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?
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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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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