April 2025
Books read:
- Saturday by Ian McEwan
- China in Ten Words by Yu Hua
- Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
- The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Trails walked:
- Brainard Lake snowshoe loop near Ward (April 7th)
- East/West Valley Loop in Lory State Park near Fort Collins (April 15th)
- Mondragon Loop near Taos, NM (April 23rd)
- Green Mountain to Bear Canyon near Boulder (April 29th)
Song(s) of the month:
- Paradise by John Prine
- Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell
- Motherland by Natalie Merchant.
April Summary:
This past April included the 55th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22nd. That first Earth Day in 1970 saw 20 million people around the US set out to protest environmental destruction and to clean up some parks while they were at it. The EPA was established a few months later, followed by the Clean Air and Clean Water acts. Today hundreds of millions of people around the world celebrate Earth Day in many different ways. Back then taking care of the environment wasn't a political issue. All those acts were established during a Republican administration. I participated again this year with my climate group as we cleaned up trash around the Golden Ponds Nature Area in west Longmont. I also attended an award presentation at Regis University in Denver where our climate organization presented our Climate Coverage Champion award to former Denver meteorologist Mike Nelson who retired this past December. See the brief news report by channel 7 here. Mike Nelson included the science of climate change in his nightly weather reporting and helped to communicate this science to his viewers. One of the many reasons I attended was that a photograph I had taken on one of my many hikes in Rocky Mountain National Park was used as the backdrop for the award plaque. It's a photo I took of Jewel Lake back in August of 2023. The photo at the beginning of this blog post, above, is that photo. I enjoyed hearing Mike talk about his own personal history with weather forecasting and how he came to understand the science of climate change and ideas on how we can resolve it. I purchased a copy of his pamphlet quaintly titled "The World's Littlest Book on Climate: 10 Facts in 10 Minutes about CO2."
I've been thinking a lot about my dad this month also. Even though he passed away back in December of 2016 at the age of 80, a day after golfing 18 holes, there are still times that I want to talk to him about something that happened with the kids (now grandkids) or at least email him an article about something amazing that happened in the sports world (like the crazy 13-11 Cubs Diamondbacks baseball game). His birthday was April 22nd, so I used to call him up every Earth Day and wish him a happy birthday ("Happy Earth Day dad!" "Ha Ha"). I still wish him happy birthday every year, hopefully he somehow hears that. Miss you dad.
The Vietnam war officially ended 50 years ago this month. I was in grade school and middle school for most of the war, so I never attended any protests, but I vividly remember the newsreels of the war and of the coffins returning to the United States. The New York Times recently had a feature on the great and brave journalism that took place during the war. Who can forget the photo of that young Vietnamese girl running naked in terror after being burned with Agent Orange? The photo below is the one that still gets to me. Kyoichi Sawada, a Japanese photographer, won the Pulitzer Prize for this photo of women and children fleeing American bombs in Quy Nhon in September 1965. Whenever I feel like life is getting hard I think about this photo and realize I don't really know what "hard" is. It should be a warning to anyone who thinks war is the answer. That war was probably the event that broke America in two in the 20th century. We've never fully recovered and we're still broken in two; the difference now is that instead of 3 news channels, we have thousands of media channels, hardly any of them with guardrails on telling the truth.
This past month's reading saw a Saturday gone bad in Ian McEwan's brilliant hands, a description of China in ten words by one of that country's most famous authors, a beautiful story about escaping one's life into a life of service at a convent, and another terrific book by Robin Wall Kimmerer on how we can create a better way to live with nature. My rambling took me snowshoeing in the Indian Peaks Wilderness, walking a pretty section of Lory State Park near Fort Collins, a long walk in the woods near Taos, and walk in the sun, snow, and thunder west of Boulder. Enjoy!
Song(s) of the month: There are thousands of songs about the environment, some good, some bad. I thought that I would include three of my favorites here in recognition of Earth Day. I doubt that most folks who have heard these songs think of them as environmental anthems, but they make a point while also being all around great songs:
Paradise by John Prine - A song I love playing on guitar because the chords are easy. I suppose some folks hear this song and think mainly about a kid's dad telling him that the place he remembers is no longer the same, a sort of lament on days gone by. But it's a commentary on what the coal industry did to the land (Peabody Coal hated this song). I like this live version with Marty Stuart where John tells about how he came to write the song. Key environmental lyrics:
Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man
Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell - OK so maybe most people really do think about this song as an environmental screed, but I'll bet lots of folks just think about the last lines where the narrator's boyfriend/father(?) leaves in a big yellow taxi. Like John Prine, Joni Mitchell is a treasure and this is just one of her many great songs. Key environmental lyrics:
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone?
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
Motherland by Natalie Merchant - This is the title track to her great 2001 album that many found too weird. I thought the album was incredible, full of philosophical greatness and strange instruments. Motherland is not one of her most well known songs, but it's my favorite of hers. I think she is brilliant and her 1995 concert at the Mesa Amphitheater in Arizona is still one of my top 5 concerts ever. Key environmental lyrics (sung as the accordion and guitar lightly strum):
Where in hell can you go
Far from the things that you know
Far from the sprawl of concrete
That keeps crawling its way
About a thousand miles a day?
In some ways it reminded me of Anna Quindlen’s great book Every Last One which I reviewed in my October 2024 blog; a great description of family dynamics followed by a terrifying episode that changes everything. But Saturday seems to address the more pressing issues of the times. Set post 9/11 (it was published in 2005) it explores how people around the world have changed since that day; more fearful of others, always scanning the news for events that could impact their (our) semi-perfect lives. The protagonist is Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon in London who’s married to a high profile lawyer (Rosalind) and has two gifted children (Theo, a blues guitarist and Daisy, an up and coming poet). Even though the novel is set during one specific day, there are snippets of the past which help build the characters and all that has led them to this particular day. The book starts out with fascinating descriptions of brain surgeries performed by the protagonist, including one in which his future wife was a patient (The author spent two years shadowing a neurosurgeon in London for research on this novel). These surgical descriptions were thoughts that Perowne was having early on a Saturday morning as he was gazing out his window when suddenly he sees a burning plane heading towards Heathrow airport; a sort of reminder of the 9/11 events.
He eventually begins his day, which includes driving to his weekly squash game with a colleague. On that drive he gets held up by traffic due to a giant anti-war protest (it was based on the actual anti-war protest that was London’s largest ever), then gets into a fender bender with three suspect characters, which will eventually lead, later in the day to the most harrowing of events. He finally has his squash game, and I don’t know how, but the author manages to make that squash game the most exciting squash game one could possibly read about. Next, he heads to visit his mother who is suffering from dementia, and even this conversation is beautifully written and brought back difficult memories for me with my own mother. Then he heads to the fish market because he’s cooking a big meal that evening as his daughter and father-in-law are in town to hopefully reconcile an unfortunate incident that tore them apart three years ago. He thinks he spots the car from the earlier day's incident with the three suspect characters following him, but it disappears…uh oh. Even the description of Perowne preparing that fish stew is beautifully done (I want that recipe!).
As the family guests begin arriving for the evening, fascinating discussions are held, including a gripping debate about the war between father and daughter. The father has a colleague friend from Iraq who has described Saddam’s brutal regime of killing and torturing, so he’s thinking maybe getting rid of Saddam is a less evil thing than the act of war; his daughter says war in any case is the worst thing. Great debate. When his wife finally arrives home from her big day at court, she’s closely followed in the door by the thugs from the earlier accident, who are wielding knives. My heart was pounding for the following scene of this hard working, gifted family at the mercy of common thugs. Lives are in the balance. It’s so good. I won’t ruin the ending because this is a book that should be read by as many people as possible. Here are some lines:
Forty-eight years old, profoundly asleep at nine thirty on a Friday night—this is modern professional life.
parents have little or no influence on the characters of their children…what really determines the sort of person who’s coming to live with you is which sperm finds which egg…Cheerful or neurotic, kind or greedy, curious or dull, expansive or shy and anywhere in between…The point is made for you as soon as you have more than one child; two entirely different people emerge from their roughly similar chances in life.
“When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in—you know, a girl I’ve just met, or this song we’re going to do with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto—think small.”
The disease (dementia) proceeds by tiny unnoticed strokes in small blood vessels in the brain. Cumulatively, the infarcts cause cognitive decline by disrupting the neural nets. She unravels in little steps. Now she’s lost her grasp of the concept of a gift, and with it, the pleasure.
childhood tails away slowly. Daisy had breasts and periods when her bed was still so stuffed with teddy bears and other soft animals there was barely room for her. Then it was a first bank account, a university degree, a driving licence that concealed the lingering, fading child which only a parent can still recognise in the newly formed adult.
It’s his duty, Henry supposes, to try to like the father of his grandchild. The despoiler of his daughter
Objects became junk as soon as they were separated from their owner and their pasts
after a certain age, when the remaining years first take on their finite aspect, and you begin to feel for yourself the first chill, you watch a dying man with a closer, more brotherly interest.
It was my first snowshoe of the season and so I forgot the old rule that 1 mile of snowshoeing is equal to 2 miles of hiking. Luckily all the trails were fairly packed down, so I didn’t have to plow any trails myself. I probably could have used spikes only, but this time of year the snow is pretty mushy, and I would likely have post-holed several times which chews up the trail for skiers and is generally not fun to do anyway. So, I wore the snowshoes nearly the entire way. I was exhausted and had two blisters by the time I was done. I slept well that night. Like most winter hikes (well, it’s technically spring, but it still seems like winter up here), I didn’t have any big animal sightings today. Just peace and quiet and the beauty of the Indian Peaks. It was the first time during any season that I had Brainard Lake all to myself. I guess the cross-country skiers were elsewhere. Nice day in the mountains after a month-long hiatus.
 |
| Some of the trails were pretty compacted |
 |
| Designated what? snowdrifts? |
 |
| Less compacted trail with Mt Audubon in the background |
 |
| The jagged Indian Peaks with Brainard Lake in the foreground |
 |
| Creek and snow |
 |
| Creek and snow with Audubon rising up |
Yu Hua is considered by some to be China’s greatest living author. His novels have been translated into 40 different languages, and he’s won the prestigious James Joyce award. He’s lucky to have this distinction, otherwise he probably would have been put in prison by now. In this book of essays, he tries to describe China in ten words: People, Leader, Reading, Writing, Lu Xun, Revolution, Disparity, Grassroots, Copycat and Bamboozle. Throughout these essays he writes about his own life growing up during the Cultural Revolution where many writers and academics were tortured and killed, and where children were encouraged to turn in their own parents if they said something bad about Chairman Mao. He also writes about Tiananmen Square which is a no no topic for most Chinese people, and he goes on to explain how the practice of stealing technology (copycat culture) and scamming on the internet (bamboozling) are generally accepted among the public as sort of revolutionary actions stemming from the days of the Cultural Revolution. It certainly helps to explain a lot. He doesn’t attack the government too much like Ai Weiwei (1,000 Years of Joys and Sorrows) who has spent time in jail or exiled, but he has some harsh criticism of how things were handled during the Tiananmen Square riots. The book was never published in China (but it was in Taiwan, which is telling). He wrote an updated version of the essays for publication in China (I’m sure he had to delete all references to Tiananmen Square in that version). I still feel like I haven’t been able to grasp China yet, but I’ll keep trying. Here are some lines:
In my childhood years “the people” was just as marvelous an expression as “Chairman Mao,” and when I first began to read, these were the first words I mastered; I could write them even before I could write my own name or the names of my parents. It was my view then that “the people are Chairman Mao, and Chairman Mao is the people.”
In those days people walked on eggshells, fearful that if they said anything wrong, they might be branded a counterrevolutionary, endangering their whole family
Turning points in history tend to be marked by some emblematic event, and the Tiananmen Incident of 1989 was one such moment
Since 1990, corruption has grown with the same astounding speed as the economy as a whole.
...Tiananmen vanished from the Chinese media. I never saw the slightest mention of it afterward, as though it had never happened.
In the thirty-odd years since Mao’s death China has fashioned an astonishing economic miracle, but the price it has paid is even more astounding.
year after year chemical plants will dump industrial waste into our rivers, and although a single plant might succeed in generating a thirty-million-yuan boost to China’s GDP, to clean up the rivers it has ruined will cost ten times that amount.
Since I grew up in a time and a place where there were no books, it’s hard to say just how I began to read.
China’s high-speed economic growth seems to have changed everything in the blink of an eye, rather like a long jump that let us leap from an era of material shortages into an era of extravagance and waste…we had no concept of expressways or advertisements; we had very few stores, and very little to buy in the stores we did have. We seemed to have nothing then, though we did have a blue sky.
we are on the verge of becoming the second-richest country in the world, trailing only the United States. But behind these dazzling statistics is another, unsettling one: in terms of per capita income China is still languishing at a low rank, one hundredth in the world.
Chinese people replaced their passion for revolution with a passion for making money
 |
| Lots of deer out today |
 |
| Your standard fence perspective shot |
 |
| I liked this shot of the red rocks beyond the high grass |
 |
| Water trees |
 |
| Looks like something out of Louisiana |
 |
| The old dead log in the water shot |
 |
| I liked this shot of the cliffs behind the water and trees |
 |
| Single track trails all around here for beginning mountain bikers |
 |
| All kinds of angles here |
The narrator flips back and forth between describing her present time in the convent and her past life from grade school up through the present. Other than Covid and the mice infestation, the other big events in the novel are the return of the remains of a nun who used to live here but was brutally murdered while helping abused women in Thailand; and the fact that the remains were accompanied by an activist nun named Helen Parry who just happened to be a woman from the narrator's past. You knew something interesting was afoot when you read this line: "When I think about the phases of my life, it is as a series of rooms behind me, each with a door to a
previous room left open, behind which is another room, and another and another. The rooms are not
quite empty, not exactly dark, but they are shadowy, with indistinct shapes, and I don’t like to think
about them much. When I hear the name ‘Helen Parry’, I think of those rooms furthest back, in the
deepest shadows."
I couldn't possibly begin to describe how wonderful this book was, but just take a look at some of the lines below and you will know what I mean:
Stones and low yellow grasses and the delicate strings of barbed-wire fencing tracing long into the
distance. Hot dry air zinging with grasshoppers. The sky a vast, white striated haze.
There is something terrible in a quiet place about the sound of a woman’s screams. It is worse than the
sound itself; it gathers force, becomes an omen or a reminder of something horrible from the past.
After the bulletin she switches off the television and returns to her cabin and her phone and her computer. The noise stops but the feeling doesn’t, that she is leaving us with all the world’s catastrophes, all the justice work undone, the poor unsupported, the natural creatures unprotected, rights unfought-for. She brings into our home, without apology, everything we so painstakingly left behind.
Composting was one of the things my mother did that other mothers did not. In our town, when I was a
child, deliberately leaving vegetables and bones to rot in your own backyard was not something that
nice people did.
You do not announce on Facebook that you, an atheist, are leaving your job and your home and your
husband to join a cloistered religious community. I mean you could, and it might be a better way than I
chose, which was not to announce anything to anyone.
I’m used to it now, the waiting. An incomplete, unhurried emergence of understanding, sitting with
questions that are sometimes never answered.
What struck me in the forest, and does now, is how nothing appeared to have changed in Helen Parry;
how the things we schoolgirls so hated her for were exactly the qualities that now gave her such
unsettling power. The unashamed demand for space. The way her clothes sat on her body, the animal
carnality of her. Her unwavering, absolute readiness for a fight
(upon leaving the hospital) she was handed an envelope with her name on
it. On the bus ride to the hostel, she opened the envelope and unfolded an invoice for the cost of burying
her child.
I think she is mourning not only Sister Jenny but something in herself. Some secret, wrestling work is
taking place, and I feel pity for her lonely labour.
I wish I was able to be a wiser daughter to (my mother) when she was alive.
Back then I thought that it would be a comfort, knowing you would grow old and die here in your home
with your sisters around you. But that’s not what happens, it turns out. You end up like everyone else,
lying alone in a room, having your wet bed changed by gentle, underpaid strangers.
It’s been my observation over many years that those who most powerfully resist convention quite
peaceably accept the state of being reviled.
A nice day in the woods with some good elevation gain for exercise, a pleasant encounter with a old timer hiker, a dirt-drawn map, lots of elk and mountain lion poop, a mysterious animal in the woods that spooked wonder dog, and a heart-stopping encounter with a grouse that fluttered away around 3 feet from me.
 |
| New Mexico bridge crossing near the trailhead |
 |
| So much mountain lion poop! |
 |
| Wonder dog wandering |
 |
| That New Mexico blue sky |
 |
| Old jeep road |
 |
| One of a limited number of views on the trail |
 |
| Wonder dog sensing something bad in the dark forest... |
 |
| Fossil pointed out by my geologist hiking companion |
 |
| Intersection of the Mondragon and South Boundary trails |
 |
| Wonder dog was renewed after lolling in this snow patch |
 |
| Dirt map that I decided not to follow.... |
She mentions the sharing of farmed goods that people in small communities experience. When someone grows more of something than they need, they'll give the rest away to neighbors so that they can store the excess in their friends' bellies. When asked about how we could possibly scale this sort of gift giving from small communities she mentions public libraries. Here items are not owned but shared by everyone for free (not just books these days, but also seeds, gardening tools, camping equipment, etc.). She realizes that it's our taxes that fund libraries, but how can we change the system so that our taxes are used more for bettering the lives of people (shocking idea these days).
One of my favorite "themes" throughout the book is her calling people who steal for their own profit, the Darrens of the world. Named for Darren Woods, CEO of Exxon. Of course Exxon is one several fossil fuel companies whose own scientists have proven that their product causes catastrophic climate change but choose to suppress and deny that information in order to continue profiting as long as they possibly can, damn the future. I wonder if Darren Woods knows about this book....
Here are some of the many great lines from this tiny but powerful book:
All that we need to live flows through the land. It is not an empty metaphor that we call her Mother
Earth.
Recognizing “enoughness” is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more.
A woolly knit hat that you purchase at the store will keep you warm regardless of its origin, but if it was
hand-knit by your favorite auntie, then you are in relationship to that “thing” in a very different way:
you are responsible for it, and your gratitude has motive force in the world. You’re likely to take much
better care of the gift hat than of the commodity hat, because the gift hat is knit of relationships. This is
the power of gift thinking.
In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with
abundance is to give it away.
In times of crisis the gift economy surges up through the rubble of an earthquake or the wreckage of a
hurricane. When human survival is threatened, compassionate acts overrule market economies.
I might give a book to a friend. You do it, too. That simple act is the atom of a gift economy. No money
was exchanged, I have no expectation of compensation in any form. That book was kept from the
landfill, and my friend and I have a bond and something to talk about; the act of giving opened a
channel of reciprocity.
Let’s remember that the “System” is led by individuals, by a relatively small number of people, who have
names, with more money than God and certainly less compassion. They sit in boardrooms deciding to
exploit fossil fuels for short-term gain while the world burns. They know the science, they know the
consequences, but they proceed with ecocidal business as usual and do it anyway.
“If there’s not enough of what you want, then want something else.”
I cherish the notion of the gift economy, that we might back away from the grinding system, which
reduces everything to a commodity and leaves most of us bereft of what we really want: a sense of
belonging and relationship and purpose and beauty, which can never be commoditized.
I want to be part of a system in which wealth means having enough to share, and where the
gratification of meeting your family needs is not poisoned by destroying that possibility for someone
else. I want to live in a society where the currency of exchange is gratitude and the infinitely renewable
resource of kindness, which multiplies every time it is shared rather than depreciating with use.
If the economy requires people to consume more resources than the Earth can replenish, just to keep
the whole thing from collapsing, isn’t it time for a new economy?”
 |
| The arcing of the trees |
 |
| Ripplin' waters |
 |
| Flowers blooming in a snow storm |
 |
| Bear Mountain lit up by the hide 'n seek sun |
 |
| Incoming storm from Green Mountain |
 |
| Storm clouds in front of a sun swept mountain range |
 |
| Green Mountain upper left |
 |
| It was bigger than a hen's egg. Turkey? Grouse? Easter? |
 |
| Storming |
 |
| No photoshop here, just the beauty of nature |