September 2024
Books read:
- More Than This by Patrick Ness
- Rim to River: Looking into the Heart of Arizona by Tom Zoellner
- Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne
- Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation by David French
Trails walked:
- La Junta Big Arsenic Loop near Taos, NM (Sep 10th)
- Lulu Mountain near Gould (Sep 19th)
- Chasm Lake near Estes Park (Sep 25th)
Song(s) of the month: Sierra Ferrell (plus a side note on Kris Kristofferson)
- Silver Dollar
- In Dreams
- Jeremiah
- Rosemary
- Lighthouse
- The Pilgrim - Chapter 33 (Emmylou Harris' version)
September Summary:
The end of September brings the baseball playoffs, which I enjoy more than any other post season in sports (oh God, is he gonna talk about baseball again?!). So much rides on every pitch and every at bat and every managerial move. Aaron Judge of the Yankees and Shohei Ohtani of the Dodgers have been doing things this year that haven't been done in decades, or ever. I'm sure the baseball gods are doing what they can to make sure those two meet in the World Series. But every other team that makes the playoffs have just as good a chance, as witnessed by the two teams that made the World Series last year (the Dbacks were the last seed in the NL and the Rangers were the 2nd to last seed in the AL). Whichever team gets hot in October usually wins, no matter what their salary cap is. I know of maybe 3 other people that will be watching....not all of them over 60...
I've been subscribing to a great newsletter called Fix The News. It's a breath of fresh air because it reports positive news. And there is lots of it, but hardly anyone knows. Why? Because there is this great collision occurring now between human nature and the media. The founder of Fix The News (Angus Hervey) explains it way better than I can in this great interview by Sam Matey. I'll try to summarize it because it's a long interview (almost as long as my blog), but I encourage you to find time to read it. We exist today as humans because our ancestors were able to survive a dangerous world by paying attention only to lurking dangers. Our DNA is encoded to listen to negative things that can harm us even though there are far fewer dangers today than there used to be. Combine that with the news media which has evolved from an advertising business to an attention gathering business. They know about our DNA and so they've seen evidence that people click on negative headlines far more often than they click on positive headlines. So now you combine human nature and the negative headlines of the news media with social media and you have an exponential explosion of negative headlines being shared by millions of people around the world every minute of every day. It's partly responsible for our growing political divisions as people on both sides gather and share their collections of negative news about the other side (see my review of Divided We Fall at the end of this blog for more on our political divisions). I don't know how this all gets resolved, but one step we can all take is to read more positive news even if it's not nearly as entertaining. Or you can just watch some baseball now....
This month my reading took me from a young adult fictional novel about life after death to three non fiction books about Arizona, the last days of the Comanches, and how to fix our political divisions (it's not likely, but it's possible). My rambling took me from the Rio Grande Gorge in New Mexico to two hikes on the opposite corners of Rocky Mountain National Park. Enjoy!
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Thanks to a great radio station in Taos, NM and to the Shazam app, I “discovered" Sierra Ferrell earlier this year. The first thing that struck me was her unique voice. I guess I’m drawn to unique voices (Nanci Griffith, Iris DeMent, Gillian Welch, Lucinda Williams). Her story sort of parallels that of Alynda Segarra (aka Hurray for the Riff Raff) who I profiled in my April 2019 and December 2022 blog posts.
Born in West Virginia and raised in a trailer park by her divorced mother, Ferrell grew up listening to her mom’s Tracy Chapman and 10,000 Maniacs CDs (good job mom). In her 20s she left home for a nomadic life on the road singing songs and eventually having some life-threatening experiences with drugs. She made the always difficult decision to clean herself up, and now at the age of 36 she has two self-produced albums, and two studio produced albums after a life filled with unique experiences. I guess her music is generally in the Americana genre, but there are also tinges of jazz, bluegrass, and even old standards. Her voice and her music seem timeless to me. The appropriately named first studio album, Long Time Coming, is the rare album that is solid through and through, and her latest album, Trail of Flowers seems solid too, but I haven’t dug into it as deeply. Here are a few songs that I love:
Silver Dollar – This is the first song of hers that I heard. It's the original version with fiddle. She released an alternative version this year that’s more sparse and is also great. But I love this original version:
In Dreams – This was probably the next song of hers that I heard. The breezy, sort of Bonanza theme music, along with her unique voice combine for a very beautiful song about a sort of unrequited love, I guess?
Jeremiah – I love this song where she’s trying to give Jeremiah some good advice. I wonder if he ever took it? Love this live version in a random field.
Rosemary – From her latest album released this year, Rosemary is basically a murder song. And it could have been released in 1940 as well as today. Timeless again. I like this live in studio version.
Lighthouse – Also from her latest album. We all need a lighthouse for our soul, don’t we? Love the background vocals and the fiddle.
See him wasted on the sidewalk in his jacket and his jeans
Wearin’ yesterday’s misfortunes like a smile.
And the chorus includes one of the all time best ever lines:
He's a walkin’ contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction
Takin’ every wrong direction on his lonely way back home.
If you ever saw the great film Taxi Driver, there is a scene where Robert DeNiro's character (Travis Bickle) is talking with Cybill Shepherd's character (Betsy) in a diner. After listening to him for a while Betsy tells him that he reminds her of that song by Kris Kristofferson....a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction. Martin Scorsese directed that movie, and also directed Kristofferson in the movie, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.
Another thing I love about Kristofferson: He was instrumental in the early success of John Prine after he saw him perform in Chicago in 1971. Oh, and he was an actor in over 50 movies! Oh, oh, and he was once featured as a promising boxer in Sports Illustrated’s “Faces in the Crowd” series in 1958. What a life.
I like this version of The Pilgrim - Chapter 33 by Emmylou Harris in 2006. The first minute includes Kristofferson's introduction to the song in his grizzled voice as he talks about who inspired it. It's great:
The Pilgrim, Chapter 33
And that’s how this novel begins, a vivid description of a teenager brutally drowning in the cold ocean and then waking up in a strange but familiar new world. It’s considered a Young Adult novel, but this has never stopped me from picking up the genre. Some of the most entertaining books I’ve read are Young Adult novels; the Harry Potter series and Looking for Alaska for a couple of examples. In general, I’ve found that YA books are simpler to read but have all the emotion you’d expect in a description of the lives of young people trying to figure out their place in this world. Seth is that young person in this book. His life, before he died was hard. He was in some ways responsible for the kidnapping and subsequent disabling of his 4-year-old brother when he himself was only an 8-year-old. He feels his parents’ blame permeating his life up until the present day when he’s a 17-year-old. He’s recently fallen in love, but social media photos upend everything, and Seth begins to wonder if life is worth living. He meets two other young people in the strange world he’s plunked into. It’s a sort of dystopian world with few animals and even fewer humans. Just lots of mysteries to unfold. It addresses themes such as Artificial Intelligence, virtual reality, teenage angst, family dysfunction, and the importance of friendship and love. Here are some lines:
There’s still no drone of machinery or engines from anywhere, but he notices for the first time that there’s no buzz of insects either, no calls of birds, not even any wind through the foliage. Nothing but the sound of his own breathing.
Is that what hell is? Trapped forever, alone, in your worst memory?
And while it was true that Gudmund’s mother and father were exactly the sort of scary American conservatives that tended to horrify Europeans, even Seth’s own parents had to admit they were pretty nice people one-on-one.
It’s just his old bedroom. With one big difference. There’s a coffin sitting in the middle of the floor. And it’s open.
How could you keep anything for yourself in this uselessly connected world?
“For a long time, people had been living two lives. And at first, I think, it was two. You could do both. Go back and forth. Between the online world and this one. And then people started staying online and that seemed less weird than it was even a year before. Because the world was getting more and more broken.”
“I wanted so badly for there to be more. I ached for there to be more than my crappy little life.” He shakes his head. “And there was more. I just couldn’t see it.”
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| Nice views of the mountains from the trailhead on the rim |
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| La Junta point with the confluence of the Red and Rio Grande rivers below |
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| Start of the closed La Junta trail...so far so good |
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| This part was...not so good |
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| Structures are still in place |
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| Most of the closed trail looked like this...it won't open for a while |
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| Finally at the bottom, smooth sailing from here |
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| The Rio Grande looks like a mountain stream here |
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| ...and like a desert stream here |
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| Typical trail on the mesas between the rim and river |
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| OK, ready for the push back up to the rim |
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| View from near the top |
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| Switchbacks |
I lived in Arizona for 40 years and it’s like home to me. I’ve hiked many of its trails and visited most of its cities and natural wonders. I’ve taken history courses and ecology courses about the state, but there were several stories in this book that I’d never heard about. Zoellner’s research was extensive, as seen by the huge bibliography at the end. Although I read this book on my Kindle, I will certainly buy a physical copy to include in my library.
In addition to being raised in Arizona (his parents, who still live in Tucson, picked him up and dropped him off at some of the Arizona Trail mileposts), Zoellner also was a reporter for the Arizona Republic and had firsthand experience with many of the big stories I remember while living there (the Robert Fisher murders, the political failures of Evan Mecham and J Fife Symington, the tragic death of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, the assassination attempt on Gabrielle Giffords, and the banking scandals). He tells these stories with great skill and personal detail, like when he went backpacking in the Hells Gate Wilderness trying to find clues to Robert Fisher’s disappearance after murdering his wife and two kids. Zoellner won the National Book Critics Circle Award for best nonfiction book in 2020 for Island on Fire: The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire, and this book on Arizona, published just last year is getting great reviews. Here are some lines:
I would be hiking across the Kaibab Plateau, down and out of the Grand Canyon, past the cinder cone of Humphreys Peak, across Anderson Mesa, down the Mogollon Rim, through the Mazatzals and the Superstitions, across the Black Hills of Pinal County, and then up and over four major ranges in succession: the Catalinas, the Rincons, the Santa Ritas, and the Huachucas to the Mexican border and then—hopefully—the spot in the valley that poured forth silver for about a week and from which the state had taken it beguiling name.
Tortillas. Leavened with oil and mineral lime, shaped on a stone, and cooked on a metal griddle, it served a function like a hand utensil to pick up bits of meat—a Mesoamerican style of table manners that can be traced to 500 BCE.
the verb enchilar means “to add chili,” hence, the enchilada.
Governor Evan Mecham: He said, among other things, that the attorney general was using a laser beam to listen to his conversations, that Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t deserve a holiday, that it was fine to call Black children “pickaninnies,” that Japanese businessmen’s “eyes got round” when they got a load of Arizona’s golf courses, that the opposition was made up of “homosexuals and dissident Democrats.” Impeachment soon followed.
One Phoenix legend has it that home prices were always cheaper west of downtown because people would drive east toward downtown in the mornings and back west in the afternoon, with the sun piercing into their eyes both ways.
(Joe Arpaio) had been a moderate on immigration; he liked to tell people he was the son of an Italian immigrant who would not be locking up undocumented workers just because they crossed the border for a job. But by 2006 he could sense the winds blowing in a certain direction.
Representatives from Colorado, Wyoming, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, California, and Arizona met around a conference table at the Bishop’s Lodge resort in Santa Fe in 1922, the same year Aldo Leopold paddled the green lagoons in the Colorado River delta. They agreed the river’s water should be divided between upper and lower basin states in specific numerical allotments. But they were working from grossly exaggerated figures. The previous decade’s rainfall had been uncommonly and deceptively generous.
The state’s three major rivers—the Colorado, the Salt, and the Gila—are all dead before they hit their natural ends, diverted and sucked away, yielding only pebbles and sand in their last miles.
A team of German prisoners from World War II staged a breakout from Camp Papago Park on the eastern side of Phoenix on the night of December 23, 1944. Armed with a makeshift kayak and a filched highway map of Arizona that showed the blue line of the Gila River, they made their way down to its shores only to find a bed of sand. “I can laugh about it now but at the time it was very disheartening,” one of the escapees told a historian.
That kind of apocalypse talk had been gathering in Arizona; the scent of oncoming Trumpism. US Representative Gabrielle (Giffords) got shouted down at town hall meetings. Talk radio savaged her; the internet was worse. A vandal broke out the windows in her office. National conservatives drew target marks on her district map. An unemployed former restaurant busboy from the west side of Tucson had been listening to the chatter and filtered it through his growing case of paranoid schizophrenia. He began to see her at the center of a conspiracy. On the morning of January 8, 2011, he brought a Glock semiautomatic handgun to one of her meet-and-greets in front of a Safeway grocery store. Gabrielle barely survived, left without ability to form words without struggle. (Six) others died; eighteen others were wounded.
Arizona’s geriatric side became industrialized on January 1, 1960, when contractor Del Webb opened the first five model homes of Sun City, the first dedicated “retirement community” in America.
Never mind immigrants commit far fewer crimes than U.S. citizens. Never mind they pay extravagant amounts of taxes that go directly into the public treasuries. Never mind that border towns are statistically among the safest in Arizona. Never mind the vast majority of street drugs are smuggled through well-guarded official ports of entry in the middle of cities. Never mind that immigrant labor built Arizona, and never mind that its economy would utterly collapse without it. The cold truth is that an overmilitarized border is profitable for almost everyone who has a stake in it but the migrants themselves.
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| Michigan Ditch bringing water to the Front Range |
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| First view of this beautiful green valley |
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| Intimidating view of Lulu Mountain that I'll be climbing |
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| Crystal clear American (nee Michigan) Lake, where I ate brunch |
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| Thunder Pass on the border of RMNP |
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| Elk grazing on the hillside |
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| Looking east |
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| Looking south into RMNP with Longs Peak in the background |
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| Looking west at Mt Richthofen |
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| Gorgeous |
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| Still gorgeous |
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| I couldn't take enough photos |
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| Back down in the valley with colorful brush |
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| So pretty |
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| One last look at Lulu |
The two sort of centerpieces of the story are Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah Parker. At the age of 9, Cynthia Ann was abducted from her ranch in Texas that was on the frontier’s border at the time in 1836. During the raid by Comanches she watched her relatives raped and killed and she was then thrown on a horse, kidnapped along with her brother, for a terrifying multi-day escape ride with little food or water. Treated poorly at first, she eventually settled into this strange life and ended up marrying a Comanche chief and having three children. One of those children was Quanah who would become the last great Comanche chief. When Quanah was 12 in 1860, their camp was raided by a combination of US Army and Texas Rangers. His father, the chief, was killed and his mother, Cynthia Ann, was captured/rescued. Her story was the subject of many books and stories at this time. Returned to her surviving relatives, along with her youngest daughter, she attempted to escape several times to try and reunite with her son to no avail. She was treated almost like a zoo animal as people from all over would come to marvel at this white woman who wanted to go back to the native way of living that she had known most of her life (she had forgotten her native English tongue and required translators). The famous John Wayne movie The Searchers was partly about Cynthia Ann’s story.
But these were just two characters out of many that are included in this riveting story of the American West. Reading about the various raids and unbelievable feats of Comanche warriors was like watching the great Western movies of the past. And the author’s ability to combine these exciting moments with an explanation of how they came about from the series of broken treaties, the gold rush of 1849, the Civil War, the Alamo, Texans’ desire for secession, the extermination of the buffalo, the disconnect between eastern politicians and western reality…all of this and more. What a great book. Highly recommend to all who want to know the true story of the clash between Manifest Destiny and the Native American way of life.
- Flattop Mountain and Hallett Peak
- The alpine lakes above Black Lake
- The Lion Lakes area below Mount Alice
- Chasm Lake
- Mount Ida
The drive up to the trailhead on this late September Wednesday was spectacular with all the trees changing colors. At the trailhead I got a bit unlucky. There were no cars parked along the road so I figured I’d get a spot no problem. Not to be. All the spots were taken (I got a late start at around 11:30am) so I was the first one to park on the road about a quarter mile from the trailhead. The first couple of miles of walking are in the woods with a moderately steep grade, and then you reach the tree line and the views just explode! Battle Mountain, Mount Lady Washington, Longs Peak and Meeker Peak surround you, with the alpine brush changing colors. The wildflowers I saw in my July hikes up here were gone in late September, as were the marmots (I did see a couple of pikas though, still collecting insulation material for their winter nests). The valley below Chasm Lake is still spectacular even without the wildflowers. Waterfalls, green grass, and pools formed by Roaring Fork Creek. After traversing this beautiful valley I scrambled up the rocky berm to Chasm Lake. There was a family just leaving so I had the place all to myself for a while. This is something that would never happen in July. I scanned the 1,000 foot vertical drop of The Diamond looking for rock climbers, but saw none. I ate my snacks while taking in all this beauty then headed back down. I started scanning the valley between Battle Mountain and Mount Lady Washington because it looked very moosey. Sure enough I spotted 3 moose RUNNING very fast. I was thinking, what in the world could scare a moose up here? There aren’t any grizzlies. Then I looked up the hill and a huge herd of elk was thundering down this steep grade. Some of the bull elk started bugling which is a very cool mating sound up here in the fall. The moose eventually moved down the hill a hundred yards or so and everyone relaxed and started grazing. I must have watched this sight unfold for an hour. It was very cool to see. Then it was back down through the woods, past the trailhead parking lot and to my car for a beautiful drive back home.
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| Ranger cabin in full fall colors |
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| A few other options from here |
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| Longs Peak on the right, Meeker on the left |
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| The trail leading into the valley below Chasm |
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| Chasm Lake |
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| Chasm bathed in sunlight with the 1,000 foot Diamond below Longs Peak |
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| A dusting of snow from the previous weekend |
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| Elk grazing at the foot of that dirt hill |
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| Big bull moose too far away to get a crisp shot |
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| Three moose hanging around the pond |
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| Estes Cone on the left, Twin Sisters on the right |
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| Beautiful fall colors |
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| Aspens in full glory on the way down |
The author is a lawyer and journalist who is a Christian conservative. He spent much of his litigious life defending religious institutions from perceived discrimination by schools, businesses, and governments. He and I differ on many policies, but we agree on the fact that the political discourse is out of hand and may never get better. He offers some hope in how the Founding Fathers set up the constitution, and especially on how James Madison foretold our current factious (and fractious) society in Federalist Paper #10. I actually read all 85 essays in the Federalist Papers and wrote about them in my August 2020 blog. And it’s true that our constitution was created to handle divisiveness and disagreements. There are so many compromises that had to be made at the time, otherwise our young country would have folded before it even began. There are two things that the author points to that will be required in order to end our dangerous rhetoric: A commitment and belief in state’s rights, and tolerance from those who disagree. Or as he puts it: “tolerance through self-governance and community autonomy.” Like he says many times in the book, let California be California and let Texas be Texas. And be tolerant of those states’ choices. For sure this sounds much simpler than reality.
In the middle of the book he goes off on three fictional tangents that seem extremely possible in today’s world. In one, California is forced to secede from the Union due to a conservative national government taking away the rights of California citizens (gun control in this case). In the second scenario, Texas is forced to secede from the Union after the Alabama governor was killed in Houston when US Government officials from a progressive national congress and president try to arrest him for refusing to abide by national mandates on abortion rights (…this book was written BEFORE Roe v Wade was overturned). In the third scenario, the US is now a conglomeration of different countries with different ideologies and so other world powers start making their moves, knowing that there no longer is a national power to stop them: China invades Taiwan, Russia invades the Baltic states (…this book was written BEFORE the Russian invasion of Ukraine). It’s a compelling thought experiment.
In the last part of the book he talks about how we need to become more tolerant as a society and a bit more about what true federalism means. It’s all well written and seems possible, but today’s social media doesn’t get many clicks for tolerance and gets LOTS of clicks for hatred, fear and divisiveness.
Here are some lines:
a person belongs to their political party not so much because they like their own party but because they hate and fear the other side.
My time in Iraq had changed me. It had also educated me. It changed my regard for my fellow citizens, especially my political opponents. If I had been willing to die for them while wearing the uniform of my country, why should I regard them as mortal enemies today?
This happened to the Christian conservative author when he criticized Trump: My youngest daughter is black, adopted from Ethiopia, and the alt-right took pictures of her seven-year-old face and Photoshopped her into a gas chamber, with Trump Photoshopped in an SS uniform, pushing the button to kill her. Her face was Photoshopped into old images of slaves working the fields of the Old South. My wife was accused of having sex with “black bucks” while I was deployed to Iraq
I’m no longer a Republican. I’m not a Democrat. And I’m in neither tribe in large part because I feel that I understand both, and I believe both tribes can and must rediscover a sense of shared community and shared citizenship.
the single biggest story of the 2016 NFL season was political—Colin Kaepernick’s decision to take a knee rather than stand respectfully for the national anthem. Overnight, one of America’s last “safe spaces” from politics became yet another ideological battle space.
given that multiple major corporations threaten to sanction red states like Georgia, Indiana, Alabama, and North Carolina while eagerly doing business in truly oppressive regimes in China and Saudi Arabia, the perception is that progressives despise their fellow citizens more than they dislike actual tyrants.
The political atmosphere has grown so menacing that virtually any person who steps into the public square can expect to experience the worst kind of hate speech and even death threats.
Tailored news feeds: both sides receive direct evidence of violence inflicted on their allies but are often entirely unaware of violence inflicted on their opponents. So the narrative builds. “They” are violent. “They” are dangerous. And “we” are innocent.
a white Republican attending church is often more likely to meet a Democrat than a progressive living in Manhattan is likely to meet a Republican.
In his book Them, Nebraska senator Ben Sasse discusses the incredible power of loneliness in American society. We are “social, relational” beings, he says. We need tribes, but—he argues—too many of the tribes that have sustained us are in a state of collapse. Families fracture, Americans disconnect from civic institutions and church attendance, and stable jobs are harder to find. It’s hard to find a sustainable, thriving community of friends and colleagues. So we seek connection. We seek a sense of belonging and purpose. Many millions of us find that sense of belonging and purpose in politics.
(Today’s political) goal is domination, not discussion, and certainly not coexistence.
while the partisan mood moves up and down, the underlying American divide grows wider, and the stakes of each election feel higher. The result is that each election result carries with it the risk of not just irrational exuberance (“We’ve discovered the key to victory!”) but also irrational fear (“We’re doomed!”).
if you are a citizen of a pluralistic, liberal republic, you need to defend the rights of others that you would like to exercise yourself—even when others seek to use those rights to advance ideas you may dislike or even find repugnant.
if you are a citizen of a pluralistic, liberal government, you should defend the rights of communities and associations to govern themselves according to their values and their beliefs—so long as they don’t violate the fundamental rights of their dissenting members.
I’m a realist, and that means that a book about division is not going to conclude with a call for love. And while a revolution of affection for our fellow humans would represent an extraordinary development in the life of our nation, I’m not nearly naïve enough to believe one is imminent, and I’m certainly not foolish enough to believe that any single political figure—or even any collection of cultural and political leaders—can bring about such a revolution. Instead, let’s start modestly. Let’s start with the absolutely most basic building block of reconstructing a commitment to liberalism and pluralism. Let’s start with a term that conservatives have grown to hate and all too many progressives abuse and misunderstand. Let’s start with tolerance, properly understood.
In one of my favorite First Amendment cases, I sued a university that declared in no uncertain terms, “Acts of intolerance will not be tolerated.”
when you try to silence people who don’t have the same opinions as you do, you’re contributing to a culture of finger-wagging shame instead of a robust, confident America.
Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow could host a peace summit in the halls of the United Nations, and talk radio would shriek at Hannity’s betrayal and progressive Twitter would cancel Maddow.
In “normal” life, friendships between conservatives and progressives aren’t uncommon. In public life, such friendships are taken as a sign of moral compromise.
Remarkably, the more media people consumed, the more wrong they were about their political opponents. They weren’t better-informed; they were misinformed. By contrast, those individuals who consumed the least media were the most accurate. Why? Perhaps because they were more likely to obtain their understanding of the other side’s opposing views through actual friendships and human relationships rather than through cherry-picked news stories that often highlight only the worst expression of the other side’s point of view.
You have to embrace the idea that your fellow citizens—even those who disagree with you—should feel at home in this land.
So, is there hope for tolerance to break out? Can we re-create a national political culture that values the voluntary associations of civil society and the self-governance and community autonomy of federalism? Will cultural antibodies emerge to save the body politic from the disease of negative polarization? Frankly, I’m not optimistic. In part it’s because the tolerance that’s indispensable to pluralism requires a degree of political and moral courage, and in modern America that kind of courage is in short supply.
Our nation is built from the ground up to handle political disagreement. It is not built to endure mass-scale dishonesty and vindictiveness.
Until next time, happy reading and rambling!