September 2026
Books read:
- My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
- Gila: The Life and Death of an American River by Gregory McNamee
- All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
- Sawtooth Mountain near Ward (Sep 11)
- Gold Hill near Taos Ski Valley, NM (Sep 18)
Song(s) of the month: Favorite songs about parenthood
- Danny's Song by Loggins and Messina
- The Mother by Brandi Carlisle
- Excavate by Macklemore and Saint Claire
- Daughter by Loudon Wainwright III
- A Father and a Son by Loudon Wainwright III
- Beautiful Boy by John Lennon
September Summary:
This month, on Mexican Independence day, we welcomed our 5th grandchild into the world. Even though babies are born at the rate of 4 births per second around the world, it seems like a miracle each time. After a few back and forth trips to the hospital, both baby and mama (our daughter) are back home and healthy. Mom and dad are exhausted like all parents of a 2-year-old and a newborn. My wife and I have been in Taos for much of the month trying our best to help out where we can and stay out of the way when we can. It takes a village (or at least a village makes it easier). I've talked about this before, but much of the world (especially the US and Europe) has drifted away from extended families towards nuclear families since the end of World War II. Our individualist societies have forgotten all the advantages of extended families in pursuit of single family homes and privacy. There are still communities around the world where extended families live together and help each other with things like childcare and expenses, but it's rare in our country. Some indigenous people and some immigrant communities still practice the art of extended family living in this country, but they are far and few between, and probably based more on financial necessity. My wife's dream has always been to have a compound somewhere where all our kids and grandkids could live together and be a part of each other's lives. It's a pretty good dream.
Alas, the cycle of life also dictates that 2 people die every second in this world. A dear friend succumbed to cancer this month and I'm heartbroken for her and for her husband and children. Her husband is a great friend and former college roommate of mine. Sixty-eight is too young, especially for a person as goodhearted as she was. She leaves behind a trail of tears and a legacy of helping others. Just to give you an idea of her legacy, check out this beautiful tribute from the former Chairwoman of the White Mountain Apache Tribe. She was as strong-willed as she was kind, and she used to drive around in her car with a bumper sticker that read: "You don't need to vaccinate all of your kids, just the ones you want to keep." I wish more people in this world were like her; we would have far fewer problems.
This month my reading rewarded me with two great fiction books; one about a woman who overcame abuse and poverty and another whose disability didn't prevent her from resisting in war ravaged France during World War II. A nonfiction book took me along the Gila River in New Mexico and Arizona. Enjoy!
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Things My Grandkids Say - "I'm gonna kiss his face!!" That was my granddaughter's response when I asked what she was gonna do when her baby brother came home from the hospital. And she did.
Song(s) of the month: Favorite songs about parenthood
- Danny's Song by Loggins and Messina
- The Mother by Brandi Carlisle
- Excavate by Macklemore and Saint Claire
- Daughter by Loudon Wainwright III
- A Father and a Son by Loudon Wainwright III
- Beautiful Boy by John Lennon
The birth of our fifth grandchild evokes great emotion, and songs are the best expression of emotion that I know. There are thousands of songs about parenthood. I'm sure everyone could come up with at least 10 songs about it. I've left out some of the obvious ones here like Father and Son by Cat Stevens, Cats in the Cradle by Harry Chapin, Isn't She Lovely by Stevie Wonder, and The Circle Game by Joni Mitchell. Here are six lesser known songs about parenthood that are full of insight and emotion:
Danny's Song by Loggins and Messina - OK well maybe this song is pretty well known, but I still get teary-eyed every time I hear it. Maybe it's the music, which seems so perfect, but it's certainly the words too. Kenny Loggins was just starting out when he teamed up with Jim Messina (Poco, Buffalo Springfield) in the early 70s. Loggins wrote this song for his brother Danny who had a baby while Kenny was still in high school. Sample lyrics:
People smile and tell me I'm the lucky one
And we've only just begun
Think I'm gonna have a son
He will be like she and me, as free as a dove
Conceived in love
Sun is gonna shine above
People smile and tell me I'm the lucky one
And we've only just begun
Think I'm gonna have a son
He will be like she and me, as free as a dove
Conceived in love
Sun is gonna shine above
The Mother by Brandi Carlisle - I wrote about this song in my December 2020 blog a few months after I'd seen her in concert at Red Rocks. Here's what I said then: "It wasn’t until her 2018 masterpiece album, By the Way I Forgive You, that she reached superstar status. She won 3 Grammys for that album and was the most nominated woman at the 2019 Grammys. There are several great songs on that album, but for me The Mother is the best. It is perhaps the greatest and most perfectly descriptive song ever written about having a child." Here is just one of the many great verses:
The first things that she took from me were selfishness and sleep
She broke a thousand heirlooms I was never meant to keep
She filled my life with color, cancelled plans and trashed my car
But none of that is ever who we are
Excavate by Macklemore and Saint Claire - Macklemore has been in the news lately regarding his stance on Palestine. It's unfortunate now that in this day of political divisiveness, someone caring for kids dying is seen as making a political statement. He was kicked off of Ed Sheeran's tour because Robert Kraft didn't like his politics. I was disappointed in Sheeran's response, but glad to hear that others canceled their opening acts to Sheeran in support of Macklemore. He is probably most well known for his great song One Love which he sang with Mary Lambert. This song about life with Saint Claire (John Sinclair) is just as poignant and moving. Sample lyrics:
My greatest achievement isn't the dollars
My greatest achievement isn't the followers
My greatest achievement isn't the accolades
My greatest achievement is my daughter
Wakin' up in the morning, bein' a father
Watchin' the light kiss her eyelids
Daughter by Loudon Wainwright III and A Father and a Son by Loudon Wainwright III- Loudon Wainwright III is a great songwriter who has been writing and singing songs for nearly 60 years, yet many people have never heard of him. He seems to have a knack for writing about parenthood and I've included two of his songs, one about a young daughter and one about the challenges between an adolescent son and a middle aged father. Sample lyrics:
Daughter
That's my daughter in the water
Every time she fell I caught her
Every time she fell
That's my daughter in the water
I lost every time I fought her
I lost every time
A Father and a Son
I don't know what all of this fighting is for
But we're having us a teenage/middle-age war
I don't want to die and you want to live
It takes a little bit of take and a whole lot of give
It never really ends though each race is run
This thing between a father and a son
Maybe it's power, push and shove
Maybe it's hate, probably it's love
Beautiful Boy by John Lennon - About his son, Sean, this song was on the last album Lennon made before his tragic death. Like Danny's Song, both the music and the lyrics combine to make a perfect song about what it's like to be a parent and have your heart wandering around outside your body. Sample lyrics:
Before you cross the street
Take my hand
Life is what happens to you
While you're busy making other plans
But back to the mother’s visit. Lucy tries to get her mother to acknowledge some of the abuse, including being locked in her father’s truck all day long as a normal sort of punishment (including one time when there was a snake trapped in the truck with her). But her mom didn’t want to discuss any of this. So, they settled into a sort of gossip session about the people from their town. Although this wasn’t satisfying to Lucy, she loved just hearing her mother’s voice after so many years. They shared this traumatic past together (her mother perhaps even having had a traumatic childhood of her own, but of course she doesn’t talk about that) and sort of bonded over that by talking about other people in their lives at the time. You can feel the love they have for each other and come to understand her mother’s inability to say “I love you” or to acknowledge any difficult conversation. The fact that her mother flew for first time in her life and navigated New York City on her own to find her daughter in the hospital tells you all you need to know.
A very short and beautiful story about poverty, childhood trauma, and fraught relationships between mothers and daughters. Here are some lines:
Her being there, using my pet name, which I had not heard in ages, made me feel warm and liquid-filled, as though all my tension had been a solid thing and now was not.
when I see others walking with confidence down the sidewalk, as though they are free completely from terror, I realize I don’t know how others are. So much of life seems speculation.
Black Hawk was taken on a tour of cities after his capture. I read his autobiography as soon as I could. And I remembered the line he said: “How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.”
It has been my experience throughout life that the people who have been given the most by our government—education, food, rent subsidies—are the ones who are most apt to find fault with the whole idea of government. I understand this in a way.
because I didn’t have one growing up, I think I’ve never quite understood television…Whenever I was told to walk the halls for exercise, pushing my little apparatus of IV bags, I saw that most patients just stared at their televisions, and it made me feel very sad.
At our small wedding reception she said to a friend of hers, “This is Lucy.” She added, almost playfully, “Lucy comes from nothing.” I took no offense, and really, I take none now. But I think: No one in this world comes from nothing.
I don’t know the last time I saw this doctor. I went a few times in the years after my hospital stay, and then once when I called for an appointment they said he had retired and I could see his associate. I could have written a letter to him to tell him what he meant to me, but there were problems in my life and my concentration was not good. I never wrote him. I never saw him again. He was just gone, this dear, dear man, this friend of my soul in the hospital so long ago, disappeared. This is a New York story too.
Chrissie said, not long ago, about the husband I have now: “I love him, Mom, but I hope he dies in his sleep and then my stepmom can die too, and you and Dad will get back together.” I kissed the top of her head. I thought: I did this to my child.
I did a sort of reconnaissance hike back in July of 2025. On that hike, I went up the 3.5 mile road but then took a left along the Beaver Creek trail instead of straight on the Coney Flats trail. I discovered from that hike that the road would be impossible in my Subaru and also that mountain biking the trail would be miserable. I also discovered that on weekdays there weren’t many four wheelers up here. So with that intel in my back pocket, I drove to Beaver Reservoir and parked at the entrance to the four-wheel-drive road (Coney Flats Road) and started my march. In my July 2025 post I wrote that, “Beaver Reservoir is a pretty lake north of the Brainard Lake Recreation Area. Much of the surrounding area is privately owned by the American Legion which reserves much of the land for combat veterans.” This is a noble cause and I’m sure this area helps relieve vets suffering from PTSD. The reservoir was sadly only half the size it was last year due to the lack of snowfall in the Colorado mountains last winter.
The walk up the 3.5 mile road took about an hour and a half and it was fine. A slight uphill grade through the forest but with LOTS of rocks. At the end of this road is Coney Flats, and it is one of the most beautiful places in Colorado. Coney Creek floods out onto a plain here and the jagged mountain tops of the Indian Peaks are impressive, including of course Sawtooth Mountain, looking like Yosemite’s Half Dome in the distance; and looking impossibly hard to climb. After crossing a very rickety bridge across the flooded plain you start climbing a bit more steeply, but not as bad as I’d predicted. The entire last 4 miles is a pretty walk, surrounded by high mountains as you traverse this beautiful valley which heads up to Buchanan Pass. At this point the trail gets extremely steep and off trail up to the summit of Sawtooth. As I was crossing through this valley, I thought that it looked very moosey but I didn’t see any moose (until I headed back the other way). I saw plenty of pikas and marmots above the tree line along with a total of maybe 15 backpackers. September is an ideal month to backpack (less rain, still plenty of daylight, and decent temperatures), plus I think you no longer need a permit up here after August. There are some classic multi day routes that take you across the Continental Divide. I stopped and talked to a ranger who told me she’d been on a five day trek and that it was starting to get too cold in the mornings for her taste.
I stopped at Buchanan Pass to take a breather and to psych myself up for the very intimidating looking hike up to the summit…and also to brace myself against the 40-50 mph winds up here. The off trail section climbs over 500 feet in less than half a mile, so not terrible, but one stretch is very steep and requires lots of rest stops. The last 100 yards or so after the false summit is all rock scrambling, but only class 1 at the most. You just have to watch your footing. The summit is exactly how I pictured it; steep drop off cliffs to the south and a smooth curve downward towards Buchanan Pass. The views are tremendous in every direction. I was in between two peaks I’ve climbed in the past with my daughter-in-law (Mt Audubon and St. Vrain Peak). I would have loved to stay up here longer but the wind was starting to make my fingers numb even though it was probably just in the 50s. I have to remember gloves on these peaks, no matter what time of year.
On the long walk back I ran into three moose, one big bull and two females. They were all a bit too close to the trail for my taste, but it is always fascinating and exciting to see these huge animals up close. My knee started bothering me only during the last couple of miles, so it held up pretty good overall, considering the distance and elevation gain. I was happy to slip into my comfy Subaru for the pretty drive back home, taking a parting photo of Sawtooth with a depleted Beaver Reservoir in the foreground. I said to myself, wow, I finally climbed that mountain!
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| Sawtooth from Beaver Reservoir |
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| Rickety bridge across the flooded plain of Coney Flats |
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| Sawtooth from Coney Flats |
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| Coney Flats |
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| That's the valley I walked through |
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| Great views from the tree line |
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| Beaver Reservoir waaay down there |
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| Just gorgeous |
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| Coney Lake far below |
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| A great sky today |
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| Sawtooth from Buchanan Pass |
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| Tiny glacier is just about gone |
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| Big bull moose on the hike out |
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| Gorgeous valley |
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| One last shot on the drive out |
The Gila River (and the book) begins in the mountains of southwestern New Mexico in what is now called the Gila Wilderness (thanks to Aldo Leopold who acquired this designation years ago as the first wilderness area in the United States). Side note: In college I would spend my annual spring break backpacking along the Middle Fork of the Gila River and came to love this place. It flows (flowed) down those mountains, through southern Arizona, just south of Phoenix and empties into the Colorado River near Yuma. It was once a navigable river but a combination of bad farming habits, mining, bad cattle management, and the voracious thirst of the 5th largest city in the US conspired to turn the river in Arizona into a dry riverbed for most years (except during damaging floods). One of my favorite stories in the book, which I had heard before was of German prisoners in a prison near the Gila in the 1940s. They had an old map of Arizona and saw that if they escaped, they could float down the Gila all the way to the Colorado River and then to the Gulf of California to freedom. When they got to the river, it was just a trickle, and they were captured soon after where they complained about the lousy maps.
The Akimel O’odham (Pima) natives made their living for generations along the Gila, using its water sparingly for their drought intensive crops that not only fed their people, but also the many Spanish, Mexican, then American settlers who passed through. It wasn’t until the 20th century that the river could no longer feed their people, and they ended up relying on government support like so many others of the native people who were uprooted from their homelands. There are so many great stories in this relatively small (around 200 pages) book. Famous people throughout the West make an appearance; Coronado, Maros de Niza, Geronimo, Billy the Kid, Kit Carson, James Pattie Ohio. A who’s who of the American southwest. Native Americans, Spanish, Mexicans, French trappers, American pioneers, miners, gold rushers, ranchers, and farmers. The famous cattle vs sheep feuds make an appearance. And of course, the telegraph and the World Wars with their critical need of copper which Arizona had in abundance along the Gila River and its tributaries. The Morenci Mine in eastern Arizona is the only copper mine in the world’s top ten that is in the United States. It sits on the San Francisco River, a major tributary of the Gila.
It’s a timeless story about greed, water in the west, and ignorance. Here are some lines:
Until recently, almost within living memory, the Gila and its tributaries formed the most important river system in the Southwestern Heartland draining an area of 80,000 square miles, a little larger than the area of England and Scotland combined, they marked the boundaries between peoples, contained invaders from north and south and acted as an avenue for the communication of biological and cultural information.
Aldo Leopold quote: “There were once men capable of inhabiting a river without disrupting the harmony of its life.”
Old Dine prophecy: when the trees die, the humans are next
The Gila River was once the boundary between the US and Mexico for 4 years after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo until the Gadsden purchase of 1852 made in part to mollify southern congressmen who wanted to build a railroad along the 32nd parallel.
In the 1870s, copper became an important ore largely through the advance of the telegraph, which required copper wire. As a result, the huge mines at Clifton and Morenci’s twin towns near the confluence of the upper Gila and San Francisco rivers were born. Within a few years, these and other mines had stripped away whole mountains, diverted rivers for hydraulic mining, and chewed up great forests.
Ralph Waldo Emerson quote: the history of man, is a series of conspiracies to win from nature some advantage without paying for it
Borrowing from Moorish Spain by way of New Mexico, the Mormons established the rotating office of water master or major domo, who had near dictatorial powers with respect to the desert's most valuable treasure.
Geronimo was born near the source of the Gila River, about 1823, and he would often return to his natal ground in adulthood, fleeing the pursuing US Army to roll on the ground and thus cloak himself with his ancestral dirt. Trained as a shaman, he had been an unforgiving warrior since his early manhood, after Mexican soldiers who had come to the headwaters murdered his mother, wife and 3 children.
In 1938 the Coolidge dam finally strangled the last of the water out of the Gila
"Arizona needs only water and climate to make it a paradise,” one booster proclaimed, to which a local wag responds, “yes, and that's all hell needs too".
John Wesley Powell quote: “I tell you gentlemen , you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights for there is not sufficient water to supply the land."
It's mostly steep walking through the woods for the first 3.8 miles before you finally reach the tree line. It's really beautiful up here above the trees. There are spectacular ridges stretching out in several directions as you walk the last mile up to the top. I was walking through the clouds at this point and watching the weather, but there was only wind and very cool cloud formations as I reached the top. But once I started heading back down, the hail and rain started. I was mostly well prepared as the only thing I was missing was a pair of gloves. My hands were the only cold part of my body and I had four layers on, including a rain jacket. It rained off and on the rest of the way down, but the hail had stopped and it was mostly pleasant as the wind wasn't blowing down in the canyon. Saw some pikas but otherwise no other animal sightings but lots of elk poop and tracks.
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| Leaves starting to change on the way up |
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| Artsy shot as I got to the tree line |
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| Low clouds up high |
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| Gold Hill |
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| Great views out towards Red River |
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| I was on the other side of this ridge in June |
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| The clouds, sun and this ridge |
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| Beautiful amphitheater north of the ridge |
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| Lots of pictures of this ridge with the changing clouds |
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| See? |
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| Wind shelter on top, with trees changing color below |
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| Clouds were the star on this hike |
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| Uh oh, I'm gonna get wet |
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| Light changing |
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| Storm's a comin' |
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| I eventually got hailed and rained on |
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| ...but it was so worth it |
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| I didn't outrun it |
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| Like something out of Scotland |
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| A very dry Goose Lake below |
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| Oak leaves changing color |
All the Light We Cannot See is over 500 pages but is an easy-to-read book. The chapters are very short and they alternate between the stories of Marie-Laure, a young French girl who goes blind at the age of six and Werner, a young German orphan who develops a knack for fixing radios. So, a girl with no sight and a boy fascinated with sound.
The story begins in the French town of St. Malo as it's being bombed by US forces in August of 1944. After some harrowing scenes, it quickly cuts back to 1934 to fill in the blanks of the lives of these two who are 16 and 18 in that 1944 bombing. Marie-Laure lives in Paris with her father who works as a locksmith for the Museum of Natural History. Their lives are fairly idyllic (as much as can be with a blind child, a mother who died during childbirth and the scent of war in the air). Her father built her a model of their Paris neighborhood to help her navigate without sight. Werner lives in a coal mining town in a German orphanage with his sister Jutta. He repairs a broken radio and he and his sister listen to a science program broadcast from France. All the neighbors come to him to repair their radios.
Eventually Marie-Laure and her father have to move to St. Malo as the Germans invade Paris. Marie-Laure's great-uncle lives in St. Malo. One of the subplots in the book is about a famous diamond called the Sea of Flames. It's a diamond with a mythological history of protecting its keeper while destroying the loved ones of its keeper. The Museum of Natural History creates three copies of the diamond and in addition to the original, scatters them around France to avoid having the Germans obtain it. Marie-Laure's father has one of these copies or possibly the original as he escapes to St. Malo. Meanwhile Werner enters a prestigious Nazi engineering school where he is a star student and ends up in a German army outfit whose job is triangulating radio signals in order to find enemy radio transmissions.
After many adventures going back and forth between August 1944 and their history leading up to this time, the story converges. Werner's outfit is looking for illegal radio signals in St. Malo where Marie-Laure's great-uncle is sending those signals. It gets very tense as their lives converge. Werner finds the house, but he sees Marie-Laure and is mesmerized by her, so he doesn't reveal the location of the radio. What ensues between them is perhaps the shortest love story ever told as allied forces converge on St. Malo.
One would think the story ended when the allied forces arrived, but it continued and eventually Marie-Laure was saved and Werner was imprisoned and deathly ill. There are two follow-up scenes, one 30 years later in 1974 and another 60 years later in 2014. There are some fascinating themes in these chapters related to how technology has changed and how younger people can never know the struggles that people went through who survived that terrible war.
Here are some lines:
Right. Then straight. They walk up their street now, she is sure of it. One step behind her, her father tilts his head up and gives the sky a huge smile. Marie-Laure knows this even though her back is to him, even though he says nothing, even though she is blind—
In another half second her father’s hands are in her armpits, swinging her up, and Marie-Laure smiles, and he laughs a pure, contagious laugh, one she will try to remember all her life, father and daughter turning in circles on the sidewalk in front of their apartment house, laughing together while snow sifts through the branches above.
Their salutes are comical; their outfits verge on ridiculous. But Frau Elena watches the boys with wary eyes: not so long ago they were feral toddlers skulking in their cots and crying for their mothers. Now they’ve become adolescent thugs with split knuckles and postcards of the führer folded into their shirt pockets.
New rumors arrive. They rustle along the paths of the Jardin des Plantes and wind through the museum galleries; they echo in high dusty redoubts where shriveled old botanists study exotic mosses. They say the Germans are coming.
“You know what I used to listen to? On our radio? Before you ruined it?” “Hush, Jutta. Please.” “Broadcasts from Paris. They’d say the opposite of everything Deutschlandsender says. They’d say we were devils. That we were committing atrocities.
Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.
He thinks of the girl who may or may not be in the city behind him. He envisions her running her cane along the runnels. Facing the world with her barren eyes, her wild hair, her bright face. At least he protected the secrets of her house. At least he kept her safe.
“When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?”
Once she sees a row of three children facedown, backpacks on their backs. Her first thought is: Wake up. Go to school. Then she thinks: There could be food in those packs.
Jutta hears about boys, sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, terrified, homesick, with trembling eyes, who show up on the doorsteps of their mothers only to be hauled howling out of attics two days later and shot in the street as deserters.
Weeks go by when Jutta does not allow herself to think of the war, of Frau Elena, of the awful last months in Berlin. Now she can buy pork seven days a week. Now, if the house feels cold she twists a dial in the kitchen, and voilà.
He kisses her once on each cheek. “Until next week, Mamie.” She listens until his footsteps fade. Until all she can hear are the sighs of cars and the rumble of trains and the sounds of everyone hurrying through the cold
Until next time, happy reading and rambling!