Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Summer 2013



First Axiom of Set Theory (Axiom of existentiality):  If two sets have identical elements, then they are equal.  Zermelo-Fraenkel axiom of set theory as quoted from The Joy of Sets by Keith Devlin

When I was a child, I burned through a lot of dirt bikes and four-wheelers.  My grandpa and uncles would help me fix the broken pieces: welded frames, rebuilt two stroke engines, grooved out multi cross tires, lathed four-bearing rear axles, partially muffled exhaust pipes, rebuilt carburetors, mud caked boots, rusted chains, and other issues. Some of them went fast.  They all ate money.  Days and nights were spent working on my step-aunt’s family farm to pay for the bikes and repairs, while I made meager contributions to my college fund.  When I was done with high school, I sold all the toys and bought a boat.  I had been borrowing my dad’s rafts and kayaks for years and it was time for me to own my own.  It was a beautiful used Sotar cataraft; teal blue tubes and a steal frame.   The boat was named Bill the Cat, after a character in my favorite cartoon at the time, Opus.  When I received an $800 teaching award during my first year of grad school, Bill got a new aluminum frame with a matching aluminum dry box.  When Bill’s wooden Sawyer oar tips broke, I replaced them.  When the oar shafts started bending in half on trips to Canada, I bought new graphite oars.  As a gift to myself for my first teaching job at Mt. Hood Community College, Bill got new bright orange Sotar tubes.  When my dad helped me decide that the tubes just weren’t sleek enough, I sold them to my friend Mike Ross, and my dad helped me fund new orange and red striped tubes.  After Bill’s first trip down the Grand Canyon in Arizona, it was time for a complete new set of straps to leash Bill together.  Some of the old sun streaked straps went in the garbage, and others still work to mildly leash beer bags, garbage bags, and coolers to Bill.  Where Bill’s old caved in blue cooler once sat, a family heirloom that was attacked by a black bear on the Rogue River now sits.  The old orange dry bag that I was given on my high school graduation now sits in the basement, replaced by a new reflective red one.  Bill has seen many an old John Deere lawnmower tractor seat come and go, grown soggy with time.  Most recently Bill received his fourth set of tubes, replacing the third set that Sotar said were completely worn out.  Bill has been most everywhere.  When Becky borrowed Bill to use on our Grand Canyon trip this year, the question surfaced; should we still call Bill the Cat, Bill?  Over his years of existence he has lost every single piece of himself.  Usually replaced by a newer item, but sometimes even replaced with something old but mechanically sound that sat gathering dust in the barn.  What can we say about Bill?

Bill the Cat in his element
My editors probably deserve a similar style of Greek philosophy inspired criticism.  Over the years they have changed and none of the original editors still stand on our blog’s board of directors.  But they still demand the same wishes that this blog should follow the rules of a blog, be quick and immediate, and remain on task either telling stories and reports in a concise way, or spelling editorial rants of criticism about the Russian Olympics’ anti-gay stances or Putin’s takeover of the Crimea Peninsula as blogs typically do.  And, with moderate amounts of prodding we shall continue (but only on the path of telling stories) with the brief interlude of a quote or two.  And the first quote comes from this blog’s hero, Jose Saramago.

“As we said earlier, the sky was one solid sheet of cloud, and it stayed like that, thus providing natural proof that the heavens care nothing about us, if they did, the clouds would have opened with glory.”  Saramago

And as we begin with my summer blog for 2013, we shall start with a Spring 2013 trip down the John Day River.  The clouds did open up and shower us with the glories of heaven, but only occasionally; it was a cold trip.  The Knapp family brought their two extremely young kiddos along and we had a merry little float.
Obligatory picture of my nephew climbing on the boat
Stuffed somewhere in the spring, William Ross ran Sunset Falls for the first time, Steph Glass did Bull Run for the first time, William and Lori D had a first time trip on Opal Creek, and we took a bunch of people down the Illinois River who had never been.  This would be one of five trips I would take through the year to the Kamiopsis Wilderness and surrounding areas.  The Illinois River has provided us with thousands of memories over the years; this time the water level was too low, but the temperatures were in the 90’s and it was hard to complain.  Some highlights included: Steph Glass giggling as she ran a difficult rapid backwards, me getting a little frustrated with a group of guides on a non-client trip, Brett Smith finding the world’s largest flask, and a lost goose spending the night with Rick.  Shortly after our trip, some of us returned for a float down the Rogue River, in the same area.  On the way home Lacey and I helped a couple of locals pull a truck out of the ditch.  It had almost gone over the edge of a very tall cliff.  In exchange we were given a couple of Hurricanes, which are malted beverages with energy drink mixed in.  They are still in my garage if anyone wants one.  Regular readers of this blog will be sad to hear that Bitey the Bear who traveled to Tasmania with the group is no longer with us.

Hanging with the chicks 










Null Set Axiom:  There is a set that has no members.
Zermelo-Fraenkel axiom of set theory as quoted from The Joy of Sets by Keith Devlin

And then summer began.  I didn’t work Summer 2013, and didn’t have any pressing projects, so the summer was full of adventure.  They began with a run down the Chetco River in Southern Oregon.  I had first heard of runs on the Chetco approximately fifteen years earlier from a pamphlet in a hotel registration office.  An old Grand Canyon guide was dragging people down the wilderness run.  They had even created an episode on Oregon Field Guide highlighting his adventures.  Then the Biscuit Fire burned large parts of the Kamiopsis Wilderness and almost everyone stayed off the river.  When I started hearing reports of boaters returning, I knew we had to plan a trip. 

“I know you’re a quiet workman on God’s eternal construction site and don’t like hearing about demolition, but what can I do?  Myself, I’m not one of God’s bricklayers.  Besides, if God’s bricklayers built real walls, I doubt we’d be able to demolish them.  But instead of walls all I see is stage sets.  And stage sets are made to be demolished.”  Kundera

In writing this blog I’m having a hard time deciding how much detail to give each adventure.  We were busy little bricklayers working our way down the Chetco’s trails and gorges.  We started by driving from Portland to Brookings to drop a car and then all the way back to Selma to head to the trailhead.  We loaded our inflatable kayaks onto a horse train and then schlepped down a trail to the put in.  We regretted our decisions about backpacks verses dry bags and boating shoes verses hiking shoes.  We probably walked and dragged more rapids than we ran.  In a long tradition of boating trips we invited 3 people named Mike.  Every canyon was different and some even had names like Magical.  An old man smoking a joint in the middle of the wilderness sent us on our way with the classic comment, “should have been here last week, the river was raging.”  He also asked us to find his lost axe at Chetco Bar that he hadn’t seen since before the fire.  We didn’t find it.  Each morning we had conversations about the best place to dig a hole in the rocky wilderness.  In one gorge we made the slowest progress I’ve ever made on a river, 4 miles in 8 hours. My plan was to give a lot more beta on this run for the blog, but when I read through my notes the only thing that seems blog worthy is the day 5 journal entry, “didn’t have to unload our boats at all today for the drags.”  Then on our last night on the river, 4th of July, we camped at the Kamiopsis Wilderness boundary to make our transition back into reality.  The only fireworks we saw that night where a group of bats working the bugs brought on by our heat.  Our only back yard lawn dart games were some Hunter S Thomson inspired version of a stacking rock game.
I think we launched on the 30th

























Making Hunter S. proud

“Believe it or not, I'm walking on air.  I never thought I could feel so free.  Flying away on a wing and a prayer.  Who could it be? Believe it or not it's just me.”

Axiom of Pairing: If x and y are sets, then there exists a set which contains x and y as elements.  Zermelo-Fraenkel axiom from Wikipedia

Back to society for a bit, Lacey and I went to another one of Oregon’s largest wilderness areas, the Middle Fork of the Santiam, to scout out a possibility on a future year’s agenda.  If Oregon has wilderness, then there must exist other possibilities outside of the Kamiopsis Wilderness.  On the way in we spotted two guys from Bend walking a wiener dog over the twelve-mile pass down to the main road.  After a midweek overnight trip their car had gotten a flat.  The car’s only jack had been lent to a friend, the electric air pump had short circuited, and the fix a flat can had done everything I have ever seen such a can do, nothing.  We gave them a ride back to their truck and after some true redneck jerry rigging sent them back to Bend.  But not without some jokes about a wiener dog, bald tires while living in the home of Oregon’s biggest tire giant, Les Schwab, and two cold ones for the back road.  I’m not one to keep things secret, so I gotta say, I think soon I’ll be dragging an inflatable kayak down the Middle Fork of the Santiam and I think it will be worth it.  It would be nice to just kayak it, but the high mountain pass makes it difficult to access the river when it has water.  I’d rather drag an inflatable down a river than a hard shell over a mountain pass.  On the way back home we bumped into my grade school friend Jesse hanging by one of the South Santiam’s large roadside campgrounds.  Our dads had been friends and later that summer when his grandpa passed away, some good stories rolled at the funeral.  I was reminded how his grandpa had been like a next-door farm kid substitute father for my dad.  I even recognized the joke about Bob calling the mini bar preflight poppers of whiskey “training wheels” as the pastor, of all people, explained at the wake.

Axiom of Infinity:  There exists a set having infinitely many members. Zermelo-Fraenkel axiom from Wikipedia

Scored a July 20th Middle Fork Salmon trip from the cancellation list.  I invited lots and lots of people, but refrained from inviting the Grand Canyon crew; I would see them enough the following month.  The water was a bit low making the upper 8 miles a bit of a drag with our beer-laden ships.  It gave us time to think of all the different types of hangovers we have had in our years of boating:
Prelaunch hangover
Hot springs hangover
Prelayover hangover
Layover hangover
Puking on your buddies boat hangover
Kayaker hasn’t ridden on a raft before hangover
Middle of the night hangover
Kayaker film fest hangover
Oh crap I’m in a kayak and still have a hangover hangover
Day before takeout hangover
Takeout hangover
Fireball hangover
What’s the worst that could happen hangover
The I got a ride on a motorboat hangover
Mary fell on me off a horse hangover
Mud fight night hangover
I just threw up on my boyfriend hangover
I think there is a pregnant crack whore sleeping in my van hangover
The British Columbia hangover
And really our list that we made on the trip goes on, but that gives you a good taste.

Continuing the long history of boating trips, we had two Mikes on this trip.  For some reason we also have lots of John’s in the boating community; and the John on this trip has gained the nickname Jesus John.
Ethan Evans, “Why do they call him Jesus?”
Mike Evans, “I don’t know maybe you should ask him.”
“Is he religious?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Can I just call him Moses?”

Messing with some of the commercial river crews, I kept telling them that I had an earworm and really needed more lines from Bennie and the Jets to help me alleviate it.  At a classic point, a member from a commercial trip ran up the bank to spill out a few lines that he had just remembered before he heading downstream.  I really don’t know why little things like that entertain me so, but and so it goes.





Somehow we missed the memo that the Middle Fork was experiencing an outbreak of the Norovirus last summer.  When we stopped in at Flying B Ranch to check on the wildfire reports and to get some ice cream our group became exposed.  Not much to say about it except almost everyone on the trip got sick at some point.  Inspired by the ranger talk on our upcoming Grand Canyon trip, Becky made the following sticker.


“The river that flows through Lisbon is not called the Lisbon, but the Tejo; the river that flows through Rome is not called the Rome but the Tiber; the one that flows through Seville is not the Seville but the Guadalquivir … but the river that flows through Castril in Spain, yes, this one is called the Castril.  Any inhabited place quickly acquires the name by which it comes to be known, but not so rivers.  For thousands of years all the rivers of the world had to wait for someone to turn up and baptize them, so that they might then appear on maps as more than just an anonymous sinuous line.  For centuries and centuries all the waters of an unnamed river passed stormily through the place where one day the village of Castril would appear, and as they passed, they glanced up at the mountains and said to one another, ‘This is not yet it.’ And they continued on their way down to the sea, thinking, just as patiently, that age follows age and that new waters would appear one day to find women beating their clothes against the rocks, children learning how to swim, men fishing for trout and whatever else came to their hooks.”  Saramago

So we returned from the river called Salmon, to our home on the Columbia River, in Portland, packed everything up in about three days and headed to a river called the Colorado in Grand Canyon National Park.  Allison Elliott had scored an early August launch, and my sister and I joined her group, for a total of 15 people for 21 days on the river.

Someone once said that it isn’t a road trip unless a car breaks down.  Sure enough in Twin Falls the Mike and Steph Glass mobile began leaking antifreeze out the heater core.  We were able to find the leak, but it would have been difficult to do a roadside fix.  So we grabbed a hotel and in the morning Mike and I went looking for the mechanic who opened the doors first.  We found the owner of John’s Automotive, Jose, opening his shop doors at eight.  It was a nice little family business surrounded by a mobile home park.  Jose even let us watch television on his family couch in one of the mobile homes.  His wife was busy making tamales to sell at the local farmers market, and inevitably Mike and I joined the production line and began helping.  Before you know it, the car was fixed and we were back on the road.  The Grand Canyon Crew had expected our car repair to take longer, so before we got back to the hotel they had gone off on a river drinks mixer run.  Bored in the parking lot, I struck up a conversation with a man named Will Smith who was walking his neighbor’s miniature dog and had a voice and a look like Morgan Freeman.  He told us a fantastical story about how he ended up in Sun Valley, Idaho, helping a foreign man who didn’t speak intelligible English get across the US to his summer job on the slopes.  Once in Sun Valley, Will worked for 34 years as a bellhop and driver at one of the hotels and joined the local church, and if you know the area, you’ll know which church.  He was now retired and living modestly in Twin Falls.  And if you know anything about this blog, you’ll know that most, but not all of the stories told here are real.

“Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say?  For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live comprise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery.  Is it an illusion?  Possibly, even probably, but I can’t rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life.”  Kundera

The rest of the road trip went smoothly.  We dropped off the RV at the put in and the other two cars headed to Flagstaff to get food.  Continuing the long tradition of river trips, Allison had invited two people named Mike on this trip.  We loaded up the coolers with ice and food at Mike Babcock’s brother’s house.  Allison’s dad also lived in town and he paid us a visit.  It was fun to see the family resemblances before we headed off on a 21-day adventure.  On the way back to the launch the heavens once again opened up and showered us with the most impressive lightening storm I have ever seen in the canyon.  In the morning, we checked out the Condors hanging from the bridge and then spent a jovial day loading the boats.  My sister had a near trip-ending fall from the trailer in the hustle of loading, but thankfully nothing was broken.  Sara Pool and I camped next to the boats while the rest of the crew had one last night of amenities at the lodge. 


“No, you smile as though you were thinking to yourself.”  Kundera

In the morning we passed around the traditional jug of Tequilla Sunrise in an oversized orange juice container while the river ranger gave us The Talk.  He was a little tired after spending the night helping out on a local flash flood upstream of the put in that would make the river brown for most of our trip.  The older river ranger who had given the talk on my first grand canyon trip 20 years earlier had been replaced by a newer, better looking version.  Some classic lines from the talk:  “I don’t want to know what narcotics you are carrying” and “Be nice to the hikers, but be careful of the new breed of hikers, the rim to rim to rim joggers.”  In was fun to see Becky’s eyes get a little glassy when the young bullet proof vest wearing, gun toting ranger mentioned rim to rim.  And on that note we launched on an adventure.

At the put in every group gets a pair of ravens from the park service that will follow you down the river.  It is a tradition to name your ravens.  Allison chose to name them Hayduke and Doc from Edward Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang.

On the first night, one member of our group made the classic mistake of changing in front of her flashlight, giving the whole group a silhouetted strip show on the far canyon wall.  On the second night we had nearby visitors from a crew of rafters from Bend, Oregon, and we played dueling banjos light shows of stripping, Shakespeare plays, dance moves, and a large dancing orange umpa lumpa that would be really hard to explain.  They trumped us with a laser; sometimes I think that Bend thinks that the universe revolves around Bend.  But we just might be generalizing here.








Yes that is a moth, and yes it is very very large
“(in a review of my blog) Jose Mario Silvia says that I am not a real blogger.  He says this and demonstrates it:  I don’t include links, I don’t have a direct dialogue with my readers; I don’t interact with the rest of the blogosphere.  This is something I knew already, but whenever people ask me I will use Jose Mario Silva’s reasons as my own and sort the subject out once and for all.”  Saramago

Day 1:  Soap Creek Campsite.
Day 2:  South Canyon.  Found lots of Native American artifacts including one stone that looked very much like a hammer.  Hayduke stole a bagel from the breakfast table just ten feet from me, bastard. 
Day 3:  Stayed at North Canyon.  Hiking trip cut short by rain and looming flash flood.
Day 4:  Stayed across from Dinosaur Camp.  Realized that camp is named after large Hoo Doo that looks like a Dinosaur.
Day 5:  Ignored flash flood possibilities and hiked up Silver Grotto.  Sara Pool didn’t like the dirty water.  Carrie managed to clamper up the slippery entrance and set a rope for the rest of us to clamper up.
Day 6:  Played speed Bocci Ball at Red Wall cavern and talked cute tourist from Germany into taking group photos.
Day 7:  Commercial crew says I look like Elton John with my sailors cap, white glasses, and painted fingernails.  Spit out a couple stanzas of Bennie and the Jets on cue to a surprised audience.  Was able to find my favorite Grand Canyon petroglyphs and show the crew.
Day 8:  Mud bath at Hance Rapid Camp.  Once again successful in taking photos of Niki’s gnome that Babcock stole from her garden without Niki and Allen noticing. 
Day 9:  Good but scary lines down Hance.  All other big rapids went fine.  The group sent post cards by mule.  Stayed at awesome camp: Trinity Creek.

Oh my gosh, my editors just staged a coup.  After reading the previous quote about Saramago’s blog, they realized that the details in this blog don’t spit forth like a traditional blog and decided to do something about it.  Please ignore the last paragraph, it was written by the editors. They stuffed me into an ambulance that was driving me to my first AA meeting when I remembered that I still had the John Deere flask full of whiskey stuffed in my jacket.  When we were half way between LA and Vegas the emergency call for the pregnant crack whore who needed a ride to the hospital came into the ambulance call center.  The ambulance whipped a U-turn and my flask slipped and landed in the hand of the driver, who was wearing a suit for some strange reason.  And there we were driving this pregnant crack whore to the hospital when the bats came out.  I really think I would have ended up at the hospital if I hadn’t talked everyone, including the pregnant lady, into stopping at a bar in the middle of the desert that we drove by.  When the bar keep held up the bar phone asking if anyone named Mike was present, I quickly grabbed the receiver.  After some slurred comments to a mad wife, I made my escape from the ambulance drivers with the excuse that my wife was waiting outside.  It took awhile, but I made my way back to Portland and this blog.  The editors have been fired and I’m now looking for a new board of directors.

“When the evening is spread out against the sky.”  T.S. Elliott



The upper part of the canyon really seemed to fly by this trip.  We were at Phantom Ranch before the trip seemed like it was really getting started.  The tradition is to send out post cards on the mules from the canyon bottom.  I was pretty proud of myself for sending one out to my dad with a El Camino that had been crushed by a giant cactus a little less than a year after he passed away:  “Dear dad, Carrie and I are back down here.  Wish you had run this river, but the tradition lives on.  Please deliver by mule and helicopter to the North Pole.”  In retrospect, I think I forgot to put a stamp on that one, but I’m sure it’ll get there because I also didn’t put a return address on it.


The rapid that scares me the most in the inner canyon is called Horn.  It still managed to scare me this time, but the lines were easy at this particular water flow.  The second scariest rapid is called Hermit.  It is big and safe and has managed to flip me once.  On the top of the rapid the young guides on a commercial group were having fun and messing with their clients.  They were singing “hey diddle diddle, lets go right down the middle” as the captain donned a hat that had been marked with a sharpie, “Safety Third.”  In response to our well meaning questions about what camp they were headed for, they sarcastically responded, “farther that you are.”  I told them my Mike Ross joke, “Did you know that chickens can swing their heads forwards and backwards with their mouths open, but humans can’t?”  We’ll have more on that group later.  Hermit treated us pretty nice, but Niki took a quick swim and Sara managed to capture her gnome pointing out the mistakes on her line.  Check out the pictures below.

Crystal Rapid gave us no problems.  The cocky commercial crew on the other hand bent a raft frame on the lower left hand wall.  They had to pull over and work on their boat and we found the safety third helmet below.  Since we had a layover day planned at the nicest camp after the rapids, Bass Camp, we decided to redecorate the helmet and return it.  Some of the hat jokes may seem a little harsh, but I promise the intent was completely jovial.  See the pictures below for details.
















At Bass the river rangers stopped in to check out our camp and permits.  The word floating downstream was that this group of rangers was being overly vigilant.  It turns out we disagree and they were quite nice.  I had dyed my hair red for the trip.  Conversation between me and the river ranger driving the motorized J rig, “Hey nice hair, did you do that for me?”  “No, but I painted my toe nails for you.”  I really do think they were a nice blue color and they lasted all the way till the first day of school when I scraped them clean. 

J-rod noticed that the park service’s hammer was drilled through the handle with a loop for securing it to the raft.  That gave him an idea; he pulled out a hand held drill, (yeah I don’t know why he had a drill) and began working on our hammer.  That brought up one of the theme songs for our trip.  It turns out, after a very long river trip songs get stuck in your head; as the Germans call it, an earworm.
“If I had a drill,
I’d drill it in a hammer,
I’d drill it into a saw,
All over this land.
I’d drill a hole in justice,
I’d drill a hole in freedom.
I’d drill out love between my brothers and sisters all over this land.”

The song worked in all sorts of ways.  If I had a tent, if I had a beer, etc, etc.  It reminded me of a story from a previous Grand Canyon trip.  My brother’s friend Monty was working on making a fire.  He kept working on the wet wood and trying his hardest when he decided that we should start bringing a bellows on river trips.  I strung him along for fifteen minutes with comments like, “yeah, something that could blow air,”  “we could even use it to blow up the rafts,” “it would come in so handy;” before I gave up and went down to the raft and brought him back a raft pump.  “If I had a bellows” should have been the theme for that Canyon trip.

Leaving Bass camp we stopped at Shimuno wash, and a guided trip was there with eight people from China.  I was a little curious, so I asked one of the older American ladies about the trip.  Turned out she was the guide’s mom and he also ran a guide company in China, hence the clients.  It was her twenty-first time down the canyon and she had a boating family, so we started bullshitting.  After a few stories, I told her that she needed to write a book of all her kids and kid’s friend’s first river adventures.  I also learned that her daughter was the trip leader on a guided trip behind us for wounded warriors.  And then she left and I schemed out a plan.  Later in the trip, at Deer Creek, the wounded warriors trip caught up with us.  I wrote my email and blog domain name on a piece of paper and headed over to the very cute trip leader.  “I promise I wasn’t hitting on your mom, but could you give her my email?”  The look on her face when I handed her the paper was great.  Then I explained that I was trying to talk her mom into writing a book and if she did, I wanted to read it.  She agreed that her mom would be good at it.  That was too much fun.

Next, we had a layover at Race Track Camp and eight people did the very hot hike up Roaring River.  Seven of us stayed behind for a very relaxing day.  I even had the chance to help a group of Austrians camping nearby find the trailhead.  It is hard to explain how a layover day on the river is maybe the best part of boating.

Pretty soon we had made our way to Lava rapid, which has by far the largest waves and holes on the river.  After watching three rafts from other groups flip on the right line, we all decided to go left.  Babcock hurt his arm in the large hydraulic and Becky was thrown from her boat.  The joke was that Bill the Cat wanted to run Lava on his own and got his wish.  It was good times with lunch and drinks on Tequila Beach after Lava.

The traditional take out for the river is Diamond Creek, but with low lake levels and a new take out downstream, we were able to float right past Diamond and spend three more days on the river.  It gave us a slow transition back into civilization with jet boats, helicopters, and more helicopters below the park boundaries.  The rapids were actually pretty good and the current was pretty steady the whole way.  Some of the crew got a ride on one of the large motorboats for part of the day.  As an interesting side note, the guides told us that their clients were a creationist group that believed that the Grand Canyon was formed in Noah’s flood.  They flew into Whitmore Wash and took a jet boat out through the flat stretch.  They took weird little side-hikes for prayer sessions and “evidence” of the great flood.  I could say more, but I’ll just leave it at that.  Our camp at Quartermaster wasn’t actually all that bad, but helicopters were flying in and out all afternoon and morning in what is called helicopter alley.  We took turns listening to Paint it Black by the Stones on Jesse’s iPod; somehow it fit.  We did a reworking of the lyrics:

“Every time I see a helicopter,
I want to paint it red,
No tourists anymore,
I want them to go back,
I see Asians dressed in their traveling clothes,
I have to turn my head until their cameras go.
Like tourists taking a picture,
It just happens every day.
I want to the see the sun,
Blotted out from the sky”
(By the shadow of a helicopter)


“As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note.”  George McDonald

Jen and I had our fifteen minutes of fame.  I noticed that one of the last guided trips to pass us had the google cameras on board.  So we started doing the chicken dance and sure enough you can see us on google maps playing for the camera.  Google Maps Shane and Jen





Somehow we made the ride home interesting.  Two of our cars stopped half way between Vegas and Reno in Topenah, Nevada.  At the bar, Carrie stole someone’s cowboy hat.  It turned out that he was a long lost second cousin, John Rice.  His quote of the day about us Horners and Rices, “We rodeo, we ranch, we live our lives.”  Waiting outside at the end of the night, Babs and I saw a cowboy walking down the street with a vacuum cleaner at one a.m.  Do you know what he said to us?  “This sucks.”  Swear to god, Babs and I couldn’t stop laughing.  Next stop on the way home was Bend to visit our friend Mike Ross for his birthday.  And then we went home and it had been almost a month of an adventure.




“who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, and alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade.”  Ginsberg

Amazingly, I still had a few more weeks of vacation left, and no reason to start setting an alarm clock.  Mike Ross, Tobi, and I headed to her family “cabin” off the British Columbia coast called Humprey Lodge.  We went fishing, helped the family work on the hydropower system, boated at night with the phosphorescence, and hung out by the fire.  Probably heard my all time favorite fire story of how Tobi’s neighbor had been abducted by aliens and Tobi’s dad and mom just stood and watched.  It is a long story, you should ask her sometime.  




I did write Tobi a limerick:
There once was a girl named Tobi,
Her pencil smelled a bit of anchovy,
She wanted to write a good sonnet,
But her mouth was filled with vomit,
Prays for a word that rhymes with Bon Jovi.
ANCHOVY!!!


We even stuffed in a quick Rogue River trip before I official began my teaching job again and summer was over.

And as is the tradition of this blog, the second to last paragraph shall be a dream sequence.  But the problem is I don’t have a single dream recorded in my journal this year.  It isn’t that I didn’t dream, just none of them stood out enough for me to write them down when I woke up.  And such a fun thing about dreams, if you don’t write them down you can never really remember them.  So no dream sequence this year.

The careful reader might have noticed the references to Axiomatic Set Theory and Greek Philosophy at the beginning of the blog.  For my first Grand Canyon trip when I was 19 years old, I missed out on taking an extra philosophy class at Chemeketa Community College when I skipped a term of classes to head down the Colorado River.  For my second Grand Canyon trip at 23, I missed out on a Set Theory class at the University of Washington.  It was one of the main reasons I had decided to attend UW and the class was only offered that term during my two-year stay at the University.  Similar to Bill the Cat, the question arises, would I have been the same Shane had I stayed in school even one of those terms?  Could I even still call myself Shane?  You see so much has changed.  I don’t have a single bone of my former self.  My favorite axiom is called the Axiom of Choice.  It is a real thing, but I don’t have the ability to explain it in a down to earth format.  That is probably partially related to missing the set theory class; it certainly might have helped.  I can say this, we have an infinite amount of choices to make in this lifetime and if we could pick out a sample decision from each variety of choices we would be thinking somewhat in line with the Axiom of Choice.  And with this in mind, I like the Shane that choose to run the Grand Canyon six times.  Bill the Cat has enjoyed his trips down the Canyon.  Life has privileged and babied me with the option to make this choice.

Take care, Shane

“I scarcely recognized myself:  the fanatical fisherman in me had died, and what remained was a stranger.  I was someone I barely knew lying on my side watching a star.”  David James Duncan in The River Why  

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