May 2026
Books read:
- Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett
- The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood
- Vigil by George Saunders
- The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover
- A Mercy by Toni Morrison
Trails walked:
- Dinosaur Ridge and Dakota Ridge near Morrison (May 27th)
- Mother Cabrini Shrine near Golden (May 27th)
- Nighthawk Loop near Lyons (May 29th)
Song(s) of the month: Earth Songs
- Paradise by John Prine (and Sturgill Simpson)
- Motherland by Natalie Merchant
- Nothing But Flowers by The Talking Heads (and David Byrne)
- Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell
May Summary:
This month I was asked to put together a video for my wife's aunt who just turned 85. Lots of people sent me photos, so I was able to sort of re-live her life through these family photos. Then I was asked to put together a music play list for her party which was expected to draw around 50 people of all ages and backgrounds. How do you choose a playlist for such a diverse range of ages and musical tastes? We've only recently gotten to know this aunt since we moved to Colorado five years ago, but creating these two pieces of media was easy because she's the sister of my late great mother-in-law. You see, they were both raised in the same way. Ten siblings living together in a tiny house in downtown Albuquerque during World War II. They slept five kids to a bed. Can you even try to imagine that? For them, family was everything and friendship was priceless. And my mother-in-law and her sister (and I'm sure all their other siblings) continued that "family is everything" and "friendship is priceless" tradition and passed it down to their kids. My mother-in-law moved from Albuquerque to Phoenix so that she could be a part of her grandkids' lives as they grew up, and she made a difference. I really miss her, but whenever we visit her sister, it's as though we're sitting with her and laughing like old times. If you want to see the 17 minute video I made, click here. And if you have Spotify, you can listen to the playlist that I made for the party here. The party was fun (my wife cooked lots of good New Mexican food for it, along with several other excellent chefs). I think everyone enjoyed the video. I took this photo as the video was playing during a Colorado windstorm:
Knee update. Last month I wrote about the fact that my knee was giving me some troubles. Here's the latest. I had an MRI and it confirmed that I had a torn meniscus, plus some arthritis and some fluid in the knee. The meniscus tear was a horizontal tear which basically means I've put too many miles on that knee (and that I'm old). I estimate that since I retired in 2015 I've put around 1,500 miles per year on it. It made sense to me since I couldn't point to any specific incident that caused the pain. Planned obsolescence I guess. Surgery to repair a meniscus is generally frowned upon in people over 65 because it could exacerbate the arthritis. So the choices are: Physical therapy, steroid injection, or knee replacement. Since I sort of do my own physical therapy through walking, hiking, and now rowing, I opted for the steroid shot. My knee is stable other than the meniscus tear so a knee replacement seems like overkill, however a partial knee replacement is still on the table if the steroid injection doesn't work. I had the injection on May 15th, then did some local walking and some chores that I wasn't able to do before. Then the real test came on May 27th and 29th when I went on a couple of test hikes (see below descriptions). So far, the knee is holding up. I'm honestly not sure if it was the injection or if the meniscus healed on its own. I still feel the knee a bit, but it's nothing compared to the debilitating pain I had the previous month. So, fingers crossed that I can continue hiking throughout the summer and beyond. If the pain returns, which I realize is possible, then we'll have the surgery discussion or maybe do another injection (they can be done every three months). Enough of the organ recital.
This month I was thankfully able to go on a dinosaur hike near Morrison, a meditational walk at a shrine near Golden, and a longer hike near Lyons which was a good test for the knee. My reading took me from one of the most famous plays written to a dystopian story set in Australia, then to an oil tycoon haunted by spirits on his deathbed and to a baseball league created in a man's mind and finally to another incomparable novel by Toni Morrison. Enjoy!
Things My Grandkids Say: A bunch of us were sitting around watching the NCAA Women's basketball final four game between South Carolina and Connecticut back in early April. At the end of the game, UConn's losing coach refused to shake hands with South Carolina's winning coach and seemed to be berating her about something; it looked they were gonna come to blows (my money would have been on Dawn Staley taking down Geno Auriemma). It was kind of shocking and we were all yelling "WOW!" Somehow that moment seemed to register into my one-year-old grandson's brain and it became his go-to word for just about everything. He sees us come to visit: WOW! He sees the overhead fan turn on: WOW! He sees his brothers going crazy: WOW! He may have said WOW, before he even said mama or dada, but his parents might refute this.
Things My Grandkids Say: A bunch of us were sitting around watching the NCAA Women's basketball final four game between South Carolina and Connecticut back in early April. At the end of the game, UConn's losing coach refused to shake hands with South Carolina's winning coach and seemed to be berating her about something; it looked they were gonna come to blows (my money would have been on Dawn Staley taking down Geno Auriemma). It was kind of shocking and we were all yelling "WOW!" Somehow that moment seemed to register into my one-year-old grandson's brain and it became his go-to word for just about everything. He sees us come to visit: WOW! He sees the overhead fan turn on: WOW! He sees his brothers going crazy: WOW! He may have said WOW, before he even said mama or dada, but his parents might refute this.
Song(s) of the month: Earth Songs
I've always wanted to put together a playlist of songs that pay homage to our Earth in some way, whether it's about the environment or climate change or just a nice song about nature. Every time I hear a song like this I think to myself, that would be a good song for that new playlist. Well, I finally made that playlist. There are currently 23 songs on the list so obviously I can't feature them all here. So I will feature 4 of my favorites from my younger days. There are LOTS of new artists making music about climate change (Billie Eilish, Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle, etc.), so if you have Spotify here is a link to my new playlist on climate and the environment. Meanwhile, here are four oldies but goodies:
Motherland by Natalie Merchant - I love everything about this song. Its slow waltz, the somber accordion, her haunting voice. It's from her brilliant 2001 album of the same name that is filled with unknown gems. Sample lyrics:
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett – This transcription of Beckett’s famous play was the oldest item on my “to read” list. I finally got around to it. I’d read and heard so many references to this play that I had to see what all the fuss was about. It’s very short, just over 100 pages. Irish critic Vivian Mercer had the best description of her fellow countryman’s play: "Waiting for Godot has achieved a theoretical impossibility – a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What's more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice."
And that’s nearly exactly how I felt upon reading this. But when it finally ended I started trying to process it and came up with several ideas: Maybe it’s about two guys in Purgatory who keep waiting for their entry to heaven (Godot); or maybe it’s really two spirits in a graveyard (they never move beyond one small scene near a tree); or maybe it’s like Groundhog Day where they keep experiencing the same day but in slightly different ways each time. As I dug into the analysis of this short play, I discovered that there are thousands of pages of interpretations of this simple little story. The Wiki page is probably longer than the written play itself! Beckett was always amused at how complicated people kept making his simply story.
It’s a story of two lifelong friends, Vladimir and Estragon, who meet in a field by a leafless tree. Estragon had slept in a ditch after having been assaulted. They talk about their lives, their thoughts, and the fact that they were both waiting for Godot to show up even though neither of them really know this guy. Estragon’s thoughts are mostly physical in nature (I’m hungry, my feet hurt) while Vladimir’s thoughts are mostly philosophical. This distinction is subtly shown in the way Estragon is always fussing with his boots while Vladimir is always fussing with his hat. It reminded me of Raphael's famous painting, The School of Athens, which I was lucky enough to see in person at The Vatican years ago. In that painting, Plato is pointing to the sky, whereas Aristotle is gesturing towards the ground. It is thought to be a depiction of their different philosophies: Plato's was more theoretical vs Aristotle's more grounded. There are three other characters in the play: Pozzo and his slave Lucky, and a messenger boy who eventually delivers the message that Godot won’t be coming today but will come tomorrow. When they receive word that Godot is not coming today, but tomorrow, they decide to meet again the next day (in the play, neither leaves the stage at this point). The “next day” as they meet, the tree now has some leaves on it (hmmm). They continue with their various conversations and Pozzo and Lucky drop by again, except this time Pozzo is blind and Lucky is deaf. What?! Then the messenger boy shows up again to tell them Godot isn’t coming but will come tomorrow. The boy doesn’t remember telling them this same thing the day before which greatly upsets Vladimir. So, they decide to meet again the next day, only with a rope so that they can hang themselves on the tree. Play ends. Fascinating. Now I know what all the fuss was about. Here are some lines:
VLADIMIR: You should have been a poet.
ESTRAGON: I was. (Gesture towards his rags.) Isn’t that obvious?
ESTRAGON: Let’s go.
VLADIMIR: We can’t.
ESTRAGON: Why not?
VLADIMIR: We’re waiting for Godot.
POZZO: I too would be happy to meet him. The more people I meet the happier I become. From the meanest creature one departs wiser, richer, more conscious of one’s blessings. Even you . . . (he looks at them ostentatiously in turn to make it clear they are both meant) . . . even you, who knows, will have added to my store.
ESTRAGON: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?
The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood – I had read the author’s brilliant book Stone Yard Devotional last April and loved her sparse writing which reminded me a bit of Marilynne Robinson. So I had to try another one. This one was so different from Stone Yard Devotional, but it still had many of the same strong feminist concepts. She’s considered Australia’s preeminent feminist writer. While I slowly read and savored every line in Stone Yard Devotional, this one, The Natural Way of Things, was meant to be more of a page-turner. Plus, there are some graphic scenes that you don’t really want to linger on in this book. For me, it was sort of Handmaid’s Tale meets Lord of the Flies; a dystopian novel with no nice male characters and the female characters are a mix of every type of woman you may see in real life (strong leaders, weaselly followers, mean girls, quiet introspective women…). The novel won several Australian book awards in 2016, the year after it was published.
As the novel begins you are introduced to Yolanda and Verla who have been heavily drugged and have no idea where they are. The “guards” are rough with them and forcefully shave their heads. Eventually they are put in a room with several other women whose heads have also been shaved. As the drugs wear off, they start to try and figure out what’s happening to them. They are all in a sort of prison deep in the bush in Australia. There is an electric fence surrounding the grounds. The two male guards are cruel, one more so than the other. There are some flashbacks to the women's previous lives and although it’s never explicitly stated, it seems that they are all in this prison because they had accused powerful men of sexually abusing them; but it’s never really clear and possibly it’s because they have been too promiscuous with the wrong people. Anyway, they’re all stuck here in this primitive prison in the outback with two cruel male guards and one incompetent female “nurse”. They are forced into hard labor building a gravel road by hand, they sleep in small shacks and are locked in every night, they are fed poorly, and beaten by the cruelest guard. The purported owners of the prison are due to arrive any day but never do. Summer turns to fall and then turns to winter and they all (even the guards) realize they have been left here to starve. As the food becomes scarce and their health deteriorates, one woman takes charge, finding a way to feed them using rusted animal traps. Here’s where it becomes a sort of female Lord of the Flies. Crazy stuff happens, filled with themes of power, politics, and survival of the fittest. Then a bus shows up….
Here are some lines:
she found herself in yet another room. Full of bald and frightened girls.
Would it be said they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the centre, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things? As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves.
The girls’ bodies have hardened, thickened with muscle. Their skin has grown tougher under manual work and sunburn and dirt. Most of them have lost their bonnets, and they scratch furiously at their thick, ragged new hair. Somebody always now has lice.
Joy’s voice strengthens and soars, crying out with bitter fury, crying out the scars on her captive heart, singing up from the depths of her despair.
there was a whiff of something bad coming. Something worse than usual.
in one glance Yolanda discovered what she had already known to be true: by winter the food would be running out.
It was men who started wars, who did the world’s killing and raping and maiming.
When they found her, her hands were still gripped around the wires of the (electric) fence, though her head lolled back now. She hung there, bowing and bending the wires. Verla looked past the strange stiff body of Hetty at the world beyond the fence.
Dinosaur Ridge and Dakota Ridge near Morrison – It has been 12 days since my steroid injection for the torn meniscus in my knee. I was doing some walking in the neighborhood and some rowing on the machine, but this would be my first real test to see if hiking is going to be possible without surgery. This ended up being the perfect test. Lots of up and down, very rocky and uneven ground, plus it rained, making everything slippery. So far, the knee has passed the test. I felt it a little bit later that night, but overall, it was great. Steroids are amazing. Just ask Barry Bonds.
The hike starts along the paved Dinosaur Ridge Road which is used by hikers, bikers, and tour vehicles from the Dinosaur Ridge Visitor’s Center. There are several interesting displays along this road with dinosaur footprints, volcanic ash, and fossils. I stopped to read many of the interpretive signs as a light rain fell. After a half mile, I turned sharply left onto the northern section of the Dakota Ridge trail. You’ve probably seen these ridges in Golden and Morrison. They almost look like dinosaur backs rising out of the earth. The Dakota Ridge trail follows along one of these ridges for a little over two miles of up and down hiking with nice views of Red Rocks Amphitheater and Mount Morrison to the west, Golden to the north, and Morrison to the south. The only unfortunate aspect of this hike is that it’s right in the crux between the I-70 and CO-470, so the traffic noise is incessant. The bird songs are barely audible through the traffic noise. But a sense of peace wasn’t the goal on this hike. It was to test my knee and to visit these interesting rock formations with dinosaur fossils. This is evidently a big mountain biking area, but the rain made this a hikers only day. A total of 5 miles with around 1,000 feet of elevation gain.
Vigil by George Saunders – I reserved this book on my Kindle/Libby app months ago, when it was first published early this year. I had no idea what it was about, but I’ll read anything by George Saunders. He’s a great short story writer and his only other novel before this one (Lincoln in the Bardo) won the Booker Prize in 2017. He’s also fairly well known for this graduation speech about kindness. So imagine my giddiness when I slowly discovered that this was a book about climate change (and the arc of a life, free will, redemption, atonement, capitalism, and the environment). And as George Saunders normally does, he adds some bitingly dark humor into all of this. There are some very mixed reviews out there on this book and it seems that folks either love it or hate it. But it hit the nail right on the head for me. I subscribe to Emily Atkins’ Substack titled Heated and she has been writing for years on the hand that fossil fuel executives have had in creating the climate crisis (not just for providing oil and gas, but for their denial and disinformation of the science even when their own scientists have proven that the world is heating due mainly to fossil fuels). This book sort of summarizes all of her work into a very entertaining 150 pages that involves an oil tycoon on his death bed, a ghost spirit trying to comfort him in his dying days, and several other ghost spirits who are trying to get him to admit to all the wrong he did by creating disinformation on climate change (notably, I don’t remember ever reading the words “climate change” or “fossil fuels” being mentioned one time in the book – it is just sort of implied).
I loved his table of contents:
Dedication
Chapter 1
About the Author
That was the whole table of contents. Hilarious. The story starts with Jill, a spirit whose human life ended at the age of 22 in a terrible tragedy, falling to earth outside of a mansion in Texas. Her spirit job is to comfort people in their dying hours to ease their transition to death. She has done this 342 times already since her human death in 1976. This time, her “charge” is an 87 year old oil tycoon named KJ Boone (could there be any better name for an oil tycoon?). Several other spirits interrupt her peaceful goal of comforting this man on his deathbed. Those spirits are trying to get the man to admit to all the wrong he’s done in his life (denying the science, creating disinformation campaigns to extend the profits of his industry, etc.). But he didn’t become an industry leader without reason. He fights all these spirits with the same talking points he’s established throughout his life, refusing to budge on this, even though Jill (the comforting spirit) starts to hear him doubt himself because she’s able to inhabit his thoughts. So that is one of the two main plot points in the book: An oil tycoon debating with spirits that are trying to show him the damage that his work has created on people and the environment. The other main plot point is Jill herself. She is still a 22 year old in her spirit life, and since she died in 1976 knows nothing about climate change. She just wants to comfort him. But all of these stories she hears starts to nag at her. She speeds back to her hometown in Indiana (sprits can fly very fast) and doesn’t recognize anything. There seem to be fewer trees, the mall is gone, the hat factory gone, the river was dammed, and there is something called a data center which she has no idea about. She encounters others in the town (spirits and otherwise), including the man that killed her. So I also loved this whole coming of age story about Jill’s spirit. These two plot points combine with a variety of funny, tragic, and crazy spirits to portray the life of a man who lifted himself out of poverty to create a lush life for himself and his family; but at what cost? Fascinating. Here are some lines:
That’s what powerful men did. Stayed quiet. Held secrets. Ran things from inside a tight protective circle, making perilous decisions only they were savvy enough to make, leaving normal morality to the mere earthlings, who lived and ate and died dully down below, never knowing the extent to which they were being shielded by a beneficent distant pulling of strings.
My eyes (as they had done in that previous realm, when I found myself insulted) filled with tears. Causing a delicious feeling of sudden power to arise in him. Airhead, he whispered fiercely. Space case, dumb bunny. Then, as if to drive in the knife: Stupid b!tch.
Suddenly I knew what had happened, and why: Ha ha, oh gosh, I realized, I’d been blown up. Blown up by (I suddenly knew his name) Paul Bowman, who’d meant to blow Lloyd up but had blown me up instead, because Lloyd and I had switched cars, just for today, so Lloyd could take mine to the shop.
You stand accused, I said. Of something. Something involving the weather. You find yourself reluctant to engage with these accusations, lest they invalidate all that you have accomplished.
Proud of the many clever concealments, distortions, and misrepresentations we cooked up, as we attempted to craft a “less negative take,” to “gain some breathing room for this essential industry we all love” and “push back against the hyperbole” regarding “this whole gosh-darned issue”!
On Sunday nights: three TV dinners on three TV trays just in time for “Bonanza.”
You didn’t have to go through any of this, did you? he said. The long death. Lucky you. Just blew right up. Bang: gone. Lucky me, I said dryly.
[oil tycoon’s daughter trying to explain what her dad did]: Was just terrific at, uh, taking a unit or division and, um, as she understood it, making it more efficient, or profitable? By trimming things back, kind of ruthlessly, and, uh, getting rid of the, like, dead wood? Which, come to think of it, was another group of enemies he might consider forgiving: those two hundred numbnuts he’d fired just before Christmas that one super-cold winter, who’d formed a sad little club and sometimes came over together, all wearing parkas, to picket their dang house.
he’d kept snapping at Randy, her earlier-mentioned prom date, just because Randy had done his science fair project on electric cars and was sort of fired up about it. Randy had been seventeen, Daddy. Was it so important that he be proven wrong? On the night of her prom?
Let’s say (just say, for the sake of argument) that he’d been “wrong.” About certain things. Wrong in arguing against a view that now, more and more, seemed to have become, by some sort of public consensus, the prevailing/mainstream view. A view supported by the (yes, he could say it now) apparent increase (anecdotal, but still) in the frequency of certain extreme weather events, occurring so frequently recently that, before his illness, he’d gotten in the habit of turning off the news before the weather came on.
Only a handful of people in all of history had ever known that kind of power. Presidents, maybe, depending on the era; kings, sure, but their kingdoms were not worldwide; movie stars and such, but that was all superficial crap. He spoke and markets moved; called a king and the king picked up. He’d decided we were sticking with oil and, godd@mn it, we’d stuck with oil and the world got twenty, thirty good years in exchange. You’re welcome. You’re welcome, world. Goodbye, beloved hunk of rock, overrun of late with jabbering moronic ingrates.
Mother Cabrini Shrine near Golden – Since I was in the area after my Dakota Ridge hike, I decided to visit the Mother Cabrini Shrine nearby. I hadn’t heard about this place until my wife’s cousin told me about it recently. The quiet and peacefulness here made up for all the traffic noise on the Dakota Ridge trail. Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850 –1917), also known as Mother Cabrini, was the first American to be recognized by the Catholic Church as a Saint (she was born in Italy but became a US citizen in 1909). Her work establishing charitable organizations for poor Italian immigrants resulted in the Vatican naming her the patron saint of immigrants. Most of the visitors I saw on this day spoke Spanish, so I assumed they were immigrants paying homage to their patron saint (psst, don’t tell ICE about this place). There are several shrines around the world honoring her life. This one is on property that Mother Cabrini purchased in 1910 to serve as a summer camp for orphan girls from Denver. The camp was converted into a shrine in 1946 once Cabrini was canonized. It’s in a beautiful location on Lookout Mountain and the grounds are well cared for. I climbed the 373 stairs to the shrine’s statue as a post-hike test of my knee. There are replicas of the Stations of the Cross during the climb to the top. After visiting the statue, I wandered around the chapel and spring area before finishing up in the meditation garden which seriously forces you into a state of meditation as the path meanders through the garden. I’d like to visit this peaceful place again and check out the museum next time. And possibly spend a bit more time meditating in this pretty place which is held sacred by many. One interesting story I read about Mother Cabrini is that she had reservations aboard the Titanic's maiden (and tragic) voyage to travel to New York on one of her many trans-Atlantic crossings, but due to problems at one of her hospitals in Chicago she changed to an earlier crossing on a different boat. Divine intervention?
The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover – What a strange book this was. The more I think about it, the more I like it. There are LOTS of baseball books out there. Goodreads has its list of best baseball books and it’s 755 books long! This book was ranked #24 on that list. It was published in 1968, probably one of the last years that baseball was the real American pastime (the first NFL Super Bowl was the year before and eventually the NFL took over as America’s pastime). I vividly remember bringing my transistor radio (Google it) to school to listen to the great 1968 World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Detroit Tigers. Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Al Kaline, Willie Horton, Mickey Lolich. Baseball at its best. The story starts out in the middle of a rookie pitcher having a perfect game through seven innings. Perfect games are rare; only 24 have been pitched in 151 years. A perfect game means you get every batter out through nine innings. No walks, no errors, no runners ever reach base. As you become invested in this perfect game, strange things start to happen. The narrator goes to get some takeout between innings at a local restaurant. Wait, how does he have time to do this? Eventually you come to realize that J. Henry Waugh is playing this baseball game on his kitchen table using dice and scorecards and pencils and an elaborate set of league rules that he has invented. Somehow this perfect game, played with only dice gets very tense, until the last out. Later in the “season” that same rookie pitcher is killed by a pitch to the head due to three perfect dice rolls of all ones. Henry is devastated that this young (imaginary) pitcher is killed. He was the son of one of the league’s best pitchers in its 56 seasons. Henry goes to the local bar and gets drunk. He shows up late to his job as an accountant and is chastised by his boss. You begin to realize that Henry is obsessed with his made up baseball league and his real life and his fantasy life begin to blend into one. His friends ask him why he’s always talking and singing to himself (one of the former players in his fantasy league made up raunchy songs about past players). Henry not only plays the games on his kitchen table, but he also writes up biographical information on all the players and their families. He uses an insurance actuarial table to determine when older players die. He conducts off-season trades and has rookies breaking through and veteran players aging out. Remember, this was written in 1968, well before all the fantasy leagues we know about today and well before computers made all of it easier to do. He uses pencil and paper (and dice)!
But this really wasn’t a book about baseball. It was a book about a lonely, depressed man obsessing with something so much that he starts to go a bit mad. His lonely life in a dingy apartment, visiting dive bars, going home with prostitutes, and commuting to his job as an accountant is only brightened by his baseball league which he sometimes plays all hours of the night. It’s something he can control, something he owns. But he eventually loses control. One great scene was when his friend from work (one of his only friends in real life) sort of invites himself over to Henry’s house to play this game. It didn’t go well. His friend didn’t understand the rules and spilled beer on the scoresheets. Henry lost it. The book ends with a strange chapter that turned out to be set 100 years in the future as the Universal Baseball League is commemorating the death of that rookie pitcher. Presumably Henry is dead by now, but his baseball league goes on. Crazy.
Nighthawk Loop near Lyons – This was test number two for my knee, a long hike with some elevation gain. It passed again! I’m not sure if it was the steroid shot or the meniscus healing on its own, but either way it felt fine during and after the hike. I’ve hiked this trail in the winter, fall, and now the late spring. It’s a pretty hike just outside of Lyons. The Hall Ranch Open Space is a big mountain biking destination, but the Nighthawk trail is for hikers and horses only. I headed up the 4.5 miles, and 1,500 feet of elevation gain (most of that gain is in the first 3 miles) on this late spring day with temps in the lower 60s at the start and the mid 70s at the finish. There is a bench at the top with perfect views of the big mountains to the west. I hung out here for a while to rest and take in all these views in perfect solitude. I only saw two other hikers, two trail runners, and one horseback rider on this day. There were a few mountain bikers on the Bitterbrush trail, but I used maintenance roads to complete the 8.5-mile loop rather than the bike-heavy Bitterbrush trail. After nearly a month off from hiking, these last two hikes this week have left me with sore calves, but with a big smile on my face, knowing that I should be able to hike this summer, barring any setbacks with my knee. No animal sightings today, and the rain held off until I finished my hike, then it dumped on this dry land, providing some relief. We need more rain!
A Mercy by Toni Morrison – I’ve read two other Toni Morrison books; Beloved and The Bluest Eye. Both were great. Beloved was set eight years after the end of the civil war and The Bluest Eye was set in the time after the Great Depression and before World War II. Life was hard for most people during these times, but even more so for black people as racism was rampant after the end of the Civil War and of course continues to this day. I remember writing in my review of The Bluest Eye that, “The fact that Critical Race Theory is controversial is really just another sign that racism still exists in this country. The truth of history is messy and people can’t always handle the truth.” For A Mercy, Morrison wanted to delve into slavery less as an issue of race than of vulnerability. Set in colonial America in the 1680s and 1690s, every woman, and some men, in this book were someone’s indentured property. Jacob Vaark, a farmer and tradesman purchased his then 16-year-old wife Rebekka from England. Lina was a Native American woman who had survived a smallpox epidemic in her tribe. Sorrow was a young black girl who had survived a shipwreck of a slave ship. Florens was a young black girl who was given to Jacob Vaark by a Spanish landowner as partial payment for debts owed (Florens’ mother offered her daughter in lieu of herself because she knew that Vaark was a kinder European than the Spanish landowner). There are also a couple of white indentured servants who help at the Vaark farm, and a free black man who did work as a blacksmith for wages. While Jacob Vaark was alive, all of these sort of orphans from different roots became a little family, helping each other and trying to find as much satisfaction as life could possibly offer during these times of disease, crop failures, and violence. However, when Vaark dies of smallpox their coalition fractures for different reasons. Jacob and Rebekka had their own sorrows together as they lost 3 infant sons and their five-year-old daughter to disease and accidents.
It was not an easy book to read even though it was under 200 pages. Half of the book is narrated by Florens, who has written her life story on the walls of her dead owner’s abandoned house using a nail. The first chapter was impossible to understand until I read it two more times, once halfway through the book and a third time after finishing the book. It reminded me of the first chapter in William Faulkner’s The Sound the Fury; frustratingly difficult to understand, but once you know more, it’s sort of phenomenal. The other half of the book is written in third person and is much easier to understand and helps to fill in all the blanks of the history of these women whose lives were so difficult, but who also found, for a time, a bit of peace and happiness. Here are some lines:
… cheerful as a bluebird. Or used to be. Three dead infants in a row, followed by the accidental death of Patrician, their five-year-old, had unleavened her.
We never shape the world she says. The world shapes us.
… her prospects were servant, prostitute, wife, and although horrible stories were told about each of those careers, the last one seemed safest.
They would come with languages that sounded like dog bark; with a childish hunger for animal fur. They would forever fence land, ship whole trees to faraway countries, take any woman for quick pleasure, ruin soil, befoul sacred places and worship a dull, unimaginative god. They let their hogs browse the ocean shore turning it into dunes of sand where nothing green can ever grow again. Cut loose from the earth’s soul, they insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans they were insatiable. It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit out a horribleness that would destroy all primary peoples.
Lina came and arranged jewelry and food on the grave, along with scented leaves, telling her that the boys and Patrician were stars now, or something equally lovely: yellow and green birds, playful foxes or the rosetinted clouds collecting at the edge of the sky. Pagan stuff, true, but more satisfying than the I-accept-and will-see-you-at-Judgment-Day prayers Rebekka had been taught and heard repeated by the Baptist congregation.
I don’t know who is your father. It was too dark to see any of them. They came at night and took we three including Bess to a curing shed. Shadows of men sat on barrels, then stood. They said they were told to break we in. There is no protection. To be female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal.
Until next time, happy reading and rambling!
I've always wanted to put together a playlist of songs that pay homage to our Earth in some way, whether it's about the environment or climate change or just a nice song about nature. Every time I hear a song like this I think to myself, that would be a good song for that new playlist. Well, I finally made that playlist. There are currently 23 songs on the list so obviously I can't feature them all here. So I will feature 4 of my favorites from my younger days. There are LOTS of new artists making music about climate change (Billie Eilish, Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle, etc.), so if you have Spotify here is a link to my new playlist on climate and the environment. Meanwhile, here are four oldies but goodies:
Paradise by John Prine - Prine received a nasty note from the owner of the Peabody coal mine after he published this song in 1971, so you just know it hit home hard. Sample 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
Here's his original version:
And I love this version by Sturgill Simpson:
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 one thousand miles a day?
Nothing But Flowers by The Talking Heads - I've always loved this song from this iconic band. It was published the year my son was born (1988) and I remember getting lost in the lyrics about an imagined world of the future which was something I was thinking about a lot then with a newborn and a two-year-old. I was reminded of it recently when I saw David Byrne play it with his new band in a Tiny Desk Concert. Sample lyrics:
This used to be real estateNow, it's only fields and treesWhere? Where is the town?Now, it's nothing but flowers
Here is their original version:
But I really love this version with David Byrne's new band, which looks like a beautiful cross section of America, from their Tiny Desk Concert in December of 2025. Byrne is 74 and brilliant, and still making great art. In 2017 he wrote this really good opinion piece on how technology was impacting human interactions. Check it out here. The song starts at the 7:54 mark, but I highly encourage you to to listen to the whole 20 minute concert which is uplifting and fun (the last song, Life During Wartime, is incredible). You'll not find a larger group of musicians having so much fun with their craft:
Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell - You all know this 1970 song. It may have been the first successful song about how humans have wrecked the environment. But I'm pretty sure that when I was 12 years old and heard this song, I mainly thought about that unique voice and that guitar making perfect music. Sample lyrics:
Don't it always seem to goThat you don't know what you've got 'til it's goneThey paved paradisePut up a parking lot
And that’s nearly exactly how I felt upon reading this. But when it finally ended I started trying to process it and came up with several ideas: Maybe it’s about two guys in Purgatory who keep waiting for their entry to heaven (Godot); or maybe it’s really two spirits in a graveyard (they never move beyond one small scene near a tree); or maybe it’s like Groundhog Day where they keep experiencing the same day but in slightly different ways each time. As I dug into the analysis of this short play, I discovered that there are thousands of pages of interpretations of this simple little story. The Wiki page is probably longer than the written play itself! Beckett was always amused at how complicated people kept making his simply story.
It’s a story of two lifelong friends, Vladimir and Estragon, who meet in a field by a leafless tree. Estragon had slept in a ditch after having been assaulted. They talk about their lives, their thoughts, and the fact that they were both waiting for Godot to show up even though neither of them really know this guy. Estragon’s thoughts are mostly physical in nature (I’m hungry, my feet hurt) while Vladimir’s thoughts are mostly philosophical. This distinction is subtly shown in the way Estragon is always fussing with his boots while Vladimir is always fussing with his hat. It reminded me of Raphael's famous painting, The School of Athens, which I was lucky enough to see in person at The Vatican years ago. In that painting, Plato is pointing to the sky, whereas Aristotle is gesturing towards the ground. It is thought to be a depiction of their different philosophies: Plato's was more theoretical vs Aristotle's more grounded. There are three other characters in the play: Pozzo and his slave Lucky, and a messenger boy who eventually delivers the message that Godot won’t be coming today but will come tomorrow. When they receive word that Godot is not coming today, but tomorrow, they decide to meet again the next day (in the play, neither leaves the stage at this point). The “next day” as they meet, the tree now has some leaves on it (hmmm). They continue with their various conversations and Pozzo and Lucky drop by again, except this time Pozzo is blind and Lucky is deaf. What?! Then the messenger boy shows up again to tell them Godot isn’t coming but will come tomorrow. The boy doesn’t remember telling them this same thing the day before which greatly upsets Vladimir. So, they decide to meet again the next day, only with a rope so that they can hang themselves on the tree. Play ends. Fascinating. Now I know what all the fuss was about. Here are some lines:
VLADIMIR: You should have been a poet.
ESTRAGON: I was. (Gesture towards his rags.) Isn’t that obvious?
ESTRAGON: Let’s go.
VLADIMIR: We can’t.
ESTRAGON: Why not?
VLADIMIR: We’re waiting for Godot.
POZZO: I too would be happy to meet him. The more people I meet the happier I become. From the meanest creature one departs wiser, richer, more conscious of one’s blessings. Even you . . . (he looks at them ostentatiously in turn to make it clear they are both meant) . . . even you, who knows, will have added to my store.
ESTRAGON: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?
As the novel begins you are introduced to Yolanda and Verla who have been heavily drugged and have no idea where they are. The “guards” are rough with them and forcefully shave their heads. Eventually they are put in a room with several other women whose heads have also been shaved. As the drugs wear off, they start to try and figure out what’s happening to them. They are all in a sort of prison deep in the bush in Australia. There is an electric fence surrounding the grounds. The two male guards are cruel, one more so than the other. There are some flashbacks to the women's previous lives and although it’s never explicitly stated, it seems that they are all in this prison because they had accused powerful men of sexually abusing them; but it’s never really clear and possibly it’s because they have been too promiscuous with the wrong people. Anyway, they’re all stuck here in this primitive prison in the outback with two cruel male guards and one incompetent female “nurse”. They are forced into hard labor building a gravel road by hand, they sleep in small shacks and are locked in every night, they are fed poorly, and beaten by the cruelest guard. The purported owners of the prison are due to arrive any day but never do. Summer turns to fall and then turns to winter and they all (even the guards) realize they have been left here to starve. As the food becomes scarce and their health deteriorates, one woman takes charge, finding a way to feed them using rusted animal traps. Here’s where it becomes a sort of female Lord of the Flies. Crazy stuff happens, filled with themes of power, politics, and survival of the fittest. Then a bus shows up….
Here are some lines:
she found herself in yet another room. Full of bald and frightened girls.
Would it be said they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the centre, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things? As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves.
The girls’ bodies have hardened, thickened with muscle. Their skin has grown tougher under manual work and sunburn and dirt. Most of them have lost their bonnets, and they scratch furiously at their thick, ragged new hair. Somebody always now has lice.
Joy’s voice strengthens and soars, crying out with bitter fury, crying out the scars on her captive heart, singing up from the depths of her despair.
there was a whiff of something bad coming. Something worse than usual.
in one glance Yolanda discovered what she had already known to be true: by winter the food would be running out.
It was men who started wars, who did the world’s killing and raping and maiming.
When they found her, her hands were still gripped around the wires of the (electric) fence, though her head lolled back now. She hung there, bowing and bending the wires. Verla looked past the strange stiff body of Hetty at the world beyond the fence.
The hike starts along the paved Dinosaur Ridge Road which is used by hikers, bikers, and tour vehicles from the Dinosaur Ridge Visitor’s Center. There are several interesting displays along this road with dinosaur footprints, volcanic ash, and fossils. I stopped to read many of the interpretive signs as a light rain fell. After a half mile, I turned sharply left onto the northern section of the Dakota Ridge trail. You’ve probably seen these ridges in Golden and Morrison. They almost look like dinosaur backs rising out of the earth. The Dakota Ridge trail follows along one of these ridges for a little over two miles of up and down hiking with nice views of Red Rocks Amphitheater and Mount Morrison to the west, Golden to the north, and Morrison to the south. The only unfortunate aspect of this hike is that it’s right in the crux between the I-70 and CO-470, so the traffic noise is incessant. The bird songs are barely audible through the traffic noise. But a sense of peace wasn’t the goal on this hike. It was to test my knee and to visit these interesting rock formations with dinosaur fossils. This is evidently a big mountain biking area, but the rain made this a hikers only day. A total of 5 miles with around 1,000 feet of elevation gain.
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| Dino bones! |
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| Rock art |
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| Rock art |
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| Rock art |
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| Steep start to the Dakota trail |
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| Mt Morrison covered in clouds |
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| Magpie |
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| Bikes to the left of me, hikers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you |
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| Gnarly trail |
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| Looking back along the ridge |
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| Gnarly tree |
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| Trail tailored for mountain bikes |
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| Nice green foothills (Red Rocks Amphitheater far left) |
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| Rock art |
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| Dino footprints! |
I loved his table of contents:
Dedication
Chapter 1
About the Author
That was the whole table of contents. Hilarious. The story starts with Jill, a spirit whose human life ended at the age of 22 in a terrible tragedy, falling to earth outside of a mansion in Texas. Her spirit job is to comfort people in their dying hours to ease their transition to death. She has done this 342 times already since her human death in 1976. This time, her “charge” is an 87 year old oil tycoon named KJ Boone (could there be any better name for an oil tycoon?). Several other spirits interrupt her peaceful goal of comforting this man on his deathbed. Those spirits are trying to get the man to admit to all the wrong he’s done in his life (denying the science, creating disinformation campaigns to extend the profits of his industry, etc.). But he didn’t become an industry leader without reason. He fights all these spirits with the same talking points he’s established throughout his life, refusing to budge on this, even though Jill (the comforting spirit) starts to hear him doubt himself because she’s able to inhabit his thoughts. So that is one of the two main plot points in the book: An oil tycoon debating with spirits that are trying to show him the damage that his work has created on people and the environment. The other main plot point is Jill herself. She is still a 22 year old in her spirit life, and since she died in 1976 knows nothing about climate change. She just wants to comfort him. But all of these stories she hears starts to nag at her. She speeds back to her hometown in Indiana (sprits can fly very fast) and doesn’t recognize anything. There seem to be fewer trees, the mall is gone, the hat factory gone, the river was dammed, and there is something called a data center which she has no idea about. She encounters others in the town (spirits and otherwise), including the man that killed her. So I also loved this whole coming of age story about Jill’s spirit. These two plot points combine with a variety of funny, tragic, and crazy spirits to portray the life of a man who lifted himself out of poverty to create a lush life for himself and his family; but at what cost? Fascinating. Here are some lines:
That’s what powerful men did. Stayed quiet. Held secrets. Ran things from inside a tight protective circle, making perilous decisions only they were savvy enough to make, leaving normal morality to the mere earthlings, who lived and ate and died dully down below, never knowing the extent to which they were being shielded by a beneficent distant pulling of strings.
My eyes (as they had done in that previous realm, when I found myself insulted) filled with tears. Causing a delicious feeling of sudden power to arise in him. Airhead, he whispered fiercely. Space case, dumb bunny. Then, as if to drive in the knife: Stupid b!tch.
Suddenly I knew what had happened, and why: Ha ha, oh gosh, I realized, I’d been blown up. Blown up by (I suddenly knew his name) Paul Bowman, who’d meant to blow Lloyd up but had blown me up instead, because Lloyd and I had switched cars, just for today, so Lloyd could take mine to the shop.
You stand accused, I said. Of something. Something involving the weather. You find yourself reluctant to engage with these accusations, lest they invalidate all that you have accomplished.
Proud of the many clever concealments, distortions, and misrepresentations we cooked up, as we attempted to craft a “less negative take,” to “gain some breathing room for this essential industry we all love” and “push back against the hyperbole” regarding “this whole gosh-darned issue”!
On Sunday nights: three TV dinners on three TV trays just in time for “Bonanza.”
You didn’t have to go through any of this, did you? he said. The long death. Lucky you. Just blew right up. Bang: gone. Lucky me, I said dryly.
[oil tycoon’s daughter trying to explain what her dad did]: Was just terrific at, uh, taking a unit or division and, um, as she understood it, making it more efficient, or profitable? By trimming things back, kind of ruthlessly, and, uh, getting rid of the, like, dead wood? Which, come to think of it, was another group of enemies he might consider forgiving: those two hundred numbnuts he’d fired just before Christmas that one super-cold winter, who’d formed a sad little club and sometimes came over together, all wearing parkas, to picket their dang house.
he’d kept snapping at Randy, her earlier-mentioned prom date, just because Randy had done his science fair project on electric cars and was sort of fired up about it. Randy had been seventeen, Daddy. Was it so important that he be proven wrong? On the night of her prom?
Let’s say (just say, for the sake of argument) that he’d been “wrong.” About certain things. Wrong in arguing against a view that now, more and more, seemed to have become, by some sort of public consensus, the prevailing/mainstream view. A view supported by the (yes, he could say it now) apparent increase (anecdotal, but still) in the frequency of certain extreme weather events, occurring so frequently recently that, before his illness, he’d gotten in the habit of turning off the news before the weather came on.
Only a handful of people in all of history had ever known that kind of power. Presidents, maybe, depending on the era; kings, sure, but their kingdoms were not worldwide; movie stars and such, but that was all superficial crap. He spoke and markets moved; called a king and the king picked up. He’d decided we were sticking with oil and, godd@mn it, we’d stuck with oil and the world got twenty, thirty good years in exchange. You’re welcome. You’re welcome, world. Goodbye, beloved hunk of rock, overrun of late with jabbering moronic ingrates.
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| Stairway leading to the shrine |
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| 373 steps and you're there! |
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| Ten commandments depicted around the shrine |
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| Mother Cabrini shrine |
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| Nice, peaceful views |
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| The chapel |
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| Peace garden |
But this really wasn’t a book about baseball. It was a book about a lonely, depressed man obsessing with something so much that he starts to go a bit mad. His lonely life in a dingy apartment, visiting dive bars, going home with prostitutes, and commuting to his job as an accountant is only brightened by his baseball league which he sometimes plays all hours of the night. It’s something he can control, something he owns. But he eventually loses control. One great scene was when his friend from work (one of his only friends in real life) sort of invites himself over to Henry’s house to play this game. It didn’t go well. His friend didn’t understand the rules and spilled beer on the scoresheets. Henry lost it. The book ends with a strange chapter that turned out to be set 100 years in the future as the Universal Baseball League is commemorating the death of that rookie pitcher. Presumably Henry is dead by now, but his baseball league goes on. Crazy.
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| Indian Lookout near the trailhead |
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| South St. Vrain Canyon |
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| Looking down at the trail I came up |
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| Lots of pretty meadows on top |
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| See? |
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| Snowcapped mountains |
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| Longs Peak on the right |
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| Meadows and mountains |
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| Longs Peak |
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| Nelson Cabin |
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| Nelson Cabin |
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| View of Coffintop Mountain, my birthday hike |
It was not an easy book to read even though it was under 200 pages. Half of the book is narrated by Florens, who has written her life story on the walls of her dead owner’s abandoned house using a nail. The first chapter was impossible to understand until I read it two more times, once halfway through the book and a third time after finishing the book. It reminded me of the first chapter in William Faulkner’s The Sound the Fury; frustratingly difficult to understand, but once you know more, it’s sort of phenomenal. The other half of the book is written in third person and is much easier to understand and helps to fill in all the blanks of the history of these women whose lives were so difficult, but who also found, for a time, a bit of peace and happiness. Here are some lines:
… cheerful as a bluebird. Or used to be. Three dead infants in a row, followed by the accidental death of Patrician, their five-year-old, had unleavened her.
We never shape the world she says. The world shapes us.
… her prospects were servant, prostitute, wife, and although horrible stories were told about each of those careers, the last one seemed safest.
They would come with languages that sounded like dog bark; with a childish hunger for animal fur. They would forever fence land, ship whole trees to faraway countries, take any woman for quick pleasure, ruin soil, befoul sacred places and worship a dull, unimaginative god. They let their hogs browse the ocean shore turning it into dunes of sand where nothing green can ever grow again. Cut loose from the earth’s soul, they insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans they were insatiable. It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit out a horribleness that would destroy all primary peoples.
Lina came and arranged jewelry and food on the grave, along with scented leaves, telling her that the boys and Patrician were stars now, or something equally lovely: yellow and green birds, playful foxes or the rosetinted clouds collecting at the edge of the sky. Pagan stuff, true, but more satisfying than the I-accept-and will-see-you-at-Judgment-Day prayers Rebekka had been taught and heard repeated by the Baptist congregation.
I don’t know who is your father. It was too dark to see any of them. They came at night and took we three including Bess to a curing shed. Shadows of men sat on barrels, then stood. They said they were told to break we in. There is no protection. To be female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal.
Until next time, happy reading and rambling!