Myth of the Automatic Earth
I should have seen Under African Skies, the movie about Paul Simon’s controversial album Graceland, on Mountainfilm Saturday.
It was a dry wind
And it swept across the desert
And it curled into the circle of birth
And the dead sand
Falling on the children
The mothers and the fathers
And the automatic earth . . .
Telluride had its very own haboob, or dust storm, on Saturday, as the sky turned gray and wind gusts in the 60s and 70s swirled through the streets, dropping branches and cutting power temporarily to the theaters. Instead, I saw it on Sunday night in the park, under a scimitar moon and brilliant, cold, dust-free skies. The automatic earth reset.
But is the earth automatic still? Will it be able to reset – its climate, its water, its ice – now that we’ve passed seven billion? That was the big question at this year’s gathering of films and film people. A significant percentage of the movies, and the presentations, were about artists, artists becoming activists, particularly when confronted with oppressive governments (Ai WeiWei: Never Sorry), with pigheaded injustice (Bidder 70), and with willful denial in the face of photographic evidence (Chasing Ice). Paul Simon, too, in 1985, defied an international embargo, and accusations he ripped off the natives, to make music with black South Africans in the midst of apartheid.
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slow-mo
The way we look to us all . . .
The way we look to Paul Ehrlich is morbidly funny. Ehrlich, the author of the 1968 mind-blower, The Population Bomb, told the symposium audience on Friday that there was in fact one “essential purpose to the automobile – as a place for American teens to have sex.”
Ehrlich was deadly serious, too. He insisted that “population and consumption cannot be separated . . . Starting a war over oil (to burn) is like starting a food war over cyanide (to eat),” he said.
“We will need many Uncle Tom’s Cabins to change the story” of our consumptive trajectory. We have had successes, he added, some hope hedging his bleak humor. “When the time was right, we have changed. We changed consumption patterns completely during World War II, for four years. We had the political will. Our biggest challenge now is to ripen the time. Like the civil rights movement. Like the fall of the Soviet Union.”
What if, a questioner in the audience asked, we found a completely clean energy source, like nuclear fusion? “It would be like giving an idiot child a machine gun,” Ehrlich responded. The consumption would reach berserker stage.
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby . . .
Journalist Richard Heinberg, author of The End of Growth, told the same symposium that we need to “contemplate a future without growth.” Though, “for politicians, including the Obama administration, there is no getting off the growth treadmill.”
Ehrlich interjected, “There are people in the administration who know the path is insane, and they tell him, and he believes them. But his political advisers tell him he can’t go there, or he won’t get re-elected.”
Poet/biologist Sandra Steingraber, of Cape Cod, was the subject of the film Living Downstream, which chronicled her ongoing struggle against bladder cancer and her investigation into the more than 100,000 toxic chemicals that have been introduced, with little understanding, from pole to pole. As a scientist she knows better than to blame her personal disease on environmental pollution, but her worry, her “living in ambiguity,” is a clear metaphor for the near panic she feels for the planet as a whole.
(My wife, Ellen, who had breast cancer in her 40s, remembers riding bikes with her friends in the cool fog behind the DDT truck on Long Island.)
Steingraber’s newest book is about fracking for natural gas. “We’ve got to stop blowing up the bedrock and setting the results on fire so we can turn on the lights,” she said from the stage at the Palm Theater, her face tight with anger.
Asked if there is a weak spot in the headlong rush to fracking in this country, she said, “Water. Four to 9 million gallons is required to frack each hole. And it’s poisoned. Half of it stays in the ground. Half comes back up, with other poisonous hydrocarbons like benzene. It cannot be cleaned. We’re taking water out of the water cycle forever. We have water to blow up the bedrock, but we don’t have water to grow food? I think most people won’t support that.”
The day I saw Steingraber speak happened to be Rachel Carson’s birthday. Rachel Carson, who was dying of breast cancer in 1963 as she testified before Congress about DDT and other pesticides in the food chain. Rachel Carson, who wrote: “Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.”
The Sierra Club once dubbed Steingraber “the new Rachel Carson.” But once Steingraber learned that the doyen of environmental groups had accepted $25 million from gas-driller Chesapeake Energy, she composed an open letter which began, “Dear, Sierra Club, I’m through with you. Call some other writer your new Rachel Carson . . . The hard truth: National Sierra Club served as the political cover for the gas industry and for the politicians who take their money and do their bidding.”
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry.
Grad Speech: Of Love and Labradoodles
Thank you for asking me here to deliver the commencement address at Colona University.
The CU graduating class may consist of only the one person, me – graduate and speaker; it is a little schizoid – but it reminds me of the very wise story my uncle’s second wife told about the cruise they took when her Powerball numbers came through at last and they were able to follow their dream of travelling to exotic shores. And she said: “The food was terrible. And the portions so small!”
They told me not to look directly at the eclipse Sunday. When I was in college we never trusted anyone over 30. Or what they told us. And look at us now! We may not have been the first generation to look right at the sun, but we very well may be the first generation not to outlive our parents. We may be the generation to break the bank of Medicare and Social Security. The Beatles told us, “All you need is love.” And that might be all we have left in the end.
We used to laugh at Chris Farley on Saturday Night Live talking about “living in a van down by the river!” Now, because we followed our bliss, that scenario is not actually out of the question for Ellen and me. We sold my VW microbus years ago, for a dollar. We liked the kid, and figured it was good karma. Now I guess we might have to look for another van.
Thank you also for the wonderful honorary degree. You could have asked Carlos Slim to jet in from Mexico and give your commencement speech. And he might have dropped a couple million of his telecom bucks on you for a real university building.
I know it was tough holding classes under that big sagebrush. But that toughness is going to serve you well out there in your future. That’s what I’m here today to talk about, the future. You need to be in on it. The one percent are not going to do it for you. Their money’s on vacation in the Caymans. You have to be paying attention. And taxes.
Be engaged with the world. Take the G8. Please. They’re meeting right now in Chicago. Deciding the future. Don’t blame Kobe. It was his teammates’ fault. Besides, he wasn’t in Chicago. He was in L.A. If the world were full of people as motivated, as blameless as Kobe Bryant, it would be a different place. For sure.
Greece is a slippery situation. There’s the Eurozone. But honestly, weren’t most of us immigrants from there to start with? We’re a nation of immigrants. Except for the Utes. But I guess they had to have come from somewhere, too. So there you have it.
In Pakistan (most of them emigrate to Britain) they just blocked Twitter for posting blasphemous images of the Prophet Mohammed. Any attempt to visually represent Mohammed is blasphemy. Have you followed that? Of course you have. On Facecrack. Or Frackbook. I can’t keep up. You young people invented multi-tasking. Just please don’t be doing it while driving. I have enough trouble keeping it on the road with two hands.
Then there’s gay marriage. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The President has come out in favor. And I see that Bristol Palin, on the other side, has pronounced the absolute value of “growing up in a mother/father home.”
Speaking of Wasilla, the Romney campaign has indicated a willingness to exhume the Rev. Jeremiah Wright scandal that worked so well for McCain/Palin in 2008. Apparently they want to bring up the subject of religion. This from an elder in a faith that baptizes dead people and believes in magic underwear.
No, dear graduate, you must set your sights high. You must raise your eyes to the mysteries of the universe. Who knows, you might someday unravel the mystery of Tiger Woods’ tragic decline. Or the mystery of all that CO2 up in the air.
You might be the archeologist who deciphers the truth of the labradoodle petroglyph in Horsefly Canyon. Or you might serve your fellow man by designing a missile defense system to keep the Front Range from stealing any more water from the Western Slope.
Above all, as you head out into the limitless world, do as I say, not as I do. Don’t ski your brain out, or freelance, or stay home with your babies and watch movies, and ride bikes together, and listen to music and be happy and have no ambitions beyond that.
No. Somebody has to keep Medicare afloat. And I don’t want to have to share too many of my secret stashes.
Pulling Up Stakes: From Hometown to ‘Chinatown’
Daughter Cecily and son-in-law Mike Bryson are starting a new life, with new jobs, on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada. Mike is leaving in little more than a week to a full-time position – something he has been seeking for a while – with a helicopter crew based in Independence, Calif., fighting fire for the U.S. Forest Service.
They figure they’ll look for a place to live in the bigger town of Bishop (pop. 3,800), about 40 miles north, where the Owens Valley jumps up abruptly to the higher country around Mammoth and June Lake, country that is every bit as severe and beautiful as the north side of the Sneffels Range. (more…)
Time and Baseball: Playing Catch
Baseball is a game of throwing and catching. Hitting and running and sliding, too, of course. But mostly, it is a game of catch based on the primordial, leisurely, endlessly variable conversation between fathers and sons under the sky on a patch of grass. (more…)
Goodbye and Hello
You may not be surprised to hear that I stole north to Utah for anther closing weekend. A last blast of winter at Alta: cold and wind and fresh snow swirling from the hard edges into soft hollows.
Is it an addiction? This wanting more. (more…)
Singin’ in the Rocks
Most mornings, as first light hits the lichen-covered rock outside our living room window, a small, white-chested bird appears and belts out a song. And I mean belts! (more…)
George Mallory: Ridgwalking 101
As I shouldered my skis and started up the hike to Highland Bowl last weekend (on Aspen’s closing day), the clouds parted briefly revealing a line of skiers, tiny in the distance, working imperceptibly up the ridge. (more…)
Flight of the Ski Season
Closing weekend at the ski area was all about flight.
Not flight from Telluride, though that too was about to happen, as locals who have been working since before Thanksgiving flee the sudden quiet and the retreating snows.
No, this was about the little girl standing rock still near the picnic tables at the top of the mountain hoping to lure a camp robber with a cracker in her outstretched hand. (more…)
Mastering the ‘Moag Holes’
When Ellen was teaching the Peanut group of tiny kids at Bear Valley years ago, her charges referred to moguls as “moag holes.” They were learning language at the same time they were learning to ski.
Most people have an ambivalent relationship with moag holes. Miss a turn, get back on your heels, and the hole will spit you out into a washboard traverse. Or worse. But knit a sine-wave line together in rhythm and control, and you will believe in the harmony of the spheres.
Telluride just placed four women in the top ten at the U.S. National Dual Moguls Finals in Stratton, Vt. Keaton McCargo, age 16, placed third. Sophia Schwartz, who grew up skiing in Telluride and Sun Valley, finished fourth. Lane Stoltzner, a graduate of the Telluride Mountain School, was seventh. And precocious 15-year-old Kealey Zaumseil came tenth.
With all the good bump hills across America, Telluride produced four of the top ten. That’s remarkable. But hardly surprising. Telluride is a bumper’s mountain, always has been. With its long, steep pitches, relatively narrow trails, and a continental snowpack that builds up in four-inch sips rather than four-foot Sierran gulps, the mogul you careen around at the top of Spiral Stairs on December 15 will be there for you, the old same shape, on March 30. Familiarity breeds bumpers.
This kind of familiarity is relatively new. Look at old ski movies and you’ll see that in skiing’s wonder years, from the 1930s through the 1960s, there weren’t very many moguls. There weren’t as many skiers, for one thing, and not nearly as many good skiers, to sculpt and re-sculpt the troughs. Lifts were slower (or nonexistent), so you didn’t get as many reps. Freestyle, as a word and as a way of approaching skiing, hadn’t been invented yet.
The go-go 70s changed everything. Faced with vast fields of pimpled snow, proto hotdoggers went crazy, relying on acid and athleticism to get them through. Then the technicians moved in. In a few cases, they were one and the same. John Clendenin made his name in stretch pants and big hair (also big air), winning early contests on reaction time and linked recoveries. Now in his 60s, he’s one of the leading swamis in the “Bumps for Boomers” movement. He’s a hero to those of a certain age who still want to ski moguls, but must now learn to ski them smooth and slow.
Lito Tejada-Flores is another one. He was the first person I saw do The Slow Dog Noodle. I doubt he could put his back down on the snow like that now, and get back up. But Lito is another advocate for, and lover of, the bumps – even late in life.
I think the first truly modern mogul skiing I witnessed was by gold medalist Edgar Grospiron, at the Albertville Olympics in 1992. He had big eyes painted on the knees of his ski pants, and those eyes, despite his legs’ sewing machine oscillations, stared Buddha-like at the straightest, fastest fall line.
Telluride’s stars have their distinctive styles. I remember watching Yukon come down Allais’s Alley, back when it was the Chair Six liftline, essentially not turning at all. He just skipped pile-to-pile down the soft tops of the bumps. He had the young back, and the elevator-shaft imagination, to pull it off. Now he weaves a circuitous jazz line – less percussive, easier on the joints, just as imaginative.
Hugh Sawyer taught a lot of Telluride’s first-generation bump kids how to be fast of hand and still of head.
Every-day skier John Roth is perhaps the quintessential Telluride bumper. He reminds me of a dancer in a Busby Berkeley musical, upright and deceptively quick in his unhurried descent of the white staircase.
The current bumper crop of hot-skiing kids owes a debt to all of them. Though I have to say what the team skiers are doing now on their micro-prepared courses, with shovel-shaved bumps and parabolic kickers, is like something from another planet. A planet where gravity can be manipulated with just the right piston action.
On any given day, moguls for me might be a bone-jarring riddle, or they could be a Slinky’s stairway to heaven. Dropping into chest-high bumps on the Plunge is a kind of inch-worm pilgrimage, extension and contraction on the tilt, like the Tibetan faithful prostrating themselves, folding up on the crests then extending into the troughs, one body length at a time along the path to Lhasa – the road (or in this case the snow) worn smooth by pilgrims that have gone before.
leave a comment