March 2024
Books read:
- The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy by Anand Giridharadas
- Ball Four by Jim Bouton
- Trust by Hernan Diaz
Trails walked:
- Greyrock Mountain Loop near Ft. Collins (March 6th)
- Devisadero Trail near Taos (Various March dates)
- Flattop Mountain snowshoe in Rocky Mountain National Park (March 20th)
- Lily Mountain near Estes Park (March 28th)
Song(s) of the month: Adrienne Lenker - Born for Loving You, and Ruined.
Scientist Spotlight – Jocelyn Bell Burnell, astronomer
March Summary:
I was thinking about human connections recently and came to the realization that I am a connection point between the 19th and 22nd centuries. My great grandfather Tata was born in the 1800s. My most vivid memory of him was his lack of a thumb which, as a 5-year-old is quite an impressive attribute. And all of my grandchildren (statistically) will live until the 22nd century. So here I am, spanning the 20th and 21st centuries just trying to make sense of the changes in the world around me since the 1800s and trying to imagine what changes will occur for my grandchildren between now and the 22nd century. It's mindboggling and fascinating and time marches on. Speaking of march....
March Madness has been in the air this month with both the men’s and women’s college basketball tournaments underway (this may also explain my lack of long hikes and books this month). This year is a bit different in that the women’s game is getting more attention than ever, mainly because of the record-breaking play of Iowa’s Caitlin Clark who broke both the women’s (Kelsey Plum) and men’s (Pete Maravich) college record for scoring this year. There are other stars this year too, like USC’s Juju Watkins and LSU’s Angel Reese. Several national polls show that more average viewers know the names of the women’s stars this year than the men’s stars which is really something new. Some say that the reason for this is that we’ve now had nearly three generations of women enjoying more equal treatment in women’s sports since the 1972 passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments. The ruling basically evened the playing court for women in sports at institutions funded by the federal government. So more women started playing sports, including my sister who played several high school sports in the 70s. There’s also a slight hint of racial tension in all of this because Caitlin Clark is white. I remember hearing the same arguments when Larry Bird and Steve Nash became NBA stars in the 80s and 90s. Many felt that they were getting the benefit of favorable officiating due to their color in a game that was becoming predominantly filled with black athletes. There may be a point to all of this. In a recent game I watched, Iowa (Clark’s mostly white team) beat Virginia Tech (a mostly black team). Virginia Tech was called for 27 fouls while Iowa had only 11. However in the latest game versus Colorado, the fouls were more evenly distributed as Iowa won easily. My son believes that it’s more related to money than to race since national viewership for Iowa games is much higher than for other teams so the NCAA may have a greedy reason to make sure she stays in the playoffs as long as possible. He pointed out that Michael Jordan and LeBron James got(get) lots of calls…which seems to take race out of the picture in favor of just generational talent and greed. But deeper down, is the reason Clark’s games are watched by so many people due to her skin color? Or is it purely her generational talent? She did have 32 of Iowa’s 64 points in that Virginia Tech game and 29 points and 15 assists in the Colorado game. I think it will continue to be an underlying issue surrounding this tournament, especially when Iowa plays LSU which is a rematch of last year's championship game. Stay tuned….Oh, and baseball season has officially started with two regular season games in Korea that included the Dodger’s Shohei Ohtani who has become the Babe Ruth of his time. He is must-see baseball like Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron used to be.
Speaking of baseball, one of the books I read this month was about the 1969 Seattle Pilots, an expansion team that lasted only one year. When I was a kid in the 60s I collected baseball cards in bubblegum packs like many kids at that time. I wondered whether I had any cards from the ’69 Pilots, so I went through my collection and what do you know, I had a few. See them below, along with a couple of other players from other teams that were featured in the book, including Dooley Womack who was traded from the Astros to the Pilots that year for the author, Jim Bouton. I probably have a few cards that may be worth money at some trade show, but I’ve never had any desire to find out. The cards were just a fun hobby for me and maybe one of my grandkids will be interested in taking over the collection when I’m gone. That’s more priceless to me. Who knows what they'll be worth in the 22nd century!?
This week’s hikes included a surprisingly beautiful and challenging hike near Ft. Collins, a tough Rocky Mountain National Park snowshoe, a few Taos workout hikes, and a short hike to an epic view. My reading took me from the secrets of progressive activism to a baseball book that changed the game forever to a novel like no other I've read. Enjoy!
Scientist Spotlight: Jocelyn Bell Burnell, astronomer
Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born in Northern Ireland during World War II. In grade school, girls were encouraged to study cooking and home economics while boys were studying math and science. Her parents argued with the school to change their policies and they did. So she learned about physics and eventually graduated from the University of Glasgow with a BS in Physics and then later received her PhD from Cambridge.
While at Cambridge, she made one of the most significant astronomical discoveries of the 20th century while working on the construction of a radio telescope. She noticed an unexpected pattern of regular radio pulses. After some disbelief of her findings by her professors, she and those same professors ended up discovering that these patterns were the first observation of pulsars (rotating magnetic neutron stars). Even though Burnell was an author of the paper (listed 2nd in the credits) proving the discovery, she was not on the recipient list for the 1974 Nobel Prize in physics like her male counterparts were (sound familiar?). Although the scientific community expressed outrage at the time, she was not initially upset about it, stating that as a student it was her supervisors that should be given credit. However, in her later years she admitted that the fact that she was both a graduate student and a female likely prevented her from being part of the Nobel Prize. Her story is portrayed in part one of the BBC series, Beautiful Minds.
In her illustrious career she went on to win numerous science awards as she made her way through careers as professor, dean of science, and eventually President of the Royal Astronomical Society, likely a more distinguished career than her male colleagues who collected the Nobel.
Song(s) of the month: Adrienne Lenker - Born for Loving You, and Ruined.
In our monthly visits to Taos, we’ve come to realize that the little town has superior radio stations to any we’ve found along the Front Range. The station we mostly listen to is KTAO which bills itself as Adult Album Alternative music. It was the first solar-powered radio station in the world and is currently the most powerful solar radio station at 100K Watts. They use 150 solar panels that sit on top of 10,800-foot Picuris Peak near Taos. One artist I “discovered” while listening was Adrienne Lenker. I heard this voice on the radio that was so distinctive that it reminded me of a combination of Iris Dement, Emmylou Harris, and Mother Maybelle Carter. It seems like her voice is on the verge of being totally out of tune, but then it pulls all its pieces together into this mesmerizing sound that I love. I imagine others may not feel the same way. I had to Shazam it and found it was a song by Big Thief called Born for Loving You. Their lead singer and writer was Adrienne Lenker. Of course, I then went down a rabbit hole of Adrienne Lenker internet history.
She wrote her first song at the age of 8 and created her first album at the age of 14. Dropped out of high school, got her GED at the age of 16 then thanks to a scholarship from Susan Tedeschi, attended the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston. She eventually met and married Buck Meek with whom she created the band Big Thief which was moderately successful as an indie music band. They divorced in 2018 but continued to be friends and create music together. She wrote most of their songs and eventually created several of her own albums, including her most recent one, released this year, titled Bright Future which includes the second song I chose to showcase, Ruined.
So, why did I decide to highlight these two songs out of all the music she’s made? I’ve always believed that music artists are at their best at the beginning and end of relationships. Love and lost love have a way of pulling the best music out of artists it seems. Two of the playlists I maintain are called Love Songs and Love Gone Bad, and they contain some of the best songs ever written. Also, I guess because Born for Loving You was the first song of hers that I heard and it’s a great love song. And then I chose Ruined because it may be one of the best love-gone-bad songs written and her live performance of that song that you can see below just wrecked me when I first saw/heard it. When she picks up the guitar near the end of the video, all of her emotions fly all over the strings in a crazily discordant and fascinating way. I wanted to go give her a hug after that performance because it looked like she needed it. It’s visceral. Check them out below:
Born for Loving You - from Big Thief’s Vampire Empire EP:
Sample lyrics:
After the first stars formed, after the dinos fell
After the first light flickered outta this motel
1991, momma pushing like hell
Tangled in blood and vine
From my first steps to my first words
To waddling around looking at birds
To the teenage nightmare, mine and yours
Thank God we made it through
'Cause I was born for loving you
Just something I was made to do
Doesn't matter what dreams come true
I was born for loving you
Ruined – live from Greenwich Village with Rick Hakim on piano:
Sample lyrics:
Until I'm brave enough to call you
I just fall through every time
I wish I'd waved when I saw you
I just watched you passing by
So much coming through, every hour too
Can't get enough of you
You come around, I'm ruined
You come around, I'm ruined
Her NPR Tiny Desk concert is really good too if you want to listen to her with the band Big Thief shortly after they released their first album in 2016:
Greyrock Mountain loop near Fort Collins – Well this turned out to be a bit more adventurous than I expected! I was not interested in snowshoeing on this day and I wanted to explore an area I haven’t visited before. So, I found this hike that I saw mentioned as one of the better day hikes near Fort Collins. It was just under an hour to reach the trailhead from my home in Longmont. There is a footbridge crossing the Poudre River providing access to the Greyrock Trail which follows the river for a short time before heading up a canyon. After a mile or so there is a junction. I took a left on the Meadow trail to make a loop.
It was a steady climb after the junction, and after a couple of miles and a thousand feet of elevation gain I reached the first highlight, which was a magnificent view of Poudre Canyon with the snow capped Rockies in the background. I stopped to catch my breath as three college kids raced past me in shorts and t-shirts. The next highlight came after about 4 miles. You climb down a steep hill to this gorgeous meadow with Greyrock Mountain rising ominously to the right. I fully expected to see a large herd of elk grazing, but it wasn’t to be on this day. Next came the fun part, navigating to the top of Greyrock. At first look it seems impossible without ropes. But as you wind your way up its southeast face you start to see a long crevice that makes its way to the top. Then, once on top, you still have to wind your way around giant rocks and eventually you find yourself in a pretty and tiny meadow on the top of this giant rock you’re climbing! The meadow would be beautiful in the fall as there are several aspen trees up here. After walking through this mini-meadow you then have some class 3 rock scrambling to make it to the summit. As usual, I was VERY careful at this point, making sure I had three points of contact at all times. By now, the three college kids were long gone and I was the only one up here…and it started to snow…and it was windy. I stopped to put on my puffy jacket, beanie, and gloves. Ahhh, better. I finally wound my way to the top and was rewarded with the third highlight…an epic view of this rugged canyon, its many peaks, and the high Rockies in the background. I could have stayed up here another couple of hours, but I wasn’t sure how long it was gonna snow and I wanted to get off the summit before things started getting slippery. So I headed back, this time taking the more direct Greyrock trail to complete the loop. Fun day.
The Persuaders by Anand Giridharadas – In today’s polarized world, I’m always on the lookout for new information on how to bring people together and how to talk to people who have views so different than yours that it seems impossible to even have a conversation. The climate group I work with does a pretty good job of training us on how to approach these things, but I know that there are still better ideas out there. It’s why I picked up this book. The prologue tells the story of two women flying into the US from Russia in 2014 to collect information about rural America; they were from the Russian Internet Research Agency which went on a huge campaign of disinformation leading up to and after the 2016 election. Those women, along with 11 other individuals and three Russian entities were eventually indicted by a US Grand Jury in 2018 on charges of violating criminal laws with the intent to interfere "with U.S. elections and political processes.” That was the prologue because it sets the table for what political activists are up against today.
This book mainly focuses on progressive activists and what they’ve learned over the past 10 years or so (the book was published in 2022). There are some famous people interviewed (Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and some not so famous people interviewed throughout the book. What persuasive methods have they found which have worked and what methods haven’t worked? What are some of the common themes they’ve come to agree upon? I’ll try to summarize, but like most solutions (and people), it’s a mixed bag and it’s complex.
Probably the most interesting and entertaining person interviewed is Anat Shenker-Osorio who is a strategic communications consultant crafting messaging for issues from immigration to contraception. She told Giridharadas, “Our opposition is not the opposition. It is cynicism.” She makes some fascinating observations about the way some Democrats try to address immigration and the economy. She basically says that they are playing in the Republican sandbox and are likely encouraging more people to vote Republican just by reminding people that, yeah, immigration and the economy are scary, we should probably elect someone strong to take care of that. Instead, she, like many others in the book, believes that most people in the “middle” really aren’t in the middle. They have complex internal emotions about many of the hot button issues. For example, they think the transgender issue is weird, but they do have a relative that is transgender so it’s complicated. Or they fought in Afghanistan and hated what Arab people were doing to their buddies but also feel that they were fighting for an America that should welcome everyone. Or they want the border closed but they know some really good “illegals” that work hard and take care of their lawn.
The author followed people knocking on doors in Flagstaff, Arizona to talk to folks about immigration. They were part of a group called LUCHA (Living United for Change in Arizona) who were using what’s called Deep Canvassing to try to better connect with constituents to help with economic, social and racial transformation. Their main ask that day was to get voters to call Senator Kyrsten Sinema to ask her to include immigration reform in what was then called the Build Back Better Act. In another section of the book I particularly enjoyed that the author interviewed John Cook whose website Skeptical Science I’ve used a LOT. I even took a class that Cook offered called Denial 101 which helps to understand the various methods that science denialism has used since the tobacco industry back in the 1960s.
Ball Four by Jim Bouton – As baseball’s spring training kicks into gear I thought I’d pick up a baseball book. This one, published in 1970, changed baseball forever. It was the only sports book listed on the New York Public Library’s 1996 list of Books of the Century, and Time Magazine named it one of the 100 greatest nonfiction books. In 2019, the Library of Congress acquired the author’s archives for their permanent collection, including all his original notes, tapes and transcripts for Ball Four. By now, there are probably better books about baseball, but when it was published it was a blockbuster. These days with 24-hour sports programming and social media we all seem to know everything that goes on behind the scenes in all sports. But in 1970, the only thing the public knew about baseball was the all-American image portrayed by its stars like Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, Willie Mays, and Jackie Robinson. Jim Bouton broke the fourth wall on that narrative with this book which describes his 1969 season with the expansion Seattle Pilots and then, when he was traded, the Houston Astros. He exposed it all; the drugs, alcohol, sex, misogyny, and more importantly, the way in which the owners took advantage of the players. Many players and sports writers were angry with him for “ruining the sanctity” of the locker room. Many libraries banned the book afraid that kids would read about the drug and alcohol use by their heroes. The then-commissioner of baseball, Bowie Kuhn, brought Bouton into his office and tried to force him to disavow everything he wrote in the book because he told Bouton that the book was detrimental to baseball. Free agency for players was finally instituted in 1976, six years after the book’s publication. Meanwhile Bouton was blacklisted from baseball.
Jim Bouton was never going to fit into the Major League Baseball community. He was a painter and jewelry maker and an avid reader. He eventually became a talented stone mason. But he also was a pretty good pitcher and played for the Yankees in the early to mid-1960s, playing in three World Series and becoming an all-star. Arm injuries and his political statements (against the Vietnam War, against apartheid in South Africa, against the racism he saw in baseball) eventually got him sent down to the minor leagues where he started working on his knuckleball pitch which requires less strain on the arm. It got good enough for him to make the majors again in that 1969 year with the expansion Seattle Pilots and then the Houston Astros. He and sportswriter Leonard Schecter agreed before the season to co-write this diary of a year in the life of a Major League Baseball player (Schecter was also shunned by his fellow sports writers when the book came out).
I had a lot of mixed feelings after reading the book. There were as many inciteful moments as there were cringe moments. Like many books, both fiction and nonfiction, written in the 60s and before, men’s attitudes towards women were a mix of misogyny, condescension, adulation, and confusion. It really shows how far we’ve come as a society in just 50 plus years when it comes to respect for women (we still have a ways to go though). Here are some examples:
Speaking of baseball, one of the books I read this month was about the 1969 Seattle Pilots, an expansion team that lasted only one year. When I was a kid in the 60s I collected baseball cards in bubblegum packs like many kids at that time. I wondered whether I had any cards from the ’69 Pilots, so I went through my collection and what do you know, I had a few. See them below, along with a couple of other players from other teams that were featured in the book, including Dooley Womack who was traded from the Astros to the Pilots that year for the author, Jim Bouton. I probably have a few cards that may be worth money at some trade show, but I’ve never had any desire to find out. The cards were just a fun hobby for me and maybe one of my grandkids will be interested in taking over the collection when I’m gone. That’s more priceless to me. Who knows what they'll be worth in the 22nd century!?
This week’s hikes included a surprisingly beautiful and challenging hike near Ft. Collins, a tough Rocky Mountain National Park snowshoe, a few Taos workout hikes, and a short hike to an epic view. My reading took me from the secrets of progressive activism to a baseball book that changed the game forever to a novel like no other I've read. Enjoy!
Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born in Northern Ireland during World War II. In grade school, girls were encouraged to study cooking and home economics while boys were studying math and science. Her parents argued with the school to change their policies and they did. So she learned about physics and eventually graduated from the University of Glasgow with a BS in Physics and then later received her PhD from Cambridge.
While at Cambridge, she made one of the most significant astronomical discoveries of the 20th century while working on the construction of a radio telescope. She noticed an unexpected pattern of regular radio pulses. After some disbelief of her findings by her professors, she and those same professors ended up discovering that these patterns were the first observation of pulsars (rotating magnetic neutron stars). Even though Burnell was an author of the paper (listed 2nd in the credits) proving the discovery, she was not on the recipient list for the 1974 Nobel Prize in physics like her male counterparts were (sound familiar?). Although the scientific community expressed outrage at the time, she was not initially upset about it, stating that as a student it was her supervisors that should be given credit. However, in her later years she admitted that the fact that she was both a graduate student and a female likely prevented her from being part of the Nobel Prize. Her story is portrayed in part one of the BBC series, Beautiful Minds.
In her illustrious career she went on to win numerous science awards as she made her way through careers as professor, dean of science, and eventually President of the Royal Astronomical Society, likely a more distinguished career than her male colleagues who collected the Nobel.
In our monthly visits to Taos, we’ve come to realize that the little town has superior radio stations to any we’ve found along the Front Range. The station we mostly listen to is KTAO which bills itself as Adult Album Alternative music. It was the first solar-powered radio station in the world and is currently the most powerful solar radio station at 100K Watts. They use 150 solar panels that sit on top of 10,800-foot Picuris Peak near Taos. One artist I “discovered” while listening was Adrienne Lenker. I heard this voice on the radio that was so distinctive that it reminded me of a combination of Iris Dement, Emmylou Harris, and Mother Maybelle Carter. It seems like her voice is on the verge of being totally out of tune, but then it pulls all its pieces together into this mesmerizing sound that I love. I imagine others may not feel the same way. I had to Shazam it and found it was a song by Big Thief called Born for Loving You. Their lead singer and writer was Adrienne Lenker. Of course, I then went down a rabbit hole of Adrienne Lenker internet history.
She wrote her first song at the age of 8 and created her first album at the age of 14. Dropped out of high school, got her GED at the age of 16 then thanks to a scholarship from Susan Tedeschi, attended the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston. She eventually met and married Buck Meek with whom she created the band Big Thief which was moderately successful as an indie music band. They divorced in 2018 but continued to be friends and create music together. She wrote most of their songs and eventually created several of her own albums, including her most recent one, released this year, titled Bright Future which includes the second song I chose to showcase, Ruined.
So, why did I decide to highlight these two songs out of all the music she’s made? I’ve always believed that music artists are at their best at the beginning and end of relationships. Love and lost love have a way of pulling the best music out of artists it seems. Two of the playlists I maintain are called Love Songs and Love Gone Bad, and they contain some of the best songs ever written. Also, I guess because Born for Loving You was the first song of hers that I heard and it’s a great love song. And then I chose Ruined because it may be one of the best love-gone-bad songs written and her live performance of that song that you can see below just wrecked me when I first saw/heard it. When she picks up the guitar near the end of the video, all of her emotions fly all over the strings in a crazily discordant and fascinating way. I wanted to go give her a hug after that performance because it looked like she needed it. It’s visceral. Check them out below:
Born for Loving You - from Big Thief’s Vampire Empire EP:
Sample lyrics:
After the first stars formed, after the dinos fell
After the first light flickered outta this motel
1991, momma pushing like hell
Tangled in blood and vine
From my first steps to my first words
To waddling around looking at birds
To the teenage nightmare, mine and yours
Thank God we made it through
'Cause I was born for loving you
Just something I was made to do
Doesn't matter what dreams come true
I was born for loving you
Ruined – live from Greenwich Village with Rick Hakim on piano:
Sample lyrics:
Until I'm brave enough to call you
I just fall through every time
I wish I'd waved when I saw you
I just watched you passing by
So much coming through, every hour too
Can't get enough of you
You come around, I'm ruined
You come around, I'm ruined
Her NPR Tiny Desk concert is really good too if you want to listen to her with the band Big Thief shortly after they released their first album in 2016:
It was a steady climb after the junction, and after a couple of miles and a thousand feet of elevation gain I reached the first highlight, which was a magnificent view of Poudre Canyon with the snow capped Rockies in the background. I stopped to catch my breath as three college kids raced past me in shorts and t-shirts. The next highlight came after about 4 miles. You climb down a steep hill to this gorgeous meadow with Greyrock Mountain rising ominously to the right. I fully expected to see a large herd of elk grazing, but it wasn’t to be on this day. Next came the fun part, navigating to the top of Greyrock. At first look it seems impossible without ropes. But as you wind your way up its southeast face you start to see a long crevice that makes its way to the top. Then, once on top, you still have to wind your way around giant rocks and eventually you find yourself in a pretty and tiny meadow on the top of this giant rock you’re climbing! The meadow would be beautiful in the fall as there are several aspen trees up here. After walking through this mini-meadow you then have some class 3 rock scrambling to make it to the summit. As usual, I was VERY careful at this point, making sure I had three points of contact at all times. By now, the three college kids were long gone and I was the only one up here…and it started to snow…and it was windy. I stopped to put on my puffy jacket, beanie, and gloves. Ahhh, better. I finally wound my way to the top and was rewarded with the third highlight…an epic view of this rugged canyon, its many peaks, and the high Rockies in the background. I could have stayed up here another couple of hours, but I wasn’t sure how long it was gonna snow and I wanted to get off the summit before things started getting slippery. So I headed back, this time taking the more direct Greyrock trail to complete the loop. Fun day.
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| Poudre River near the trailhead |
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| First highlight, view of Poudre Canyon |
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| Poudre Canyon |
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| First view of Greyrock Mountain |
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| Large meadow below Greyrock |
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| Greyrock from the meadow - I'm gonna climb THAT? |
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| Small meadow on top of Greyrock |
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| Small frozen pond on Greyrock, with Wyoming to the north |
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| View from on top of the class 3 scramble |
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| Forever views |
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| Just beautiful up here |
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| Heading down Greyrock |
This book mainly focuses on progressive activists and what they’ve learned over the past 10 years or so (the book was published in 2022). There are some famous people interviewed (Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and some not so famous people interviewed throughout the book. What persuasive methods have they found which have worked and what methods haven’t worked? What are some of the common themes they’ve come to agree upon? I’ll try to summarize, but like most solutions (and people), it’s a mixed bag and it’s complex.
Probably the most interesting and entertaining person interviewed is Anat Shenker-Osorio who is a strategic communications consultant crafting messaging for issues from immigration to contraception. She told Giridharadas, “Our opposition is not the opposition. It is cynicism.” She makes some fascinating observations about the way some Democrats try to address immigration and the economy. She basically says that they are playing in the Republican sandbox and are likely encouraging more people to vote Republican just by reminding people that, yeah, immigration and the economy are scary, we should probably elect someone strong to take care of that. Instead, she, like many others in the book, believes that most people in the “middle” really aren’t in the middle. They have complex internal emotions about many of the hot button issues. For example, they think the transgender issue is weird, but they do have a relative that is transgender so it’s complicated. Or they fought in Afghanistan and hated what Arab people were doing to their buddies but also feel that they were fighting for an America that should welcome everyone. Or they want the border closed but they know some really good “illegals” that work hard and take care of their lawn.
The author followed people knocking on doors in Flagstaff, Arizona to talk to folks about immigration. They were part of a group called LUCHA (Living United for Change in Arizona) who were using what’s called Deep Canvassing to try to better connect with constituents to help with economic, social and racial transformation. Their main ask that day was to get voters to call Senator Kyrsten Sinema to ask her to include immigration reform in what was then called the Build Back Better Act. In another section of the book I particularly enjoyed that the author interviewed John Cook whose website Skeptical Science I’ve used a LOT. I even took a class that Cook offered called Denial 101 which helps to understand the various methods that science denialism has used since the tobacco industry back in the 1960s.
There are so many people out there working hard to fight for what they believe in and are trying to create change in a really democratic way: By talking to people. It really comes down to having longer and deeper conversations with people, finding some common ground and then finding a way to come to a fuller understanding of some of the issues driving our time, like climate change, immigration, racism, and the economy. This longer discussion is needed to inoculate us all from the 10-second Tik Tok videos and 260-character X tweets that people look for to confirm what they think they stand for. It’s pointless to attack the individual who believes the disinformation and conspiracy theories that abound; and it’s even more pointless to compare your facts with theirs. The thing that seems to make inroads into persuading people comes down to having a civil conversation and moving forward from there. Granted there are probably 10% of people on both sides of an issue that will never change their minds, but those 80% in the “middle”, well they have a complex set of experiences that form what they believe. Let’s talk.
Devisadero Trail near Taos, NM – I wasn’t able to get out on a long hike during our March trip to Taos this time, however I was able to walk this sort of workout hike that my daughter and son-in-love have been doing with their new baby and the two dogs. We walked it three times this week. It’s a pretty good workout with around 1,000 feet of elevation in around a mile and a half. One day it was mid 30s and a blizzard, one day it was sunny and warm, and another day it was just windy. Welcome to New Mexico in spring! The new baby loves being outdoors which is a good thing since her parents practically live outdoors between all their skiing, biking, hiking, camping, and rafting. The views from up top are nice, with the snow-covered mountains to the north and the Rio Grande Gorge to the west. One of the things they love most about New Mexico is that nearly everyone keeps their dogs OFF leash. It’s better for the dogs, safer for the hikers, and just a better all around experience, as long as the dogs are trained well.
 |
| The village of Taos down below |
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| Wonder dog admiring the view |
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| Son-in-love, daughter, and granddaughter |
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| Me too |
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| Daughter and granddaughter on a cooler day |
Ball Four by Jim Bouton – As baseball’s spring training kicks into gear I thought I’d pick up a baseball book. This one, published in 1970, changed baseball forever. It was the only sports book listed on the New York Public Library’s 1996 list of Books of the Century, and Time Magazine named it one of the 100 greatest nonfiction books. In 2019, the Library of Congress acquired the author’s archives for their permanent collection, including all his original notes, tapes and transcripts for Ball Four. By now, there are probably better books about baseball, but when it was published it was a blockbuster. These days with 24-hour sports programming and social media we all seem to know everything that goes on behind the scenes in all sports. But in 1970, the only thing the public knew about baseball was the all-American image portrayed by its stars like Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, Willie Mays, and Jackie Robinson. Jim Bouton broke the fourth wall on that narrative with this book which describes his 1969 season with the expansion Seattle Pilots and then, when he was traded, the Houston Astros. He exposed it all; the drugs, alcohol, sex, misogyny, and more importantly, the way in which the owners took advantage of the players. Many players and sports writers were angry with him for “ruining the sanctity” of the locker room. Many libraries banned the book afraid that kids would read about the drug and alcohol use by their heroes. The then-commissioner of baseball, Bowie Kuhn, brought Bouton into his office and tried to force him to disavow everything he wrote in the book because he told Bouton that the book was detrimental to baseball. Free agency for players was finally instituted in 1976, six years after the book’s publication. Meanwhile Bouton was blacklisted from baseball.
Jim Bouton was never going to fit into the Major League Baseball community. He was a painter and jewelry maker and an avid reader. He eventually became a talented stone mason. But he also was a pretty good pitcher and played for the Yankees in the early to mid-1960s, playing in three World Series and becoming an all-star. Arm injuries and his political statements (against the Vietnam War, against apartheid in South Africa, against the racism he saw in baseball) eventually got him sent down to the minor leagues where he started working on his knuckleball pitch which requires less strain on the arm. It got good enough for him to make the majors again in that 1969 year with the expansion Seattle Pilots and then the Houston Astros. He and sportswriter Leonard Schecter agreed before the season to co-write this diary of a year in the life of a Major League Baseball player (Schecter was also shunned by his fellow sports writers when the book came out).
I had a lot of mixed feelings after reading the book. There were as many inciteful moments as there were cringe moments. Like many books, both fiction and nonfiction, written in the 60s and before, men’s attitudes towards women were a mix of misogyny, condescension, adulation, and confusion. It really shows how far we’ve come as a society in just 50 plus years when it comes to respect for women (we still have a ways to go though). Here are some examples:
- Norm Miller drilled a small hole in the back of the dugout. We can now beaver-shoot any woman who sits in a certain seat in the first row. Not only that, if you blow through the hole you get some interesting reactions. Miller is being acclaimed as a genius...you could run under the stands and look up at all kinds of beaver.
- And I’ve known ballplayers who thought it was great fun to turn on a tape recorder under the bed while they were making it with their latest broad and play it back on the bus to the ballpark the next day.
But then, mixed in with those cringe-worthy moments were real gems, like these:
- Gary Bell and I hired a car and drove up to the Berkeley campus and walked around and listened to speeches—Arab kids arguing about the Arab-Israeli war, Black Panthers talking about Huey Newton and the usual little old ladies in tennis shoes talking about God. Gary and I are really the crazy ones. We’re concerned about (getting batters out), making money in real estate, and about ourselves and our families. These kids, though, are genuinely concerned about what’s going on around them. They’re concerned about Vietnam, poor people, black people. They’re concerned about the way things are and they’re trying to change them.
- Back at the hotel, Gary and I talked about the relationship between country and city guys on a ballclub, which is intertwined with the relationship between whites and blacks. There are lots of walls built up between people, and I pointed out that if I’d never roomed with Gary I would still think, “Oh, he’s just a dumb Southerner.” So probably the solution is to have people live together. I mean we still disagree about a lot of things—religion, politics, how children should be raised—but because we’ve been able to talk about these differences, spend so many hours together, we’ve been able to at least understand them.
- One time nobody in the bullpen would talk to me for three days because I said I thought that Billy Graham was a dangerous character. This was after he had said that Communists were behind the riots in the black ghettoes. I said that when a man of his power, a man with such a huge following, makes a statement like that, he is diverting attention from the real causes of riots in the ghettoes.
- (Leon McFadden, black player) had grown up in Los Angeles in a mixed neighborhood and never had a single racial encounter until he was a baseball player in Georgia. The team bus stopped at a restaurant and all the players piled in. The man behind the counter asked McFadden if he’d like to come back and eat in the kitchen. For the first time in his life he began to view white people with anger and suspicion.
- Why do ballplayers have to take drugs and have girlfriends in the first place? This may come as a shock to some people but it’s because they’re human beings. Young human beings. Think of a ballplayer as a fifteen-year-old in a twenty-five-year-old body. Being a professional athlete allows you to postpone your adulthood. You grow up in Hero World. Parents change the dinner schedule for you, teachers help with grades, coaches fawn over you, cops ask for an autograph and someone else buys the drinks.
- “Religion is like baseball,” said Steve. “Great game, bad owners.”
The version I read was the 30th anniversary of its publication and it had comments from Bouton for the 10th, 20th, and 30th anniversaries. The section on the 30th anniversary was poignant. His 31-year-old daugther had just died tragically in a car accident and he wrote all about his pain and depression afterwards. It was heartbreaking. And then, on the Father’s Day after her death, one of his sons wrote an oped in the New York Times about his dad. It was basically asking the Yankees' organization to finally lift its ban on Jim Bouton and to invite him to the annual Old Timer’s Day. The oped went into details about his dad’s life and all the accomplishments he’s had, then the tragedy of losing a daughter. George Steinbrenner relented after the oped and invited Bouton to the Old Timer's Day game. Bouton’s description of walking into Yankee stadium after all those years was terrific. Most of the players by then had forgiven him, but not all of them.
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| Heading up the Flattop trail |
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| Nice view of frozen Bierstadt Lake in the distance |
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| View of Longs Peak from near the Dream Lake overlook |
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| Trees are getting smaller, near the tree line |
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| Winter trail going straight up instead of using switchbacks |
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| Emerald Lake Overlook, didn't want to get too close... |
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| Frozen Emerald Lake below, Longs Peak above |
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| Beautiful up here |
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| Hard snowshoeing in the deep snow |
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| View of Bierstadt Lake from high above tree line |
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| Snow and clouds |
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| Pretty view of Longs |
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| So much snow |
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| View of Hallett Peak from near the trailhead |
When I read the table of contents, I was already hooked. Such a strange list of headings:
- Bonds: A Novel by Harold Vanner
- My Life by Andrew Bevel
- A Memoir, Remembered by Ida Partenza
- Futures by Mildred Bevel
It looked like a list of four novellas…I looked back at the cover: Trust, A Novel. OK, let’s go!
What those four sections turned out to be were four completely different viewpoints of the life of a God-like Wall Street financier and his wife before, during, and after the market crash of 1929 which triggered the Great Depression. It is the reader’s job to enjoy these stories and to try and piece together what might have been the true story the novel was trying to tell.
Part one, the novel within a novel, tells the story of Benjamin and Helen Rask, a power couple in New York. Both were brilliant in their own ways, he with his math and financial genius and she, with her music philanthropy that extended to helping fund many of the various arts institutes around the world. In the novel within a novel, Benjamin Rask ends up taking a lot of the blame for the downfall of the stock market in 1929 and his wife Helen ends up with a mental illness that eventually takes her life (same as her father). It would have been a great novella all by itself.
In part two, Andrew Bevel, the “real life” financier upon whom Benjamin Rask was modeled tells his own life story which disputes much of what was stated in the novel within a novel. He discusses how it would be impossible for one man to bring down the market and that for his entire life (and the life of his ancestors) he only had the good of the country in mind, along with creating a successful finance industry. Also, in his telling, his “real life” wife Mildred suffered from cancer and not from mental illness.
In part three, a woman named Ida Partenza tells her story. This is the heart of the novel and the most entertaining, but not by much, as the last section is fascinating. Ida, the daughter of Italian immigrants lives with her anarchist father in Brooklyn. They are badly in debt and need money to pay the rent which is months overdue. She finds a unique job working for Andrew Bevel (author of part two above). The story of her getting this job is entertaining in and of itself. The job turns out to be helping Bevel to write his autobiography to dispel everything that the novel within a novel said about he and his wife. The conversations between Ida and Bevel are worth the price of admission. Both brilliant in their own ways, but he has all the power, so she has to proceed cautiously. She gets the feeling that his descriptions of his wife, Mildred, are somewhat lacking and overly simplified. He wanted only to depict her as a sweet, intelligent woman who enjoyed her music and her philanthropy. Nothing more, nothing deeper. Why? Ida’s personal life was this great dichotomy between her father’s anarchist publications which loathed Wall Street and her job with the most powerful man on Wall Street. Terrific stuff. At the end of this section, an older Ida Partenza who has become a successful writer is going through the New York Public Library in search of more information on Mildred…she finds a cryptic diary buried in some other papers. The diary is titled “Futures” by Mildred Bevel.
Part four is that diary by Mildred. It is a diary she wrote while suffering the ravages of the cancer that took her life as she was living in a Swiss sanatorium to ease her pain. The descriptions of her pain alone would be worthy of an insightful novella, but then she interspersed those painful thoughts with memories of the relationship between her and her husband. It is slowly revealed that she was the main reason for Andrew Bevel’s meteoric success in the 1920s. Her grasp of math through her music genius helped her to see patterns that others couldn’t. So, this is why Andrew Bevel wanted Ida to keep the description of his wife so simplistic…he didn’t want it revealed that she was the brains behind his success. Mildred then saw a way to game the market by pretending to know the future when in actuality the time delay in one of the market secretaries entering stock information into the ticker allowed for this anomaly. She never intended to act on this but did tell her husband, who DID act on this, and that is part of what eventually brought down the market. She called him a criminal. They didn’t speak for 2 years. She got sick, they reconciled, she died. Her secret died with her…until Ida found her diary.
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| Nice view of Twin Sisters near the trailhead |
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| Cool rock formations on the way up |
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| First view near the windy top |
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| Sat on this clump of snow with this magnificent view |
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| You can almost see the wind |
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| Jagged mountain peaks everywhere |
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| Steep and snowy trail near the top |
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| Last push to the top |
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| Didn't need snowshoes but those that came before me did |
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| Typical Estes Park scene on the way home |
Until next time, happy reading and rambling!