March 2021

Books read:

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States by Walter Johnson

Trails walked:

Rabbit Mountain Open Space near Lyons (Various)
Poudre River Trail near Greeley (March 18th)
Deer Mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park (March 25th & 28th)

Song(s) of the month – D.B. Rielly: One of These Days, Prenup, I’ll Remind You Every Day, Don’t Think So Much, and Wrapped Around My Little Finger

Scientist Spotlight - Svante Arrhenius

March Summary: A Native American woman is now in charge of all federal lands in the US. Let that roll around in your head for a bit. Incredible. After all we’ve done in the past 200 years to usurp Native Americans and their land, it has come full circle. If that’s not progress, I’m not sure what is. Slow progress, but progress none the less.

We’ve had 2 mass shootings this month (well, more than that, but two that took up most of the news cycles). I guess that means things are getting back to “normal” after a year of the pandemic. Mass shootings are emotional, visceral, scary, and they terrorize a community. One of the books I'm reading now (will be in next month's blog) addresses the differences between our immediate, intuitive reactions vs slower, more thoughtful reactions. Statistically the vast majority of people under 40 die from suicide, car accidents, poisonings, and homicide by someone they know, usually with a cheap handgun. But those events rarely make the news and if so, just for a minute. Mass shootings are a tiny percentage of deaths but a huge percentage of media coverage. We can all picture ourselves heading to the grocery store to pick up some milk and ending up a random victim for no good reason. It's hard for our brains to consider statistics when our emotions are running high from all this news coverage. The shootings launched the usual arguments about gun control and the innocuous extension of thoughts and prayers to the victims’ families. Eight years ago, 5- and 6-year-old children were killed in a mass shooting and nothing really changed afterwards. So, if nothing changed after THAT, then nothing will ever change. For a while the stories will take up a large portion of the news cycles, and then eventually will be replaced by other stories and we’ll all eventually forget about it and go on normally with our lives (at least those of us who didn’t have loved ones that were murdered in the shootings – their lives are shattered forever). I don’t have any answers. I personally do not own a gun. I’ve somehow managed to survive my 62 years without the need for one. But then I’ve never lived in a high crime area where I thought I needed protection and I’ve never been interested in hunting. I do believe that our country has an unhealthy and unnecessary attachment to guns, but I don’t think that’s gonna change as our political divide grows wider by the day. No matter the motive for mass shootings, I believe that there HAS to be something mentally wrong with someone who is able to randomly kill strangers. The pandemic certainly did nothing to address mental illness in the country as it’s probably worsened. But there are thousands of mentally ill people that don’t kill others. I don’t believe there are any possible solutions to this problem in our country. There are 400 million guns here and they aren’t going anywhere. So brace yourselves for the usual slate of mass shootings going forward but also remember that they only account for a small percentage of our ridiculously high level of gun deaths.

My reading and rambling episodes were somewhat limited this month due to:

A week and a half of babysitting our grandson due to daycare issues
The 4th largest snowfall in Denver area history
March Madness

At least those are all the excuses I could come up with. Nevertheless, I did manage to hike along one of Northern Colorado’s major rivers and managed a day at Rocky Mountain National Park. I read one incredibly written fiction novel and a non-fiction novel which taught me a lot about systemic racism in this country.

Scientist Spotlight – Svante Arrhenius

Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius won the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1903. He was a famous scientist in his day; however, today he is best known for his study of CO2 emissions and their impact on climate. Building upon the prior work of Joseph Fourier, John Tyndall and Claude Pouillet he became the first person to use the science of physics and chemistry to measure the impact of CO2 emissions as a greenhouse gas. He concluded in 1896 that humans were already emitting enough CO2 to cause global warming. His work in this area didn’t get the recognition it deserved until the 1970s when scientists using the first super computers discovered that his theory about the extent of warming from CO2 was remarkably accurate. Arrhenius was almost a century ahead of his time. Post publication note: Actually Eunice Foote predated all of these men on this topic with her 1856 paper on warming gasses. See the June 2023 blog post.

Song(s) of the month – D.B. Rielly

D.B. Rielly may be the best songwriter you’ve never heard of. The only reason I’ve heard of him is because my wife and I went to see a show at Fiddler’s Dream Coffeehouse in Phoenix several years ago. We were two of eight people in the audience (and two others of those eight were the opening act…). I suppose it was embarrassing for Rielly but he put on a great show and I was amazed at his songwriting and his mastery of so many different instruments (accordion, guitar, banjo). His songs range from deeply moving to hilarious. I’ve included examples in the below links.

Here’s a hilarious bio from his website:

"D.B. Rielly was born in the hearts and minds of lonely widows. He was raised by traveling vacuum cleaner salesmen and fed a strict diet of Cream of Wheat and Gilligan's Island until, at the age of three, he was sent off to receive his education at the I Don't Like Your Attitude, Young Man, Academy of Discipline. Decades later, realizing he'd never be able to snatch the pebble from anyone's hand, they "graduated" him. D.B. was unprepared for a world full of choices, opportunity, reality TV, and boy bands, so he wandered – clutching tightly to the only memory he had left: the sound of a Hoover Deluxe 700. It's no surprise that he gravitated toward the accordion – and is shunned by music lovers everywhere."

· One of These Days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrJF94CkX98

· Prenup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tcy85hIyV4

· I’ll Remind You Every Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaYkRnkNPEY

· Don’t Think So Much: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI52-JwhLVg

· Wrapped Around Your Little Finger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgaoMfDuFGA

Rabbit Mountain Open Space: The first couple of weeks in March I was called upon to help watch our grandson due to daycare issues. I really enjoyed those two weeks of bonding with the little guy and watching him soak in everything he sees and hears. The only downside was fewer big hikes. So I decided to write about what’s turning out to be my local “workout” hike. It’s not as steep as Piestewa Peak or Tom’s Thumb back in Phoenix, but it’s close by and it’s got great views of the Great Plains, Continental Divide, and the front range of the Rockies. There are three main trails in this open space in the eastern-most foothills of Boulder county: Eagle Wind (2.5 miles), Little Thompson (1.5 miles), and Indian Mesa (2.2miles).

These foothills form a transition zone between the wide prairies to the east and the Rocky Mountains to the west. In this transition zone you will find lots of various plant and animal life. I nearly always see deer, prairie dogs and hawks here and I imagine the summer will be filled with wildflowers...and rattlesnakes. The St. Vrain water supply canal bisects the open space (mainly through an underground tunnel) and brings water from the mountains (via Carter Lake) to the cities of the front range as part of the Colorado Big Thompson project. The land was sold to Boulder county in 1984 to be preserved for us all to use and enjoy.

On weekdays it’s easy to find yourself alone on a trail up here. Weekends are more popular, but still not really overrun with people. The Eagle Wind trail has the greatest variety as it climbs the hill and then enters pine forest for a bit with great views of the Rockies. I took my wife on this trail recently and she discovered just how slippery mud can be. Fortunately, she wasn’t hurt too bad, but her nice bright white jacket took a hit. The Little Thompson Overlook trail is the steepest (around 600 feet in 1.5miles) and takes you to a nice overlook of the Little Thompson river basin (so, appropriately named). The Indian Mesa trail follows a dirt road and ends with some nice views towards the Little Thompson canyon area, but overall, I would say that this is the least interesting of the three trails. There are some other non-maintained trails in the area marked with a sort of fire symbol with numbers from 1-4 on them. They are possibly old fire roads, but I’ll have to research this a bit. I’ve been on a couple of them and would like to explore them all.

Easy walking on dirt roads

Views north and east towards the plains

Several arroyos drain the open space

Old jeep road

Nice views of Longs Peak from the Eagle Wind trail

Great views

Views from Little Thompson overlook

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace: This was the 3rd novel from Wallace and was never finished even though he had worked on it for ten years. His editor published it after arranging it per notes that Wallace had left behind prior to his suicide in 2008. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012. His more famous novel was Infinite Jest, published in 1996. I’ve always enjoyed reading, but Infinite Jest is what brought me to really appreciate great writing, in addition to great stories. From the two novels of his that I’ve now read, there really seems to be no need for a plot or even character development because the writing is so incredibly innovative and mesmerizing that it doesn’t even matter what’s going on….and in many cases you wouldn’t be able to figure out what was going on anyway. I get the feeling that Wallace basically wrote about the thoughts and arguments he had going on inside of his head all the time. I imagine these conflicting thoughts are what led him to take his own life. Benjamin Alsup of Esquire had this line in his review of the book: "If it keeps you up at night, it won't be because you've got to know what happens next. If you're up, you'll be up because DFW writes sentences and sometimes whole pages that make you feel like you can't breathe."

The book is about the lives of people working for the IRS in Peoria, Illinois in the late 70s and early 80s. How could a novel with this subject be interesting? Because it’s basically about boredom and the American Dream and as Michiko Kakutani said, it’s “this immensely gifted writer's vision of the human condition as lived out in the middle of the middle of America.”

Each chapter could be read as a series of short stories. One chapter has three IRS agents stuck in an elevator discussing the philosophy and history of American politics. Another chapter describes the childhood of an IRS agent whose goal it was to place his lips on every part of his body….yes every part….and a chiropractor is involved…Another chapter describes the impoverished history of a female IRS agent who was “begat in a car, born in a car, and raped several times in cars.” One chapter was devoted to how an IRS agent started his teenaged and college life as a “wastoid” only to see the light after wandering into a lecture on Advanced Tax Accounting which changed his life. There are 60 pages devoted to a conversation between a breathtakingly beautiful woman and a guy who isn’t in the least moved by the beauty of this woman and yet it’s a fascinating conversation. You can’t make this stuff up (at least I can’t). Here are some (actually many) interesting lines:

I remember feeling the actual physical feeling of hatred of most commercial rock—such as for disco, which if you were cool you pretty much had to hate, and all rock groups with one-word place names. Boston, Kansas, Chicago, America—I can still feel an almost bodily hatred. And believing that I and maybe one or two friends were among the very, very few people who truly understood what Pink Floyd was trying to say. It’s embarrassing.

The bus was unclean, and some of the passengers appeared to have been aboard for several days running, with all that that entails in terms of hygiene and inhibition.

Americans are in a way crazy. We infantilize ourselves. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens—parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges, but not our responsibilities. We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality.

Just where the failure and breakdown had occurred was still a matter of controversy despite blamestorming sessions at the very highest levels.

…thirty-year-old men who had infants in high-tech papoose-like packs on their backs, their wives with quilted infant-supply bags at their sides, the wives in charge, the men appearing essentially soft or softened in some way, desperate in a resigned way, their stride not quite a trudge, their eyes empty and overmild with the weary stoicism of young fathers.

Knowing that internal stress could cause failure on the exam merely set up internal stress about the prospect of internal stress.

The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong with everybody.

Men whose soft faces fit their jobs like sausage in its meaty casing.

(He) could almost literally see the small pink man drinking Pepto-Bismol straight out of the bottle and going home to a woman who treated him like an uninteresting stranger.

This conversation about the American founders: “They believed in rationality—they believed that persons of privilege, literacy, education, and moral sophistication would be able to emulate them, to make judicious and self-disciplined decisions for the good of the nation and not just to advance their own interests.” Response: “It’s certainly an imaginative and ingenious rationalization of racism and male chauvinism, that’s for sure.”

This emphasis on man as the individual and on the rights and entitlements of the individual instead of the responsibilities of the individual. We’re turning into consuming citizens instead of producing citizens.

I used to spend time imagining what my father’s face looked like when he was alone…and there was no one to shape a certain expression for.

I don’t think my father loved his job with the city, but on the other hand, I’m not sure he ever asked himself major questions like “Do I like my job? Is this really what I want to spend my life doing? Is it as fulfilling as some of the dreams I had for myself when I was a young man serving in Korea and reading British poetry in my bunk in the barracks at night?” He had a family to support, this was is job, he got up every day and did it, end of story, everything else is just self-indulgent nonsense.

Unlike the Christian girlfriend, I never seem to recognize important moments at the time they’re going on –they always seem like distractions from what I’m really supposed to be doing.

I imagined tax accountancy to be the province of fussy little men with thick glasses and elaborate stamp collections….

For those who’ve never experienced a sunrise in the rural Midwest, it’s roughly as soft and romantic as someone’s abruptly hitting the lights in a dark room. This is because the land is so flat that there is nothing to impede or gradualize the sun’s appearance. It’s just all of a sudden there. The temperature immediately goes up ten degrees; the mosquitoes vanish to wherever exactly it is that mosquitoes go to regroup.

In Philo, educating yourself was something you had to do in spite of school, not because of it—which is basically why so many of my high school peers are still here in Philo even now, selling one another insurance, drinking supermarket liquor, watching television, awaiting the formality of their first cardiac.

The infant, however, would just gaze at the auditor fiercely, with a combination of intensity and disdain, its expression rather as if it were hungry and the auditor were food but not quite the right kind.

As most adults know, the distinctions between one’s essential character and value and people’s perceptions of that character/value are fuzzy and hard to delineate, especially in adolescence.

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.

..the real skill that is required to succeed in a bureaucracy. I mean really succeed: do good, make a difference, serve. I discovered the key. This key is not efficiency, or probity, or insight, or wisdom. It is not political cunning, interpersonal skills, raw IQ, loyalty, vision, or any of the qualities that the bureaucratic world calls virtues, and tests for. The key is a certain capacity that underlies all these qualities, rather the way that an ability to breathe and pump blood underlies all thought and action. The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes every thing vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air. ….It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

You think of the IRS as composed of small gray bow-tied men, legions of the bullied of childhood now armed with law to bully you with humorless precision.

As an infant I was ‘colickly,’ a feeder so rapacious my mother weaned me early to save herself.

Poudre River trail near Greeley: The Poudre river (pronounced POO-der) provides water for much of northern Colorado. Its headwaters are partly in Rocky Mountain National Park and it flows for over 100 miles where it empties into the South Platte River east of Greeley. Its official name is Cache de la Poudre which is French for the hiding place of the powder. Evidently it stems from French trappers in the early 1800s having to store their gun powder before fording the river so it wouldn’t get wet. Prior to the trappers giving it a name, I’ve read that the Sioux called it "Minni Luzahan" which means "Swift Current” (I imagine lots of rivers in the Rockies had that name….).

The Poudre River Trail is a 21-mile paved path that follows the river between Windsor and Greeley. I received my first covid vaccine at the Walmart in Greeley and decided to check out the trail while I was in the area. I walked the portion between the Kodak Watchable Wildlife area and Jones Ditch. It was a really nice walk. I spotted a bald eagle guarding its nest, a few hawks, and dozens of deer. Off to the north of the trail are several industries including, Kodak, Halliburton (frac sand processing), Front Range Energy (ethanol production), Vestas (wind turbines), some steel processing plants, and a plant that develops composite materials for aircraft. It’s sort of an interesting snapshot of America and Colorado where you have this natural beauty coexisting with the factories that keep the economy going and provide fuel for people wanting to heat and air condition their homes and keep the lights on. I’m hopeful that in the future I’ll see the Halliburton and Front Range Energy factories converted to wind turbine and solar panel manufacturing as our energy transition to renewables gains steam.

Coloradans of all political persuasions love the outdoors, and this is reflected in this 21-mile path through one of the more conservative towns in the state. It was a nice day, especially since I received my "uno dose" of the vaccine!

Hey, Hay!!

Old farm equpiment

Poudre River reflections

Industry north of the trail

Jones ditch, dug in the 1860s

Cottonwood with farm houses behind

Gnarly

Snow covered bluffs by the river

Kodak bridge

River bend, cottonwoods, bluffs

Bald eagle guarding its next

Reflections

Paved path through the trees

Rippling waters

River reflections with Rockies in the distance

The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States by Walter Johnson: I’ve read several books in the past 5 years which have given me some illumination on the pervasiveness of racism in America and they have helped me to understand it more from the point of view of the oppressed and less from my own old white man view. I thought that I understood it. Well, it turns out I’m a first day freshman in the college of the history of racism in the US. And this book has opened my eyes. It’s fascinating and enraging and sad and even a bit (but not much) hopeful. Walter Johnson is a professor of history at Harvard with an expertise in 19th century America and slavery; and, ironically, an old white guy.

Johnson grew up two hours west of St. Louis and was invited to a conference at Washington University in St. Louis in October of 2014. The weekend of the conference coincided with the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson (a St. Louis suburb) and the resulting protests and the eventual national recognition of the Black Lives Matter movement (which actually began the year before when George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin). Since he was from the area and an expert on 19th century America, he saw a story beginning to form. Johnson draws an arc (pun intended) from the Lewis and Clark expedition which started in St. Louis in 1804, through the pre-Civil War compromises on slavery, through the Civil War itself and then reconstruction, the disputed 1876 presidential election which resulted in the withdrawal of federal troops from the south leaving black citizens unprotected, Jim Crow, the rise of industry, the two world wars, the cold war, the civil rights movement of the 60s and on up to the Ferguson protests over Brown’s killing by police. Whew, that’s a lot to cover. He expertly unravels the structural racism during those years which has kept people of color from rising up in society, specifically in St. Louis, but also in the United States in general. The basic claim made in the book is that St. Louis has been the crucible of American history and that much of American history has unfolded from the juncture of empire and anti-blackness in the city of St. Louis. He tells the story of what he terms “racial capitalism”: the intertwined history of white supremacist ideology and the practices of empire, extraction, and exploitation. Monsanto, Emerson Electronics, and Western Cartridge all play a role here too. And he talks a bit about how poor and working class white people have been led for years to believe that their interests lie in making common cause with their political leaders and economic betters.

Upon returning from the Lewis and Clark expedition, William Clark ended up in St. Louis and was in charge of Indian removal from states east of the Mississippi out towards the west, where eventually they were all removed or slaughtered in the ensuing decades. The western outpost of the US Army was located at Jefferson barracks in the city which at one point after the civil war was the headquarters of the US Army as westward expansion needed clearing (slaughter) of Indians.

Slavery was more brutal in Missouri, explained partly because of the nearness of freedom across the river in Illinois. So, the history of the city has this wanton destruction of the Native Americans, combined with a more brutal treatment of slaves, plus a major slave trading market where black people were “sold down the river” to New Orleans and the Deep South. The strange mix of free black people with slaves in this growing city made for an uneasy uncertainty. Many free black people were killed. One of the first lynchings recorded in US History was here in 1836 (the burning of Francis McIntosh). The Dred Scott Supreme Court case began here (it’s basically the ruling handed down which stated that black people, whether free or slaves, were not protected by the Constitution).

A seemingly unending series of local, state, and national laws and rules continued to hold back people of color in St. Louis and it continues to this day with redlining and zoning and tax laws and realtor practices.

Some sobering stats: Today’s population is 300,000, around the same as in 1870 but only a third of the total in 1950. St. Louis consistently ranks in the top 10 in the US in murder rates. There is an 18-year difference in life expectancy between a child born to a family living in the almost completely black Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood and a child born in the majority white suburb of Clayton, ten miles west. Delmar avenue bisects the city between north and south, black and white and this line holds nearly every significant marker of social well-being in the city: rates of adult diabetes, childhood asthma, levels of lead in the bloodstream, internet access….

Two of the most famous murder ballads were based on true murders involving blacks in St. Louis (Stagger Lee and Frankie and Johnny). I can still remember my mom singing Frankie and Johnny when I was a little kid….I wonder if she knew what it was about….

Ragtime music was created in St. Louis….Scott Joplin came here from Texas. St. Louis hosted the World’s Fair AND the Olympics in 1904....and was pretty much the center of the world that year. Mark Twain, Henry James, TS Eliot, Thomas Wolfe, Frank Lloyd Wright, all toured the fair.

There are stories of people who have tried to make a difference. Their story of bravery is incredible, and it continues to this day. Maya Angelou lived here after all; she famously said of St. Louis: “a new kind of hot and a new kind of dirty, a city with all the finesse of a Gold-Rush town.” Chuck Berry, Josephine Baker, Ike and Tina Turner, Miles Davis, Dick Gregory, Elston Howard, Archie Moore, Sonny Liston, Redd Foxx, Robert Guillaume…all from the St. Louis area.

The stories he tells of the Indian massacres and the black lynchings are difficult to read and it’s hard to believe that humans did these things (do these things) to other humans. I can’t even bring myself to reproduce them on this blog, they are so horrible. But we can’t continue to ignore these truths in our flawed history as a country. They need to be highlighted so that more of us can become enlightened and understand that our childhood education of US history was a white washing in more ways than one.

Deer Mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park: Deer Mountain is a popular hike in Rocky Mountain National Park. It's a 3-mile steady uphill to a tremendous view of the Mummy Range, Longs Peak, and Beaver Meadows. I hiked the entire trail on a Thursday and then part of it again the following Saturday with my wife when the weather was nicer and the blue skies beautiful. Microspikes came in handy for walking on the mostly packed snow and ice. On Thursday I saw no deer on the mountain, but luckily we saw some on Saturday otherwise I'd have to question the naming of this mountain. On Thursday, there was very little wind, and hiking in cold weather in the snow with very little wind is a treat. Everything falls silent and it's like you're walking in a snow globe. It was spring break for some kids so I saw a few families with their school age kids doing the hike. They all seemed to be enjoying themselves. We're so lucky to have this wonderful national park less than an hour away. It's the same way I felt about the Superstition Wilderness near Phoenix. On the Thursday hike I managed to have the summit (10,000 plus feet) all to myself which is always a joy, especially in this popular national park.