November 2022
Books read:
Song(s) of the month – Willie Nelson - Red Headed Stranger album
Scientist Spotlight – Caroline Orr Bueno - Social and Behavioral Scientist
November Summary:
After five years and 11 months of being in a sort of limbo, my mom passed away. I say limbo because she was always very dependent and reliant on my dad who passed away in December of 2016. I had the feeling that she was just waiting for her time to go so that she could join him. Their deaths were surprising even though they were both in their 80s (which is old enough to be president these days). Since both deaths were surprising, I guess the upside is that neither of them had to suffer through long illnesses (although my mom was on the dementia spectrum which generally impacts the family more so than the patient). Families are complicated, containing years of intersecting and diverging relationships. My dad was a force of nature, pulling along everyone in his path in a generally positive and fun direction. He was genuinely curious about the world and about everyone in it. My mom was whatever the opposite of a force of nature is. She was very withdrawn and generally uninterested in the world or its inhabitants. Growing up, I felt this but couldn't really define it. I just knew that my dad would ask about my day and remembered a particular event I was looking forward to whereas my mom didn't. But she was my one and only mom, the person I was physically connected to for nine months before I made my appearance in November of 1958. My mom was good with babies and I saw that when our kids were born. She was very loving and gentle with her grandbabies. She started showing signs of mental illness in the 1980s, once even trying to take her own life. Medication helped, but she was never the same person after this time period. Rest in peace mom, and say hi to dad....and remember to ask him how his day was.
- Heartburn by Nora Ephron
- Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir by Jann S. Wenner
- Underworld by Don DeLillo
- Homestead Meadows near Pinewood Springs (Nov 2nd)
- Pawnee Buttes in northeast Colorado (Nov 8th)
- Lagerman Reservoir and Open Sky Loop near Longmont (Nov 15th)
- Praying Hands and Windy Gap in the Superstition Mountains near Apache Junction, AZ (Nov 30th)
Song(s) of the month – Willie Nelson - Red Headed Stranger album
Scientist Spotlight – Caroline Orr Bueno - Social and Behavioral Scientist
November Summary:
After five years and 11 months of being in a sort of limbo, my mom passed away. I say limbo because she was always very dependent and reliant on my dad who passed away in December of 2016. I had the feeling that she was just waiting for her time to go so that she could join him. Their deaths were surprising even though they were both in their 80s (which is old enough to be president these days). Since both deaths were surprising, I guess the upside is that neither of them had to suffer through long illnesses (although my mom was on the dementia spectrum which generally impacts the family more so than the patient). Families are complicated, containing years of intersecting and diverging relationships. My dad was a force of nature, pulling along everyone in his path in a generally positive and fun direction. He was genuinely curious about the world and about everyone in it. My mom was whatever the opposite of a force of nature is. She was very withdrawn and generally uninterested in the world or its inhabitants. Growing up, I felt this but couldn't really define it. I just knew that my dad would ask about my day and remembered a particular event I was looking forward to whereas my mom didn't. But she was my one and only mom, the person I was physically connected to for nine months before I made my appearance in November of 1958. My mom was good with babies and I saw that when our kids were born. She was very loving and gentle with her grandbabies. She started showing signs of mental illness in the 1980s, once even trying to take her own life. Medication helped, but she was never the same person after this time period. Rest in peace mom, and say hi to dad....and remember to ask him how his day was.
We had 23 people and seven dogs at our house for Thanksgiving. It was chaotic and it was great fun, and none of the dogs ate the turkey! The food was incredible as everyone pitched in for an eclectic mix that included a deep fried turkey, 48-hour long smoked ribs, red chile enchiladas, corn bread, mac 'n cheese, green bean casserole, and many delicious home-made pies. There was also a bit of wine and beer to add to the cheer. Thanksgiving continues its years-long dominance in the holiday competition (in my opinion) as it brings together family, friends, food, and football with no obligations to buy presents, make a costume, or shoot off explosives (assuming the deep fried turkey was done right). It was a wonderful day.
I managed four hikes and three books this month. My reading took me from a hilarious take on relationships to the history of Rolling Stone magazine to another brilliant novel by Don DeLillo. My rambling took me from 1880s homesteads to the desolate northeast corner of the state to a local reservoir with a Swedish past and then back to the desert for a day in the Superstitions Mountains. Enjoy.
Scientist Spotlight: Caroline Orr Bueno -
Song(s) of the month: Willie Nelson - Red Headed Stranger album
Homestead Meadows near Pinewood Springs: My daughter drove up from Taos to surprise me for my birthday and join me for my first hike of the month. I hiked most of this trail in February of 2021 and wrote about the Homestead Act and the subsequent acts to oppress and suppress the Native American population. It was a very different hike late in the fall vs late in the winter. Much less snow and the creek was not frozen. We added an extra mile plus to the hike by adding the Meadow Loop and the Brown homestead (like I said in my original write up, I’ll eventually visit all the homesteads up here). We saw a very fit older couple from Texas, a family with their dogs and toddler, a lone hiker, and a lone biker all day, so it’s still a low traffic trail on weekdays this time of year. The first 3 miles or so is a steady climb up Lion’s Gulch to the first meadow. From here there are several trails branching in different directions that will take you to the various homesteads that were established from the 1880s to the 1920s. The interpretive signs are good and give you a feeling for what life was like back then. The one that struck us most was the story of Sarah Walker who homesteaded on her own starting in 1914. She had no horse so she would walk the 3 plus miles to the road (now US36) and hitch a ride into Lyons to sell her eggs and cream. Tough lady. All the people then were tough, much more so than we are today.
It's a pretty walk, through pines and meadows. The homesteaders sure picked a nice spot to settle. You get occasional peeks towards Rocky Mountain National Park on the walk to the Irvin and Brown homesteads. We saw a big bull elk and a glimpse of something black and fast running through the woods (bear maybe?). A nice 11 plus mile walk with daughter and her wonder dog.
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Heartburn by Nora Ephron – Nora Ephron is a joy. She has such a great sense of humor to go with her intimate knowledge of the human psyche, especially concerning relationships. Her screenwriting for When Harry Met Sally is still the best dialog on human relationships I’ve ever seen. More famous for her great movies (besides When Harry Met Sally, there is Sleepless in Seattle, Heartburn, Julie and Julia, Silkwood, and You’ve Got Mail among others), she started out as a journalist and then became a screenwriter and novelist. She died of complications from Leukemia in 2012 at the age of 71.
Heartburn, published in 1983 is a semi-autobiographical story of her marriage and divorce to journalist Carl Bernstein (he of the Watergate scandal coverage). Only Ephron could write a comedy about infidelity and divorce (during which she had a toddler and was 7 months pregnant). It’s funny, poignant, and includes some great recipes (she wrote the novel from the viewpoint of a relatively famous cookbook writer). It’s interesting reading novels from the 1980s; so much of the dialog could never be written in today’s politically correct world that it almost seems scandalous reading it, but that’s just what people wrote (and said) during that time. Here are some lines:
“Well, whoever she’s having an affair with, she’s still having it,” I said. “How do you know?” said Mark. “She had her legs waxed,” I said. “And it’s only May.”
My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.
A week later, she checked out of the hospital, filed for divorce, and went to New Mexico to find God.
“Jonathan is the undersecretary of state in charge of Middle Eastern affairs,” I said. My father looked at Jonathan. “I suppose they don’t give that job to Jews,” he said.
I wondered whether Detective Nolan was single. He wasn’t exactly my type, but look where my type had gotten me.
He would never eat onions because he claimed he was allergic to them, which he wasn’t. I know, because I snuck them into everything. You can’t really cook without onions.
Lucy Mae Hopkins had given up men for Jesus forty years earlier, and she couldn’t understand why anyone else wouldn’t, given the choice.
It’s true that men who cry are sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own.
Try flying any plane with a baby if you want a sense of what it must have been like to be a leper in the fourteenth century…All those men in suits, looking at you as if your baby is going to throw up over their speech drafts…When you have a baby, you set off an explosion in your marriage, and when the dust settles, your marriage is different from what it was. Not better, necessarily; not worse, necessarily; but different.
Pawnee Buttes in northeast Colorado – I decided to take a combination hike and road trip on election day so that I could stay away from all the news of the day. I’ve had my sights set on the Pawnee National Grassland area in northeastern Colorado for some time. I thought it would be a nice change from my normal mountain and foothills hikes. And was it ever! Looking over the map I decided that I would first head into Nebraska’s far eastern corner, near where it intersects with both Wyoming and Colorado. Why? Because how often do you get to experience the highest point in Nebraska? And because it was only 30 minutes from the Pawnee Buttes trailhead.
I planned my drive to avoid I-25. Any Colorado drive that can avoid either I-25 or I-70 is a good drive because the last thing you need is to drive home after a beautiful hike only to end up stuck in traffic on one of these far too busy interstates. So I headed northeast through Platteville and Greeley where I was greeted by the pungent odor of the JBS meat processing plant (on the rare occasion when the breeze blows in from the northeast we are treated to that odor here in Longmont…reminds me a bit of my old Aggie days at New Mexico State University!). Interestingly, James Michener attended college and did some teaching in Greeley. He based his novel Centennial in the town and around Colorado. Leaving Greeley, I passed though miles and miles of oil and gas rigs as this is the heart of Colorado oil and gas production. It’s part of the Denver-Julesburg Basin and there are currently 1,100 drilling permits operating here. The Niobrara shale formation is part of this basin and fracking operations have increased the number of leases. Interestingly I also passed by huge wind farms. The Cedar Creek wind farms produce 550MWatts of power (enough to power around 100,000 homes) and used to be the largest in Colorado until the wind farms near Limon were set up in 2014. I managed to get a shot of a windmill towering over a little oil pumpjack. Here’s hoping we can stop pumping out that oil and gas and soon replace the energy with wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal, as all of them are much cleaner (and in many cases cheaper) than oil or gas. Fossil fuels are of course left over dinosaur remains and this area is also somewhat famous for the discovery of various dinosaur fossils in the late 1800s including giant bear dogs called amphicyons, dwarf horses, mastodons, and the rhino-like titanotheres.
I crossed the Nebraska border after around 15 miles of dirt road and made my way to the High Point Bison ranch. The owners are nice enough to allow the general public to access the high point, called Panorama Point (with a $3 self-serve fee at the open gate). After a three-quarter mile bumpy road, I was greeted by a small herd of buffalo and a stone marker indicating the highest point in Nebraska (5,424 feet). I signed the guest register (quite a few entries!) and watched the buffalo for a bit before heading back into Colorado for my hike.
It was 20 miles of easy dirt road from Panorama Point to the Pawnee Buttes trailhead. Mine was the only car here on this weekday. I read the many informative signs at the trailhead and then started my walk on this perfect sunny day in the upper 50s and lower 60s. At just over a mile I decided to leave the Pawnee Buttes trail and follow an arroyo to see where it took me. I walked down the arroyo for around a mile as it twisted and turned, occasionally turning into a mini slot canyon and then opening up with views of sandstone buttes. I kept my eyes open for dinosaur bones and I did find several bone fragments, but I’m sure they were of some more recent critters. I stood for a while watching a big coyote hunting on the mesa just above me; as soon as she saw me she hightailed it out of there in a cloud of dust. I headed back up the arroyo to the main trail and walked to both the western and eastern buttes. They are fascinating to explore, sitting up there 300 feet above these flat plains. I’m sure they were used by the ancient people of the plains as markers during buffalo hunts on their way to and from their homes. The eastern butte is on private land, but a sign there seems to indicate that you can visit as long as you’re respectful of the landowner’s rights. I was. I made my way back towards the car and decided to take the Lips Bluff trail back which is normally closed to hikers from March through June to protect nesting eagles and hawks. This was probably the highlight of the day as the trail climbs Lips Bluff and then crosses the bluff over some fairly precarious ridges with steep drops of a couple hundred feet on both sides. It was fun! And the views of the buttes from up here and the surrounding plains are terrific (marred only by the occasional oil/gas pumping stations in the distance).
My drive back through these small towns was easy and enjoyable. I passed the time listening to one of my favorite podcasts. It’s called A Matter of Degrees and is hosted by Dr. Leah Stokes and Dr. Katharine Wilkinson and they tell fascinating stories about climate change science and politics. It was the perfect podcast for a drive through the oilfields and meat processing plants of Weld County, Colorado. There are lots of good, hardworking people that live here and I hope that they will be able to find work as the future of energy and agriculture change with the times.
Like a Rolling Stone by Jann Wenner – I’ve read Rolling Stone magazine for most of my teen and adult life. My wife knows this, which is why she got me this newly published book for my birthday. Jann Wenner has led quite a life. He started Rolling Stone in 1967 at the age of 21 with $7,500 he received in loans from friends. There was no other magazine like it. There were teen music idol heart throb magazines (Tiger Beat) and cultural magazines (Life), but nobody had thought about writing seriously about the great music that was being made in the 60s and then 70s; and then addressing the social issues that many of the songs were about. Vietnam and civil rights were all over the headlines and young people had no place to go for information relative to them. He filled a niche and Rolling Stone eventually became one of the most famous and most awarded magazines in history. Although music was at the heart of the magazine, it eventually delved into politics to provide a voice for what young people wanted. Some of the best writers of the time wrote for Rolling Stone (Tom Wolfe, Hunter S Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Jon Landau, Truman Capote) and importantly, some of the greatest photographers provided incredible portraits of the music and times (Annie Leibovitz, Herb Ritts, Richard Avedon, Sebastiao Salgado).
The haphazard life of the writers and photographers during the 60s and 70s was fascinating to read about. Drug and alcohol binges while on tour with the Rolling Stones; trying to interview the quirky personalities of people like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, and John Lennon. Wenner became close friends with many of them. Among his closest and deepest friends throughout his life were Mick Jagger, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Bruce and Patti Springsteen, Bette Midler, Bono, actor Michael Douglas, and Ahmet Ertegun (founder of Atlantic Records and chairman of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame); the eclectic list goes on and on. There are some incredible stories throughout the memoir.
Not all of the book was interesting. He spent a lot of time on personal issues like his decades long struggle with his homosexuality; eventually leaving his wife of 25 years, although to his and her credit, they made it work for the kids. I anxiously awaited his personal life stories to give way to his stories about the musicians, politicians, and activists that he wrote about and became friends (and enemies) with. He gracefully handled the one major scandal the magazine had when their source in a university rape case was not properly vetted before releasing the story. And his discussion of how the internet eventually cratered the magazine business was insightful.
At over 500 pages it contains a LOT. But most of it is fun to read and I enjoyed reminiscing about my youth and the music that helped to form who I eventually became. After finishing the book, I watched the documentary Gimme Shelter, about the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont in 1969 where the Hells Angels killed a kid (the story featured prominently in the book). It was chaos. And really that’s how most concerts were in those days (without the part about the Hells Angels killing someone). People constantly going up on stage, tripped out on drugs, everyone listening to the music instead of recording it on their phones, clothes discarded, jugs of alcohol and joints passed around….ahh those were the days my friend….
At Wenner’s 60th birthday party Bruce Springsteen stood up and told a story about his teenage years when he saw the first issue of Rolling Stone, with John Lennon on the cover, at a record store near his house. “I can’t begin to tell you how shocking it was to find something that seemed to be speaking directly to me. For us young musicians in the outlands, it was the only thing we had that gave us information and inspiration about what we aspired to be and what we hoped to be. And the community we wanted to be a part of.”
Here are some lines:
My pediatrician in New York was Dr. Benjamin Spock…
When I was ten, “Heartbreak Hotel” came out and there was no turning back.
When they stopped, I asked the bass player who they were. He whispered in my ear, from one head full of acid to another, “We are the Grateful Dead.”
Ralph (Gleason) had written an essay for the academic journal American Scholar titled “Like a Rolling Stone”, in which he argued that Dylan and the Beatles, as well as Simon and Garfunkel and the Stones, were poets, the truth tellers about the current state of the world…his essay was the philosophical underpinning of Rolling Stone, our thesis, and ultimately our name. It was the title of Bob Dylan’s greatest hit and also a salute to the Rolling Stones, whom I worshiped. The Stones took their name from Muddy Waters’ first hit record, Rollin’ Stone.
Mick stopped the mixing and told me he had finished one more, and would I like to hear it? It was “Sympathy for the Devil.” The final take had been done the day after Bobby Kennedy had been gunned down, and Mick added the lines, “I shouted out, ‘Who killed the Kennedy’s?’ After all, it was you and me.”
(Linda Eastman) asked if I would assign her to (photograph) the Beatles in London; she would pay her own way. Sure, why? To meet Paul (She eventually became Linda McCartney).
I came of age with my country in flames, at home and abroad. Nixon came along and mobilized fear and hate into a national political movement. He started the War on Drugs. Every last bit of it was racist. The men I believed in were assassinated, shot down like dogs. This was not what we’d been promised The was not the American Dream.
Rolling Stone was the first publication to reveal (Henrietta Lacks) identity. The story became the 2010 best seller by Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Jon Landau officially resigned to produce and manage Bruce Springsteen. He invited Jane and me to the debut of Born to Run at the Bottom Line in New York. Bruce was playing his guitar from the tabletops and seemed to be having the best time of his life.
Annie did a poignant portrait of Michael (Douglas) holding his infant son naked. Michael sent me a letter that stated, “It’s amazing how a grown man holding a baby can make a drug magazine look so respectable.”
Steve Jobs made a speech at the annual Magazine Publishers Association conference soon after we met, telling them that print was dead and computers would destroy their businesses. He was twenty-five years early, but he was right.
Tom Wolfe, of all people, was the first person who ever told me about rap music. He liked to go to Harlem and the Bronx to watch the crews battle it out, and he was writing rap lyrics of his own.
Bono had an 1830s Georgian mansion on the cliffs of Killiney overlooking the Irish Sea…Salman Rushdie (hiding out due to the fatwa issued on him) was living secretly in the guest house.
Jackie Kennedy Onassis had been the guardian of New York’s best self. The enchanted spell she cast was no more, and now it was a different city. She was extraordinary, the most exquisite person I had ever met.
(The movie) Almost Famous was a love letter by Cameron Crowe, to his time at Rolling Stone. It caught all the fun and seriousness that we brought to our jobs…
After 9/11 Bruce (Springsteen) released The Rising…Bruce was not asking for vengeance, but for us to rise above it, accept the losses, transcend the ancient hatreds, and celebrate the yearning for human connection…Make no mistake about the greatness of this album. It is a masterpiece.
Our climate coverage was outpacing everyone other than the science journals…Bill McKibben had been a regular contributor since 1989.
Al Gore on why he got out of politics: “What politics has become requires a tolerance for triviality, artifice, and nonsense that I personally find I have in short supply.”
Rupert Murdoch told me, “The trouble with you is you believe what you read in the New York Times.” I said, “The trouble with you is that you believe what you read in the New York Post.”
I asked Obama for his favorite Dylan song, he said “Maggie’s Farm.” Any other politician would have chosen “Blowin’ in the Wind,”…But Maggie’s Farm is about the Man, ain’t going to work for him anymore ain’t going to slave, ain't going to do what anybody tells me to do.
You’d be surprised how much access the military gives Rolling Stone. After all, their goal is to recruit our readers and send them to their death.
Lagerman Reservoir and Open Sky Loop near Longmont – It was a cold week and today’s high in the upper 30s was going to be the warmest day, so I decided to stay close to home (and lower in elevation) and walk one of the many miles of trails near town. Lagerman Reservoir is exactly one block west of the Longmont city limits.
Frederick Lagerman founded a Lutheran congregation at the Ryssby settlement in 1878. The settlement was established by Swedish settlers from Ryssby, Sweden in 1862 as part of the Homestead Act. The congregation built an irrigation reservoir and named it after their pastor. The pretty Rysbby Church nearby was built in 1882 and is used today for weddings and other special events.
Lagerman Reservoir is fed by Dry Creek and other nearby ditches. It’s recently gone through some changes as less water enters the reservoir (I guess if you rely on Dry Creek for water, you might expect this). There was a massive fish die-off in 2018 and various science organizations have been studying the changes for the past few years.
It’s a well-known birding site as many waterfowl use it on their migration path from the Arctic to South America each year. I saw lots of cool looking water birds in the lake, including these cute little white-headed ducks called buffleheads. I also spotted a prairie falcon soaring above the water and four coyotes hunting for prairie dogs on this cold and crisp day. The trailhead has plenty of parking and a restroom on the north side of the lake. I started here and first walked the 1.5 miles around the lake with great views of Longs Peak and the Front Range. The western part of the loop is closed from May through August for nesting birds. After completing the loop, I hopped on the Open Sky Loop, just north of the trailhead. This loop was opened in 2017 after years of various land acquisitions by the county. The entire area is now known as the Lagerman Agricultural Preserve and most of the land is leased to local farmers and ranchers for crops and livestock. The loop is a nice, winding walk along old jeep roads with great views and bucolic scenes of livestock and some old farming equipment. I saw more prairie dogs than I’ve seen on any hike I’ve ever been on, which explains the coyotes and the large number of raptor sightings in this area. I only saw two other hikers on this cold day, along with a group of young, maybe college aged runners. This loop would make a great 4-5 mile run if I was a runner. I hope to explore more of the many great trails and open spaces close to Longmont in the coming months, especially when I’m not able to get up into the mountains.
Underworld by Don DeLillo - I had read that DeLillo's novel, White Noise was coming out in movie form this month which spurred me to read another of his novels. Underworld was a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It lost out to Philip Roth's American Pastoral which was also brilliant. It also came in second to Toni Morrison's incredible Beloved in the New York Times' best novels of the past 25 years in 2006. Famed book critic Harold Bloom said the novel, "touched what I would call the sublime," and compared it to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and Roth's American Pastoral. I agree with all of these assessments. It is now on my non-existent list of best novels I've ever read. Even at 827 pages, I wanted more.
Praying Hands and Windy Gap in the Superstition Mountains near Apache Junction, AZ - During my few days in Phoenix while I was dealing with the death of my mother, I took advantage of a free day to get into my beloved Superstition Mountains. When my mother-in-law passed in January I was able to get a day in here also and it's really healing and special. I miss the desert in the winter. I've been on nearly every trail in the Superstitions but I hadn't been on these trails before. They were surprisingly fun! Tall rock formations, enormous saguaros, and of course I had to add an off trail jaunt up an arroyo that turned out to be beautiful with 400 foot cliffs surrounding me. There were quite a few folks wandering around the easy trails near the foothills, but once I started climbing into the rock formations I only saw 4 other people the whole day. Two of them were a couple of dudes in their 70s sharing a marijuana joint while watching the sun go down in the desert!
How does a woman studying behavioral science end up on Russian hacker target lists? That's what I wanted to know when I saw her name pop up briefly and then read this article about her in Washington Monthly. She earned her PhD in Social and Behavioral Sciences from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she was honored to receive the Charles C. Clayton award for outstanding early-career performance. She began her career studying anti vaccine misinformation (this was well before covid). She built models to find irregularities in social media accounts that pointed to bots or foreign (usually Russian) hacking operations. She became somewhat famous (or infamous, depending on where you get your news) after tying Roger Stone to Wikileaks and Stone's subsequent misogynistic and inflammatory tweets that he eventually removed (the things he posted about her are horrible and indicative of his guilt). At the time, she was tracking Russian disinformation about Ebola which eventually led her to Stone. She talks a lot about context collapse, which I wrote about last month in my review of Jenny Odell's book, How to do Nothing. This is the crux of the problem with how social media attempts, impossibly, to deal with complex issues.
As the attacks on her have increased, so has her determination to do this brave work of uncovering the mis- and disinformation rampant on social media. What she does is just a drop in the bucket because she is going up against so many bad actors, but she's doing the work and the more she does it, the better she gets at it. There are others out there doing this same work. Sometimes I think they are our only hope of bringing some sort of sanity to the incessant insanity of social media and our ever increasing divisions caused in large part by this misinformation. She's recently been studying the impact of social media on the increasing violence of young white supremacists. Here's wishing her luck and safety as she pursues this noble cause.
I honestly can't count the number of times I've seen Willie Nelson in concert picking that old guitar of his with the hole that he's been playing most of his life. His shows are always fun and entertaining. He'll be 90 next year and he's still performing, but on a much more limited basis. His life should be made into a movie. From his family picking cotton, to his Texas high school sports success, to his crew-cut Nashville song writing days, his Outlaw Country genre establishment, run ins with the law for marijuana possession, run ins with the IRS and subsequent debt relief from releasing The IRS Tapes album, his involvement in the Farm Aid concert series (at which he still performs), his movie career, and on and on and on. He's been writing and recording music since the 1950s and has released 98 studio albums, 14 live albums, 51 compilation albums and 41 video albums as well as the soundtracks for The Electric Horseman and Honeysuckle Rose.
After success as a writer in Nashville, along with some of his own albums, he tired of the corporate scene there and headed to Austin, Texas where he helped to establish the "Outlaw Country" brand of music. This is the period in which he put together what I view as his masterpiece album, Red Headed Stranger in 1975. It's a concept album that follows the eponymous fugitive from the law who has killed his wife and her lover. His cover of Fred Rose's Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain was his first number one hit. Rolling Stone magazine had this album on their list of the 500 greatest albums of all time and it was number one on Country Music Television's list of the 40 greatest country albums of all time. The album's title became one of Willie's nicknames. It's been called the Sgt. Peppers of country music as it was the first country album to follow a theme rather than just compiling radio singles. Although Willie wrote only 6 of the 15 tracks, he made them all his own, with his sparse music and nasally sad voice. It's terrific. Check it out here (best when played in the YouTube app):
It's a pretty walk, through pines and meadows. The homesteaders sure picked a nice spot to settle. You get occasional peeks towards Rocky Mountain National Park on the walk to the Irvin and Brown homesteads. We saw a big bull elk and a glimpse of something black and fast running through the woods (bear maybe?). A nice 11 plus mile walk with daughter and her wonder dog.
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| Daughter crossing a bridge near the trailhead |
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| Daughter and wonder dog at the start of the meadows |
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| A bit of snow on the trail to Irvin Homestead |
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| Irvin Homestead |
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| A peek inside |
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| Part of the heated tub plumbing |
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| The heated tub! |
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| Some basic shelves and leftover items |
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| Old sawmill remnants |
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| A peek at the peaks in Rocky Mountain National Park |
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| A very uninformative sign at the Brown Homestead |
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| Other homesteads to explore in the future |
Heartburn, published in 1983 is a semi-autobiographical story of her marriage and divorce to journalist Carl Bernstein (he of the Watergate scandal coverage). Only Ephron could write a comedy about infidelity and divorce (during which she had a toddler and was 7 months pregnant). It’s funny, poignant, and includes some great recipes (she wrote the novel from the viewpoint of a relatively famous cookbook writer). It’s interesting reading novels from the 1980s; so much of the dialog could never be written in today’s politically correct world that it almost seems scandalous reading it, but that’s just what people wrote (and said) during that time. Here are some lines:
“Well, whoever she’s having an affair with, she’s still having it,” I said. “How do you know?” said Mark. “She had her legs waxed,” I said. “And it’s only May.”
My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.
A week later, she checked out of the hospital, filed for divorce, and went to New Mexico to find God.
“Jonathan is the undersecretary of state in charge of Middle Eastern affairs,” I said. My father looked at Jonathan. “I suppose they don’t give that job to Jews,” he said.
I wondered whether Detective Nolan was single. He wasn’t exactly my type, but look where my type had gotten me.
He would never eat onions because he claimed he was allergic to them, which he wasn’t. I know, because I snuck them into everything. You can’t really cook without onions.
Lucy Mae Hopkins had given up men for Jesus forty years earlier, and she couldn’t understand why anyone else wouldn’t, given the choice.
It’s true that men who cry are sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own.
Try flying any plane with a baby if you want a sense of what it must have been like to be a leper in the fourteenth century…All those men in suits, looking at you as if your baby is going to throw up over their speech drafts…When you have a baby, you set off an explosion in your marriage, and when the dust settles, your marriage is different from what it was. Not better, necessarily; not worse, necessarily; but different.
I planned my drive to avoid I-25. Any Colorado drive that can avoid either I-25 or I-70 is a good drive because the last thing you need is to drive home after a beautiful hike only to end up stuck in traffic on one of these far too busy interstates. So I headed northeast through Platteville and Greeley where I was greeted by the pungent odor of the JBS meat processing plant (on the rare occasion when the breeze blows in from the northeast we are treated to that odor here in Longmont…reminds me a bit of my old Aggie days at New Mexico State University!). Interestingly, James Michener attended college and did some teaching in Greeley. He based his novel Centennial in the town and around Colorado. Leaving Greeley, I passed though miles and miles of oil and gas rigs as this is the heart of Colorado oil and gas production. It’s part of the Denver-Julesburg Basin and there are currently 1,100 drilling permits operating here. The Niobrara shale formation is part of this basin and fracking operations have increased the number of leases. Interestingly I also passed by huge wind farms. The Cedar Creek wind farms produce 550MWatts of power (enough to power around 100,000 homes) and used to be the largest in Colorado until the wind farms near Limon were set up in 2014. I managed to get a shot of a windmill towering over a little oil pumpjack. Here’s hoping we can stop pumping out that oil and gas and soon replace the energy with wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal, as all of them are much cleaner (and in many cases cheaper) than oil or gas. Fossil fuels are of course left over dinosaur remains and this area is also somewhat famous for the discovery of various dinosaur fossils in the late 1800s including giant bear dogs called amphicyons, dwarf horses, mastodons, and the rhino-like titanotheres.
I crossed the Nebraska border after around 15 miles of dirt road and made my way to the High Point Bison ranch. The owners are nice enough to allow the general public to access the high point, called Panorama Point (with a $3 self-serve fee at the open gate). After a three-quarter mile bumpy road, I was greeted by a small herd of buffalo and a stone marker indicating the highest point in Nebraska (5,424 feet). I signed the guest register (quite a few entries!) and watched the buffalo for a bit before heading back into Colorado for my hike.
It was 20 miles of easy dirt road from Panorama Point to the Pawnee Buttes trailhead. Mine was the only car here on this weekday. I read the many informative signs at the trailhead and then started my walk on this perfect sunny day in the upper 50s and lower 60s. At just over a mile I decided to leave the Pawnee Buttes trail and follow an arroyo to see where it took me. I walked down the arroyo for around a mile as it twisted and turned, occasionally turning into a mini slot canyon and then opening up with views of sandstone buttes. I kept my eyes open for dinosaur bones and I did find several bone fragments, but I’m sure they were of some more recent critters. I stood for a while watching a big coyote hunting on the mesa just above me; as soon as she saw me she hightailed it out of there in a cloud of dust. I headed back up the arroyo to the main trail and walked to both the western and eastern buttes. They are fascinating to explore, sitting up there 300 feet above these flat plains. I’m sure they were used by the ancient people of the plains as markers during buffalo hunts on their way to and from their homes. The eastern butte is on private land, but a sign there seems to indicate that you can visit as long as you’re respectful of the landowner’s rights. I was. I made my way back towards the car and decided to take the Lips Bluff trail back which is normally closed to hikers from March through June to protect nesting eagles and hawks. This was probably the highlight of the day as the trail climbs Lips Bluff and then crosses the bluff over some fairly precarious ridges with steep drops of a couple hundred feet on both sides. It was fun! And the views of the buttes from up here and the surrounding plains are terrific (marred only by the occasional oil/gas pumping stations in the distance).
My drive back through these small towns was easy and enjoyable. I passed the time listening to one of my favorite podcasts. It’s called A Matter of Degrees and is hosted by Dr. Leah Stokes and Dr. Katharine Wilkinson and they tell fascinating stories about climate change science and politics. It was the perfect podcast for a drive through the oilfields and meat processing plants of Weld County, Colorado. There are lots of good, hardworking people that live here and I hope that they will be able to find work as the future of energy and agriculture change with the times.
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| Bison ranch in Nebraska |
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| Bison on the bison ranch, near the highest point in Nebraska |
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| 5,424 feet high in Nebraska! |
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| Commemorative sign |
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| Wind turbine towering over a pumpjack (hopefully indicative of the future) |
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| Pawnee Buttes from the road |
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| Mine was the lone car at this isolated trailhead |
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| Interesting sandstone formations |
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| Water wearing down the sandstone |
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| Isiah, Isaac,....and....Sam? |
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| One of a few mini slot canyons made the hike fun |
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| I'm gonna go with a dinosaur bone.... |
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| Western butte up close |
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| Eastern butte under thin clouds |
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| Western butte as see from the Eastern butte |
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| Scoured arroyo formations |
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| Heading up to Lips Butte |
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| On top of Lips Butte...you have to cross that thin bridge |
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| I made it, but my shadow is still on the other side |
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| Very cool landscape from up here |
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| A bit like the Badlands of South Dakota |
The haphazard life of the writers and photographers during the 60s and 70s was fascinating to read about. Drug and alcohol binges while on tour with the Rolling Stones; trying to interview the quirky personalities of people like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, and John Lennon. Wenner became close friends with many of them. Among his closest and deepest friends throughout his life were Mick Jagger, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Bruce and Patti Springsteen, Bette Midler, Bono, actor Michael Douglas, and Ahmet Ertegun (founder of Atlantic Records and chairman of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame); the eclectic list goes on and on. There are some incredible stories throughout the memoir.
Not all of the book was interesting. He spent a lot of time on personal issues like his decades long struggle with his homosexuality; eventually leaving his wife of 25 years, although to his and her credit, they made it work for the kids. I anxiously awaited his personal life stories to give way to his stories about the musicians, politicians, and activists that he wrote about and became friends (and enemies) with. He gracefully handled the one major scandal the magazine had when their source in a university rape case was not properly vetted before releasing the story. And his discussion of how the internet eventually cratered the magazine business was insightful.
At over 500 pages it contains a LOT. But most of it is fun to read and I enjoyed reminiscing about my youth and the music that helped to form who I eventually became. After finishing the book, I watched the documentary Gimme Shelter, about the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont in 1969 where the Hells Angels killed a kid (the story featured prominently in the book). It was chaos. And really that’s how most concerts were in those days (without the part about the Hells Angels killing someone). People constantly going up on stage, tripped out on drugs, everyone listening to the music instead of recording it on their phones, clothes discarded, jugs of alcohol and joints passed around….ahh those were the days my friend….
At Wenner’s 60th birthday party Bruce Springsteen stood up and told a story about his teenage years when he saw the first issue of Rolling Stone, with John Lennon on the cover, at a record store near his house. “I can’t begin to tell you how shocking it was to find something that seemed to be speaking directly to me. For us young musicians in the outlands, it was the only thing we had that gave us information and inspiration about what we aspired to be and what we hoped to be. And the community we wanted to be a part of.”
Here are some lines:
My pediatrician in New York was Dr. Benjamin Spock…
When I was ten, “Heartbreak Hotel” came out and there was no turning back.
When they stopped, I asked the bass player who they were. He whispered in my ear, from one head full of acid to another, “We are the Grateful Dead.”
Ralph (Gleason) had written an essay for the academic journal American Scholar titled “Like a Rolling Stone”, in which he argued that Dylan and the Beatles, as well as Simon and Garfunkel and the Stones, were poets, the truth tellers about the current state of the world…his essay was the philosophical underpinning of Rolling Stone, our thesis, and ultimately our name. It was the title of Bob Dylan’s greatest hit and also a salute to the Rolling Stones, whom I worshiped. The Stones took their name from Muddy Waters’ first hit record, Rollin’ Stone.
Mick stopped the mixing and told me he had finished one more, and would I like to hear it? It was “Sympathy for the Devil.” The final take had been done the day after Bobby Kennedy had been gunned down, and Mick added the lines, “I shouted out, ‘Who killed the Kennedy’s?’ After all, it was you and me.”
(Linda Eastman) asked if I would assign her to (photograph) the Beatles in London; she would pay her own way. Sure, why? To meet Paul (She eventually became Linda McCartney).
I came of age with my country in flames, at home and abroad. Nixon came along and mobilized fear and hate into a national political movement. He started the War on Drugs. Every last bit of it was racist. The men I believed in were assassinated, shot down like dogs. This was not what we’d been promised The was not the American Dream.
Rolling Stone was the first publication to reveal (Henrietta Lacks) identity. The story became the 2010 best seller by Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Jon Landau officially resigned to produce and manage Bruce Springsteen. He invited Jane and me to the debut of Born to Run at the Bottom Line in New York. Bruce was playing his guitar from the tabletops and seemed to be having the best time of his life.
Annie did a poignant portrait of Michael (Douglas) holding his infant son naked. Michael sent me a letter that stated, “It’s amazing how a grown man holding a baby can make a drug magazine look so respectable.”
Steve Jobs made a speech at the annual Magazine Publishers Association conference soon after we met, telling them that print was dead and computers would destroy their businesses. He was twenty-five years early, but he was right.
Tom Wolfe, of all people, was the first person who ever told me about rap music. He liked to go to Harlem and the Bronx to watch the crews battle it out, and he was writing rap lyrics of his own.
Bono had an 1830s Georgian mansion on the cliffs of Killiney overlooking the Irish Sea…Salman Rushdie (hiding out due to the fatwa issued on him) was living secretly in the guest house.
Jackie Kennedy Onassis had been the guardian of New York’s best self. The enchanted spell she cast was no more, and now it was a different city. She was extraordinary, the most exquisite person I had ever met.
(The movie) Almost Famous was a love letter by Cameron Crowe, to his time at Rolling Stone. It caught all the fun and seriousness that we brought to our jobs…
After 9/11 Bruce (Springsteen) released The Rising…Bruce was not asking for vengeance, but for us to rise above it, accept the losses, transcend the ancient hatreds, and celebrate the yearning for human connection…Make no mistake about the greatness of this album. It is a masterpiece.
Our climate coverage was outpacing everyone other than the science journals…Bill McKibben had been a regular contributor since 1989.
Al Gore on why he got out of politics: “What politics has become requires a tolerance for triviality, artifice, and nonsense that I personally find I have in short supply.”
Rupert Murdoch told me, “The trouble with you is you believe what you read in the New York Times.” I said, “The trouble with you is that you believe what you read in the New York Post.”
I asked Obama for his favorite Dylan song, he said “Maggie’s Farm.” Any other politician would have chosen “Blowin’ in the Wind,”…But Maggie’s Farm is about the Man, ain’t going to work for him anymore ain’t going to slave, ain't going to do what anybody tells me to do.
You’d be surprised how much access the military gives Rolling Stone. After all, their goal is to recruit our readers and send them to their death.
Frederick Lagerman founded a Lutheran congregation at the Ryssby settlement in 1878. The settlement was established by Swedish settlers from Ryssby, Sweden in 1862 as part of the Homestead Act. The congregation built an irrigation reservoir and named it after their pastor. The pretty Rysbby Church nearby was built in 1882 and is used today for weddings and other special events.
Lagerman Reservoir is fed by Dry Creek and other nearby ditches. It’s recently gone through some changes as less water enters the reservoir (I guess if you rely on Dry Creek for water, you might expect this). There was a massive fish die-off in 2018 and various science organizations have been studying the changes for the past few years.
It’s a well-known birding site as many waterfowl use it on their migration path from the Arctic to South America each year. I saw lots of cool looking water birds in the lake, including these cute little white-headed ducks called buffleheads. I also spotted a prairie falcon soaring above the water and four coyotes hunting for prairie dogs on this cold and crisp day. The trailhead has plenty of parking and a restroom on the north side of the lake. I started here and first walked the 1.5 miles around the lake with great views of Longs Peak and the Front Range. The western part of the loop is closed from May through August for nesting birds. After completing the loop, I hopped on the Open Sky Loop, just north of the trailhead. This loop was opened in 2017 after years of various land acquisitions by the county. The entire area is now known as the Lagerman Agricultural Preserve and most of the land is leased to local farmers and ranchers for crops and livestock. The loop is a nice, winding walk along old jeep roads with great views and bucolic scenes of livestock and some old farming equipment. I saw more prairie dogs than I’ve seen on any hike I’ve ever been on, which explains the coyotes and the large number of raptor sightings in this area. I only saw two other hikers on this cold day, along with a group of young, maybe college aged runners. This loop would make a great 4-5 mile run if I was a runner. I hope to explore more of the many great trails and open spaces close to Longmont in the coming months, especially when I’m not able to get up into the mountains.
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| View of Longs Peak from near the Open Sky Loop trailhead |
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| Nice framed shot of Longs Peak |
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| Hay! |
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| Views of the Flatirons |
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| Front Range prairie dog wondering if I was an enemy |
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| Bunny commandeering a prairie dog hole |
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| Cold War era microwave towers on Table Mountain in the foreground (possibly being repurposed to listen to deep space signals) |
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| Nice lighting on the foothills |
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| Two tiny looking joggers silhouetted on the trail |
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| Lagerman Lake view of the Flatirons |
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| Lots of waterfowl enjoying the water before it freezes |
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| Lagerman Reservoir |
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| Cool cloud formations above the Flatirons |
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| Crashed spaceship? |
The book starts with a beautiful description of the 1951 baseball pennant game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the NY Giants. Even non-baseball fans will have heard of Bobby Thompson's "shot heard around the world" where he hit a 3 run home run in the 9th inning to win the pennant. Thompson and Willie Mays' team went on to lose the World Series that year to a Yankees team that had Joe DiMaggio in his last year and Mickey Mantle in his first year. The actual ball that Bobby Thompson hit to win the pennant was never found, but DeLillo's fictional account follows the stories of the people who had the ball in their possession. But the novel isn't about baseball; it's about so much more.
After the 1951 beginning, the novel is told backward in time, starting in 1992 and ending back in 1951. Nick Shay is the protagonist who is the current (1992) owner of the famed home run ball. It's an incredible tale encompassing the varied topics of waste management (both regular and nuclear), J. Edgar Hoover, nuclear weapons, marital infidelity, organized crime, chess, murder, redemption, religion, politics, art, the cold war and subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Lenny Bruce, Little Richard's Long Tall Sally, and Christian mysticism. Whew! And really that's just part of it. DeLillo's writing is brilliant; the dialog is crisp and funny; the characters are fascinating; and his portrayal of American culture from the 1950s through the 1990s is spot on. Don't let the length of the book deter you, it's so good. Here are some lines:
“When JFK was shot, people went inside. We watched TV in dark rooms and talked on the phone with friends and relatives. We were all separate and alone. But when Thomson hit the homer, people rushed outside. People wanted to be together. Maybe it was the last time people spontaneously went out of their houses for something. Some wonder, some amazement. Like a footnote to the end of the war. I don’t know.”
The word plutonium comes from Pluto, god of the dead and ruler of the underworld.
You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole point is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed. Die liquid, so they can convert to cash.
“Excuse me but if you rotate the map of Latvia ninety degrees so the eastern border goes on top, this is exactly the shape that’s on Gorbachev’s head. In other words when he’s lying in bed at night and his wife comes over to give him a glass of water and an aspirin, this is Latvia she’s looking at.”
He would take showers sitting down while Clarice and Carl went running on their running machine upstairs, they were training to live forever.
I have cancer recurring in so many parts of my body the doctor gives me group rates.
Clarice would have to rent a hospital bed for the apartment, high sides so he wouldn’t tumble to the floor. Strangers would come to wash his genitals, immigrants from countries on the travel channel.
She knew there were stories about her past, how she used to twirl the big-beaded rosary and crack students across the mouth with the iron crucifix. Things were simpler then. Clothing was layered, life was not.
it’s a good job and pays well and has the benefits and provides for my widow when I die from overwork
I take my students into garbage dumps and make them understand the civilization they live in. Consume or die. That’s the mandate of the culture. And it all ends up in the dump.
Marvin had to make an emergency visit to the hotel toilet, where he unleashed a firewall of chemical waste.
Who cuts your hair? Did they arrest the mass murderer who cuts your hair?”
Lenny Bruce on the Cuban Missile Crisis: "You know what this is? This is twenty-six guys from Harvard deciding our fate.”
She had a European accent slashed and burned by long-term residency in New York.
He did not have enough height and weight to contain all his rage.
leaders of nations used to dream of vast land empires—expansion, annexation, troop movements, armored units driving in dusty juggernauts over the plains, the forced march of language and appetite, the digging of mass graves. They wanted to extend their shadows across the territories. Now they want...computer chips...
It was the U.S., Viktor says, that designed the neutron bomb. Many buzzing neutrons, very little blast. The perfect capitalist tool. Kill people, spare property.
Marian and I are closer now, more intimate than we’ve ever been. The serrated edges have dulled away.
It was a beautiful day, with temps in the 60s and a few clouds. It was good for my soul to visit the desert one more time. It has so much to offer, especially here in the Superstitions.
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| Huge chain fruit cholla! |
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| I'll be scrambling around at the bottom of those rock formations |
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| Praying Hands |
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| Sphinx like formation |
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| Praying Hands from the other side |
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| Pooh bear in profile? |
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| Nice colors |
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| Windy Gap was an eerie kind of place |
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| Awesome rock formations |
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| Desert beauty |
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| Elephant foot? |
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| I was scrambling up this stuff to Windy Gap |
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| The trail heads into these rocks |
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| Trail squeezes through Slot Rock here |
Until next month, happy reading and rambling!