom's Thumb high up in the background

View of Phoenix from the base of Tom's Thumb

View of Fountain Hills and the Superstitions from the East End Trail

Sonoran whipsnake on Vulture View Scenic Point

Gila Monster!!

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Persig:  I noticed that this book has been on my “books to read” list longer than any other, so I figured I better get to it.  I saw that it was in my daughter’s library which she’s storing at our house temporarily, and since the public library is still closed, I decided to borrow it from her.  A 1974 book reviewer in the New York Times said, “I now regret that I lack the expertise in philosophy to put Mr. Pirsig's ideas to a proper test, for this book may very well be a profoundly important one—a great one even—full of insights into our most perplexing contemporary dilemmas. I just don't know. But whatever its true philosophical worth, it is intellectual entertainment of the highest order.”  That pretty much sums it up for me too.  For some reason, my brain keeps breaking when I try to understand either great poetry or deep philosophy.  I feel like there are times when I’m close to understanding some of it however and this book brought me close to understanding interesting philosophical ideals.  There were several pages in the middle sections of this book which I could not grasp, no matter how many times I read it.  But overall, like the reviewer quoted, I was mostly entertained, and my brain was stretched pretty good.

It is a sort of memoir (I’ve seen it categorized as fictional autobiography, philosophy, nonfiction, and/or memoir) set during a cross country motorcycle trip the author took with his 11-year-old son.  During this trip, the author expounds on his view that the ills of 20th century could be resolved if each individual adopted a higher philosophy of life.  The problem is that he went insane trying to discover exactly what this philosophy should be.  The cross-country trip was taken some time after he was released from the mental institution and had been given electric shock therapy to “cure” him.   I have the feeling I could drive myself insane if I really took the effort to fully understand the ideas the author was trying to convey.  As the title infers, he uses the maintenance of his motorcycle as a symbol, or maybe allegory, for how to treat oneself or one’s soul or one’s views on life, I think.  You can own a motorcycle and appreciate it for its beauty and form but never understand how to maintain or fix it; this would be a romantic view of the motorcycle.  Or you could appreciate it by fully understanding how it works and taking the time to figure out how to properly maintain and fix it; this would be a classical view of the motorcycle.  This romantic vs classical view of things dates to the ancient philosophers and there are schools of thought for each.  I think that Pirsig was trying to find a balance between the two views in pursuit of what he called “Quality” or “the Tao”.  Tao is defined as:  the unconditional and unknowable source and guiding principle of all reality.   Years before this motorcycle trip, the author was teaching writing and learning philosophy.  As he argued philosophy with his professors, his mind just sort of exploded and he ended up in a mental institution. 
During the road trip, he was working out who he is now vs who he was before the electroshock therapy (he gave the name Phaedrus to this pre-insanity persona), all while trying to reconnect with his 11-year-old son who was 6 when he was institutionalized.  The re-connection didn’t go too well because the son had fonder memories of the fun and excitable Phaedrus than of the current calm, reflective, and brooding dad he was with on this road trip. 

I very much enjoyed reading about 75% of this book; the road trip, the motorcycle maintenance, and his search for meaning and rediscovery.  There were portions that drifted so deeply into the bowels of philosophy where I was totally lost, and I found myself rereading several sections without being able to understand anything. 
The book was rejected by over 100 publishers before he found someone to publish it.  It became a best seller and has sold over 5 million copies worldwide and has been translated into 27 different languages. 


Between the World and Me by Ta’Nehisi Coates: I guess that I just wanted my mind to be blown away this month.  Between the wild and fascinating ramblings of Dave Eggers, the motorcycle Zen of Robert Pirsig, and now the brutal truth of Ta’Nehisi Coates, I feel like there’s been a total shift in the foundation of what I thought to be reality.  And that is what Coates is trying to accomplish with this brilliant epistolary he wrote to his 15 year-old-son.  Between the World an Me won the National Book Award in 2015 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  The writing is beautiful, sad, and obviously came from the very deepest part of his heart.  And with all the news lately from Minneapolis (the murder of George Floyd), this should be required reading for everyone.  

Coates, born and raised in drug-torn West Baltimore, weaves advice to his son on how to survive being a young black man in this country with our history of mistreatment of black people along with a sort of who’s who among those who have striven to define and resolve the unending racism.  This is the first book I’ve read on my new Kindle (yes, I finally made the plunge, mainly because my library is still closed and ebooks are the only books I can check out now).  It’s a good book to read on an e-reader because I’m able to immediately research the people of color he mentions throughout history that, sadly, I had never heard of even though many of them accomplished incredible feats during their lifetime.  Why had I not heard of these people?  The answer lies in the basic truth the author was leading to throughout the book.  That basic truth (to paraphrase Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times book review) is that the American dream of a comfortable suburban life with a good job is an exclusionary fantasy for white people who are enabled by, but largely ignorant of, their history of white privilege and black suppression. To become aware of their gains from slavery, segregation, and voter suppression would shatter that Dream.  Another way to state this is written by the author: “There exists all around us an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much.” 

There is too much social commentary in the book to talk about in this blog post.  He helped me to understand a bit about the black culture of music, clothes, religion, and activism; including how black history in this country led to those cultural norms.  He doesn’t offer much hope for changing systemic racism and it’s easy to understand why after reading this brilliant essay.
Here are a few lines from the book:

“I was a curious boy, but the schools weren’t concerned with curiosity.  They were concerned with compliance.”

“…the craft of writing is the art of thinking.”

Saul Bellow: “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?”  
Ralph Wiley: “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.”

To his son: “You must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which somehow, will always be assigned to you…. Racism is not your fault, even if it is ultimately your responsibility”


 Sidewinder/Ocotillo loop in the Phoenix Sonoran Preserve:  I hiked in the southern portion of the preserve last month and wrote about my Dixie Summit/Union Peak loop.  I picked a cool morning this May to hike in the northern section of the preserve by creating a 13-mile loop combining the Sidewinder and Ocotillo trails.  It was 55 degrees and breezy when I got out of the car at six in the morning.  I almost put on a sweater, but knew I’d just be hauling it around for about 12.5 miles so decided I’d try to enjoy being cold for a half mile or so as summer is quickly approaching.  By the time my hike ended at around noon it was 82 degrees with a nice breeze to keep me from heating up.  The final score was 31-24.  Thirty-one mountain bikers and 24 hikers during the hike.  I saw most of the hikers at or near the two main trailheads, but I think that this loop is pretty popular with the mountain biking crowd.  This was a Wednesday morning.  And note to self:  try not to plan a 13-mile hike when you haven’t even worked out in over a week….my knees and feet were very sore at the end of the day.

 The wildflowers are gone and most of the cactus flowers are gone, but the Saguaro blossoms were blooming.  This is the state flower of Arizona and it’s pollinated by bats at night and birds and bees during the day.  About halfway up the Sidewinder trail I stopped to chat with a guy doing some trail maintenance.  Nice guy. He was clearing out some big rocks in a sharp downhill bend to prevent bikers from injuring themselves.  He said most people thank him for the work but some gripe that he’s “sanitizing” their trails and making it too easy….just goes to show it’s impossible to please everyone, no matter how much good you think you’re doing.   No interesting animal sightings on this hike other than the standard birds, lizards, and rabbits.  I did see a dead scorpion though!  Once again, hats off to the City of Phoenix for creating and maintaining these great trail options in the middle of the 5th largest city in the country.  

As you can see on the profiles, the Sidewinder trail has a LOT more up and down


In case you weren't sure which way to go

Nice views northeast towards Spur Cross and the Cave Creek mountains

Dead tree breakdancing

Nice view of the Sidewinder trail winding its way up the hills

Saguaro blooms in the desert

Dead and live saguaros, plus a blooming barrel cactus


Lots of blooms on this one

Sunrise shot with balloons rising

Bye!


Escalante’s Dream: On the Trail of the Spanish Discovery of the Southwest by David Roberts:  From August through December of 1776, while a new country was being born 2,000 miles to the east, two Franciscan friars journeyed 1,700 miles through difficult terrain across what’s now the southwestern United States.  Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante were tasked with finding a route from New Spain’s oldest colony in Santa Fe to their newest one in Monterey, California.  The author dubs them the Spanish Lewis and Clark as they charted unknown territory with no knowledge of what lay before them.  There were other goals besides finding a route.  They wanted to find suitable places for additional Spanish settlements, convert the indigenous tribes to Christianity, and find gold and silver.  They failed in all of their stated goals.  The most incredible accomplishment was that none of the explorers died during this brutal trip.  The meandering path they took was northwest from Santa Fe, then up the western part of Colorado straight west to Provo, Utah, then south towards Cedar City.  In what is now southwestern Utah they decided to return to Santa Fe because they believed California was too far away and they were struggling to find food and water.  They took a more southern route back to make a large loop of discovery.  It took them 11 days after reaching the Colorado river to find a way across.  At this point they were on their 4th horse-as-food and the weather was getting colder.  Once across the river, the traveling was easier.  They stopped at the Hopi mesas and were met with an understandably cold shoulder from the many previous years of being mistreated by Spanish friars and governors. 

So that is the main story and it had potential to be a great adventure book based on the diary of Escalante (like what Stephen Ambrose did for Lewis and Clark in Undaunted Courage).  But the author intertwined the friars’ story with his own story of battling cancer and driving with his wife on a road trip to re-create the Dominguez/Escalante journey.  Unfortunately, he revealed enough of himself to make me kind of despise the guy, despite the fact that he was battling cancer and had led a fascinating life of adventure in his past.  He was incredibly condescending to local people he met on his road trip, including his wife.  I kept hoping for his present-day adventures to go away and to dive more into the 1776 adventure.  But that didn’t happen.  I appreciate his intelligence and his sense of adventure, but his air of superiority towards everyday people trying to help him was just too hard to read (why didn’t his editor save him from this?). 

I will say that this book helped me better understand how many of the Spanish explorers and missionaries mistreated the native tribes of the southwest.  Sure, there were some benevolent Spanish, but the famous ones you hear about; Coronado, Onate, Vargas…they were incredibly cruel and were eventually tried for war crimes.  I also found out that the fiesta de Santa Fe (a famous fiesta I’d always know about growing up in New Mexico) was initially established to commemorate Vargas’ brutal reconquest of the native tribes after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.  No wonder the native tribes of New Mexico hated the fiestas…..
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin:  I used to read a lot of science fiction when I was in college, but very little since then. No particular reason, it just worked out that way.  My hiking buddy told me a couple of story lines of Le Guin's novels and I was intrigued.  Then I started reading about her and her work and came to find out she's a freaking genius.  This book, which won the Hugo and Nebula prizes for science fiction, was written in 1969 and contains subject material that would be politically and socially controversial even today:  The impact of sex and gender on culture and society, the impact of religion on society and politics, and the meaning of patriotism and loyalty.  Some pretty heavy stuff all distributed nicely in a fascinating story of an anthropologist (Genly Ai) from Earth who is representing a federation of planets called Ekumen.  His goal is to get the leaders of the planet Gethen to join this federation.  

 The people of Gethen are androgynous for 24 of the 26 days of each month.  The other 2 days they become either male or female (no telling which until specific situations call for it) and enter what's called "kemmer" where they are able to reproduce if desired.  So any person on this planet can either birth or sire a child and many have done both.  This is very confusing to Genly as he deals with people on a day to day basis, because they seem to contain traits of both men and women he is familiar with from Earth.  Interestingly there is no rape, seduction, nor war on this planet. The story is great and includes political intrigue, religious and mystical experiences, an escape from prison, an 80 day epic trek across an ice field in winter, and a very satisfying conclusion that shows the ultimate price for loyalty to mankind.  Here are some excerpts:

 The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty:  not knowing what comes next.

 It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

 Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.

 Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light.

 I wondered what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend's voice arises, and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry.  Where does it go wrong?

 He loved his country very dearly sir, but he did not serve it, or you.  He served the master I serve....mankind.

 Brilliant.
Until next month, happy reading and rambling.