Delirious Ramblings

At the Bristlecone Wall

The Bristlecone Wall, Kachina Peaks Wilderness, January 2012

When I finally reached the thin green line of prostrated bristlecone pines on Agassiz Peak the trees presented me with a choice: If I blundered my way through their ranks and up the summit ridge I would be allowed to stand atop the mountain with only ravens and the blue air above. But the price of that rocky pinacle would be very high: the sound of those trees' ancient limbs cracking and snapping under my weight, of seeing my bootprints pressed carelessly into the cindery alpine tundra. Or... I could willingly abort my climb there at the base of the bristlecone wall, cede victory to the Kachinas, and descend with my wilderness ethics intact, leaving those shining Methuselahs undisturbed in their high and hostile abode.

I'd always thought I would do the right thing when faced with the choice between their well-being and the bragging rights for bagging Arizona's second highest point, but until you are actually there, staring up at those fragile and vulnerable trees after something like 3,800 vertical feet of difficult climbing with only a few hundred more to go, well... you don't really know, do you? Summit fever can afflict the best of us, make us do things we wouldn't normally do.

I looked up at the great pyramid of stone above me, imagined what the view down into the Inner Basin would look like from the top, how the thin breeze blowing along the summit ridge would feel ... and I let it all slip away. I turned back. For their sake I would not walk upon the summit that day.

I had passed the test.

A Paradox of Liars

I ask for training and for my sins my employer ships me off to Las Vegas for a tech conference where, car-less, I spend five days in a very large, very clean, very expensive hotel listening to smart people lecture on all the latest trends in software development. The air conditioned conference rooms are full of 30 and 40 year-old programmers (mostly men, but there are a few women, too) who listen intently through countless powerpoints and screens of computer code.

 

We all smile and nod as if we understand what the presenters are saying. I watch my fellow software engineers closely and realize that, like me, they're all scared shitless by what's happening in the tech industry. We dutifully jot down snippets of code or Internet URLs into our laptops and iPads, but inside we're all wondering if the mobile Internet tsunami that's approaching will be the wave that finally washes us up onto the beach of greying irrelevance.

On the second day I bust out of the mega-hotel's sterile compressed air environment onto the Las Vegas strip in search of the sun and something beautiful to point my camera at. I photograph some of the buildings, walk the sidewalks, and try to wrap my head around this very strange place the gods of capitalism have built in the desert.

 

I see some homeless guys sitting on a pedestrian overpass. They wear enigmatic expressions on their faces and hold crude cardboard signs in their laps. "Need money for my kids" or "Unemployed - please help. God bless you." Shunned away from the others is another man holding a sign reading "I won't lie to you. I just need to get a whore."

I look at them and slowly realize that I've happened upon a tragic logic puzzle: which of the men is the real liar? Which, if any, of the men is deserving of a few dollars? There has to be some profound statement in this arrangement, some penetrating insight into the human condition, but the noise of the traffic is too distracting for subtle thinking and I walk on, feeling guilty - and a little stupid - that I couldn't see the solution.

The next morning I see a man dressed in jogging attire talking animatedly with something inside one of the ubiquitous garbage cans. I assume he is talking on a bluetooth headset to someone who is not present. But then I notice that his sweatpants are soiled and he is obviously not a tourist out for an early jog. When he departs I consider looking inside the trash can to see who (or what) he was speaking with, but chicken out. Perhaps it was the Las Vegas version of Oscar the Grouch, someone best left alone.

 

Farther along I notice that the walkway is covered with what looks like leaves. Groundskeepers from nearby hotels glide along on humming sweepers, swirling and pushing the leaves this way and that. They leave long slimy trails behind them like giant snails. When I get closer I discover that it is not leaves they are sweeping up, but rather playing-card sized advertisements for escort services. On the tiny squares of cardboard are printed pornographic pictures and telephone numbers: asians, barely legal, big tits, small tits. I resist the insane urge to shuffle and kick my feet through the cards, as I did just a week prior in the freshly fallen aspen leaves of the Kachina Peaks Wilderness.

Later I sip Starbucks coffee and eat a banana that I paid way too much for. In this drought-stricken land I stand near acres of water, complete with fountains that jet into the air every few minutes across the surface in sequence. The jets of water dance and whirl across the man-made lake, culminating in a big finale with all the spouts shooting water up into the air together. I think they filmed a scene from Ocean's 11 here, but I'm not sure. The lone mallard duck bobbing along the edge of the water is no help. Apparently he is not a George Clooney fan.

 

A woman dressed in a sharp suit with a name tag from one of the nearby mega-hotels stomps by. She screams "I AM NOT UNREASONABLE I AM NOT UNREASONABLE I AM NOT UNREASONABLE!!!!" into her cell phone. I look at the mallard and he rolls his eyes.

It's dark and huge mega-hotels covered with neon and glass tower above me. Crowds of tourists speaking Japanese and German and French and even some English pack the sidewalks. They all have camera phones, which they use incessantly. I take a few photographs of the glowing buildings against the twilight, practicing motion blur techniques with the moving traffic. I feel like I've stepped into the dystopic movie Blade Runner.

 

Three of us from the conference meet at a mexican restaurant for drinks and dinner. It is our last night in Vegas and the conference is over; tomorrow we head home. A trio of mariachis play a quirky cover of the Eagles' "Hotel California" and I watch the 30-something waitress working the tables. When she thinks no one is looking her perky smile fades and is replaced by a look of infinite weariness. She is unbearably beautiful.

 

It has been a long week and the beer hits me hard, buzzing its way straight to my brain.

And then, sitting there in the noise and hustle of the restaurant it comes to me: The homeless men on the bridge were playing at a variant of the Liar's Paradox, and thus, there was no solution to their little game at all.

The True Form of Gambel Oak

The True Form of Gambel Oak, June 2011

In a couple of Plato's dialogues (mainly Republic and Phaedo) the character Socrates attempts to get at the true nature of knowledge and reality through his Theory of Forms. The gist of the theory is that because everything around us is changing and ultimately temporary the things we see in the physical world are not as "real" as the underlying abstract concepts and ideas of those things. These underlying concepts possess a higher and more fundamental kind of reality and are thus the only way we can really gain knowledge. In a nutshell he's positing that transitory rocks, trees, dogs, people, etc. are just temporary instantiations of the more permanent and independent underlying concepts such as Rock, Tree, Dog, Person, etc. So, in a way, the theory of Forms basically states that there is a purer, more "real" world independent of this world, accessible only through mind.

When I saw that my camera's lens had introduced a strong chromatic aberration effect into some photographs I took of oak leaves my imagination leapt into overdrive. What if the leaves always looked like that - with the edges of the leaves outlined with white fire - and I just hadn't looked at them from the right perspective before and so never saw them glowing like that? I immediately thought of Plato and his theory of Forms, of the true nature of reality and how we so often mistake flickering shadows on a cavern wall for what's really happening. What if instead of a simple error in the focusing of disparate wavelengths my lens had actually captured a fleeting glimpse of the true Form of Gambel Oak shining through and around the leaves?

If one could see the unchanging, true Form of Gambel Oak, what might that Form look like? And if you did look through a crack in the world into that realm of Forms, would you go blind, your eyes seared by the supreme beauty of the true quality of the archetypal Oak? Would you forever find yourself trying to look beyond the green leaves into that bright shining world? Would the regular world around you fade to a dim, gray, and forever bleak place where nothing could ever compare to what you knew to be reality? Wouldn't that be a form of Hell?

Ruminations on the fallibility of technology and the disappearance of reverence

In the moonless early morning hours of September 15th, 1944 a U.S. Army Air Force B-24 bomber on a training mission out of Albuquerque slammed full speed into the side of Humphreys Peak, killing all eight crewmen. The plane exploded upon impact and what is left of it is strewn for over a hundred yards over a rocky clearing in the thin, cold air above 11,000 feet. It is said that the flames burned so hot that parts of the wreck are melted into the boulder field.

Saturday morning, almost seventy years later, I sat silently in the snow next to the largest piece of the aircraft visible above the snowfield. Soft clinking sounds emanated from the wreckage as the breeze worked at the shredded aluminum. One of the plane's landing gear, oddly intact after all these years, stood watch over the scene like a cemetery statue. Farther up the slope in the stunted bristlecone and spruce forest I could hear Mountain Chickadees, Pygmy Nuthatches and Clark's Nutcrackers calling to each other, welcoming the rising sun and it's warmth.

If the shades of the dead crewmen were present they were keeping well out of sight.

As I crouched there in the snow I wondered about the men that rode this plane into the mountainside. Who were they? What were their names? Where were they from? How had fate brought them together on that particular aircraft on that moonless night in 1944? What were their plans for life after the war?

In the minutes leading up to the crash was the pilot tentatively feeling his way through the darkness, unsure of the plane's location or altitude? Could he sense the danger the mountain represented beyond the cockpit glass, an invisible black silhouette swallowing up the stars?

Or did the crash come as a total surprise, the mountain abruptly jumping up to meet them from the darkness like some great volcanic jack-in-the-box? Did they trust their WWII-era machine and instruments with the same fierce intensity as we so often do our own 21st century ones? Perhaps the crew, mesmerized by the soft glow of radium dials, plowed full speed into the mountainside in a kind of technologically induced trance, their eyes not believing until too late the black-on-black reality looming up outside the cockpit windows? After all, they too were living at the apex of history and technological progress, the same as we are today.

After I returned from the mountain I clicked on google and to my horror discovered that the Internet is stuffed to the brim with accounts of hikes to the B-24 crash site, GPS coordinates, tracklogs, and digital photos of hikers posing triumphantly next to the landing gear. I even read reports of people taking pieces of the plane from its resting place as souvenirs. Somehow it all seemed very insensitive and shallow and stank of high irreverence.

I suspect that there are many lessons to be learned up there in that high altitude clearing, the domain of wind, ice, and the Clark's Nutcracker: Lessons on the fallibility of technology and how trusting too much in bits of metal and sand can carry a high price - perhaps ultimately the highest price imaginable; Lessons on the superficial, often callous nature of our countrymen, some of whom would think nothing of taking artifacts from a crash site; And I suspect that there are even deeper lessons on how those of us who choose to visit these high, sacred places choose to behave, how we should behave.

Warren Crowther, Ray Shipley, Clyce McClevey, Charles McDonald, Patrick Pertuset, James Hartzog, John Franke and Hugh Brown.

Those are their names.

Five month temporal panorama of the Veit Spring sheepherder's cabin

My shiny new Forest Service backcountry permit was giving me itchy feet Sunday morning so I drove up snowbowl road part way and did a big four mile loop around Veit Springs with a chunk of the Kachina Trail thrown in to add some difficulty. It was a really nice outing with some 600 feet of elevation gain, lots of quality solitude spent meandering slowly through immense snow covered meadows, cathedral-like aspen stands and thick, brooding spruce/fir forest.

I had been to the Veit Spring area before back in August after an aborted Humphreys summit bid due to inclement early morning weather. That time I just hiked around the loop, checked out the old sheepherder's cabin and the spring boxes and then back to the truck. It was before the aspen shed their leaves and everything was very green from the very wet monsoon season we'd just finished. I met several parties of sightseers ooohhing and ahhhhing at the verdant scenery.

Sunday was of course vastly different. The area was blanketed in deep snow, the trees had dropped their leaves several months before, and the site was completely abandoned, the exclusive domain of cross-country skiers and snowshoers like me.

The second picture, the one with snow, was taken just to the right of the young aspen tree growing in the left foreground of the first picture. I read somewhere that the Forest Service actually partially rebuilt the cabin some years ago, shortening it greatly in the process to keep vandals out. I guess before that the cabin was taller and covered by graffiti.

The "Five month temporal panorama" of the post title refers to the fact that the two views, despite their physical location being almost identical, are separated from each other by roughly five months in the time dimension. Spatially the two pictures are not far from each other, but temporally they are very widely spaced - almost half a yearly cycle apart. So they give you a kind of temporal panoramic view of the site. It's kind of neat when you think of it that way.

I will return to this site in future years, if I remember, and expand on the "panorama" further.

EDIT 1/11/2011: Hit the "Publish" button too fast and this post had an incorrect URL. Apologies to you guys reading via RSS feeds...

Some thoughts the day after killing my television

So yesterday I finally did something that I've been thinking about for a long time:

I killed my television.

Call it a new year's resolution of sorts, although that's not exactly what it was. The beginning of the new year just happened to coincide with my decision to voluntarily switch off the boob-tube.

Well...  Okay, to be totally honest, I didn't really kill my television, at least not in the extremist sense where you physically throw it in the trash and purge your life of all forms of video entertainment. But I did cancel my cable subscription, which is kind of like giving the television a hard jab to the solar plexus. The TV is still in my living room but it's no longer connected to the coaxial cable through which loud commercials, insane "reality" shows, talking heads, echo chambers, and shrill shouting were making their way into my daily life.

After I hung up the phone I had one of those Lord, what have I done? moments. Did I really think I'd be able to replace vegging in front of the TV with reading, music, chatting, and the occasional NetFlix DVD? Wouldn't I go stark raving mad from the boredom? I mean, hell, the lady at the cable company had actually offered to half my cable bill if I'd only change my mind. And I'd refused! In a way I kind of felt sorry for her. She seemed genuinely puzzled when I told her I just didn't want to watch TV anymore. Imagine how a pusher would feel if suddenly one day all the junkies decided they didn't want to buy his "product" any more?

Okay, that's a little melodramatic. But still, it feels like I've committed some sort of iconoclastic crime against the Mother Culture and the thought police are on the way.

Wish me luck!

Some thoughts upon returning from Las Vegas Connections conference

I'm back from the Las Vegas Dev/Win/Exchange/Sharepoint Connections conference at Mandalay Bay. Over the week I was there:

1. I gained five pounds due to overeating and interruption of my normal exercise regimen. I knew I'd gain some weight but I wasn't expecting to pack on five freakin' pounds. My plan, lame as it was, was to climb the forty-some-odd flights of stairs in the hotel a couple of times over the week but for various reasons it didn't happen. The one time that I tried I discovered that people had been using the stairwell for cigarette breaks and the air inside was all but unbreathable. Oh, well. Next time I'll bring Mount Elden along with me or else visit the hotel fitness center.
2. I learned more about Microsoft's Exchange 2010 mail/calendaring server than I thought I would. The last couple of these Microzombie conference thingies I've been to boiled down to big multi-day marketing sessions. Exchange Connections surprised me with the depth of some of the presentations. Exchange 2007 was already a pretty damned spiffy mail server but Exchange 2010 just makes it better. The Firefox/Safari-enabled Outlook Web App (OWA) is going to be a very welcome change for non-Windows users.
3. I saw only two birds the entire time I was on the Las Vegas strip, both of which were male grackles. They looked kind of stressed out and eager to go elsewhere. By the fourth day I was feeling the same way.
4. I was astounded at how low the water level was in Lake Mead versus the last time I drove over the Hoover Dam seven or eight years ago. Without even leaving the car it was readily apparent how far down the lake was just by looking at the large white "bathtub ring" along the shoreline. There is very serious trouble brewing for anyone dependent on Lake Mead (and probably the Colorado River as a whole) for water. The Lake Mead Water Levels chart I found is downright scary. I don't think most people living in the southwest appreciate just how dire the situation really is.
5. I wondered how blackjack dealers, roulette croupiers, and other casino gaming workers can go home at the end of the day and feel good about a job well done. I mean, how can they feel job satisfaction about helping to funnel money from people who clearly don't understand basic probability and into the coffers of huge corporate entities with no-one's best interest at heart? I can't think of a single good social quality of these jobs beyond providing basic sustenance for the workers.
   
   Judging from the high percentage of minivans and older cars in the employee parking level of the hotel I suspect that gaming jobs don't pay well at all. The idea that those waitresses walking around the casino floor wearing hot dresses and offering cocktails to the players could be single mothers living lives of quiet desperation kind of took some of the fun out of the experience. I suspect that the casinos really don't want their guests thinking too deeply about this.

I guess that's about it. Anyone else been to Vegas lately?

Parking garage philosophy

More wit and wisdom, this time scrawled on the wall of the parking garage:

You can no more be sure of the accuracy of your ideas, then the falsehood of others!

Our little philosopher needs to learn about the proper use of commas and the difference between "then" and "than". It's probably a good thing that it's written in chalk. Still, you'll see this sort of stuff only at a University!