November 2024

Books read:

The Blue Plate: A Food Lover’s Guide to Climate Chaos by Mark J. Easter
Anything Worth Doing: A True Story of Adventure, Friendship and Tragedy on the Last of the West's Great Rivers by Jo Deurbrouck
Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness by Jamil Zaki
Oaxaca Journal by Oliver Sacks
Border Child by Michel Stone

Trails walked:

Coffintop Mountain near Lyons (November 5th)
Oaxaca Rambling (November 12-18)
Ralph Price Reservoir to the North Inlet near Lyons (November 21st)
Deadman Gulch near Lyons (November 24th)

Song(s) of the month: Taylor Swift

The Man
Lover
Death by a Thousand Cuts
All Too Well

November Summary:

I've written several times about how November is my favorite month (my birthday and Thanksgiving, duh), so I won't bore you with all of my reasons for why Thanksgiving is the greatest holiday. Ours was more subdued than normal this year with only 13 people vs. the 25 we had last year. Hopefully not too many holidays were impacted by the election results which seem to continue to divide us more and more each year. Ours certainly wasn't impacted because the food was too good to stop talking about.

I don’t travel by air much anymore. There are several reasons, ranging from carbon footprint to my age, to the fact that I did a LOT of international travel when I was working. The whole idea of hurtling through space for thousands of miles in a metal tube with a hundred other people seems just crazy to me now. Add to that the hauling of suitcases, taking on and off of belts and shoes after waiting in long security lines, having immigration and customs officers stare into your soul, and on and on. I remember when my parents reached their 60s, I used to ask them why they don’t travel anymore and they never had a good answer, but now I know why. These days I’d rather spend my travel budget hanging out with my kids and grandkids in airbnbs not far from home. But this month I made an exception. The heart of Mexico has always been on my wish list and thanks to my daughter’s insistence, we agreed to visit the cultural center of Mexico in Oaxaca. So my wife and I met our daughter, granddaughter, and son-in-love at the Dallas airport for the final leg of our trip to Oaxaca, officially called Oaxaca de Juarez. Oaxaca (pronounced Wha Ha' Ka) comes from the Nahuatl word Huāxyacac, which means "place of the guaje trees”. The city and its nearby ancient city of Monte Alban are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its most famous resident was a Zapotec native named Benito Juarez who was sort of the Abraham Lincoln of Mexico (he was president from 1858-1872 during a disruptive period in the country's history). My daughter wanted to go there for the food, as it’s the culinary center of Mexico. If you want to see some of the food in an entertaining way, check out the Netflix show Somebody Feed Phil – Oaxaca episode. We ended up eating at 3 of the places Phil visited. It was a wonderful week of food, colors, music, and the friendly people of Oaxaca and its surrounding areas. I write more about it below under Oaxaca Rambling.

Oh, I believe we had an election this month. My candidate lost. As Bill Clinton so famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” I imagine we’ll be in for lots of chaos in the next four years as we saw in Jan 2017-Jan 2021. But, as they say, the people have spoken, and this is what more of them wanted. Let’s all hope something positive comes out of it, and let's hope that divided families keep it all together.

This month I chose a couple of books about Oaxaca, one a memoir and the other a heartbreaking novel. I also read three other books, one about food and the climate by a Fort Collins ecologist whom I’ve met, one about the cures for cynicism, and a great true story of an Idaho river runner. My rambling took me around Oaxaca and to a couple of places around Ralph Price Reservoir near Lyons. Enjoy!

Things My Grandkids Say:

As his father was getting ready to deep fry the turkey for Thanksgiving, he had to admit to his son that this year he didn't get a bird direct from the farm. So grandson told us..."Did you know my dad bought a turkey this year that didn't come from the farm, it came from the factory." It was still tasty....

Song(s) of the month: Taylor Swift

I wouldn't consider myself a Taylor Swift fan even though I do like some of her songs. I did enjoy her documentary, Miss Americana, because it showed her creative process as she produced many of her big hits. I recently ran across her NPR Tiny Desk concert from 2019. At this point in her career she was really big, but she hadn't yet exploded like she did during last year's ERAs tour. Even so, it was fun watching the crowd of women and young girls at this tiny desk concert. Normally there are just a few office workers watching the show, but Taylor's show was standing room only with the workers inviting their daughters and family friends to attend. Taylor talks about the meaning behind each of these songs and in between she hands out guitar picks to the young girls in the audience. She's a solid individual with a load of talent. Be sure to listen to the last song where she provides a stirring rendition of one of her most popular songs.

The Man
Lover
Death by a Thousand Cuts
All Too Well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvVnP8G6ITs

The Blue Plate by Mark J. Easter – A dear college friend gifted me this book that was written by his brother-in-law who lives just up the highway from us in Fort Collins. He figured I’d love it, and he was right. Mark Easter is an ecologist who has done research in both the university and private arenas. He specializes in studying the carbon cycle and the carbon footprint of agriculture, forestry, and other land uses. His family history includes farming in the harsh prairies of Colorado and Nebraska. It’s a beautiful book with colorful art by Liam O’Farell and wonderful photographs of food and farms. I love how he tied in the story of his great-grandmother’s farm with the story of agriculture’s past and where it is, or rather, should be headed.

According to the latest charts from the EPA, agriculture, forestry, and other land uses account for 22% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. The other GHG sources are Energy-34%, Industry-24%, transportation-15%, and buildings-6%. This checks out with one of the final observations the author made in this book: “The best we appear likely to achieve through these (sustainable) farming practices, however, is to offset between one-sixth and one-third of today’s annual worldwide carbon footprint, if low-carbon farming practices were widely adopted over the next three decades.” This would actually be a great achievement, and I was heartened to hear so many stories about the many people around the world making food production more sustainable. As the author also states near the end of the book, “By working with nature, rather than against it, the growers in this book and others like them have bent the arc of history toward sustainability and regeneration. That gives me hope.”

The book is separated into nine chapters with unique and compelling titles like, The Excited Skin of the Planet, The Corn Eaters, Steve’s Peaches, and The Cow in the Room. He navigates the world of food production from soil health to fisheries to dairy and meat cattle, to tilling vs cover crops, and even large-scale composting. I learned so much. The climate advocacy group I work with doesn’t do much work in the area of agriculture as we focus on energy, transportation, and government policies to encourage reduction in CO2 emissions. So I was happy to learn more about the area that impacts all of us: What we eat and how it’s produced. He ends the book with a list of ways in which the world can eat its way out of the climate crisis and then follows that with some actions that everyone can take to reduce their own carbon footprint from the food they eat.

Here are some lines from the book that I enjoyed:

Unlike in the energy and transportation sector, no new technological breakthroughs are required to begin the process of drawdown in agriculture. Good agricultural policy, accurate market pricing, and a simple commitment to efficient use of resources are what we need most today to extend the knowledge we have from the millions of acres where carbon farming is already practiced.

The actions of the plow, wind, Great Plains storms, and wheat led to such rapid soil carbon declines that within two or three decades after the plows first cut the sod, crops completely failed or were so poor that farmers needed to prop up the ecosystem with expensive chemical fertilizers or animal manure.

On average, (the Colorado River) collects and moves more than 5.3 trillion gallons of water a year. Unimaginable, yet we have managed, in a single generation, to use it all up…our desire for winter vegetables, and agriculture’s capacity to deliver them, drove the Colorado River’s extinction more than anything else.

A typical one-pound head of lettuce produced in the area required about thirty-one gallons of irrigation water (not counting an additional three gallons of water evaporated upstream).

“What are the best low-carbon choices for seafood?” “Farmed mussels are probably the best choice. Farmed oysters, clams, and scallops are a close second.”

Steve Ela (Ela Family Farms): “I think farming is all about building healthy soil.”

Raising meat—and especially meat from cattle, sheep, and goats—creates more emissions by a factor of between ten and fifty than any other food source except shrimp farmed in clear-cut mangrove forests.

As a cow grazes, she first cuts, chews, and swallows forage plants into the rumen (a cow’s first stomach) until it is full, on average about fifty liters of material. After filling her rumen, the cow rests and “ruminates.”…The cow is chewing her cud. With each wad of cud, she has regurgitated a mouthful of the rumen contents after the microbes have had their way with it. She chews the contents into a sloppy green mash and swallows it back into her reticulum (her second stomach), where it proceeds through the rest of the digestive tract.

The town of Greeley, Colorado, sits at the center of more beef cattle than any other US county besides Tulare County, California, near Fresno.

Cattle from concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) poop out about fifty-nine pounds of fresh, wet manure each day on average, so besides the beef, a feedlot like this one likely produces about 2.2 billion pounds of fresh manure and a similar amount of urine each year.

A modern dairy today milking one thousand cows produces as much manure as a town of sixty thousand people.

Farmers today consistently produce mountains of food. And for the last four decades, throughout the world, we have consistently thrown 40 percent of it away every year. “If the United States went grocery shopping, we would leave the store with five bags and drop two in the parking lot. And leave them there. Seems crazy, but we do it every day.”- Dana Gunders author of Wasted: How America is Losing up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill

Coffintop Mountain near Lyons – I hiked this distinctive profile mountain last November on a much clearer day. On that hike I created an off-trail loop that was really difficult. I vowed that next time I would take the normal trail up here to make it easier. Well, so much for that idea. I started the hike at the Button Rock Preserve parking lot which is huge. The hike along the road up to the dam used to be very popular but since they banned dogs from the area there are fewer people. The dog ban was because most people don’t clean up after their dogs and the fact that this is the main water supply for the city of Longmont. I passed some rock climbers and fishermen on the one mile walk along the dam road and then turned left onto the Sleepy Lion trail for just under a half mile before turning left again onto an old unused jeep trail. I followed two other jeep trails for another half mile until I crossed the Button Rock trail and then headed up the unnamed social trail that leads to the top of the mountain. The next two miles to the top were a challenge. The social trail is hard enough to follow under good conditions, but a storm the previous day had dumped four inches of snow up here and I was constantly backtracking, trying to find the trail. Much of the way I was bushwhacking through the snow looking for an easier way up. By the time I finally reached the top I was exhausted. But I was happy with the view of Ralph Price reservoir below and the massive snowstorm covering the Rockies behind it. I had no great mountain views like last year due to the storm that was coming in. But it was still special being out here, finding my way to the top, and being completely alone. I took a break, caught my breath and headed back down, sliding much of the way due to the steepness and the snow and the mud. It’s that time of year when the mud is just as slippery as the snow. This could possibly end up being my annual November birthday hike. In Phoenix it was the Circumference trail around Piestewa Peak. I never had to worry about snow on that hike…..

Waterfall below the dam at Longmont Reservoir

The walk along the road by the North St. Vrain

Snow accumulating in a meadow near the push to the top

More snow as I climbed

Icicles

Nice views of Ralph Price Reservoir near the top

The big mountains were covered with clouds today

More snow comin'

View to the northeast

Trail art

Pretty winter scene

Confusing stretch of trail here

Anything Worth Doing by Jo Deurbrouck – Winner of the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award, this true story of adventure really resonated with me. Probably because my daughter was a Grand Canyon river guide for many years, and I got to know several of her friends who reminded me of the characters in this book. The author was also a river guide for many years but decided to eventually “settle down” into a less dangerous path in life which wasn’t so hard on the body. The big New York City publishing companies all turned down her manuscript, so she and her husband created their own publishing company (Sundog) and went on to win the most prestigious outdoor book award. Take that New York!

The story focuses on two iconic Idaho boatmen, Clancy Reece and Jon Barker. Reece, along with Barker’s father A.K. were among the founding members of the first Idaho rafting communities back in the 1970s before rafting became the tourist industry that it is today. Reece became Jon Barker’s mentor, and they became friends whose love for the Salmon River was their bonding force. The title of the book was taken from their mantra: Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

The story begins in 1996 when the author, who was river guiding at the time in Idaho, heard about the death of an iconic boatman (Clancy Reece). She couldn’t understand why he had died while the other two boatmen survived, he was practically a god in the Idaho boating community. This puzzle stayed with her, and she eventually spent 10 years of her life interviewing friends and relatives, reading Reece’s private writing, and eventually piecing together this incredible story. Although she spends some time discussing their past and the river community in general (and even Lewis and Clark and the damming of the Columbia River), she eventually tells the story of two adventures taken by the two men, including their last and fatal one.

The initial adventure was a first ever decent from the source of the Salmon River to where it empties into the Pacific Ocean as part of the Columbia River. Reece built a special boat for this trip that was part river dory for the fast stretches of Salmon and Snake River whitewater, and part sailboat for the long stretches of Columbia River that has been dammed up into a series of reservoirs. This took place in 1986, well before others were writing stories about source to sea adventures. They had all kinds of troubles, mainly dealing with the headwinds on the Columbia, but they eventually succeeded in the most dramatic way by somehow overcoming the deadly bar where ocean and river currents fight each other and claim any small boats that dare to cross it. Their other adventure occurred ten years later in 1996. That year, the Salmon River was in one of its highest ever runoff flows (100,000 cubic feet per second). Most rafting companies cancel trips when the runoff is this high, but they weren’t on a normal trip; they were on a mission to see how many miles they could row down a river in 24 straight hours. There are few places on earth that you can row fast water for so many undammed miles; the Salmon River is one. At around 21 hours and over 200 miles they ran into trouble well after navigating the worst rapids imaginable in the runoff.

The author’s description of these harrowing adventures is riveting and it’s no wonder she won this award. Some people will tsk tsk and say the men should never have put themselves into that situation in the first place, but those people have never met many boatmen and women. I have, and I understand. So does Chris Dombrowski of the Missoula Independent who wrote this review of the book: “Anyone who’s ever sung along buzzed to the Old Crow Medicine Show line, ‘If I die in Raleigh, at least I will die free’ will love this story, as will anyone who has ever known and been quickened by the feral spirits of wild people in love with wild places, and anyone who has ever sat beside a river and pondered the water’s beauty and brute strength, and anyone who wants to be transported by a landscape and a story rooted in the physical world.”

Oaxaca rambling – We walked so much in Oaxaca that my son-in-love’s phone alerted him upon his first day back home that his number of steps has dropped dramatically versus the previous week (and they walk the dogs 2-4 miles each day at home!). Our Airbnb was located at the intersection of two of the city’s largest indoor markets (Benito Juarez and 20th de Noviembre), each of which covers an entire city block. These markets are filled with sights, sounds, and smells found nowhere in the US. You can buy practically anything you can imagine in these markets (from cooked grasshoppers and tacos to cell phones and utensils). Our Airbnb gave us a bird’s-eye view of the vendors heading to the markets each morning with their wares and I looked forward to watching them while holding my 9-month-old granddaughter who loved these sights. We ate dinner one night at one of the many food stalls in these markets.

Dinner in 20th de Noviembre Market

Central de Abastos Market

All the meats!

Bags and bags of shrimp

So many spices and chiles

Azuly?

Bags of grasshoppers too in Benito Juarez Market

The main square, or Zocalo, was a quarter mile from where we stayed and we visited most days because of the music, the parades, and the people watching. And we found our favorite morning mocha (Oaxacan chocolate is world renowned) and bakery another quarter mile from the Zocalo. Two of the days we ventured to the beautiful Barrio de Jualatlaca, a mile and half away, with its building murals, tree-lined streets and great restaurants. It was here that we had cocktails and snacks at Casa Armadillo Negro (the Black Armadillo). The Ponche Fresca made with mezcal was incredible. I made a bad mistake in paying the bill via Venmo using US dollars instead of Mexican Pesos changing a 700-peso ($35) meal and drinks for four, into a $700 meal! The owners were very helpful in sorting all that out. I chalked it up to traveler fatigue and didn’t make that mistake again.

Walking towards the Zocalo

Our favorite bakery near the Zocalo

Son-in-love, granddaughter and daughter
at an outdoor market near the Zocalo

Nearing the Zocalo

Hotel on the Zocalo

Dancing at the Zocalo

Cool trees and agave on the Zocalo

Art near the Zocalo

Outdoor market

San Geronimo church north of the Zocalo

Wedding parade near the church

Art near the church

Entering the colorful Barrio de Jalatlaco

Murals in Jalatlaco

Colorful neighborhoods in Jalatlaco

Art everywhere

...and flowers...in November

Creative use of corn husks

All the nanas

Great cocktails and snacks at the Black Armadillo

Granddaughter enjoying one of many parades

So many parades!

Took granddaughter to the park while her parents went mountain biking

Colorful shop entries

One day we made the three-quarter mile walk to the Central de Abastos market near the bus terminal. Guidebooks warn tourists not to go there because it’s too dangerous, and I can now understand why they give this warning, but we never felt in any danger at all. This market is huge, and it contains a food stand that was featured on the Netflix show Somebody Feed Phil called Memelas Doña Vale. That food stand was one of the highlights of our trip. The pork, the morita salsa, the eggs, the tortillas, the hot chocolate, all were delicious. As we made our way out of the maze-like market, we ran into a heroin shooting gallery and into a completely naked woman wandering around aimlessly. So, we certainly saw some of the underbelly of a large international city. We took taxis to the outskirts of town to see Monte Alban, which contains pyramid structures dating to 500BCE, and to eat at Alfonsina, another trip highlight where we ate some of the best food any of us had ever eaten, including the famous Oaxacan black mole.

Breakfast at the famous Dona Vale's in Central de Abastos

The salsa was to die for, coffee and hot chocolate with breakfast

Monte Alban dating to 500BCE

Wide view of Monte Alban

Son-in-love and daughter at Monte Alban

At the peaceful and amazing Alfonsina restaurant

Appetizer at Alfonsina

World famous Mole Negro at Alfonsina

One day we took a long taxi ride to the Sunday market at Tlacolula de Matamoros where indigenous people from the surrounding mountains come to sell and buy wares in their colorful handmade Sunday outfits. We had a delicious lamb stew and tacos at Juanita’s food stall in the market (the people that owned this stall were so friendly and helpful). While in Tlacolula we visited Casa del Tio Joe which has an interesting background. While waiting for their plane in Santa Fe, our daughter and son-in-love ran into a couple with a three-year-old daughter. Their daughter played with our granddaughter and the two couples talked. It turned out that they were flying to Oaxaca also where they owned a mezcal operation. They invited us to visit if we were in the area, and so here we were in a tiny village, at a private mezcal bar, learning about the mezcal fermentation process while sipping a lot of mezcal. Joe was in the US army for 20 years before returning to his native home as the 4th generation owner and operator of this mezcal operation. He gave us a full appreciation of mezcal, and his love of the land is on full display as he describes his work. Another highlight.

Sunday market in Tlacolula

Indigenous women from the mountains in their Sunday best

The meat grilling section in the Tlocolula market

Eating lamb stew and tacos at Juanita's in Tlacolula

On the walk to Tio Joe's Mezcal bar

Daughter and wife at Tio Joe's

Joe explaining different types of agave plants for making mezcal

On our last evening and morning in Oaxaca we just wandered around the central part of the city, eating at food stalls on the street and taking in all that this city had to offer. It was our goodbye to this beautiful place with its warm people (and warm climate!).

Fish with yellow mole at Tradicion...yum

So many holes in the sidewalks!

Granddaughter enjoying her last night of the full stimulation of Oaxaca

Hope for Cynics by Jamil Zaki – A lot of this book reminded me of Hans Rosling’s book Factfulness, which showed scientific proof that the world is better off than most people believe it to be. Hope for Cynics goes on to show that people are better humans than their fellow humans believe them to be. I picked up this book because I thought it would help me to continue to try and understand the political divisiveness of our country and our world. And it certainly helped me to better understand this, even if the solutions still seem out of reach.

Jamil Zaki is a Stanford psychology professor and runs the university’s Social Neuroscience Lab where he studies how humans can socially connect more effectively. He defines cynicism as the belief that humanity is greedy, selfish and dishonest. There’s been a general understanding for several years that cynics are generally intelligent and successful people that point out the worst of human behavior, but study after study has shown that cynics tend to perform less well than non-cynics on cognitive tests, they earn less money, and they lose more often in negotiations. Zaki says “cynicism doesn’t help us see reality more clearly, but it does change reality, poisoning our relationships, our lives, and our culture.”

There was a fascinating study done in Brazil on these two different villages. The lake village consisted of fishermen in small boats who competed individually with other fishermen in the village for the limited resource of fish in the lake. The ocean village needed bigger boats and therefore a collaboration was required among the villagers to catch fish in the large, choppy ocean; they helped each other if a storm came. The lake village people didn’t help each other because it would mean more for them if their neighbors had trouble. The lake village suffered more health problems, depression, and cynicism. The ocean village was healthier physically and mentally and showed little cynicism.

Zaki points to empathy and trust as critical skills to destroy cynicism. He also talked a bit about the difference between healthy and helpful skepticism vs unhealthy and destructive cynicism. He talked about the increasing rate of income inequality and its responsibility for people’s cynicism, and how the cycle of increased cynicism helps anti-democratic leaders stay in power (cynics protest far less often than non-cynics). Another experiment run in Zaki’s lab was to bring republicans and democrats together in the same room. Time after time these studies showed that reasonable discourse between these factions brought them to a closer understanding of each other’s different views on divisive topics.

Here are some lines:

On our televisions and phones, corruption, inequality, and crime rule. But the grocers, teachers, and friends we see in person show us a version of humanity that is kinder and less suspicious.

Media companies trade in judgment and outrage. Our cynicism is their product, and business is booming.

one powerful tool he used to fight cynicism was skepticism: a reluctance to believe claims without evidence…Cynicism is a lack of faith in people; skepticism is a lack of faith in our assumptions.

In study after study, most people fail to realize how generous, trustworthy, and openminded others really are. The average person underestimates the average person.

Many people live in the ruins of their worst moments, trapped by pre-disappointment, cynicism, and loss.

In 1980, the American middle class owned about 50 percent more wealth than the country’s richest 1 percent. By 2020, the top 1 percent owned more than the entire middle class…This has stranded millions of people on the economic margins.

People in more unequal states and nations tend to be polarized, hostile, stressed, lonely, materialistic, and mistrustful.

In the months after Facebook came to a campus, students became more depressed, anxious, exhausted, and eating-disordered. They visited counseling services more often and consumed more psychiatric medicine than before

In 2018, researchers paid nearly three thousand people to shut down their Facebook accounts for four weeks. This digital cleanse lowered people’s depression by 25 to 40 percent, comparable with going to therapy.

Between 1970 and 2010, the mention of “love” in popular music dropped by 50 percent, while the use of “hate” tripled.

Ernest Hemingway once said, “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” He was half right. Trust doesn’t just teach us about people; it changes them. It’s a gift they repay.

In 1965, US CEOs earned twenty-one times as much as their average employee. In 2020, they made more than 350 times as much.

Conflict is rising in the US and beyond, for lots of reasons, including tribal cynicism: the belief that people on the other side are stupid, evil, or both.

So long as we fight over partisan identities, the struggles that most of us share—such as rising inequality—remain under the radar.

Research has found, time and time again, that when people interact with outsiders one-on-one, some of their prejudice melts away.

Efficacy without anger can leave us complacent. Anger without efficacy leaves us paralyzed and cynical.

A relative of hers would often share bigoted opinions about Mexican and LGBTQ people. One night at dinner she replied to one of his rants, saying, “I know you’re a good man. I think you would run into a burning building and rescue somebody if you could and you wouldn’t care whether they were gay, straight, Mexican, white. How can I reconcile the good man that I know you are with the words that just came out of your mouth?”

Democracy falters, and citizens fight to keep it alive. Authoritarian leaders strip away rights, and people protest and organize to broaden them. It’s unclear who will prevail. The boulder rolls down the hill; someone pushes it back up.

To Emile, it was a doorway. He knew—not in his mind but somewhere deeper—that almost no one is born to hate; that kindness, cooperation, and care are a return to who we really are.

Oaxaca Journal by Oliver Sacks – I had read the author’s wonderful book Musicophilia three years ago and wrote about it in my October 2021 blog. Sacks was a British neurologist, naturalist, science historian, and writer. He was most famous for his book Awakenings which was adapted into an award-winning movie with Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro. I spent a delightful week in Oaxaca this month with my wife, daughter, son-in-love, and granddaughter; so I was curious to read about Sacks’ view of Oaxaca during a 2000 botanical trip he took. The author went on this trip as part of the American Fern Society, so most of the folks were experts on ferns, and Oaxaca has some of the most diverse collection of them anywhere. The book is basically Sacks’ diary of his trip and I’ll be honest, I skipped most of the parts that got into the geeky details of ferns. I was more interested in his observations about Oaxaca and its people. He wrote eloquently about all the same things we saw: the vibrant colors, the dire poverty, the delicious food, the pre- and post-Columbian history, the friendliness of the people, and the markets! Here are some lines that I enjoyed:

I know Oaxaca has the richest flora in Mexico. I see now it has the richest, most varied foods as well. I think I am beginning to fall in love with the place.

This market is so rich, so various, that, reluctantly, I put my notebook away. It would need more talent, more energy than I have, to begin to do justice to the phantasmagoric scenes here.

Benito Juárez went to the University of Oaxaca to become a lawyer. Became the governor of Oaxaca—and finally the president of Mexico, in 1858. Extraordinary that a man, a Zapotec, from a small village, Luis continues, could become the president of Mexico. With his humble origins, his feeling for poor people, his liberal ideas, he was the Abraham Lincoln of Mexico.

We got lost, and almost killed, trying to cross the Pan American Highway. We saw open sewers, children with infected eyes and sores. Fearful poverty, filth. We were almost asphyxiated by diesel fumes; we were almost bitten by a ferocious, perhaps rabid dog. This is the other side of Oaxaca, a modern city, full of traffic, with a rush hour, and poverty, like any other.

It is one o’clock now—the day, quite chilly at seven a.m., has become rather warm. When I came to this square a few hours ago, everyone avoided the shade and sat huddled in the sun, warming themselves like lizards in its rays; now the pattern is reversed—the sun-baked cafés and benches are deserted, while those in the cool shade are packed.

There are only three groups of truly pure-blooded Indians left: one in the rain forests of Chiapas, one in Oaxaca in the cloud forest, and one in the north of Mexico. Their ancestors fled at the time of the Conquest, and they had survived only through isolation; for them, at least, there was dignity, autonomy, whereas if they had stayed in Oaxaca, they would have been slaves.

Within fifty years of the conquistadors’ arrival, Luis continued, the native population was decimated. Disease, murder, demoralization—entire peoples committed suicide in order to avoid enslavement, regarded death as preferable. Most of those remaining intermarried with the Spaniards, so that almost all Mexicans today are mestizos.

The agave—maguey—is to Central Americans what the palm is to Polynesians. the maguey not only provides fiber for ropes and coarse fabrics, and thorns for sewing, but sweet, odorous pulp for fermentation.

Of the many new foods I have eaten in the past days, the grasshoppers have pleased me especially— crunchy, nutty, tasty, and nutritious; they are usually fried and spiced. After getting used to these, I am ready to try a maguey worm—we see baskets of these, writhing,

Monte Albán was founded in Olmec times, around 600 B.C.—more or less at the same time as Rome; The leveling of a mountaintop to create this plateau was in itself an astonishing feat of engineering, to say nothing of providing irrigation, food, and sanitation for a population estimated at more than forty thousand. This city housed slaves and artisans, vendors and traders, warriors and athletes, master builders and astronomer-priests, and it was the center of a network of trade relations spreading throughout Mesoamerica, a great market for obsidian, jade, quetzal feathers, jaguar skins, and seashells from the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

The conquistadors had lusted for silver and gold, and robbed their victims blind to get these—but these were not the real gifts they brought back. The real gifts, unknown to the Europeans before the conquest, were tobacco, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, gourds, chilies, peppers, maize, to say nothing of rubber, chewing gum, exotic hallucinogens, and cochineal.

Gold was not valued by the pre-Columbians as such, as stuff, but only for the ways in which it could be used to make objects of beauty. The Spanish found this unintelligible, and in their greed melted down thousands, perhaps millions, of gold artifacts, in order to fill their coffers with the metal.

Ralph Price Reservoir to the North Inlet – I had hiked to the North Inlet back in May of 2022 from the Coulson Gulch trailhead, so today I would try to connect those hikes by getting to the North Inlet from the Button Rock Dam trailhead. The trailheads are 12 miles apart on different roads, but only 5 miles apart as the crow flies. North St. Vrain creek actually enters Ralph Price Reservoir from the southwest, so I assume they named it the North Inlet because it’s the North St. Vrain that enters it here. I’ve hiked up and down Button Rock Dam road several times in the past, either to get to Coffintop Mountain or just to take a nice, leisurely hike along the North St. Vrain. But I had never walked along the north shore of Ralph Price Reservoir until today. It’s a surprisingly pretty hike! The shore is full of large rocks that make it look like an ocean shoreline in some places.

From the trailhead it’s an easy two-mile walk to the reservoir. From here it’s another two miles along the shore to the North Inlet Loop. Most of this portion of the hike is easy up and down walking along the shore except for one short section that is very steep and scrambly in order to get around a long cove. The views of the lake are great along this section. The North Inlet Loop heads towards a small weir (diversion dam) that alters the flow of the North St Vrain before it empties into the reservoir. I ran into a couple of scientists from Ft. Collins who were studying the aftereffects of the area from the big 2013 flood. After chatting a bit, I continued down the North St. Vrain which was half frozen with ice on this day to where it entered the reservoir. The area here is very scoured from that 2013 flood and it looks more like braided Alaskan rivers than a small mountain stream. When I was here in May of 2022, there were several washed up trees. Those were mostly gone now after what must have been a massive cleanup effort since then. I finished the loop and then headed back along the shores of Ralph Price Reservoir and then down Button Rock Dam Road to my car. A very nice 10-mile walk that also connected up a previous trail. No big animal sightings but I did run into a very large poop left by what must have been a very large mountain lion.

Reflections in Longmont Reservoir

Reflections in Ralph Price Reservoir

Hardy tree growing out of the rocks

This was the only tricky part

Big mountain lion up here

Half frozen North St. Vrain

North St. Vrain

Ralph Price Reservoir as the sun was sinking

Pretty lake

The beach!

It was just me and the deer out here today

Border Child by Michel Stone – Stone is a writer based out of Spartanburg, South Carolina and has won several southern writer awards, including the Mary Frances Hobson Prize for Distinguished Achievement in Arts and Letters, the Patricia Winn Award for Southern Literature, and the South Carolina Fiction Award. She wrote a piece in Lit Hub where she said: “The motivations of a mother in Charleston, South Carolina are not so different from a mother’s motivations in Tegucigalpa, Honduras or in Kyoto, Japan, or in Konongo, Ghana. .. Humans need food, safety, a sense of well-being, and love. We want to provide for our children and we want to belong.” I loved that sentiment, and it explains a bit how an Anglo writer from South Carolina can write so beautifully about a Oaxacan family in Mexico.

This novel takes place much further south than her home state, mostly in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. It tells the heartbreaking story of Hector and Lilia who live in a small peaceful village on the coast called Puerto Isabel. Hector was always dreaming about making it big in El Norte (the US) and eventually he makes it across the border and gets a good job in South Carolina. Lilia eventually makes enough money to cross with her baby daughter to live with Hector in the US. But the baby is lost during the crossing and that changes their lives forever. They eventually get deported back to Mexico and live their sadder lives in Puerto Isabel, but three years pass and some clues as to the border tragedy give them some hope. Hector goes to Acapulco to make some “shady” money to travel to the border city of Matamoros to search the orphanages there for their daughter. Meanwhile Lilia is home with their now two-year-old son and is pregnant with another child. As Hector is on his adventures, Lilia struggles to survive, making pottery to sell to tourists at the local market. This part really struck me, because I would see the poor villagers making their way to the Oaxaca markets every day with their wares, hoping to make a few pesos. Her story really brought home the humanity of this everyday endeavor for people to carve out a living from tourists like us and how one purchase may make a difference in their ability to provide food on the table for the day.

Anyway, back to the story. Hector eventually finds information about the whereabouts of his long-lost daughter, and it’s good news for her, but it also means that he and Lilia will likely never see her again. Just heart wrenching.

Here are some lines:

They had been the most loving, most affectionate couple in all of Mexico until that unforgettable, life altering day at the border, when she’d arrived unexpectedly and without their child.

After living in el norte Lilia understood the tourists photographed her not because of her exquisite beauty, the loveliness of her shade tree where iguanas often sunned, or even the tidiness of her courtyard. They snapped their pictures because the poverty of her village interested them.

We can’t shield our children from pain, even if we carry them in a sack against our breasts. Still the bee can sting, the thorn can prick.

“She’s your daughter. The child we had here is your daughter.” She anticipated an emotional reply, but his guttural reaction and the volume of tears pouring freely from his closed eyes brought an unexpected heaviness to Karolina’s heart. With his head bowed, the deluge fell into his lap, and he could not speak.

He wondered how many times a life could shatter and still be a life of any use

Deadman Gulch near Lyons - I've had my eye on this steep trail for some time, thinking that it could be a good workout hike closer to home than my usual Mt. Sanitas hike in Boulder. I finally got a chance to hike it when my daugther, son-in-love, and granddaughter were in town for the Thanksgiving holiday. We parked along the road near where the AllTrails app showed the trailhead to be. There is no official trailhead or sign as it's just a social trail that locals have created. There is a much better parking option a few yards down the highway that I will use next time. We gathered up my granddaughter and the dogs, crossed the highway, which is normally not too busy and starting walking through a drainage and then headed nearly straight uphill. The footing is a bit slippery on this crushed granite, similar to the Tom's Thumb trails northeast of Phoenix. My daughter and son-in-love had no troubles because it's very similar to many Taos hikes...steep! The trail climbs 1,200 feet in less than 1.5 miles, and I'd say that a half mile of that is fairly flat, so most of that 1,200 feet is gained in about a mile. The views from up top are great, but we couldn't see the big mountains due to storm clouds. It turns out that this is a really good workout hike only around 20 minutes from my home. I'm sure I'll be doing it more often in the future.