September 2020
Books read:
- NW by Zadie Smith
- American War by Omar El Akkad
- Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Trails walked:
- Mingus Inner Maze Loop near Jerome (September 1st)
- Sycamore Canyon Dorsey Spring near Flagstaff (September 9th)
- South Boulder Peak near Boulder, CO (September 22nd)
- Sourdough trail near Nederland, CO (September 24th)
- Kachina trail near Flagstaff (September 28th)
Song of the month:
- Into the Mystic by Van Morrison - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6r2P4W9Yog
Scientist Spotlight:
- Richard Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988)
It was part of Rolling Stone’s list of 500 greatest songs of
all time and according to a BBC survey, the song’s cooling melodies make it one
of the top songs chosen by surgeons to play during operations. So there you go, Into the Mystic. It’s a great song to play today in order to help soothe the nerves as the world,
and our country seem to be heading in a downward spiral.
He was only 25 years old when Robert Oppenheimer invited him
to join the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, NM. He was present at the Trinity test site for
the first atomic bomb test in July of 1945, about a month before the bombs were
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I “discovered” Feynman when I watched some BBC videos that
were recorded at his home in 1983. The series is called “Fun to Imagine” and
Feynman takes on various physics concepts and explains them brilliantly in
terms most everyday people would understand.
His teaching skills were every bit as outstanding as his science
skills. You can view those videos
here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYg6jzotiAc&feature=youtu.be
I parked at a hairpin turn on Forest Road 104 about a mile
east of the 89A highway. Forest Road 104
does take you to the top and it’s a pretty decent dirt road that most passenger
vehicles could manage. But I chose to
hike up the Butterfly and West Rim trails to the top and then walked down FR104
back to my car. I walked a total of
about 7.5 miles; 3 of them along the road.
At the hairpin turn where I parked there is room for maybe 4-5
cars. Look up the drainage here and
you’ll see an old concrete dam; the trail starts just on the other side of that
dam.
There are several old closed logging roads on this mountain
that have been converted to hiking/biking/horseback riding trails. The logging roads reached their heyday during
the Jerome mining boom in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It’s a bit confusing navigating these trails
and I recommend using a GPS track to avoid the many wrong turns you could
take. At one point I had to hike cross-country
for about a quarter mile to connect the Butterfly trail (#536) to the West Rim
trail (#538). I turned right on the West
Rim Trail to head uphill (next time I’ll turn left which looks like it takes
you to a nice viewpoint). There are some great secluded viewpoints along
this trail that I found by heading off trail a few yards towards the rim. The trail ends at a hang gliding and
paragliding launch site that’s considered the premier launch site in Arizona (https://www.azhpa.org/mingus). There’s a small campground here that is
reserved for members of the Arizona Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association. From here I hiked north along the rim for more
views and ate lunch on a small promontory jutting out where I found a small
memorial to a young man from Cottonwood who was only 18 when he died. I don’t know his story, but his name was Ben
Latham and I can’t imagine the grief his family felt. His small memorial is located in a beautiful
spot, overlooking the town of Cottonwood far below.
After lunch I headed south along the rim, past the launch
site for more views where there are some really nice public campgrounds. Next, I headed down FR104 past a Methodist
Camp and hung out at Mingus Lake for a while since it was so nice outside and I
was the only one there. It’s more of a
large pond than a lake, but it’s pretty. After relaxing and watching the fish jump, I
headed back down to my car. Another
beautiful day in Arizona.
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| The "trailhead" - had to scramble over that dam to start |
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| The dirt road to the trailhead |
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| Mingus Lake reflections |
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| Trail art |
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| View from up top |
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| The hang gliding launch pad |
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| Views |
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| Small memorial on top |
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| Memorial tags |
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| Cottonwood far below |
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| Sign at the hang gliding launch |
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| Launch pad |
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| Looks like someone was raking the forest to stop fires from happening..... |
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| Big juniper! |
The writing style
is a bit complex, mixing first and third person, stream of consciousness, and
other styles. Some may find this hard to
follow, but I thought it added to the whole complexity of the story she was
trying to write. I loved it and will
eventually read all her novels.
Here are a few of
my favorite lines:
Once they were
the same age. Now Leah is aging in dog
years. Her thirty-five is seven times
his, and seven times more important, so important he has to keep reminding her
of the numbers, in case she forgets.
They were married
before they were friends, which is another way of saying: Their marriage was the occasion of their
friendship.
Michel is a good
man, full of hope. Sometimes hope is
exhausting.
…time as a
relative experience, different for the jogger, the lover, the tortured, the
leisured.
Nathan Bogle: the
very definition of desire for girls who had previously only felt that way about
certain fragrant erasers.
This house makes
her feel like a child. Cake ingredients
and fancy rugs and throw cushions and upholstered chairs in chosen
fabrics. Not a futon in sight. Overnight everyone has grown up. While she was becoming, everyone grew up and
became.
He has a face
that hopes to please but cannot owing to chinlessness.
Mothers are
urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is
precisely what repels their daughters, forcing them to turn away.
Of course, it’s
harder for a man to be objective. They
have the problem of pride.
Breaking up a
fight between two men: Leah inserts herself between the two of them, stretching
out her hands to separate them, an imploring woman in an ancient story.
“…Never go out
with a Spanish girl, though, seriously, that is serious advice. They ain’t rational. For real!
Their brains ain’t wired normal.”
“..well, they
just feel no hope, the young people, Felilx, no hope, we’ve used all their
resources, haven’t we, used them up, well, we have!”
In households all
over the world, in many languages, this sentence usually emerges, eventually:
“I don’t know you anymore.”
This was a
phenomenon previously unknown to Natalie Blake:
a man spontaneously recognizing an error and apologizing for it.
Low-status person
with intellectual capital but no surplus wealth seeks high-status person of
substantial surplus wealth for enjoyment of mutual advantages, including longer
life-expectancy, better nutrition, fewer working hours, and earlier retirement,
among other benefits.
…panic and rage
to see her spoiled children sat upon the floor, flicking through past images,
moving images, of themselves, on their father’s phone, an experience of
self-awareness literally unknown in the history of human existence—outside dream
and miracle—until very recently.
My daughter’s wonder dog and I were in the northeast section
of the wilderness and used four different trails starting at the Dorsey Springs
trailhead to make a nice 8.5-mile loop (I actually parked the car a quarter
mile up the road from the trailhead since that part of the road was a bit
dicey). I started down the Hog Hill
trail, then briefly on the Winter Cabin trail, paralleled the canyon on the
Kelsey trail, and finally back up to the rim on the Dorsey Spring trail. I had shade most of the way through pine,
juniper, and scrub oak vegetation.
Around a half mile or so on the Kelsey trail, past the Winter Cabin the
trail was overgrown so lots of bushwhacking and scratches (luckily, I wore long
pants for this hike since it was 46 degrees at the start).
I enjoyed this hike for the solitude, the running springs,
the Winter Cabin, and some nice views of the canyon. The views weren’t as spectacular as other
trails I’ve been on in the area, but they were nice. Winter Cabin is part of a group of cabins in
the area used by ranchers in the early 1900s to house workers when cattle were
moved to lower elevations during the winter.
They were all built near springs so that water was available year-round.
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| San Francisco peaks from the long dirt road |
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| Dorsey Spring |
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| I liked this trail sign's wooden post |
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| Big camp spot by Dorsey spring |
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| Some views between the trees |
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| Nice views into Sycamore Canyon |
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| Views |
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| These trees appear to be bowing down to their rock god |
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| Winter Cabin by the trail sign |
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| Winter Cabin spring |
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| Winter Cabin |
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| Natural arch |
The story is
about America’s 2nd Civil War, fought during the years 2075 and
2095 between the northern blue states and the southern red states. This time the war between the states is not
about race (the country has seemed to overcome that issue finally). It’s fought over the use of fossil fuels as climate
change continues to devastate the US and the world. However, like the first civil war, there are
cultural differences at play also. To
make the novel even more dystopian, a plague was intentionally released just as
the war was ending which ends up killing over 100 million people, more than 10
times the amount killed during the war (much of this is stated at the beginning
of the book).
The main
character whose life helps to tell the story of the war and subsequent plague is
Sarat Chestnut (born Sara T. Chestnut) who is a force of nature. Her family is devastated at the beginning of
the war and ends up trying to survive in one of many ramshackle refugee camps in
the southern state of Mississippi near the Tennessee border. Her family and friends’ struggle for survival
in the camp make for a great story in and of itself, but there is so much more
to come. When Sarat is 12, she meets a
man in the refugee camp who becomes her life teacher and who sort of brainwashes
her into becoming a rebel insurrectionist, helping the southern states in their guerrilla war against the north. The
story shows Sarat progressing in her training and knowledge and hatred for the
north.
The state of the US at this time was described
(divined?) by the narrator as follows: “My favorite postcards are from the
2030s and 2040s, the last decades before the planet turned on the country and
the country turned on itself. They
featured pictures of the great ocean beaches before rising waters took them;
images of the Southwest before it turned to embers; photographs of the
Midwestern plains, endless and empty under bluest sky, before the Inland Exodus
filled them with the coastal displaced.
A visual reminder of America as it existed in the first half of the
twenty-first century: soaring, roaring, oblivious.” As the narrator states near the beginning,
“This isn’t a story about war. It’s
about ruin.”
One fascinating
aspect of this foreboding story is that the 5th Arab Spring has
succeeded, and the Muslim nations unite as a powerful democracy called Bouazizi.
In order to keep America destabilized
and weak, Bouazizi sends aid (food, clothing, weapons) to the south in order to
extend the war. They also play a hand in
the plague that devastates the Union as the war is ending.
In between story
chapters, the author inserts dispatches, interviews, and history reports which
help to provide background information about the war and the state of the world
at this time.
Some other great
lines from the book:
About the rebels:
Ahead of them to the west lay certain death at the hands of a superior
army. But behind them, in the dead-end
towns, where they were born, lay a slower kind of death—death at the hands of
poverty and boredom and decay.
But the old men
swore there had been cities—entire countries even—in these places. Millions once lived here, they said, before
the temperature soared and the oil ran out.
All her life
she’d had little interest in the working of boys’ minds, which she imagined
only as a set of flimsy pinwheels turning in the direction of obvious things.
And we were the
only ones from around here who survived, because we were the only ones who
drove to every store from here to three towns over, buying every last can of
beans and bottle of water we could find; preparing for it (the plague).
There are two old
cabins along the Shadow Canyon trail before it starts its steep climb. The first one is McGillvray cabin which was built
between 1870 and 1885. The McGillvrays
ran cattle in this area. The next one is
Stockton cabin, built in 1910 by Jessie Stockton, a Denver writer who used to
drive her family up here in a Model T ford where they had to walk the last
quarter mile.
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| South Boulder Creek near the trailhead |
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| Flowers, wonder dog, Flatirons |
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Flatirons |
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| Happy after climbing up to the saddle |
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| Views west into the Rockies |
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| Left to South Boulder, right to Bear Peak |
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| Stockton Cabin |
The story begins
with a fictional narrator describing how he came to write this story. Its
famous first line is "All this happened, more or less." As the narrator is describing his idea of
writing a war novel to his friend, the friend’s wife berates him for writing
another war novel glorifying these wars where we send our kids to die. When he tells her the real story he plans,
they become great friends. The novel
within the novel tells the story of Billy Pilgrim who enters World War II as a
chaplain’s aid. He survives the Battle
of the Bulge only to get captured and eventually sent to Dresden as a forced
laborer. He survives the firebombing of
Dresden. Somewhere between the Battle of
the Bulge and Dresden, Billy becomes “unstuck in time” due to his abduction by
aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. Tralfamadorians
believe in time as a continuum and not linearly, like we do. Their analogy to Billy is that they view a
person’s life as though they are looking at the span of the Rocky Mountains;
and when they see an Earthling he doesn’t have 2 legs but several, in all sizes
from when they were an infant through old age.
Billy is kept naked in the zoo on the planet in an Earth-like home
environment (complete with a recliner) where Tralfamadorians come to watch him the way we watch animals in
the zoo (they go wild when he gets up to go the bathroom). Eventually they bring him a porn star from
Earth to mate with and they have a child together. During
this time the story bounces back in time, along with Billy Pilgrim (evidently
the aliens gave him the ability to bounce back and forth in the timeline of his fascinating life, both before, during, and after the war).
There were many
interesting philosophical ideas discussed by the characters in the book. It was an enjoyable read. Here are some of my favorite lines:
Billy Pilgrim: “The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. ... When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."
The ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really
fought.
And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where
all those people and their homes had been.
But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.
The doctors agreed:
He was going crazy. They didn’t
think it had anything to do with the war.
They were sure Billy was going to pieces because his father had thrown
him into the deep end of the YMCA swimming pool when he was a little boy, and
had then taken him to the rim of the Grand Canyon.
Those beloved books gave off a smell that permeated the ward
– like flannel pajamas that hadn’t been changed for a month, or like Irish
stew.
He said that everything there was to know about life was in
The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
He had already seen a lot of their marriage, thanks to
time-travel, knew that it was going to be at least bearable all the way.
From a study of America by an alien: America is the wealthiest nation on Earth,
but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, “It
ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.” It is in fact a crime for an American to be
poor, even though America is a nation of poor.
Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but
extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with
power and gold. No such tales are told
by the American poor. They mock
themselves and glorify their betters.
The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is
himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel
question: “If you’re so smart, then why
aint’ you rich?” There will also be an
American flag no larger than a child’s hand - glued to a lollipop stick and
flying from the cash register.
Billy’s daughter to her aging father: “Oh my God, you are a
child. If we leave you alone here, you’ll
freeze to death, you’ll starve to death.”
And so on. It was very exciting
for her, taking his dignity away in the name of love.
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| Fall color from the 72 highway |
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| Nice fall color on the trail also |
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| Wonder dog way ahead of me on this nice trail |
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| Some views from the trail, not many |
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| These trees all had metal tags like prisoners in a forest |
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| Pretty trail |
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| Daughter taking photos |
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| Daughter and wonder dog wandering |
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| Nice views |