The Big Sikorski

O! To be a peasant again - visiting Babcia's village in Poland

2009-01-06T23:22:00.002-07:00

I'm not sure exactly what I had in mind when I decided I ought to visit the village my great-grandparents' came from.My great-grandmother - we all called her "Babcia", which means grandmother in Polish - lived to be 106, so she was someone I had known personally but knew little about. I figured I was now visiting Poland for the third time, and why hadn't I bothered to do this before? I'm not into geneaology or anything, but finding this village couldn't be too difficult, since my great-uncle Tony visited there in 1988.
That must not have been a very good trip, by the way. 1988 was not a good time in Poland; I remember him telling me not to visit Poland, because it was so poor. The people in the village had offered him a pear. It was the best pear they had, but Uncle Tony described it as a terrible pear. I think it was a sad experience for him.
But, it my two previous visits to Poland, in 2000 and 2001, I had nothing but good thoughts. Sure, there were large grey Communist-looking apartment blocks, as in the rest of Eastern Europe, but the people seemed filled with optimism. They were free of Soviet shackles, and about to join the European Union, the most exclusive club of rich countries. The skies may have been gray, but the future was bright.
And so, my motivating philosphy in visiting Kobylin-Kruszewo – Babcia's village – was, Why not? It was there, and I would be there, and by this point I was undaunted by traveling in Poland. Of course, none of my friends lived near Kobylin-Kruszewo (pronounced “kru-SHAY-vo” – w's in Polish are pronounced as v's), which is in northeastern Poland, near Bialystok. But surely this couldn't be much of an obstacle. Somebody would help me.
So I arrived in Poland with almost no information on my antecedents. A friend of mine had made a similar visit to his great-grandparents village in Slovenia a few years ago, and he regaled me with tales of old-timers who knew his relatives buying him beers and getting him drunk. Surely this would be my experience, too!
Everything started off fine. I had gone to the website couchsurfing.com, which is a place where travelers can find people willing to host them in their homes. I searched the profiles around Bialystok, and focused on one: Sylwia, who lived in a village somewhere near Lapy, and had a car that sometimes ran. She seemed nice person, who had similar interests in the outdoors as me. I sensed she would be willing to help me. I contacted her; she was a lawyer and very busy, but she agreed to help me, as long as I came on a weekend. This was no problem, I assured her.

The time arrived in December, after I had been traveling in Europe over a month, and was circling back to Poland to head home. Sylwia lived with her parents in a house outside Lapy; her father, a mechanic, raised pigs as a hobby and killed one on the day I arrived, so we had an excellent – and very fresh! - pork dinner. Sylwia amazed me, because she was in the middle of a big, important case and had to do tons of research over the weekend, but she still made time for my little project.
On Sunday, after Sylwia spent the morning in the law library in Bialystok, we headed to Kobylin-Kruszewo. It is a very small village, of maybe 30 houses. There are no store, bar, post office, or church. And, seemingly, no people. We saw some cows, and some dogs. Sylwia knew what to do; she found the house of the town's “head man” - it had a label on the front saying as much. After a fair amount of knocking, this person showed up, and Sylwia quizzed him on the whereabouts of Sikorskis, Grodskis (Babcia's maiden name), and anybody who might be related to them. The man said that almost everybody in the town was a relative newcomer, and that there were no Sikorskis or Grodskis. Sylwia asked me if I knew the names of anyone who had stayed behind; I did not. We wandered about the village some more – it was nice, really. The homes all faced a large pastureland with a creek running through it, and there were woods behind that. We encountered two elderly villagers, and Sylwia asked them similar questions. They didn't know of any Sikorskis or Grodskis, either.

We drove to the next village, Kobylin-Borzymy, which was a bigger village. We went to the church there, where the priest showed us a shelf full of antique books listing all the births, deaths, marriages, etc., that had taken place over the past 200 or so years. I knew Babcia had been born on July 2, 1879, so we looked for that... but the elegant calligraphy in the books was not in Polish – it was in Russian! Apparently this area was controlled by Russians at that time, and everything had to be written in that language and alphabet. Which was kind of difficult for all of us: me, Sylwia, and two priests. I even had the Cyrillic alphabet cheat-sheet I made in Ukraine, which was a little bit helpful... but it would have been more helpful if the priests in those days wrote in big block letters, rather than fancy script.

But... we found her name! Teofila Grodska... or Grodskaya, as they Russianification would have it. (Okay, this photo is really blurry, but trust me on this.)

It was there in the book, and we looked for an address to maybe find out where she lived, but no luck. Sylwia wondered if I knew when she was married, or other names of relatives, but no. She also wondered how I could come to this village with so little information, but really, all my friend did in Slovenia was mention his name and the old-timers had a big party, so why should my experience be any different? Of course, my village had almost no people in it. (She also admitted that she didn't know the names of her great-grandparents, so it's not just me!)
So we went back to the village and took some more photos. Sylwia seemed a little disappointed, and said I should find out more from Uncle Tony and then she would return and find out more on her own. She was determined – perhaps more than me? It was odd. I was pretty happy to see my village and how they lived. I mean, they were farmers. It's something I figured out before, but it's interesting to see it in front of you – the land, the barns, the cows. Babcia's son Henry, my grandfather, born in the USA, was a New York City policeman, and my father is an engineer. Farming seems rather foreign to me. Yet here was the proof – Sylwia said no one could live here and not be a farmer, because that was all there was. And so, this is part of who I am. That to me was a success.
After returning home I called Uncle Tony and found out some more information. While he didn't have any addresses and didn't know the names of any relatives who stayed behind, he did tell me that Marcelli Sikorski, my great-grandfather, came from a different village, Sikory-Pawlowieta, farther down the road. The two didn't meet there, they met in America, and were married at a church in Brooklyn. Babcia had left from Bremen, Germany, on a ship called the Weimar in 1901. Uncle Tony had had copies of both birth certificates translated from the Russian, and confirmed that the parents had been part-owners of farms.
I passed this information along to Sylwia, who remains determined to figure out my past. It looks like I'll have to go back to Poland again. Sooner or later, there will be a party for me, I'm sure of it.

Istanbul to Rivne, Ukraine - The Hard Way

2008-12-18T16:36:00.001-07:00

The easy way, of course, would have been to fly. But when you're short on money and long on time, a 40 hour journey doesn't sound that bad. Adventure in foreign lands! Indeed.
And really, it started off fine. My Turkish friend Selim Cor rode the city bus and tram through the middle of Istanbul to the bus company office with me, and we said our goodbyes. I was going to take a 12-hour bus to Bucharest, and the train to Ukraine from there. I was very early; there were two buses headed to Bucharest, and mine was slated for 3:30 p.m., a half an hour later than the other one. While waiting, I met a Romanian student on an Erasmus exchange at Istanbul University, named Bogdan Constantinescu, who was headed home to Bucharest. He informed me of three things: 1) the bus would arrive in Bucharest in the dead of night nowhere near the train station, which is where I needed to go; 2) the taxis would definitely try to rip me off; and 3) his sister might give me a ride... if I showed up at the bus station at the same time he did. He was on the earlier bus.
So, a race to Bucharest! But it wasn't much of a race, really – my bus already caught up to his by the time we reached the Bulgarian border. That's a two-hour stop, by the way – you have to stop at the duty-free shop, of course (a great place to buy Turkish raki), and then there's the getting out of Turkey, and then there's the getting into Bulgaria, with long waits checking passports and visas and whatnot, and somewhere there's customs, and of course most of the Turks on the bus were hauling tons of goods for sale in Bulgaria... although our driver must have paid off the right people, because at one point when we were waiting outside the bus, a passenger implored us to run back onto the bus, and the driver ran on, too, and we sped across the border... without customs checking out a single thing in the luggage compartment.
At this point we were well ahead of the other bus... but we gave them time to catch up to us at the next stop, a row of Bulgarian roadside stands. It seemed to be for loading up on bric-a-brac one might have forgotten to pick up in Turkey. Amply loaded, the next stop was for gas. I was pretty confident at this point that our speedy driver would see us to Bucharest before the other bus.
Oh, I also picked up a stray along the way – a New Zealander named Tom Welch who had bicycled from London to Istanbul, and was now on his way back. He had the same dilemma as me – needing a ride to the train station at 3 o'clock in the morning. And while he had given his bicycle away to a lucky young Turkish kid, he did manage to pick up several traditional Turkish musical instruments in Istanbul. Plus my ample luggage, and Bogdan's ample luggage, and Bogdan's sister brought their mother along to welcome his home, and this is not a very big car we're talking about here...
Did I mention that Bogdan had a party on his bus? I'm realizing this story is not traveling in a particularly linear fashion, but I mean, come on – while Tom and my bus was hellbent for Bucharest, Bogdan's assistant driver had broken out a bottle of champagne and was offering it as a prize to the best dancer. Dancing champagne party! This is what happens when you have a choice of buses in Istanbul, apparently: one is the fast one, and the other is the party one. Next time I'll know to pick the party one.
So where am I? Oh, yes, in a mysterious bus parking lot somewhere in Bucharest, Romania, creating a comedy routine of making big luggage fit in little car at 3 a.m. Lucky for Tom and me, the Bogdan family thinks picking up random foreigners in the middle of the night is highly amusing. Somehow we manage to cram everything, musical intruments and all, into the car's various crevices, and we're off... on a tour of Bucharest! Bogdan's mom points out the parliament building off in the distance, which is in fact the second-largest building in the world, by volume, after the Pentagon. All we can see are the lights on the roof, but that's pretty good for a free dead-of-night tour, no?
Railway station at last. It's closed till 4:30. We have an hour to kill. We – and by we I mean all of us: me, Tom, Bodgan, sister Andrea, and mother Luiza – visit a gas station/cafe. Despite Tom's and my desire to pay for coffee for them all, Romanian hospitality wins the night. The three of them all speak excellent English, and are happy to have this unusual opportunity to be our hosts.
4:30 – back at the train station. While we can now get into the building, the international ticket office doesn't open till five. We wait some more. Finally, the window opens. While I did my homework and diligently wrote down the names, numbers, and times of the trains I intended to take to Ukraine (I really wasn't expecting to have three translators!), Tom was flying by the seat of his pants, and really didn't have a clue as to where he wanted to go or when he wanted to go there, as long as he ended up in Dresden by whenever. Or something along those lines. He was up for pretty much anything, and he and Bogdan were having long negotiations with the ticket lady. Meanwhile, the young woman on line behind us overhead all the translating, and she wanted some of that good stuff, too. Can I tell you how nice it is to have someone translate for you during these sort of instances? Yes, I can – just you wait.
So this woman, whose name was Lutse, was Hugarian, from Budapest. Naturally Bogdan and company were enjoying translating so much they agreed to do it for her, too... and Tom had just decided to travel to Budapest, so he and Lutse could be train buddies! And, while we were all waiting at the platform, she even told him she would be his guide for Budapest. Lucky Tom!
Thus ends the English-speaking segment of my journey.
Which is not to say the honeymoon was over. My train, though by no means new, was uncrowded and more than amply comfortable. It was headed all the way to Moscow, and even though I was traveling during the day, I was given a sleeper compartment, which I had all to myself. Traveling in style! While Bogdan's family may be disappointed to hear it, I'm not ashamed to say I slept through all of Romania.
Till the border, that is. I'm always confused by border crossings – someone wants to wake me up, someone wants to know what my deal is, I always know six words in one language or another and I always use the wrong language for the wrong dude... The leaving of Romania wasn't bad, but the Ukrainians had very probing questions as to my business, what I was carrying, how much money I had, and they did a bit of poking around in my luggage. Not bad or anything, and their English was very good. There was this whole cast of characters who would show up, one or two at a time. At past crossing they'd always been guys, but Ukraine has a more progressive system, I guess. Two female passport checker ladies came one – one was very tall and beautiful and nice, and wore camoflage and a furry hat, and the other was straight out of central casting for the not-nice Ukrainian border lady. In fact, I could swear Cate Blanchette used her as the template for her character in the last Indiana Jones movie – right down to black straight-bang haircut.
So, the tall, beautiful border lady was very nice indeed. I told her I had left out the address of my friend Vova Lypchuk in Rivne on the form, because I didn't know it, and she sympathetically mentioned this to the not-nice one, who grumbled but let it slide. Then they left... with my passport in the nice lady's hand.
Which was fine – I figured they just had to go to the official stamping booth to run it under the official ultra-violet passport detector machine and give it its official stamp. So I just waited.
And waited. And waited. I grew concerned. When the train started to move, I grew extremely concerned, and made a desperate plea to the conductor: “Passport???”
“Passport, da, da, da,” she said dismissively.
What does this mean? I mean, I know it means, “Passport, yes, yes, yes,” but what did she mean by that? The train was moving very, very slowly. After 200 meters, it stopped. Then it started moving again. Then it stopped again. There only appeared to be two of us in this railcar besides the conductor – me and this little old bubushka lady. We were both standing in the aisle, looking out the window. I was looking out the window wondering what was going on. Was she looking out the window wondering what was going on, or was she just looking out the window? Had they taken her passport, too? Was she worried? She appeared calm. Why was she calm?
The train started moving again. Alarmed, I once again pleaded with the conductor: “Passport?”
This time she said, “Don't worry!”
Ah, English, Don't worry, music to my ears! No, I wouldn't worry. I would just sit there, not worrying at all.
The train stopped again. We couldn't have been more than 500 meters from where I last saw my passport. The train started heading back in the other direction – could it be? No. It stopped again. What was going on?
I decided that they were changing the wheels of the train to fit Ukrainian tracks. We weren't being jacked up off the ground or anything, but I was alone in my Anglophonicity and this is what I came up with. We went back and forth and stopped like this for about an hour and a half. That was when we every so slowly rolled back to the site-of-passport-last-seen, and the passport ladies came back on and gave me back my passport. Silly American!
But that is not where the fun and weirdness ends – oh, no. Not budging an inch from that spot, it was apparently determined that we were now officially in the Ukraine, and the old bubushka lady got off the train – she had to endure all that with her station right there! And some other ladies got on. I couldn't figure out what their deal was – they passed by, muttering something in a foreign tongue, and I just shook my head and they left. A few minutes later one of them came back, right into my compartment, and handed me a paper plate with some pierogies on it. I thought she was giving it to me for free, but it soon became apparent that she wanted money for it. Well, I was a bit hungry, and I had some Romanian money left over that I didn't know what to do with, so I inquired if she would take that. Affirmative. Of course, I was only in Romania for a little while, and hadn't quite figured out the money yet. I handed her some change. No, that wouldn't be enough... but then she handed me a beer. Why yes, I could use a beer, thank you! Oh, right, she hands things first, then wants money for them. I wasn't used to this system. I handed her some one lei notes... she'd take a bunch of those, yes, but more. Somewhere another beer got handed to me – thank y... right. More money. I was having trouble this. Somewhere along the line I discovered that the word “Nyet” is in my vocabulary, and it seemed to work quite well. “Nyet. Nyet. Nyet.” I just had to keep doing this. I wish I had figured this out sooner, though – I had already paid, what? Eight, 12, 15 dollars? For two beers and some cheese blintz things? The total value is probably less than $2, now that I know what I'm doing. Well, heck, Tom gave away his bicycle, I could at least give away some Romanian money for no apparent reason.
Onward. It wasn't long before the train stopped in the small city of Chernovcy, Ukraine, where I had a four-hour layover. I also had to reserve my sleeper bed for the next train, to Zdulbunov. After that I had a five-minute layover, then a ½ hour train to Rivne.
Simple, right? No. The train lady seemed a bit baffled by my list – of course, she didn't speak any English, nor did anybody, apparently, in Chernovcy. I'm not sure how much she cared for the Latin alphabet, either. This was my first real immersion into the world of Cyrillic spelling, and if you think not understanding the language is bad, try not being able to read it, either. Exciting! Especially if your train ticket person has an idea that it would really great for you to have to wake up at 4:12 a.m. and switch to another train in the middle of the night in some random location. Which appeared to be the case. She also wanted to charge me for the sleeper bed, although I thought I had paid for that in Bucharest. Ah, well, maybe not... but that meant I would have to find a Bankomat or money exchange place, and there didn't appear to be one in the train station. Did I mention that my rolly suitcase has a flat tire? Yes, it happened in the Czech Republic, the wheel bent and got jammed, so I started dragging it, and that flattened it out... 8 countries later, give or take, the wheel is now triangular, and not very pleasant to drag. Especially on cobblestones and up and down sidewalk curbs, of which Chernovcy has plenty. But the Bankomat was not too far, and I was soon back to the ticket lady. Who, I think not only charged me for the sleeper bed, but gave herself a tip as well. It's hard to say for certain.
Ah, well. I still had a few hours in Chernovcy. What to do? The station seemed mildly entertaining: There were a lot of stray dogs who lazed about on the chairs, and a cleaning lady who threatened them with a mop. Then she threatened the drunks who were sleeping with a mop. Then she threatened me with a mop.
I had a mission: to find a telephone card so I could call Vova with an update. There was a pay phone with telephone card slot at the station, but the lady in the shop right next to it had no idea what I was talking about. She got a policeman to help, and he asked to see my passport. They were amused by my mime routine of me phoning Vova on a pay phone using telephone card, but baffled as to how they could help.
I left my suitcase at the train station storage area, and headed up the hill into town. There were pay phones every 20 meters or so, and plenty of small shops of the type that sell telephone cards in every other city in Europe, yet none of these shops sold telephone cards. I went to the town square. There were young people walking around, with the women wearing knee-high stilletto-heeled boots and tight pants or miniskirts. This, I've discovered, is the official uniform of Ukrainian women.
I went into a restaurant that had a picture of something resembling a pizza on the sign. There was a teenaged boy working inside. I looked at a menu – all Cyrillic, no pictures. “Pizza?” I asked. The boy nodded and pointed to the whole menu. It was completely incomprehensible. I just pointed at something and hoped for the best. How bad could it be?
It turned out to be ham and cheese and ketchup and sour cream and maybe a few other things. Not bad, really, although it smelled like pickles even though there weren't any pickles on it.
The town wasn't very exciting, so I headed back to the train station and waited there. Eventually the train showed up, and I found my seat, although it appeared it wasn't a sleeper bed. But... a guy spoke English! He looked at my tickets. It turned out that I didn't have to switch trains in the middle of the night – my two tickets were for the same train. And as for the last leg, from Zdulbunov to Rivne, he informed me that Zdulbunov was only a few kilometers from Rivne. He let me borrow his mobile phone and I called Vova, who was already planning to pick me up there. All was well! And, even better, the guy showed me that my seat, which was located in the aisle across from the sleeper beds, actually folded out to a bed. It was about four inches too short for me, but I slept like a baby, and Vova was waiting for me at the station when I arrived.

Jackson

2008-09-27T20:15:00.003-06:00

Sometimes you just have to let Johnny Cash do the talking for you.

When I breeze into that city, people gonna stoop and bow. (Hah!)
All them women gonna make me, teach 'em what they don't know how,
I'm goin' to Jackson, you turn-a loose-a my coat.
'Cos I'm goin' to Jackson.
"Goodbye," that's all she wrote.

But they'll laugh at you in Jackson, and I'll be dancin' on a Pony Keg.
They'll lead you 'round town like a scalded hound,
With your tail tucked between your legs,
You're goin' to Jackson, you big-talkin' man.
And I'll be waitin' in Jackson, behind my Jaypan Fan.

Chinese react to Ray's article

2008-05-22T21:17:00.004-06:00

Remember this article, about itinerant artist Jim Mott? Well, Jim sent me the following exchange, which he tracked down somehow from a Chinese message board. It's amazing how word gets around.

Notes: I was doing a Google search for “itinerant artist project” a couple of weeks ago and found the Christian Science Monitor article about it being discussed on a Chinese website. A friend’s daughter, who is living in China, was kind enough to make a translation of the Chinese forum posts (below).
She mentioned also that the name of the Web site, Laosanjie, means "three old classes." The term refers to people in the high school graduating classes of 1966, 1967 and 1968 whose education was interrupted by the Cultural Revolution. Meanwhile, of course everyone sends infinite ripples that end up going all over the world, but it's fun to have something that lets me see that in action. Plus, without the "ripple" back from China and its mention of xiaosa, I would have forgotten that my thinking and my project had been influenced at least a little bit by a class in Taoism, particularly a reading of Chuang Tzu with its concept of “free and easy wandering” – something my project would seem to exemplify (although, in reality, I’m an anxious and constrained traveler). Anyway, this is an interesting peek into a chat group from another country and culture:

HOW AN ITINERANT ARTIST* INSPIRED ME (postings from 4/17/08 – 4/30/08)
[*the Chinese could also be read as “vagabond artist”] translated by Stephanie Schubmehl

Merry Deer (discussion leader):
[Merry Deer has posted the photo and opening paragraph from the CS Monitor article, in it’s original English]

Soaring Crane:
Very interesting. I guess you’re telling me to work on my English, Merry Deer. That’s great! I think I’m going to need a Chinese version, though. Ha.

Merry Deer:
Hadn’t quite finished posting yet. You got the first reply in, buddy.

The photo and opening paragraph above are from an article in the Christian Science Monitor. The article is titled “Itinerant Artist Will Paint for a Bed and a Meal.” The painter’s name is Jim. Influenced by Odysseus, the hero of the Roman [sic] epic poem, he has found a unique way to live and travel in the United States. He plans to live a life free of monetary exchanges, traveling and learning by staying with ordinary people who have an appreciation for art. Jim’s host provides a meal and a place to sleep, and he creates a painting in return. He repays his host’s hospitality by painting a picture, creating an artistic representation of his host’s surroundings for the host to enjoy on the wall of his or her own home.

I want to follow this painter's example. What I’m thinking is that I could go to people’s houses and help them learn English. Think that would work? Any volunteers? Hee hee....

I want to find this kind of people, or this kind of school. The school here wanted me to teach classes, but I’ve resigned. I’ve thought about starting a completely different life. Maybe this June I’ll start off in Kunming. I can support myself until I find something.

Running in Circles:
That should be doable. You’re all set up if you've got a professional skill. A lot of people want their kids to study English now. Living conditions usually aren't great, though. Find a school first and then find suitable candidates through them.

You’re all such useful people. I feel so inadequate! I can’t do anything.

Gong-chang Zhang:
Yep. The forgotten generation.

North:
So just go as a tourist. Let Merry get on with his work.

So what you're really saying, Merry, is that you’ll start off teaching English at Plateau Gentleman’s [one of the site administrators] house. He’ll give you room and board. I’ll join you in Yunnan and teach Plateau Gentleman’s kids English and nursery rhymes. We can discuss photography, too.

Plum:
Not a bad idea.

Merry Deer:
I know you’re a painter, too, buddy!

Soaring Crane:
Hahaha, I didn’t notice the discussion raging here until today. If you’re coming to Yunnan, Merry Deer, let me know so I can make plans. Come and have a look. It will do you good.

North mentioned my grandson. He really is a bundle of joy. The funny thing is that he can’t write yet, so he dictates letters to me and insists that I reply. When he visits he’s forever pestering me and asking to play. Apparently I’m his idea of the perfect playmate.

Volley:
Itinerant educator vs. itinerant artist? Haha, this rocks. That’s just the kind of thing you’d come up with, Merry. You always have a unique take on things.

Merry Deer:
I bet an itinerant dancer would have no trouble getting by.

North:
I want to be a ganma [adopted mother], a sweet old ethnic-minority mommy. I’d give them love and find out what I’m truly capable of.

Open Field:
This itinerant artist is a genuine free spirit [xiaosa, “natural and unrestrained”].

Merry Deer:
No one thinks of “free spirit” as a derogatory term, but in order to truly be a free spirit you have to give something up.

North:
But you gain something in return.

[Untranslatable and not especially relevant joke that relies on punning interpretations of the Chinese words for “free spirit” and “latte”]

YZ Traveler:
[Reply to untranslatable joke: Literally translated, it goes something like: What’s the difference between a free spirit and a latte? One is watering the flowers, and the other is holding barbells in a weightlifting competition].

Clad in white, adorned in red:
I want to be a free spirit too, but I can’t give anything up. It’s not that easy. Maybe Merry Deer can arrange things so that all of us retired teachers in the thatched hut [a Laosanjie literature discussion board] can travel around giving classes?

Merry Deer:
That would mean setting up a mobile school. Find a school in the mountains, teach there for one semester and then move on? Is it okay if we all live in a dorm?

North:
Find a school in the mountains, teach there for one semester and then move on?
That’s been my plan from way back : ) It would be beyond great if a lot of people want to get in on it : ) I’m with you : )

Merry Deer:
I have a friend who’s actually setting me up with a private tutoring position. Last week was pretty hectic, but now I’m in Shanghai for the May 1 holiday.

Little Bit:
Haha, someone actually wants a university professor for a private tutor?

Of possible further interest to fans of my Christian Science Monitor articles: the current (June 2008) issue of Wired magazine has a feature on Bernie Krause. He was the subject of my first Monitor article back in June 2007.

Back in the Tetons again

2008-05-22T21:02:00.007-06:00

As of last Friday, I have returned to Grand Teton National Park to work. I'm in Moose this time, at the park's south entrance. The reason for change? I had applied to my old place very late in the season, and all the positions had already been filled. The same was true here, actually, but they had a cancellation, so now I'm in. I've been working four days, and aside from a few curmudgeonly coworkers, it's been fine. It's great to be back here, that's for sure. Both Bozeman and writing had been getting a bit too complicated for me, and I longed for the simple life that only comes from living a 30-second walk from work and being on the meal plan. Speaking of which, this place (I'm purposely not naming it to avoid getting in trouble) has an excellent meal plan - we can eat anything off the restaurant menu, and sit in the restaurant itself. I guess that's because it's a small place, and it doesn't make sense for them to build a whole dining facility just for employees.

There's been tons of snow all winter and into spring (and into yesterday). The weather was nice and sunny and warm earlier in the week, and I did some road biking into the Slide Lake area east of the park, and also to Jenny Lake and String Lake, which were both still covered in ice and snow. Yesterday and today have been snowy, sleety, rainy, and chilly (see photo below, same view as above), and the same is forecast for the next few days. I've got two days off coming up, and it looks like I'll either be holing up here in the dorm or making my first foray into Jackson. I'm not really looking forward to either. I should look up Black George and hang out with him.

On a related note, I've got some goals for the summer. One is I want to save enough money to travel in the fall. I want to go to Nepal and Ladakh in India, where my friend Deb will be. I've been looking at air fares, and I think it might be cheaper and more flexible to get one of these around-the-world fares. And I'd like to spend a good two months away, so I really want to make and save some money here. With that in mind, I've been trying not to drive much, and haven't driven at all since I got here (one week). That's a good start, but I'd also like to do a lot of hiking, climbing, and kayaking, so I will be driving a certain amount. Just hopefully not too much. But I'd like to avoid going to town as much as possible.

I also haven't had any coffee or caffeinated tea since arriving. And I started jogging today. I'm trying to be all healthy, you see. We'll see how long it lasts.

Vernon Gliko

2008-05-02T14:09:00.004-06:00

I was really busy in March with writing assignments, which was great but drove me a little bit crazy. Here's one of the results (of the writing, not the craziness), which ran in the High Country News on April 14.

A Montana rancher stands his ground against subdivision
High Country News
April 14, 2008
http://www.hcn.org/servlets/hcn.Article?article_id=17641

Also recently appearing in print are articles in Outside's Go, Via, Distinctly Montana, Montana Magazine, and the Tributary.

Dolores River - Diversion Dam Rapid

2008-04-14T10:38:00.000-06:00

Pandora's Box photos

2008-01-29T00:43:00.000-07:00

It turns out I didn't win any of the categories at the Equinox Theatre One-Act Festival, but, really, I'm not upset. I can honestly say that I was impressed with every single one of the plays, and the winners totally deserved to win.

Here's some photos taken on Friday, January 18, by Gerald Pape, Jr., the director of Bob Hendricks' "Let Your Dog Be the Judge." Thanks, Jerry!

(Note: I'm having a little trouble loading more photos. Stay tuned.)

New Year's Resolution (a little late)

2008-01-29T00:37:00.000-07:00

I'm finally getting around to this: The one thing I want to say for 2008 is that I want to make $10,000 more from writing than I did in 2007.

Which maybe sounds outrageous, but really, I think it's doable. (Can you keep a secret? I really didn't make that much from writing in 2007.)

Plus, I'm up to $2 a word now! Honestly, when I started doing this I had no idea people got paid that much. Now making a living actually seems feasible.

Don't mind him, he'll take the stares

2008-01-25T15:11:00.000-07:00

Here's my fourth article for the Christian Science Monitor's Backstory page: "A Legless Artist Documents the World in 32,000 Stares", from the January 22, 2008 edition.

Be sure to give a listen to the little reporter commentary I recorded for the website!

The Greatest Show on (Very Muddy) Earth

2008-01-06T15:06:00.000-07:00

Every year Outside Bozeman magazine holds a "Suby Tales" competition, in which owners of Bozeman's omnipresent Subarus submit stories of their cars' wonders. Having been the owner of not only a Subaru, but also of a very excellent Suby tale, I decided to submit a story. Unfortunately, my story was over 1200 words and the max for the contest is 800, so I had to do some heavy editing. Here's the unedited version. I'll let you know if I win anything.

Suby Tale: The Greatest Show on (Very Muddy) Earth

Okay, so I’m a Flatlander. I admit it. I can’t help that I was born and raised in New York, and, like many others, I hope it’s the sort of thing that’s not too obvious.

But, the fact is it takes a while to adjust to some of Montana’s idiosyncrasies. Namely, that a road that’s closed during winter may not having a sign noting this.
Such was the case when, during a warm spell in March of 1993, me and my nifty silver 1990 Loyale wagon decided to take a scenic jaunt. Brandishing an official Montana state highway map with freshly elected governor Marc Racicot’s smiling face looking benevolently upon us, we eyed what looked to be to be an excellent loop: north from Belgrade along Dry Creek Road, picking up Sixteenmile Creek Road at Maudlow, taking that east to Ringling, and then south on Hwy. 89.

The weather had been unseasonably warm, getting up into the seventies. An early spring! Nothing like zipping along Montana’s rural back roads to take in the scenery. Not even a patch of snow was visible along the gravelly Dry Creek Road; it looked like it would be smooth sailing all the way to Ringling.

But looks can be deceiving. The ghosts of Maudlow offered few hints – an abandoned schoolhouse offered no lessons to visitors. The Suby and I rolled onward.

The road became narrower… and muddier. It was barely noticeable at first, but as we passed one cow pasture after another, gaining elevation all the while, the road gradually became slick. Then sloppy. No problem for the Suby, of course – I just pushed the handy red button for on-demand four-wheel-drive, and slathering through the muck was nothing but fun.

Farther on, it got worse. Perhaps you’ve heard of something called “gumbo”? That’s the kind of mud that just sticks to itself – the more your wheels turn, the more mud you pick up, until your tires no longer have traction, they just have mud. The sliding and slathering was no longer fun, as I dropped the Suby’s automatic transmission down to low 2, and then low 1. I wondered how far it was to Ringling; could the road get any worse? Maybe it would be a good idea to turn around. But no, the road couldn’t get any worse, could it?

It got worse. Much worse. I was swerving left and right, flooring the gas pedal in a desperate attempt not to lose momentum.

In an even more desperate move, I abandoned the road. Drove it right off the side, onto the unfenced pasture. Cows looked on curiously. Surprisingly, this worked very well. The road was crap, but the side of the road was not bad. Not good, mind you, but the little car found enough purchase to roll onward.

But the road seemed interminable. I alternated between left-side pasture, road, and right-side pasture, depending on what looked most passable. And the Suby did a great job, powering through the thickest gumbo I ever imagine existing. A nightmare of gumbo – the car was covered in it.

Finally, the road began to descend. Ringling would be ours! But not quite yet – inexplicably, there was a massive snow berm completely blocking the road. I had barely seen any snow the whole way.

But the Suby had done so well, I knew there was only one course of action. I floored the mother. Full speed ahead! I’m givin’ it all she’s got, Cap’n! It would be like Evel Knievel and the Dukes of Hazzard except with snow. In a Subaru.
But it was not to be. Despite the full-throttled thrust, the Suby got high-centered midway through. We were stuck, and good.

These were the days before cell phones, and there was only one course of action: Hoof it to Ringling, and seek help there. How far was Ringling – four miles? I had no jacket, no water, no food, and it was getting dark. I said goodbye to the Suby and headed out on foot.

I didn’t see a soul the whole way to the sleepy little town, but I knew where to go: the bar. No shortage of people there. I shamefully confessed my fate to the crowd of ranchers. The response: “You’re the third one this weekend!”

Apparently, Sixteen Mile Creek Road has high entertainment value for Ringlingers. They told me to use the payphone outside to call a tow truck in Livingston. How much would that cost? Dejectedly, I went outside and picked up the phone. It was dead. Was this part of the fun?

I went back in. One old rancher said, “Well, okay, I’ll give you a pull, but just let me finish my beer.” He was drunk off his keister. I didn’t like the looks of this, but I was desperate.

Following him into the truck, he said, “Just give me a hand bringing in the cows first.” Sure, why not? He probably just wanted me to hold the fence open or something.

We drove a short to the ranch, and getting out of the truck he pointed to two four-wheelers and said, “The right one’s the gas, the left one’s the brake.” He hopped on one of them. I looked at the other, thinking, He’s kidding, right? He fired his up and, taking off, yelled, “Don’t mind the one’s that are calving, I’ll get those later!”

I looked at the thing. How hard could it be? I hopped on, switched the key, grabbed the right handlebar, and turned. It roared to life. I took off after the cows.
How does one herd, anyway? Watching the man, it seemed like you just head straight for the cows and yell a lot. I wasn’t much of a yeller, but I was okay at running straight at them. They generally moved, although rarely in the right direction. And how was I supposed to know which ones were calving? It would be nice if they had a big “C” painted on the side of them or something.

After ten minutes of pathetic herding, the man took pity on this sorry-assed Flatlander and called it good. We headed back to the truck, where another guy was waiting. His minivan was stuck in the mud farther back on the road, with a wife and two kids still in it. Another sucker! “Hop in,” the man said.
Hey! How come he didn’t have to work for it? Ah, well.

My Suby was waiting for us at the snow berm – which, I learned, was the barrier so that no one from the Ringling side would be foolish enough to drive on the road. No such luck on the Maudlow side, of course, but then, what would Ringlingers do for fun this time of year? The Superduty diesel made short work of it, plucking the Suby off the snow like popping the head off a dandelion.

It was smooth sailing from there on out. The Suby was covered in thick clumps of mud, but it was no worse for wear. Me, on the other hand… well, I’d had a good walk. I learned how to drive a four-wheeler, and how to herd cattle. I didn’t bother with the ones that were calving (or several others that weren’t). I learned my car kicks ass in mud.

And most of all, now I know where to hang out in March when I’m looking to make fun of some Flatlanders.

Undersea Photo Ops

2008-01-02T20:29:00.001-07:00

From my recent trip to Florida:

Here's me and Squidworth at the Nickelodeon Hotel in Orlando...

And here's me and a mermaid at Weekie Wachee World...

I might as well grow some gills and start living underwater!

Experience

2007-12-19T14:49:00.001-07:00

"To have a great adventure, and survive, requires good judgment. Good judgment comes from experience. Experience, of course, is the result of poor judgment."
-Geoff Tabin

See this frozen waterfall? Doesn't it look nice? That's Palisades Falls in the Hyalite Canyon area south of Bozeman. Craig and I started to climb it about two weeks ago, when this picture was taken, but it had been really warm and we didn't like the looks of the ice up high, so we called it good at halfway and went home.

On Saturday we went back out; it had been a lot colder, and the falls looked a lot fatter, so we figured we were good. Craig led the first pitch, then, since there wasn't a good belay spot on the ice, I lowered him and and started from the bottom. I placed an ice screw about ten feet above his highest one, and continued climbing... but the ice was getting worse. I placed an ice screw but sensed that the ice wasn't very solid there. I told Craig I'd place another one right away.

The thing is, the ice just kept getting worse. Plus, I was getting more and more tired, and it was very hard to balance myself precariously on the toes of my crampons, hanging on with one ice tool while trying to insert a stubborn screw with my one free hand. And there wasn't a good place to put it, so I just kept going up - it's much easier to go up than down.

My pick placements got sloppier. At one point I had them hooked onto little more than snow, but my arms were so tired I couldn't fathom whacking them into something more solid. And there wasn't much that was more solid - what there was was brittle, and would send dinner plates of ice cascading below. So I balanced precariously, just resting, debating my next move, philosophizing about mortality... and I moved my left pick a little bit. Just a teensy bit, but it was enough to shift my balance, and I knew I was going to fall.

"Fall.....!" That's all I managed to get out of my mouth. I was near the top of that picture.

I was ten feet over that last, insufficient screw. It came out. I remember thinking, as I flew head first through the air, that it would be nice to stop falling. At any time, really.

I must have fallen about 40 feet, but the next screw held and eventually the rope did what it was supposed to do. It stopped me before I reached the ground, and as Craig lowered me to the ice I wondered why my glasses were covered in blood. I had the wind knocked out of me, but I had remained conscious - or at least I thought I had. But I had a deep gash on my forehead, and blood was spurting out of my nose.

I sat there, trying to stop the bleeding, Craig helping me. I didn't feel all that hurt, but I was definitely shaken up. Craig started collecting the stuff; fortunately I had no trouble standing up and walking.

We drove to Urgent Care in Bozeman; along with needing five stitches on my forehead and one on my nose, I had also broken my nose - not displaced, just a crack. What's odd is that I don't remember hitting the ice. Later, Craig guessed that when I was flying through the air upside down, one of the razor-sharp ice screws slinged around my neck had reached up and sliced me.

So, really, I'm okay. It didn't hurt at all. I think right now my back hurts more than anything, from getting torqued by the rope when it finally stopped me.

It just makes me wonder how lucky I am. There's a nice welt on my helmet from something. That could have been my head. And though my glasses don't seem to have received a scratch, I have to wonder if they saved me from being blinded.

So I sit here and wonder what it all means. Why do I climb? More to the point - why do I climb ice? It's an unknown quantity. Unlike rock, it changes. It's more risky.

Former climber and Sierra Club president David Brower once wrote, "It is not variety that is the spice of life. Variety is the meat and potatoes. Risk is the spice of life." That's all well and good, but how much risk does one person need?

Of course, compared to other mountaineers, this is nothing. A little broken nose and some stitches? It's enough to remind me that I enjoy being here, that's for sure. Is it enough to keep me off the ice? I kind of doubt it. My mom asked me to take a little break, and I assured her that that would not be a problem. But in a month or so...

I don't know what draws us to such things. It makes little sense, but the allure is strong.

Plus, now that I've got some experience, I should have good judgment, too. Right?

Ice climbing season kicks off

2007-12-01T21:05:00.000-07:00

And, boy, does it ever - it was FREEZING! It was the annual Bozeman Ice Climbing festival in Hyalite Canyon, and the climbing part wasn't so bad, but the waiting around to climb was very, very, very cold. So cold that my camera refused to function, so I have no pictures of my own. Which is especially sad because the ice was very beautiful, and I feel I have definitely improved over my performance at the same event last year. In fact, my (attempted) climb of The Sceptre was one of the most exciting of the day! At least I thought so, anyway. It was really very hard, with a bulging, overhanging section in the middle with giant icicles hanging off it. Most of the climbers used the rock on the side of the waterfall for support over this difficult section. I tried to do that, and was way more successful than I thought I would be - only I didn't really know where to go from there. For some reason, I edged left over the icicles, which left nothing for my left foot to connect to. So I was connected by two ice axes and my right foot, and I wasn't getting anywhere, so for some reason I moved farther left... so I then had nothing for my right foot to connect to. So I was just dangling there. I pulled my right ice axe out of the ice, but then I was just dangling from one arm - which was kind of exciting with all the people watching below, including some truly world class ice climbers. (Canadian Guy Lacelle had just done the route before me - he's climbed more ice than anyone in the world.) So I'm hanging there by one ice axe, realizing I can't go on - but I can't really get off, either. Well, I can, but it would involve falling. We're on top rope, so it's pretty safe, but falling would involve leaving my leashless ice axe in the ice. Which, in the not-very-coherent moment, seemed like something I shouldn't want to do. But, really, with all the top-notch guys down below itching to go next, it wouldn't be a problem. So I let go of the ice axe and fell, and then the ice axe came out of the ice and fell, narrowly missing my head and then crashing down toward the spectators below. Exciting!

No one was hurt, thankfully. I was dangling there on the rope so I asked to be lowered by my belayer, who seemed a bit surprised that I didn't want to try it some more. I was so close!

Ascent of Gallatin Tower

2007-10-30T22:50:00.001-06:00

Here's footage from Gallatin Tower, which Craig and I climbed Oct. 23. It was our first 5.8 trad ascent, so we were feeling pretty good about it. Well, I was, anyway. Craig fell a few times. I think he felt better when we got back to the car.

Artist-troubador

2007-10-18T12:01:00.000-06:00

Click here for my third article on the Christian Science Monitor's Backstory page.

Here it is...

2007-10-06T19:40:00.000-06:00

... my first NY Times article.

I have a lot to say about this, but for right now I'm just going to let it speak for itself.

Update: And doggone it, people like me!

2007-09-30T00:38:00.000-06:00

This was the Stuart Smalley-inspired blog entry I wrote on January 22, 2007:

"I want to be a professional freelance writer. I want to do this in Bozeman, Montana. I want to cover people and events I myself find interesting. I want to write for magazines and newspapers, based in print or on the Internet, that have an appreciation and respect for my talent, and that challenge me in ways that I find constructive. I want to be paid well for my efforts.

"Okay, that was weird. It better work."

Back then I was agonizing over the fact that a local weekly newspaper stopped returning my phone calls, and I doubted that I'd ever be able to make a living at this. I've certainly come a long way in the nine months since then. Today I was working on an article for a prestigious national publication in which I'm getting more than $1 per word. I still haven't quite gotten it to where work is steady and I just come up with ideas and editors beg me for the honor of gracing their publications with my articles, but I feel like I'm really not too far away from that. There have actually been editors competing for my articles, and I've been able to garner more money for my work because of it.

So, let's just say that maybe Stuart Smalley knows what he's doing, okay? And, with that in mind, I might as well start a fresh one:

"I want to make a decent living as a professional freelance writer. I want to be based in Bozeman, Montana, but I also want to be paid to travel to assignments in far-flung locales. I want editors to continue to have an appreciation and respect for my talent, and continue to challenge me in ways I find constructive. I want editors to respond to my ideas and queries, and I also want editors to contact me with their ideas for me. I want longer assignments, and I want $1/word to be the minimum I will accept for an assignment. I want to continue working with photographer Anne Sherwood, and I want her to continue getting assignments, too. We both want to start shooting video.

"I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!"

What the hell - why not?

Spinner of yarns, maker of floats

2007-09-29T16:06:00.001-06:00

The mystery is revealed! Here's my latest in the High Country News - it's the story photographer Anne Sherwood and I were working on for the trip down to Wyoming several weeks ago (see a couple of entries below).

Added bonus - there's a movie! Well, sort of a movie. Basically it's a slideshow with Black George (and a few questions and interjections from me) as voice-over. Movies are new to the hcn.org website; so new, Anne and I didn't even know we were making one. But, hey, not a bad start, no? Next stop, Hollywood!

Fe fi fo fum

2007-09-26T00:23:00.001-06:00

I'm a natural videographer, don't you think?

For more Whitefish trip photos (and a few Evel Knievel Days photos for good measure), click here.

Free Wisdom

2007-09-26T00:18:00.000-06:00

NOTE: I wrote this post back in July, then took it off after I got a bit paranoid about writing in the big leagues and having a somewhat revealing blog. Rereading this, I realize I wrote nothing that could get me in trouble, and what I wrote is, I think, really worth having up here. I'll even add an update at the end.

****

A few weeks ago I noticed something: though it's happened sporadically, I've added a total of one new publication to my list of credits for every month that I've been back in Bozeman. I think that's pretty good, so I'm going to try to keep it up.

Let's see, it's now July, and I got here in October. That's nine months:

1) The Tributary
2) Billings Gazette
3) Belgrade News
4) Outside Bozeman
5) Distinctly Montana
6) Christian Science Monitor
7) North Bay Bohemian
8) High Country News
9) Jackson Hole News and Guide

Not bad, huh? The trick now is to keep adding the higher-paying publications, and try to up my ante a bit. That's what I'm working on.

I've come up with a theory to that effect, which is based on my long and varied experience waiting tables. I have worked in lousy two-bit diners and high-end candlelit affairs, and everything in-between. In all those places there were some really good servers and some really bad servers - it didn't make much difference whether the place was a horrible place to work and you made really bad tips, or if it was just the opposite. Well, maybe it made a little bit of difference, but not as much as you'd think.

I noticed there were some really good servers in really bad restaurants, and some bad servers in good restaurants. The same, I think, is true for publications. I don't know how bad writers end up in good publications, but I'm not going to worry about that. The thing that concerns me is the really good writers who work for the really - well, not bad, but low-paying - publications. And, naturally, I'd venture to put myself in this category.

Whether we're waiters or writers, why do we do this? Convenience, ignorance, fear... there's a lot of reasons, I think, but none of them are very good. The thing is, if you realize you're doing it, that's probably the first step to changing it. I think a good writer can write for high-paying publications, just as good servers serve for restaurants in which they make a lot in tips. It's just a matter of confidence, timing, and persistence.

So that's what I'm gonna do.

****

UPDATE: It's September now, and I've been itching to reveal my new additions to the list. Some of these I'm still awaiting contracts for, and none of the articles have come out yet, but I'm excited so I'll list them anyway.

10) The New York Times (two articles awaiting publication)
11) Montana Magazine
12) Outside's GO
13) Big Sky Journal

I'm even two magazines ahead of schedule!

Logs

2007-09-25T22:40:00.001-06:00

Think we've got enough for the winter here? (I sure hope so.)

3 Peas in a Pod

2007-09-09T12:04:00.001-06:00

Aren't we all cute and cuddly here? That's me on the left and photographer Anne Sherwood on the right. And the dashing man in the middle? Well, I'm going to be coy about that for now. Let's just say that Anne and I went on assignment in Wyoming, he had something to do with it, and root beer floats were part of the deal.

I've been off the blog for a while, for a couple of reasons. One is pure laziness, another is I've been busier than usual because I've had several new assignments for great publications, and another is that I've had to reassess what this blog is supposed to be about. As a journalist for high-falutin' publications, I can't really express myself in the way that I've grown accustomed to, because I'm supposed to be unbiased - and that affects everything I do publicly, right down to this blog. That's something I totally support, because I embrace this role, and I think the rules are good. As journalists, we have more power than the average joe on the street, so we don't need to assert ourselves in other ways. That all sounds fine to me on paper, but the reality of it hasn't been so easy to embrace. I have to be careful what I say - which kind of defies the original purpose of this blog. Hopefully I'll find a happy medium somewhere.

Here's some new articles for you:
Sculpting a reason to love the wind, High Country News, Aug. 20, 2007
(You'll need to subscribe to read the complete text, at least until Sept. 17 or so. Then it's free.)
Sculpting a reason to love the wind

Eco People, The Tributary, Sept. 2007
Eco People

Accordion Festival Craziness!

2007-08-05T22:14:00.001-06:00

Sam Louden is at it again, this time cutting the rug at the Accordion Festival in Phillipsburg, Montana. C'est la vie, say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell.

Any which Ray you can

2007-08-02T11:24:00.000-06:00

(Note for blog-headline conoisseurs: The 1980 Clint Eastwood/Clyde the Ape movie "Any Which Way You Can" was shot in Jackson, Wyoming. While Ray Dillard would have been working in Jackson Lake Lodge at the time, he didn't mention running into either Clint or the chimp.)

(This originally ran in the Jackson Hole News and Guide.)

Fifty seasons and counting: Ray Dillard
by Ray Sikorski

Though he is 83 years old and has worked in Jackson Lake Lodge for 50 consecutive seasons, Ray Dillard insists he is neither the oldest nor longest-serving employee of the Grand Teton Lodge Company. That honor, he claims, belongs to a man in his 90s by the name of Russ Stone, who travels from Idaho once a week or so to check on bus maintenance.
But being the second-oldest and second-longest seems to suit the understated newsstand manager. Of course, he really does hold the title. Stone only works once a week, whereas Dillard routinely logs over 40 hours a week, and pays his dues in more ways than that: He still lives in the employee dorms, and he still dines in the employee cafeteria.
“It has been basically pretty good,” Dillard says, referring to the cafeteria's offerings. He notes that the increase in staff hailing from south of the border the last few years has resulted in fare with a distinct Mexican flavor.
“And that's okay with you?” I ask.
Dillard shakes his head no. Despite the silver and turquoise tie that complements his crisply pressed shirt, he is, was, and will always be a mid-westerner – with the taste buds to match. “So I go to the salad bar.”
Despite his years, Dillard emits a youthful innocence that I've grown accustomed to. We meet on the comfortable sofas of the lodge's grand upper lobby, its floor-to-ceiling windows showcasing the splendor of the Tetons. But this isn't a first-time encounter; we're old comrades. I worked at Jackson Lake Lodge myself, serving a respectable six seasons in the Pioneer Grill lunch counter, where Dillard was a daily presence. He would come in on his breaks for coffee, or iced coffee if it was hot out – or, if he really wanted to throw you a curve, root beer. He would say, “Hello, Ray!” and I would respond, “Hello, Ray!” Somehow, we never tired of this, taking simple pleasure in the notion that two people could share the same first name.
A junior high school teacher in Jefferson, Iowa, Dillard came to Grand Teton National Park in the summer of 1958, visiting a fellow faculty member who had taken a job at Colter Bay. Dillard himself had planned to work in Yellowstone, but was taken by the scenery and imposing architecture of the fortress-like lodge, which had opened three years earlier. When his friend mentioned an opening in the lodge's gift shop, Dillard decided to stick around.
And he continues to stick around, returning for the camaraderie of tourists and coworkers, even after retiring from his school in 1989. He has endured four concessionaires, five general managers, and countless coworkers. I recall waiting on former employees, some of whom returned to Jackson Lake Lodge to vacation with their new families: “I just saw Mr. Dillard – I can’t believe he's still working there!”
Sometimes Dillard can't believe it himself. “Many times at the end of the season I'd say, 'Boy, that's it.' But by January I began to get a little anxious to come back.”
Which is basically how we all did it. Dillard just did it over and over and over again.
Remarkably, despite being surrounded by miles of hiking trails made famous in glossy magazines, Dillard claims he has never set foot on a trail, preferring to spend his days off lunching in Jackson or taking lodge-sponsored bus tours. He recalls with fondness visits by luminaries including Grace Kelly and Harvey Firestone. And he appears a bit perturbed by what he considers one of the biggest changes over the decades: “Men used to wear suits at night for dinner. Now they go in Bermudas.”
I prod him on this, hoping to break past what I sense to be a politician's veneer. Does he approve of it? “It's hard not to approve of it. It's just a national transformation into informality.”
I suppose one does not last 50 years at any job by flapping one's tongue. But chances are he won't get fired if he refers to modern-day tourists as slobs, so I prod some more.
“You come to accept it,” he says, betraying not a whit of disdain. “People are still mannerly.”
Perhaps it's just better to play it safe. After all, Dillard plans on coming back next year.

Viva Knievel!

2007-07-29T23:22:00.000-06:00

Evel Knievel Days in Butte was a blast. Along with assorted motorcycle daredevilry, we were treated to an appearance by Evel himself. Well, he was on the other side of a big dirt landing ramp and we didn't actually see him... but we heard him over the PA system. I'm fairly convinced he's still alive.

Pictures can only do the event so much justice. Above is the freestyle flying-through-the-air event, and on the right is the amazing "Wall of Death." There was also the Globe of Death, and the crashing through the walls of fire of death, and plenty of other tomfoolery.

My friend Sam Louden contributed a poem for Evel Knievel days, which is below. And below that is a video that sums up the day better than I ever could. Check out how the teenage chick abandons her boyfriend for Sam!

The Last Weekend

Go to Butte on the Last Weekend
Of July to see the leather, see the hides
Revealed, tanned and inked and wrinkled
Before their times from radical hard
Living and liquor,
Tobacco and sun.
Crass and creed-less, the faithful gather to celebrate
dare-
Devilry—defying death by dying slow:
Melanoma, emphysema, hepatic cirrhosis,
Pulmonary fibrosis—the final wreck,
The tragically anti-climactic terminal crash
Of Evel Knievel. Betwixt choppers and scooters,
Kids do shooters in t-shirts from Hooters.

Evel Knievel Days! Hooray! Drink and smoke,
Dance through the crowd from spectacle to spectacle—
Jumps and bikes,
Fire and cleavage—
With the throng who is by far more spectacular
In and among America’s strength: the redneck liberal
Quaffing booze from a mason jar;
The conservative Democrat, loving guns
And sucking heavy metal water from a mason jar;
Hyped-up teens quick to mate and speed
To guzzle meth from a mason jar;
Hard-edge biker-woman—shameless
Rough and ready to drink blood from a mason jar,
Blood from a baby to preserve her youth;
A baby happy to drink her milk from a mason jar;
Everybody dehydrated and hyper from the complimentary
Energy-drink imbibed in or out of a mason jar.
Evel Knievel, chemical daze under wildfire haze;
Mullets and rattails amaze on those high holy days.

Sam Louden dancing

2007-07-29T23:21:00.001-06:00

It's Evel Knievel Days 2007 in Butte, Montana, and I just can't get enough of the irrepressible Sam Louden's one-of-a-kind dance moves.

People notice things

2007-07-11T17:38:00.000-06:00

Like the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, for example. In today's "What's Up With That?" section, Chronicle staffer Brook Griffin noticed my Christian Science Monitor article about Ron Gompertz, owner of Bozeman's EcoAuto.

The Chronicle's website doesn't show the article without subscribing, but it's just a blurb so I think it's okay if I stick it here.

Monitoring Gompertz: Ron Gompertz is in the news again. The Bozeman resident and chief purveyor of tiny, fuel-efficient cars, is featured in the July 9 edition of the Christian Science Monitor in the science and tech section.

The story follows Gompertz around town in one of his 1,500 pound cars drag racing with diesels on Main Street and telling a complicated and convoluting life story.

The gist of the story centers on Gompertz selling environmentally aware vehicles in a state that doesn't really care about being that environmentally friendly. At one point Gompertz is even quoted as referring to Montanans driving big trucks as a "Neanderthal kind of thing."

While this kind of thing probably won't sell any more of those tiny cars, it was an interesting read. Those who want to know more can check the article out at www.csmonitor.com, click on the "sci/tech" button.

Should I take this mentioning of my article as a compliment? Of course!

This time, with chutzpah

2007-07-08T17:33:00.000-06:00

This is Ron Gompertz, owner of Bozeman's EcoAuto dealership (photo by Anne Sherwood), and subject of my second Christian Science Monitor article.

When doing a scientific experiment, it doesn't count if you achieve success just once. You have to do it twice, in case the first time was a fluke. So I'm pretty proud of myself for having two articles in the Monitor.

This article is also important because it represents the first collaboration between myself and Bozeman-based photographer Anne Sherwood, who primarily shoots for the New York Times. I met Anne through a mutual friend several years ago; this past winter we met again, which was strange in that it was like we had always been close friends. We were familiar with each others' work, and we both expressed interest in collaborating. We both share an interest in exploration, adventure, and meeting fascinating people (like the dude in this article), so I think we both hope this will be the first of many collaborations.

Something EVEL this way comes

2007-07-02T16:16:00.000-06:00

by Ray Sikorski

(This article originally appeared in the July issue of the Tributary magazine.)

Ah, July in Montana. There's nothing like frolicking in meadows of beargrass beneath the purple peaks of Glacier, floating languidly down the Madison on a hot day, and watching maniacs on motorcycles crash into walls of fire in Butte.

Yes, Evel Knievel Days are back. Once again the Richest Hill on Earth will measure its wealth not in copper, zinc, and manganese, but with the mother of all mother lodes of vicarious thrills and adrenaline. This year's lineup, taking place in Uptown Butte July 26-28, boasts teams of Superbikers, Balls of Steel Stunts, a Wall of Death, world record attempts in the firewall crash and jumping motorcycles over cars, and it's all presided over by the red-white-and-bluest American icon of all time: Evel Knievel himself.

To those of us of the male gender brought up in the glorious 1970s, the mind has a hard time conceiving of a greater bacchanal. And yet, observant early visitors to the www.knieveldays.com website noticed one other event: Evel Knievel, the Rock Opera.

Whoa. The mere thought of it: Evel, resplendent in his leathers. Motorcycles flying through the air. Blazing electric guitars. The larger-than-life history of Butte's favorite son, world premiering in rock ‘n’ roll glory at the Mother Lode Theater.

Alas, it was not to be. Our Lady of the Rockies may bring miracles, but even this was out of her realm. Budgetary constraints have prevented the show from going on – in Butte, anyway. Jef Bek, founding member of Los Angeles' Zoo District Theatre Company and writer of the show, is forging ahead with the production of the rock opera, opting instead for a fall world premiere at the Bootleg Theater in L.A.

Like other boys of a certain era, Bek got bit by the Evel bug – hard.

“I remember getting big slats of wood and cinder blocks and riding my Schwinn and actually talking kids into laying down, and I was actually jumping people,” the 44-year-old composer relays via phone. “That was kind of fun.”

Later, a close encounter with a tree stump put the kibosh on plans for further gravity-defying glory, but the star-spangled superbiker was never far from Bek's mind. After successfully working as musical director for Chicago's New Crime Productions, Bek wanted to compose something of his own.

“If I were to write my own musical, what subject would I write about?” Bek asked himself. He wanted something to take place in the early '70s, as an excuse to write the kind of classic rock that he loved, and he wanted a subject that hadn't already been overdone. “It just kind of hit me: Evel Knievel. He's dramatic, he's rock 'n' roll, crazy... I just thought, man, that would be brilliant.”

The idea got put on the back burner once Bek moved to L.A., but it was always simmering back there. The events of September 11, 2001 brought it back to the fore. Bek saw people becoming more and more divided along political lines as the prospect of war became more ominous, but he remembered things being different back in his youth.

“I want to write this show about an American icon, that reflects a time when you could be rebellious yet proud to say you were an American,” Bek recalls thinking. “You say Evel Knievel to the farthest left-thinking person and the farthest right-thinking person, and you get the same response: 'Evel Knievel, wow!'”

Bek went to work on the music and lyrics for the rock opera. Of course, he still needed official authorization from the man himself. Demo CD in hand, Bek flew to Florida, hoping for the green light. Knievel and his wife, Krystal, picked Bek up at the airport in Knievel's red-white-and-blue pickup. “I'm happy to report that yeah, he was driving pretty aggressively,” Bek says.

The aggressive driving may have made him happy, but it didn't relieve Bek of his apprehension. After all, he had painted an unapologetic portrait of the man, pulling no punches with Knievel's well-documented taste for booze, women, and violence.

“I go into some dark areas, because if it's just a fluff piece where every song is just about how wonderful Evel is, it's not very compelling.”

Knievel, now in his 60s and ailing from his numerous injuries and illnesses, popped Bek's CD into the truck's player. He seemed to like the music, Bek reports. For one song, in which Linda, Knievel's first wife, sings a bittersweet love ballad, Knievel pulled his truck into a convenience store and parked. He paused, listening to the music, then turned to Bek and said, “Jef, you nailed it.”

The show was on.

Production has been going on ever since. The show will include a live band with two guitars, a bass, drums, and keyboards, 16 singers, including eight principles and eight background vocalists (“I like a lot of voices,” Bek says), and a rear-projection video screen onstage to simulate the motion of speeding motorcycles.

“You picture Evel Knievel center-stage on a motorcycle singing a song, and behind him is this video screen that shows road movement, but going the other way so it kind of gives the impression that he's riding.”

While the world premiere is now slated for L.A. in the fall, Bek hopes the show will make it to points beyond – including Vegas.

And what about Butte, the town that inspired Evel to jump his way to glory?

The production may not arrive any time soon – but Bek might. Despite not taking the show with him for Evel Knievel Days, he just might make a trip up on his own.

“To be honest with you, I've never seen a motorcycle jumping a bunch of stuff,” he says. “I may come. I'm thinking that's a good idea.”

Hopefully he’ll remember to bring his Schwinn.

“Evel Knievel, red, white, and blue/ Evel Knievel, we wanna ride with you!” Crank the tunage from “Evel Knievel, The Rock Opera” by clicking here.

Finding Nima

2007-06-26T23:33:00.000-06:00

At last, my article about Nima Sherpa has finally appeared in Outside Bozeman! Those of you familiar with Sonoma Valley may know Nima from the Meritage Restaurant and Martini Bar. Along with being a really first-class waiter, Nima's also an accomplished climbing Sherpa on Everest - plus, he's spent time in Bozeman, too. Perfect for an article in Outside Bozeman, no?

Beyond Organic

2007-06-22T12:01:00.000-06:00

Green String's string theory goes past green

I had interviewed Bob Cannard, Jr. for an article for the Sonoma Valley Sun a year ago. His Petaluma farm stand opened since then, and I thought it would make a good article. While I was in California I paid it a visit, and the result was this article that appeared in the June 20-26 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

The Big Article

2007-06-14T23:09:00.000-06:00

We're all looking for a big break, right? Well, I just may have gotten one, in the form of an article I sold to the Christian Science Monitor, a paper of international renown and repute. Here it is:

Sound Lands on Google Earth

Not only did it end up in the Monitor, the article was also picked up by USA Today, the ABC News website, and was reported to have been at the top of Google News. It's no exaggeration to say it's been seen by millions of people. I was pretty happy to make $400 on the deal, which is a lot more than I'm used to... but someone said, "Shouldn't you make more, taking into account the circulation?"

I don't know. Hopefully it will translate into something I can make a living off of. Naturally, I'm trying to milk my success for all it's worth, querying like mad, using the credit as a selling point for the innate wonderfulness of my prose. Oh, I've got lots of ideas. Are you an editor? Do you want to hear them? Just ask!

I had an interesting conversation with my housemate Craig today. He's a jazz guitarist, and we discussed the value of writing versus music. I posited that writing is valued more in our culture than music, in that everyone who graduates high school is expected (hopefully) to be able to write a coherent sentence, while only a small percentage can write a line of music. Ironically, that means musicians are valued more when it comes to performing. After all, we all can put a few words together, right? But only the talented among us can make music, or so it seems. So, anyone who knows a few songs can get a $50 gig playing in a bar, whereas a writer may takes years to earn the same. But in all fields, anyone who truly excels can rise to the top and make scads of dough.

Hopefully I've been at this gig long enough. Baby needs a new pair of shoes!

UPDATE: Things are going well - just landed an assignment for the "Unusual Westerners" section of the High Country News.

Down and Dirty at the Prom

2007-06-08T18:19:00.000-06:00

(The following was originally published in the June 2007 edition of Bozeman's Tributary magazine.)

Down and dirty at the Prom
The bump and grind meets a one-man media circus

by Ray Sikorski

At last, I had a date to the prom.

With Bozeman Public Schools Superintendent Michael Redburn.

Okay, maybe this was wishful thinking on my part. Redburn said I could attend the Bozeman Senior High School Prom on May 5, in the interest of journalistic freedom and the public's right to know. He also said I couldn't interview any students, I couldn't take pictures, and I would have to stand in a special observation corral put in place so parents could keep an eye on their kids. He also said he'd really rather that I not attend at all.

Perfect!

Naturally, my intentions were noble. Last year's prom had sparked an explosion of controversy over the way the students danced. Parents Melea and Dean Mortenson had written letters to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle demanding something be done about the bumping and grinding they had witnessed students doing on the dance floor, moves they considered overtly sexual and inappropriate for teens at school-sponsored dances. Voices were raised at school board meetings, yet “dirty dancing” persisted.

And I didn't even know what dirty dancing was. The craziest dance we ever did at my school was the “Rock Lobster,” in which we held our noses and slowly wriggled “down, down, down...” to the tune of the B-52's undersea shanty, only to explode in innocent glee to the final, rocking verse.

I asked Bozeman High senior Sean Smith about it; Smith had written an opinion piece for the Hawk Tawk newspaper defending students' right to dance the way they wanted to. According to him, for the moves in question the female leans back and rests on the male behind her, and they move their bodies in a way that some have described as simulating anal intercourse.

“I personally believe it's innocuous,” he said. While Smith said he had never seen the groping of breasts and hiking up of skirts that some had described, he admitted that, “There's definitely is a fair amount of physical contact.”

Smith cited a survey of high schoolers taken last year, which said that 80 percent of students support no restrictions on dancing. He added that there's little point in trying stop something that's difficult to enforce, while much more egregious acts go on that parents have little knowledge of.

“They don't see what goes on at student parties,” Smith said, referring to students getting drunk, removing clothes, and “seeing who you can hook up with.”

Superintendent Redburn echoed the sentiment that alcohol is a far greater concern than dancing – although he said that the dance moves have been a concern of administrators long before the letters started appearing in the newspaper. Redburn said that there are levels at which chaperones can deal with inappropriate dancing, although there's not always agreement as to what constitutes inappropriate.

“There are students that push the envelope,” he said, explaining that those students would be approached and asked to back off, with possible behavioral follow-ups in school later on.

“Our intent is to keep this event a fun activity for kids,” he said. To prevent the heightened attention from interfering with the event, administrators sent a letter to parents explaining rules of conduct for the prom, which including a ban on cameras – not only for your correspondent, but for all students, to prevent the possibility of photos ending up in a newspaper. Obligations under federal privacy regulations were cited as the reason.

Paranoid? Redburn will be leaving his post at the end of the school year, to take a teaching position at MSU. Were the extreme measures to avoid a black mark on his record? I don't know. I do know he seemed very happy to see me, all cleaned up in my jacket and tie, as I made my way up the stairs of MSU's Strand Union building for the big night. He personally escorted me to the long hallway north of the ballroom for the “Parent's Corral,” which would be my post for the evening. There, I would have a view not only of the prom, but of the parents intent on keeping tabs on their kids.

Perfect! Right?

Well, yes and no. I could see all the students milling in, wearing their formal best. I could talk to the parents, whose opinions of dirty dancing ranged from “I'm not happy with it” to “Stuff goes on, it's always gone on for years” to “How did you dance when you were that age?”

The problem was I was about 50 yards away from the dance floor; I needed a telescope to size up the action. Was lewdness going on? I saw five students in something that looked like an inverted conga line. Was that what all the fuss was about? Or maybe that couple, where the boy was slyly sliding his palms down towards the girl's derriere; she immediately removed the offending digits to a more respectable location. But that move's been around since dancing was invented.

Without being able to interview students, my options were limited. A duo from the Bozeman Police Department showed up, who said their job was primarily to keep an eye out for alcohol violations.

“The way they dance is not a legal issue,” said school resource officer Trent Schumacher.

I had little to go on. The camera ban had been watered down to not taking any crowd shots; kids happily flashed away in the hallway. Maybe rules were being relaxed all around.

I ventured beyond the fence of my corral. Parents were doing it; surely it would be okay for me. But, despite there being hundreds of kids to keep an eye on, I felt certain that I was the one being watched most closely. No sooner had I advanced into forbidden turf when Redburn appeared nearby. I retreated to my corral.

Not much going on there. I went into the hallway. Surely there would be no issue with merely talking, right? I had a job to do, after all. It wasn't fair to set me up so I couldn't even see what was going on.

I started talking to two students accompanied by an adult, but before I even got their names Redburn was on top of me, accusing me of being a one-man media circus, threatening to banish me from the dance, and pointing me back to my corral. I asked if I could even interview adults. He said no, it wasn't a public event and people didn't come there to be bothered.

God, it was just like being in high school.

I went out to the parking lot, where no one would hassle me. A gaggle of teens seemed open to questions.

“I was almost going to pull mommy mode in there,” said Danielle Salcido, who attends Bridger Alternative School. Salcido, 19, said she used to grind, but since becoming a new mom her views have changed.

“That was cool when I was like 17, but not anymore,” she said. “They all look like they want to be strippers or something. ... Seriously, if I saw my daughter dancing like that, I'd pull a shotgun on the boy. I'd be like, 'Get away from my daughter!'”

Salcido admitted that she was in the minority among students.

“That's just gonna lead to one thing, and that one thing leads to another, and then you end up pregnant,” she said. I asked if she was speaking from experience.

“Yes, I am,” she said.

“[It's] one thing when you're in private, just with a couple people ... you're with your close friends so it doesn't really matter. But when you're in prom and dancing like that, it makes you look really terrible,” she said. She added, “Half of them in there are probably on something.”

Jeremy Saunders, 19, said that many of the kids just want to show off for the chaperones. Salcido's friend Katie Mahony, 19, said “It's just a bunch of horny kids on Ecstasy.” She added, “I think it's disrespectful to yourself.”

The next morning I felt used and discarded. Some date! My experience with Redburn left me feeling irritable. What a cad.

I had placed calls to the Mortenson family prior to the prom, with no response. I figured I'd give it one more try.

Dean Mortenson picked up the phone. Yes, he had stopped by the prom; he went near the end, and verified that they were doing the same kind of dancing to the same kind of music as he had previously witnessed. He also said that most of the evening he and his wife had been at an alternative dance they had arranged at Clubhouse, the glow-in-the-dark miniature golf place in the mall. There, a group of about 30 students enjoyed black-light dancing, air hockey, video games, and refreshments before filtering out to the after-prom party at the high school.

Mortenson said he realized that the school wouldn't change its ways, and arranging an event for students who cared to dance in a more old-fashioned way was the only way to assure a reasonably wholesome environment.

“We tried and we ruffled some feathers,” he said. “I think Bozeman High School is a really good place. We just had a problem with the type of dancing that goes on at the prom. Some parents, or maybe most parents, may be okay with it, but I'm not. I don't want to come off as the moral police or the bad guy. I guess I'm surprised that more people aren't more concerned about the type of dancing. Maybe they are and they just don't have an alternative.”

Mortenson, a father of eight, admitted disappointment at the low turnout for the Clubhouse dance. “I think we could have had quite a few more people come if we had advertised it more, and I think we will next year,” he said.

Yes, the age of innocence will return. All I need now is a date.

Bozeman writer Ray Sikorski is the author of “Driftwood Dan and Other Adventures,” available on amazon.com

More climbing: The Tetons

2007-05-05T18:17:00.000-06:00

Okay, let me just get this out of the way: We borrowed a canoe, we were all psyched to use it, but then I called the rangers and they said Jackson Lake was still frozen. So we didn't bring the canoe. Instead, we went through the annoying minutiae that comes with every backpacking trip, deciding what to take and what too big and what's too heavy and what's absolutely essential and what we should leave home (poor Snoopy!), because we'd being hiking and bushwhacking to the base of Mount Moran.

But when we got there, it turned out the lake wasn't frozen at all. But now we didn't have the canoe. Plus, we learned there was still a lot of snow of the trail, and we'd be postholing the whole way to the foot of the Skillet Glacier. No fun! Then Craig looked at the mountain and decided he didn't like the way the snow looked, so we decided to do something else instead.

And maybe it was just bad vibes. We went a little ways up Cascade Canyon to check out Baxter's Pinnacle, which we set aside for the following day, and to do a little free-form rock climbing on some random cliffs on the canyon's north side. We saw a helicopter overhead - Craig thought it was some kind of scenic flight, but I told him, no, that sort of thing didn't go on in the Tetons. If you see a helicopter in the Tetons, it's always bad, and you can always read about it in the paper the next day. Later, when I was climbing, Craig saw the chopper fly by again, this time dangling something that looked like a body bags.

But we didn't worry about that. We did our fun little thing on the cliff, only mildly annoying each other when we were choosing a descent method (Craig thought it looked like rain and was in a hurry all of a sudden).

Instead of backpacking into the base of the Skillet Glacier on Mount Moran, we car camped at Spalding Bay on Jackson Lake. Well, almost. Snow blocked the final 500 or so feet, so we had to carry the stuff the rest of the way. What a beautiful night! Full moon, moon shadows, strange critters howling in the distance, colder than heck, the whole enchilada.

The next day: Baxter's Pinnacle. This was a five-pitch climb that I understood to be rated 5.6 - easy, same as Skyline Buttress in the Gallatin Canyon (below). Well, the first pitch, which Craig led, was super easy. The second pitch, which I led, was not so easy - seemingly at least 5.7. Craig, who got stuck carrying the pack with our shoes and water, had a short fall right before the belay point. But no biggie - it was a beautiful day, and we were ready for more.

Craig led the next pitch, which was a beautiful 5.6 chimney problem; after that it was easy-breezy to the massive and sttep summit pinnacle. Oh, and it rained. Pretty hard, too, but we decided to wait it out. Sure enough, the sun came out bright as ever, revealing not only a rainbow below us, but a bald eagle soaring right above the final pinnacle.

About that pinnacle: We didn't know how to get up it. The climb was supposed to be a 5.6, right? Well, there was nothing on that block of rock that looked remotely 5.6-ish. We discovered a little traverse that led to the west and north sides of the rock, so we decided to check it out... but we couldn't get up those sides, either. Oh, we tried, with Craig doing a noble job on the northwest corner. But no cigar. It was raining again, so we decided to rappel down to the base.

Later we learned that the summit block actually starts out as a 5.9, before turning back into a 5.6. The route Craig tried was a 5.8. Oh, well. Do we really need to carry the big, fat "Climber's Guide to the Teton Range" with us everywhere we go? Maybe so. I had copied down some notes from it, but I failed to discern's the climb's subtleties. We considered ourselves triumphant anyway. What the hell.

Oh, about the chopper? When we got to Jackson, we read the front-page headline: Two climbers killed on Grand Teton. We were witnessing the body recovery. They were local guys from Kelly. It happens a couple times every summer in the Tetons. I guess this year's just gotten off to an early start.

Climbing: Skyline Buttress

2007-05-05T18:02:00.000-06:00

I figured I ought to write about a recent outing just to show you that not all my adventures end up in disaster. Last week Craig and I made an attempt to climb Skyline Buttress, a rock climb in Gallatin Canyon south of Bozeman.

The climb is rated 5.6 - not very hard, but we're still novices and this was our first major multi-pitch climb. Just getting to the base of the climb was a bit of an adventure, especially since Craig called the ol' "You go that way, I'll go this way" move, splitting us up... and then decided he'd go my way, but I was looking for him above me...

Ah, well. We made it to the base of the climb eventually.

And I don't really have much in the way of trauma and drama to report (if you want that, see below). The day was beautiful, the climbing was easy, and neither of us fell. We placed protection the way it's supposed to be placed, we learned a few things about setting directionals (using slings so the rope stays straight) and tying into anchors from others on the rock, and we watched people doing way crazier things than what we were doing. The climb was great fun, especially the chimney section and the tunnel section, which required us to pop out of a small hole in the top of the rock. We decided a better name for the climb would be "Santa's Revenge."

I suppose the end got a little spooky, when it started to sprinkle a little and I climbed a pinnacle that I decided really wasn't part of the climb. I ended up downclimbing it, with its wobbly rock, in the rain.

But other than that all was well. We made it back to our packs for sandwiches and pudding, and watched the climbers on Sparerib. Possible future climb? We'll see.

Railbike adventure, ho!

2007-05-05T16:55:00.000-06:00

The railbike odyssey continues. I finally decided the test tracks at Wallace and L Streets in Bozeman were destroying my bike. Sure, the first couple of times it was important for me to take care of some necessary tweaking, but after repairing the thing time and time again I finally realized that I was dealing with the worst set of railroad tracks in the state of Montana.

So, onto bigger and better things. Was my bike ready? Who knows. It wasn't ready to take another beating at the test tracks, that's for sure. I had originally considered riding the abandoned line from Wilsall to Livingston, but after a bit of research I realized I'd have permission issues with some of the landowners along the rail line. I needed a place without such constrictions, preferably on National Forest or BLM land. I needed... Homestake Pass.

Here's where Montanans take a deep breath, look at me dubiously, and mutter, "Wow." Homestake Pass is the route I-90 takes over the Continental Divide to Butte, Montana. It's known for steepness and treachery.

The rails running alonside it, however, aren't steep at all. After all, it's rare that any railroad has more than a three percent grade, Homestake included. It takes a big, swooping northward turn before coming back toward the interstate, making the pass in double the distance. Plus, the rails were gorgeous compared to the test tracks: straight, gleaming, clean, and totally gap-free. If it weren't for the large sage and juniper bushes growing up between the rails, it might even be fun.

Yes. Now, the Bentley railbike was not designed for wimps. Two- or three-foot plants, I could ram through them, no problem. Those weren't the problem. It's the four- and five-foot trees that were the problem.

Of course, if you see a big tree growing up between the rails, the common sense thing to do is dismount, lift the bike off the tracks, carry it past the tree, and realign the bike back on the rails. It gets old after a while, but it's the only sensible thing to do.

Other than getting rather repetitive, that wasn't the problem. The problem was the in-between-sized trees, the three-and-a-half-foot junipers in-between the tracks, or the taller ones growing right alongside the rails. For these suckers, I had a choice: dismount and carry, or go to full-throttle ramming speed for the railbike-juniper battle royal.

Knowing me, which do you think I chose most often?

Suffice it to say (as usual), the railbike didn't fare too well. Oh, it won the occasional battle, with me emerging triumphant on the far side of the tree, bushy branches flying from my spokes. But more often than not it sent me crashing to the tracks, right on the delicate front-end guide.

A note to those of you who just can't help taking notes so you can try this at home (not recommended): My two most recent modifications to the front-end guide were smashing successes (literally). 1) Lowering the skateboard wheels with washers was something that should have been done originally, and really helped keep the guide on the tracks. 2) Replacing the guide-springs with a less-tense pair not only made it easier to align the device on the tracks, I think it helped keep the sideboards from splitting from the multiple times the bike sloughed off the tracks.

In fact, the sideboards - both of which had previously split and I had reinforced - were fine. It was the main horizontal board of the front-end guide that split. Yep, cracked right in half... but there were enough bolts in the thing for me to keep on truckin'.

And truckin' I did go. At certain points the bike rode quite nicely, just like in the pictures on the Bentley website: merrily clacking along, swaying gently as the tracks sped beneath my wheels. Then, Clunk!, as I thud inelegantly the seven inches to the rail. Thank God for that foam testicle-protector I put around the top tube. Usually it was plants knocking me off the rails, but I noticed that when the track banked left - which seemed to be most of the time - my rear wheel had a really hard time staying on the rail, even if there wasn't a weed to be found. Conversely, when the tracks were straight and level I had no problem staying afloat.

Which was exactly the case for my first trestle. Honestly, it scared the shit out of me. Sure, it was plenty wide, and if the bike came off the tracks there was little chance of plunging over the railing-less side. But just the idea of riding a hundred or more feet over a gully, staring right through the tracks at it, with no one around for miles, was a bit nerve-wracking. Suffice it to say I went slow. Really slow. Like, barely moving slow. But, as you can see from the picture, it was dead-straight and the most weed-free section of the entire trip. I made it across without incident.

The second trestle was just as long and high, but it had the added bonus of a left-leaning (!) curve at the end. I made it through the straight part with slightly more confidence than trestle number one, but, yet again, the left-leaning rail sloughed off my back wheel at the end. Fortunately I didn't plunge through the tracks to my demise.

I went a little ways farther past the second trestle before running into a whole slew of trees growing between and next to the rails. It was growing late and looking like rain. I looked at my GPS unit to figure out how far I'd gone: 2.87 miles. Yikes! I hadn't even made it beyond the big hairpin back toward the top of the pass. And I had hoped to make it to Butte.

Oh, well. I considered going further - for about a second. I was tired of lifting the bike past trees. Plus, there was the cracked board in the front. I'd be done for if I kept going.

So I turned around and headed back down. Which was great! Even though the grade was gentle, downhill was way more fun than uphill... and, now that the track was mostly right-leaning, I seemed to have no problem staying on the rails. I clacked merrily for about a mile, removing only for the really big trees, ramming through the little ones, and cruising over both trestles. Then... I don't know what happened. I must have hit a gap in the rail or something; all I know is I came to an immediate stop, my left shin ramming the outrigger pole, my front wheel bouncing off the track.

And that was pretty much that. I had split one of the wooden arms holding the front-end guide in place (I had broken this board once before, by the way). Sadly, I removed the front-end guide and outrigger from the bike. There would be no more railbiking this day.

It was raining hard now, and I wasn't dressed for it. I duct taped the contraptions to each other and tried carrying them as I pedaled down a faint trail next to the rails. But the weight-distribution was all off, and that didn't last for long. Instead, I walked the bike and the contraption the mile and a half back to my car.

So now I have a dilemma: Do I rebuild this dagblamed thing for the nth time, or do I just let it sit in the garage, rusting away? After all, there's plenty more rails that need to be explored. And I still have some more wood, and some more metal bars to reinforce things with. And, I'm still the only one in my neighborhood who has one.

Or, maybe I'll just set aside a day to ram my bike into trees and parked cars. It'll have about the same result.

I'm on deadline

2007-04-19T18:40:00.000-06:00

I love the sound of that: I'm on deadline. I'm on deadline! Everybody kind of stands back and goes, "Oh, sorry, I didn't realize you're on deadline. Clearly you're an important person doing important things. I'll just meekly stand over in the corner. I won't bother you. You do your work."

It's kinda like, "Back off man, I'm a Ghostbuster!" Or, better yet, "Back off man, I'm a Ghostbuster AND I'm on deadline!" Wow. Imagine the power.

Okay, gotta go. I'm on deadline.

Rail Bike - It works!

2007-04-15T20:23:00.000-06:00

Yes, the rail bike worked! Here's its first trial run.

Pretty hot, huh? My friend Sam took the footage; that's his daughter Olivia. Of course, at the end of that run the tracks disappeared, the front strut device dropped, I ran over it with my front wheel, and broke one of the maple sections. So it was back to the shop.

I braced the broken maple, made a few modifications, and took it back out later in the afternoon. Again a great trial run! But turning around and coming back, the front device dropped in a gap in the tracks, and that was all she wrote. Both wooden struts were demolished, as well as two of the three wooden discs that hold up the outrigger wheels.

I'm psyched, though. Hopefully I'll get this back on track (ha ha) by tomorrow.

Peak-a-boo

2007-04-14T21:41:00.000-06:00

Nice peak, huh? Looks like it'd be pretty fun to climb, right? Craig and I were going to ski the Banana Couloir, which sounded pretty appealing (get it?), but we ran out of time. But we made it to the pass, so that's pretty good. Here's some pics:

Ready for liftoff

2007-04-14T21:29:00.000-06:00

The railbike is ready! Trial run is scheduled for tomorrow. Wish me godspeed. Please.

Goodbye, Kurt Vonnegut

2007-04-12T23:15:00.000-06:00

Kurt Vonnegut has died, and the most fitting tribute I could think of was to watch my old video copy of Rodney Dangerfield's "Back to School." Vonnegut plays himself in the movie; it's just a tiny part, but it's classic: Dangerfield's character hires Vonnegut to write a book report... on Kurt Vonnegut. The report gets an F. They cuss each other out over the phone. Hilarity and hijinks!

So it goes, so it goes, so it goes. I imagine playing that part was a nice moment in Vonnegut's life, one in which he could poke fun at himself and his improbable life as a revered writer. He was my favorite way back when, and still is one of my favorites. I remember defending him to a friend who claimed he was a hack... but no. He wrote in a style that was similar to the style of children's books, but he used that to illustrate the technological highs and human lows of our lives. My bookshelf still proudly displays all his books. Naturally, he was an influence on me, both as a writer and for his insights into life. There never was anyone like him. I hope he'll be remembered as one of the best.

Flat Stanley Goes to Bridger

2007-04-10T19:44:00.000-06:00

Flat Stanley is this kid who was smushed by a bulletin board, and he wanted to go on a trip so his family folded him up and mailed him places.

Which sounds rather abusive. I received Flat Stanley in the mail from my 7-year-old nephew James, although I don't know how James got him. Found him on the street, squeaking for help? Anyway, James sent him to me to have some adventures with, and that's something we're never short of around here.

Housemate Ross and I decided to head up to Bridger Bowl today for the last official day of the ski season - and why not take ol' Flat Stanley with us? He seems like a good sport. Probably not dressed properly with the tie and all, but hey, no one up there really cares.

So away we go! Might as well pose at the entrance sign:

And, of course, if you're going to ski, you're going to need a lift ticket. We don't want any embarrassing incidents! Fortunately, I work at Bridger Bowl, and I'm entitled to a few freebie passes for my friends. Kitchen manager Tina was more than happy to help us out with a voucher...

...and then ticket-man Jeff got us all set up:

Not only did we get an all-day lift ticket, we got Stanley a Bridger Bowl tattoo for his leg. That should loosen him up a bit! The lift line ticket puncher couldn't help but admire it:

And then we were off. I'm not sure if Flat Stanley has ever ridden on a chairlift before, but Ross and I didn't hear any complaints from him:

We put Flat Stanley in Ross' backpack for safekeeping. After all, we were headed to the steep and dangerous "Fingers" area, and Flat Stanley doesn't need to be any flatter.

At Bridger Bowl, the chairlifts don't go all the way to the top of the mountain, so if you want some really nice, steep, untracked powder, you're going to have to carry your skis to the top. Ross was nice enough to carry ol' Flat Stanley, too:

And then it's go, Flat Stanley, go!

Flat Stanley made several runs on the mountain... and he even made a bunch of new friends!

Ah, yes, after a hard day on the slopes, there's nothing like a nice, frosty apres-ski beverage. Yum! It looks like Flat Stanley's getting the hang of life out here after all.

Easter Skinday on Mt. Ellis

2007-04-10T18:33:00.000-06:00

Here is a picture of my backyard. Why show a picture of my backyard? Certainly there's no adventure to be had back there (excluding Ross' trampoline, that is).

Ah, but look closer, dear readers. Off in the distance, directly over the birdbath, Mt. Ellis hovers over our fair city. And you know what? I've never climbed it all the way to the top. Yep, that thing's been tapping me on the shoulder for years, but I've only managed to make it up to its lower summit twice.

It's not like it's inaccessible or hard to climb or anything. Quite the contrary - backcountry skiers regularly ascend its southeastern flank to ski down fluffy, untracked powder. So, this past Easter Sunday, that's exactly what my housemate Ross and I planned to do.

For such an undertaking, one needs very specialized backcountry ski gear: skis with bindings that release at the heels for uphill travel, and adhesive skins to affix to the bottoms for uphill traction. Of course, once you're all decked out with the requisite gear, it's also kind of nice to have some snow. Since it is, after all, April, there were a few patches at the lower elevations that could have used some sprucing up. Here I demonstrate how to cross a creek when you're too lazy to take off your skis. Note the brightly colored outfit - yet another benefit of buying gear in thrift stores!

It took Ross and me two and a half hours to reach the ridge between lower and upper Mt. Ellis. Well, it took me two and a half hours; Ross spends his summers on a Hotshot crew fighting forest fires in the summers, and he's like bionic or something. Fortunately, he doesn't seem to mind waiting, which he was doing patiently by the time I huffed and puffed my way up the steep skintrack to the ridge.

(Note: If you look carefully past Ross' head, you can make out Mt. Black, which Craig and I climbed two weeks earlier.)

From the ridge it was an easy skin up to the 8,331 foot summit. What a beautiful day! But we couldn't stand around like a bunch of tourons drinking in the view; Easter dinner was scheduled for 5, and we were hungry. So down we went.

Of course, it wouldn't be a Ray outing without at least a little bit of adventure, so it was pretty much mandatory for us to get stuck in a bunch of impassable trees for a while, having to clambor out of deep snow just to get going in the right direction. But that didn't last for long; most of the run was mercifully aided by the laws of gravity, with enough long, open runouts to keep us happy. Of course, the snow was deep and warm and heavy and a bit unmanageable. Really, it was a bit of a struggle to turn in, but hey, I was just happy to be there. We made it home at five o'clock on the dot, got our fill of Easter vittles, and then (with about four glasses of wine in me) I made my counterclockwise circumnavigation of Mr. Boulder (see below). Then I went to bed, with every bone in my body aching.

The State of Bozeman's Real Estate

2007-04-10T18:19:00.000-06:00

(The following article was the cover story in the April issue of Bozeman's Tributary magazine.)

by Ray Sikorski

Home-seekers Bill and Margot Zell aren't asking for much: something in walking distance to Bozeman's Main Street, not too decrepit, with at least two bedrooms – three would be great – and a nice, tree-filled yard for their two-year-old to play in. The ideal home would incorporate at least one rental unit, so they could have some income to help offset the mortgage. The Zells would also like to spend less than $300,000.
So far, they haven't come up with much.
“It's a little discouraging right now,” said Margot Zell. Currently the family is living in the two-bedroom basement of their Montana Whitewater rafting business in Gallatin Canyon, which Zell admits is getting a bit cramped. They've looked at about a dozen homes, but haven't found anything that fits the bill. The the nicer in-town houses have had “For Sale” signs with $400,000-plus price tags on them for months, but so far there's been no indication that owners are interested in lowering their prices. And the lower-priced in-town homes?
“What we're looking at is 400 houses that need to be renovated,” Zell said, referring to some of the prospects as “falling apart and manky and disgusting.”
“The sellers are acting like they don't even have to sweep the floor,” she said. “They're still hoping for the old days when they don't have to do anything.”
She was referring to the heady days of 2004-5, when a house listing sparked instant interest, with potential buyers lining up to outbid each other on the asking price.
She admits that she and her husband may be a bit picky. Despite lower prices in the now-sprawling suburbs, the Zells are adamant about moving into either the south or north side of old Bozeman, for its small-town, walkable feel, and where many of their friends live.
“But maybe we can't afford that, and have to buy a big Yukon and drive around all day,” Zell said.
For now, the Zells are willing to wait it out, hoping for prices to go down a bit.
“I need to feel that feeling,” Zell said. “I need to get that chemistry. For the amount that people are asking, I need to love it.”

***

Realtor Jaclyn Katz doesn't pussyfoot around the facts of the local housing market.
“When even local people tell me, 'Oh, I was born and raised in Bozeman and I can't afford to live here,' I tell them, 'Look, I'm a great realtor, I can do a better job for you than anybody else, but I don't have a magic wand. You are competing with people who have a lot more money than you do.'”
Katz explained that Bozeman, with its outdoors-based lifestyle, has simply become an extremely desirable place to live, and is still a bargain for many who come from other parts of the country, particularly retirees.
“A bungalow they bought 40 years ago is now worth so much money, they can now come here and write a check for anything and it doesn't seem expensive to them. But the person who's moving from anywhere else in Montana, or Idaho, or Washington State, wants to tell me why they have to have land and why they have to be within 20 minutes of Bozeman, but they can't go over 300.”
Katz suggested that potential home buyers need to adjust their expectations, and consider buying a condo or townhouse or living in Belgrade instead of insisting on their dream home.
“You wouldn't believe how many people I talk to who refuse to compromise. They want everything.”
And buyers aren't the only stubborn ones, Katz said. She agreed with the Zells that many sellers are still living in the roarin' 2000s.
“It's too much testosterone in pricing,” she said. “Because they've got it all in their head that they couldn't possibly live with themselves if they didn't make a profit. If you want to sell it at 2004 prices, then sell it in 2004.” She said that sellers are being greedy, and so are buyers.
“Buyers think they've got it to where they want to low ball everybody. So we're not getting anybody together.” The result, she said, is an overall slowdown in home sales.
She added that the desire for land has been driving prices up around the valley for years, and despite a nationwide decline in real estate, she doesn't expect prices on more modest homes to go down anytime soon.
“Bozeman is not like the rest of the country,” she said.
“If you are tied in to anything below 200 or below 215, there's nothing on the market, or almost nothing, and it's not a buyer's market. And a lot of buyers are under the misconception that they should keep looking and looking and looking because the prices are gonna go down, and I don't think that's gonna happen in that range of property, and the interest rates are probably gonna go up,” she said, adding that in the higher range there are a glut of new homes. She explained that builders prefer building bigger, more expensive spec homes to get a larger return on the price of land and other expenses.
“Nobody's building anything affordable,” she said.
Of course, “affordable” isn't what it used to be. Katz explained that when she moved to Bozeman from New Orleans in 1994, “affordable” was anything below $100,000... and long-time residents complained that 20 years earlier “affordable” was around $25,000.
“What's 'affordable' today is well over 200,” she said.

***

Gallatin Association of Realtors president Tricia Bailey said the median price of a single family home without acreage is $285,750... and that now is a great time to buy a home.
“It's gotten a lot better for buyers in Bozeman in the last six months,” she said, explaining that there's plenty of homes on the market. She said that currently there are 116 homes – mostly condos – under $175,000 in Bozeman; of those, 85 percent are brand new. Plus, interest rates are still below 6 1/2 percent, she said.
“It's still a great rate,” Bailey said, adding that while home prices may not be noticeably coming down, they're not going up, either.
Of course, those prices still remain out of reach for many people who work in Bozeman, where wages haven't increased at anywhere near the rate that home prices have. It's with that in mind that the Gallatin Association of Realtors read a letter of support for a draft of the Workforce Housing Agreement that's being hammered out by a coalition of home buyers, realtors, builders, lenders, and low-income advocates.
Jennifer Olson, a lender with First Horizon Home Loans and a member of the Workforce Housing Task Force, said the idea of the agreement is that everybody involved will have to give a little, for the ultimate benefit of the community. She said that when the original draft of the ordinance came out, the burden was overwhelmingly placed on the developers. “I totally didn't agree with it,” she said. The new version fixes that, she said.
“We've asked developers, builders, parks and rec, lenders, realtors, landscapers... even the taxpayers are going to have to give some,” Olson said, explaining the agreement makes it possible to sell lots to builders at cost so they can build affordable homes.
The agreement aims to help people who make 80 to 100 percent of the area's median income buy a home. These are the teachers, civil servants, police officers, and firefighters; Olson said that assuring that these workers are able to live in the city in which they work is integral to concept of community. Without that possibility, “You're good enough to save my home and my family, but you're not good enough to live here,” is the message they would receive, Olson said.
“It's good for the city of Bozeman,” Olson said. “It's the right thing to do.”
Former mayor and city commissioner Marcia Youngman first started addressing Bozeman's housing situation as long ago as 1980. Also a member of the task force, Youngman said that despite an initial “sense of doom,” she was amazed that the disparate group was able to reach consensus on the agreement. She said that there are a number of builders who have been interested in building affordable housing, but due to the high cost of land haven't been able to do so without taking a loss.
“Now they will be able to do it and still make a living,” she said.
Youngman expressed optimism for the agreement's outcome with the city commission; hearings are expected to take place in either April or May. She said that all city commissioners have shown support for the basic concepts of the ordinance, which could go into effect as early as July 1.
Human Resources Development Council president and city commissioner Jeff Rupp said he expected the city commission to tweak the agreement a little bit, particularly in the controversial area regarding city park land, before it passes.
“I think it's good that we're now talking just about how we're doing it, rather than whether we're doing it,” he said. “And I think that's a monumental step forward.”
Rupp said that despite progress on the ordinance, helping provide housing for families that make $50,000 to $60,000 a year still ignores a significant swath of Bozeman's workforce.
“That does not get down to what the need is,” he said. “People who make $10 an hour in our town, $20,000, $30,000 a year should have a chance to own their own home. A condo. Something that builds wealth.”
He said he'd like to make appreciation and equity available to as many people as he can.
“For every action there's a reaction. For everybody who's speculating and flipping homes and making a living on the fact that our homes are appreciating at 15 to 18 percent a year for several years, there's a downside to it.”

***

So, can the average person afford to live in Bozeman?
“I think it's possible, you just have to be a little bit more creative sometimes,” said Tracey Menuez, who hosts home buyer education and counseling as HRDC's Community Development Associate.
“The idea that someone who's making $20,000 a year is just going to go and buy a home in Bozeman... it's just not an idea that's going to happen,” she said. However, she added, if you connect that person with down payment assistance programs, matched savings account programs, the Montana Board of Housing lower interest program; if you ask if they can bring in a roommate, or get help from their parents, maybe they have a shot.
“You just have to be more creative, and add more pieces to the puzzle.”
HRDC's Home Ownership Education Program and individual counseling attempts to realistically address home seekers' needs, Menuez said.
“They all know they're going to give up something,” she said. “I don't ever have somebody who comes in here – sometimes maybe for the first appointment, but definitely not for the second appointment – do they come in here and think, Okay, I'm getting a house, on an acre, in Bozeman... they know that's not happening.”
Instead, Menuez attempts to figure out what programs home seekers might qualify for, and what their monthly payments might be.
“Sometimes we're the bearers of bad news. We sit down and say, 'You know, you really can't afford this loan.'”
A private non-profit that receives its funding from federal and state grants as well as private sources, Menuez said that HRDC's Home Ownership Center was able to help lower-income families when it started the program in 2003, but now it’s using the same amount of money to help higher-income families. She said the last five loans she worked on were for people in professional positions or very high in the service industry.
“They're not just starting out at six dollars an hour,” she said.
Menuez said that while Bozeman lagged behind cities such as Missoula, Billings, and Great Falls in gaining federal funds for housing assistance, the city has gained ground in using big box funds and affordable housing mills to help people buy homes.
“The city of Bozeman has contributed $230,000 to date, mostly for down payment assistance,” she said.

***

“We had hoped to have a house with some property,” said Alexandra Divis, who moved into a three bedroom, two bath condo off Durston Street on the city’s west side in December. “We waited too long. I feel we got the next best thing.”
Divis, a retail clerk, and her husband, who works in video production, moved to Bozeman in July from Orlando, Florida, where they lived in a house with a swimming pool and “the whole nine yards.” Divis said the couple is not rich.
“We could probably afford a house in Bozeman, but there'd be nothing else,” she said. “It would stretch us to the max.”
She said she's concerned Bozeman will go the way of Santa Fe and Jackson Hole, where prices have spiraled well beyond the reach of the average worker.
“I've seen it happen in California, I've seen it happen in Florida,” she said. “A lot of people discover it, and prices go up. I don't know if that will happen here. I think it could.” She added that she hopes Bozeman doesn't become so densely built-up that it takes away from her reason for moving here.
Despite not landing the home of her dreams, Divis is happy with her condo.
“Literally, I can look out my kitchen window and see the Bridgers. You can't get that with some houses. It's out there, you have to look for it,” she said.

Meet my climbing buddy: Mr. Boulder

2007-04-10T17:35:00.000-06:00

Wow, oh boy do I have a lot of blogging to catch up on. I slack off for a few days, and people are banging on my door, demanding more blogs.

Well, not really. I sense that you're out there, though. The fact is, I've been doing a lot of interesting things lately, and I haven't been writing them down for you, my loyal readers. So I'm going to have to make up for some lost time.

First off, meet Mr. Boulder. Mr. Boulder is not your ordinary rock. First of all, he's fake. Utterly. Why hide it? He was never real to begin with. He was put there for the enjoyment of Bozemanites, and enjoy him we do. Just the other day I was climbing on him, along with about 200 children of varying ages and climbing abilities, along with several nervous parents. The kids seemed to enjoy standing on top and asking me weird child questions when I was huffing through a particularly difficult series of handholds: "Is that hard? Did you buy those shoes just for this? Are you good?"

To answer, yes, it's hard, I bought the shoes to climb, but not just for climbing Mr. Boulder, and... am I good?

Well, I like to think I'm getting better. After all, I just completely circumnavigated Mr. Boulder in a counter-clockwise direction, without touching the top or the bottom. Some large-limbed muscle-bound guy was kind of impressed when I told him that.

Yep, me and Mr. Boulder, showing off our stuff. One of these days maybe even the kids will be impressed.

Fool for thought

2007-04-02T23:39:00.000-06:00

Last night (April Fool's Day) several Bozeman writers, myself included, performed the fourth annual "Foolish Words," a story we all conspired to write. Well, not conspired, exactly. Poet Sam Louden started it, he passed it along to the next person, and so on, and so on... Fifteen writers and 8,524 words later, the beast was cooked.

I'd love to show you my entry, but it wouldn't make much sense without the rest of it. Actually, it doesn't make much sense WITH the rest of it... which is sort of the nature of the game. I ran into former Foolish Wordster Paul Groueff today, who said it's liking taking the old axiom "too many cooks spoil the broth" and turning it on its ear. Like, spoiling the broth so incredibly that it's actually kinda interesting.

Instead of posting my part, I'll let you see the whole dang thing. My part is at the very end -- I was once again given the role of anchor-man, in which I had to tie together the myriad twists and turns and characters that everyone else had created.

The thing is full of Bozeman (and Butte) specific jokes that not everyone will get, but that's part of the fun. Really, we do it each year primarily to entertain ourselves... although a few spectators did show up, on their own accord, at the Leaf and Bean coffeehouse. Plus, I'm editing it somehow so that it will once again be published over several issues of the Tributary magazine.

Please also note that during the performance I not only read my own part, I also read the part written by Equinox Theatre director Soren Kisiel, who was unable to make it. Which meant I spent a good deal of the evening faking an Irish accent - and, scarily enough, I think I actually did a halfway decent job. I can jest pull the Blarney out of me arse, I tell ye.

Is it? Can it be?

2007-03-28T17:02:00.000-06:00

Winter gives way to spring... Life, death, rebirth.

The king is dead. Long live the king!

Behold, the mighty snowboy!

Craig and Ray's Epic Adventure

2007-03-27T19:22:00.001-06:00

So the ice climbing season's pretty much over and the rock climbing season is just beginning, but the whole point of all of it is for Craig and I to increase our magic bag of tricks to we can tackle anything the mountains throw at us. I'm talking about big mountains here; sure, it's fun to do dainty little climbs up waterfalls and cliffs, but we want to bag some summits.

That's why we decided to tackle 10,941 foot Mount Black in the Absoroka (pronounced, for some mysterious reason, "absorkee") Range south of Livingston. And not just the easy way up, either; no, it's still winter in the high peaks, and we wanted to go straight up the steep northwestern snow couloir. That's the lower molar root-looking thing on the upper tooth in the topo map above.

Please forgive the lack of photos. I need to get new rechargable batteries, I guess. The ones in the camera were dead, as were my backup ones. I brought along a backup spy cam, just in case, but that was dead, too. So, no photos! Suffice it to say it was quite lovely in the morning, and we wanted to give it the finger in the afternoon. There's a Google Earth image below (opposite orientation from the topo; it's looking southeast), which includes some of the approach; just imagine the whole thing covered in snow.

Give it the finger? But why? Isn't it a beautiful, snow-covered peak?

Ah, yes. Yes, indeed.

You see, the thing with mountaineering is that you have to be kind of speedy. You don't wanting to be waiting around for the snow to melt. Because it will... or, at least, it'll get soft. And that's a bad thing.

Craig and I knew this. So, when we reached the 9,000 foot Pine Creek Lake, the beginning of the de facto climb, we had to assess. It was 11:30. We had started at the 5,500 ft. trailhead at 7 a.m. We were way the hell behind schedule. Bunch of slowpokes. Any self-respecting mountaineer should summit by noon. There was no way.

We looked at our couloir. The sun had hit it, but it was already going back into the shade. It probably didn't get more than about an hour of sun all day. That's not enough to melt it and make it all mushy - which would make for an extremely dangerous descent - right?

We decided to carry on, knowing the danger and assessing as we went along. We would shoot for a 2 p.m. turn-around time, meaning if it was 2 p.m. and we weren't at the summit, we'd turn around. Two p.m., or 2:30 p.m.

Or why not even later than that? After all, the snow was fine. It was reasonably firm, and the sun had already gone behind the mountain. Plus, with daylight savings time it doesn't get dark till like 7:30 or 8 p.m. What was there to worry about?

We kicked steps up the steep approach to our couloir, and decided to go for it. The weather was nice, we were feeling good.... and when else would we get this chance? To lighten the load and speed things up, we deposited our packs - including the rope, snow pickets, and extra clothes. The altitude was starting to tire us out, so we wanted to make the going easier. And it was good - plunk in the ice axe, one step, two steps. Straight up.

At 3 p.m. we were greeted by a decidedly fierce gust of wind - we had reached the ridge. The summit was just a ten minute walk away, and we couldn't resist. Craig and I zipped up, leaned into the wind, and clambored over wind-blown rocks and alpine grass to the summit. After a high-five and about six seconds of taking in the view, we headed back.

And still, it was wonderful. I strapped on my crampons for this stretch; the snow in the couloir was firm and the descent was easy-breezy. We made it to our packs, and everything was just as we left it. After donning our snowshoes we descended to the lake, and had a nice little break. The rest of the trip would be all downhill.

Downhill, of course, has various connotations. There's the literal lowering of elevation, which is appropriate, and there's the feeling often connected with that that the hardest part is in the past. We figured that to be true as well.

But that was not the case. At all. Which is where the third meaning of downhill comes in: things good, things good no more. Situation disintegrating. Snow disintegrating. Turning to mush.

It's true that the hardest, most dangerous part of the expedition was behind us. We were now on a regular Forest Service trail; there were no 65 degree couloirs to slide down. Maybe a few snowy slopes in which you could twist an ankle or maybe break a leg, but nothing where death is a real issue.

The real issue, it turned out, was snow holes. The kind you make when you put your weight on your foot and the snow won't hold you, and you sink up to your waist. While the sun hadn't been shining for long in our couloir, it had basically been cooking the south-facing meadows of the approach. Even with snowshoes we couldn't stay up - and we had about six miles of it to deal with.

I don't really know how to explain how annoying it is to continually be falling in up to your waist in these slushy holes. And, with our heavy packs, it made pulling up and out of the holes quite a chore. Especially when you have to do it over and over and over, and then follow some schmoe's ski tracks down to a dead end and have to backtrack out of it, only to have your snowshoe come off because it's wedged in under the snow...

What an ordeal. Then it got dark. I always bring a headlamp when I do anything outdoorsy, just because you never know. I actually brought two that morning, one for Craig... but when I offered it to him before we set out, he said he didn't need it. I suppose it made sense - who would have thought we'd be hiking for more than twelve hours? He didn't want it, so I left the extra headlamp in the car.

Bad move! I wasn't long before Craig was apologizing, pleading, vowing to change his ways. "I swear, I'll never leave home without a headlamp again!" He wanted me to illuminate the trail - which at the lower elevation was covered in ice, not snow - so he could follow behind. I think the combination of altitude, exhaustion, dehydration (we kept running out of water, by the way), and walking on mud and rocks with snowshoes at the lower elevations was getting to him. We were at Pine Creek Falls, less than two miles from the trailhead, and he suggested abandoning our packs and coming back for them the following day. He was going a little loopy.

I ended up giving my headlamp to Craig and following him. He switched into his crampons for a better grip on the ice, and we slowly plodded along.

We made it to the trailhead at 10:15 p.m., a little over 15 hours from when we began. I was pretty impressed with myself for my stamina, especially carrying the unused rope the entire way. Craig, meanwhile, was ready to pass out. At some point I think he vowed never to climb another mountain again.

I think he's over it now, though. After all, it was a success. We reached the summit!

Sno more

2007-03-27T18:59:00.000-06:00

But wait! There's snow in the forecast!

That's right, we're badass

2007-03-22T23:05:00.000-06:00

Here's Craig leading on the standard route of Practice Rock in Hyalite Canyon. While this route was only rated 5.6 in the book, it seemed to me to be way harder... or maybe it was the fact that it was cold and miserable out, and - as usual - Craig made me get up way too early. The rock is like touching ice cubes! Anyway, I was pretty impressed by Craig's lead up it. It doesn't look it from this photo, but he's at least 60 feet above the ground. I was adequately scared, and happy to have him lead the whole thing. I was right behind him the whole time, though.

We had planned to climb a few other routes on the rock, but instead we decided to declare success and call it a day. We had lunch at the Pita Pit instead.

Behold, the Mighty Lump

2007-03-22T23:03:00.000-06:00

Looks like spring is here.

March Ray Procrastination Update

2007-03-15T12:16:00.000-06:00

Yes, it's that time again -- the time when I'm actually supposed to be writing an article, but will do absolutely anything to put it off. It's Ray Update time!

Hmm. What have I been up to? Well, clearly there's the rail bike; the deadline for my rail bike article isn't until May 1, but I need to have actually ridden it somewhere successfully by then, and, I don't know, I just don't have that much faith in my skills. I'll probably need to rebuild it three times by then. Wish me luck.

Ski season is still happening, sort of. As you can tell by what's left of the snowman (below), it's been kinda warm in these parts lately. Fortunately it snowed gangbusters right through the first of March, but since then it's been inordinately lame. Temps in the 60s, for pete's sake!

The flip side to that is it means rock climbing season has started early this year. Yep, Craig and I have turned in our ice picks and screws for chalk bags and camming devices, and we've been heading to the cliffs. We had a remarkably inauspicious start at the Allenspur area south of Livingston. We attempted to climb something called "Look Ma, No Hands," a "sport" route (with bolts that can be clipped into on the rock face) rated at 5.8, which sounded pretty easy. It looked pretty easy, too, like something you could almost walk straight up. Doesn't it? "Almost" is the operative word here. A short way up we understood the meaning of the route's name: there are no hand holds at all. Plus, it's just steep enough to make it impossible to walk up. It had us stumped. Craig and I both attempted to lead the route, but we both gave up. We scampered down with our tails between our legs (well, ropes, anyway). Humiliating. We have a plan for a future assault, however -- usa da knees. That's the plan.

The next day fared a bit better -- we headed to Neat Rock, which is on the Madison River about 30 miles west of Bozeman. It was raining in the morning, so we chose this route because of its reputation for dryness -- not to mention rattlesnakes. We figured that rattlesnakes wouldn't want to live in a wet place, and it turned out to be a good assumption. Though damp at first, the sun soon came out and dried the rock off completely. We didn't see any rattlesnakes, either, although the unpleasant factor was more than compensated for by copious amounts of pigeon crap on the route. I put my hand right in a big, stinky pile of it - yuk!

This route was rated 5.7 for the first pitch, and we made it up without any major incidents. Minor ones, yes -- the aforementioned pigeon poop, plus general scaredy-pantsedness. You could, like, fall and hurt yourself! Also, Craig was trying out some weird aid climbing technique in the lower section, in which he was using slings to stand in... I don't want to get into that. We should maybe be thinking about that stuff for the 5.12s, but not for the 5.7s. I think I got him straightened out. On a positive note, this was a trad route, which entailed placing nuts and camming devices into the rock rather than utilizing fixed bolts, and I think we performed with panache in that regard.

The second pitch was rated 5.9 and scared us. There were two alternatives, a 5.6 and a 5.7. We either couldn't figure them out or they looked scary or we decided we needed to get back right away (take your pick), so we ended up rappelling back down to the bottom.

Success!

So I'm really psyched for climbing now. I bought a chalk bag, some more carabiners, and a bunch of quick-draws. I'm ready for anything. I've been hanging out most days at the fake boulder on the linear trail a few blocks from the house, trying to get in shape and figure this whole climbing business out. Hand holds, foot holds, smearing, edging, nasty little crimpers, dynos... everything. Yesterday I met a guy there named Tony; he and I may climb something together next week. He's kind of new at it, too, although he's clearly a stronger climber than I am already. But he doesn't even have a harness yet, so maybe we can teach each other some stuff. A Mormon dude, just moved here from Twin Falls, Idaho. Youngish guy. I think he's a gutterman for now, till he figures his life out. Come to think of it, he's a guitar player; he said he's interested in getting a music degree. I should probably introduce him to Craig (oh, Craig will be jealous if I have a new climbing buddy!).

In other news, there's a possibility that I will take over for Tim Omarzu in the Managing Editor's desk at the Sonoma Valley Sun for six weeks while he hikes the Pacific Crest Trail sometime this summer. It's really just in the idea stages now, so it's far from a sure thing. But the ski season, aka my day job, ends April 8, and I'm going to have to figure something else out. I have to wonder if I've burned my bridges with the Sun at all. My father always advised me to not burn my bridges, but in my own acquired wisdom I've decided that sometimes it's really kind of fun to burn bridges. Smoke! Fire! Flames! What could be more satisfying? Then there's my friend Tailor, who famously said he's burned so many bridges he needs a boat. I think somewhere in between there's a happy medium.

Let's not forget that I still have a girlfriend in Santa Rosa, so it'd be nice to spend some time out there with her. I'll probably be heading out that way either way at the end of April or May for a visit. I promised the Sonoma Press Club that I would take part in the Wingo Regatta, which is supposed to be sometime in May. Does anyone know when?

Craig and I have a whole bunch of mountains on our summer agenda, so I'd like to be back here by early July.

Uh, oh. I'm running out of things to update you on. I may have to do some actual work. No, no! Let's see... oh, Sam and I went on our mancation to Manaconda (that's Anaconda) a week or two ago, where we skied at the very steep Discovery Basin and visited the illustrious Butte. That's Sam at Butte's Pekin Noodle Parlor, below. It was once a brothel, so note the curiously private booths.

While we're still more or less on the subject, I miss editing. Keeping all the writers in line and interested, letting them know what's what... I think I was pretty good at it. It would be nice to be doing some of that sort of thing again.

The snowman, it's melting!

I'm melting!

2007-03-13T20:11:00.000-06:00

I've been working on the rail bike...

2007-03-13T19:59:00.000-06:00

...all the live-long day. And night. And then the next day and night. It's taking forever, but it's coming along. As you can see, the front-end assembly is nearly complete. I now have the added element of deadline pressure, as I'm going to be writing about my rail bike exploits for a magazine article. Please, please, make it work! This Bentley guy I bought the plans from is a piece of work -- I'm doing things like drilling straight into a solid steel rod, and then trying to screw a bolt into the threadless hole. ??? The whole thing is hardwood and steel and even raw iron. It'll be the approximate weight of a 1956 Buick, which I imagine is Mr. Bentley's transport of choice when he's not out riding the rails.

If the work doesn't look too pristine, please note that I was fired from the Flatiron mandolin factory after two days for total incompetence. Try as I might, building things is just something I'm not that talented at. My father would have had this thing whipped out in no time, but, alas, I'm not my father. It's been a challenge. Please, please, make it work!

Behold, the Snowman

2007-03-10T19:57:00.000-07:00

Home, Part II

2007-03-05T15:39:00.001-07:00

After leaving Colorado, I made a beeline back to Montana determined to make things work. My first stop, however, was not Bozeman. It was Cooke City, Montana, a one-horse, many dog, hard-drinking, snow-buried National Park entrance station town, 2 hours from the nearest supermarket. I landed a job there at the All Seasons Inn in mid-November... except nothing happens in Cooke City in mid-November. The summer tourists are long gone, and the winter snowmobilers and skiers haven't arrived yet. Most of the 60-or-so year-round residents had split for the off-season. The All Seasons was about the only thing open; I couldn't even buy a loaf of bread. Well, after a week the store opened, and I could buy a frozen loaf of bread. But it was pretty spartan there for a while.

The job there was terrible. Along with there being no customers, it naturally followed that I made no tips. Every now and then some snowmobilers from North Dakota would show up, and I would still make no tips. I may have developed a prejudice against North Dakotans at this time. It snowed non-stop while I was there, and every now and then they'd close the road through Yellowstone, the only way in or out of the place. That often impeded deliveries, so I'd sometimes have to tell the customers we were out of things, such as eggs and produce. I lived in a decrepit room off the side of the hotel with a floor that glittered. I couldn't figure it out at first -- little glowing dots, that showed up when I turned out the lights at night. I finally realized that there were nail holes in the floor, and the lights were on in the basement. I worked with a one-armed cook who liked to say things like, "Can you give me a hand? I can sure use one." Yuk, yuk, yuk. That place was non-stop laughs.

On top of that, I couldn't seem to make any kind of connection with the locals... until I gave my notice, that is. I mean, I wasn't making any money (not that I had much to spend it on), the job sucked, the customers sucked, and everyone in town sucked. But once word got around that I was leaving -- which took about five minutes -- the townsfolk seemed genuinely distraught. One new drinking buddy, gone! Apparently they had just been breaking me in slowly. Oh, well. It was an interesting two weeks, if nothing else. Character building.

So, clearly, Cooke City was not home. Nor was Big Sky, to which I returned for the winter ski season. I got into an argument with my manager in the Huntley Dining Room and transferred to the cafeteria. Which I suppose was great for the principle of it all, but it was a lousy job. It was made worse by one of my co-workers, Aaron, who always needed to take command of every situation, even though he was kind of a dullard. I still see him around town in Bozeman from time to time, and it gives me the creeps.

Mercifully, the ski season ended, and I was finally off to where I now really, really wanted to be. I guess I believe that a town, much like a person, can embrace you in some way when it's just right. I stayed with Chick and Aleece for a week, scanning the classifieds for a roommate situation that might seem right. I remember looking at a few of these places: milk cartons loudly labelled with heavy black magic marker, demarcated shelving, lists of chores... But, really, there wasn't much reason to look beyond the very first place I checked out: 612 West Main St.

It's pictured at right in its current form. Apparently it's now a real estate office. It's also blue. It used to be brick red. And what a deal it was! As you can plainly see, it was a very nice house, with wood floors, leaded glass windows, washer/dryer, dishwasher, backyard, large rooms, and plenty of storage space in the basement and garage. Plus, it was right on Main Street, so we could sit on the front porch and watch teenagers cruise the drag in their pickup trucks on weekend nights. Sometimes they'd yell at us. My share of the rent was $219 a month, and I shared it with two guys: the high school math teacher/neat freak Al Schondelmeyer, and jazz guitarist Craig Hall.

Does the name Craig Hall sound familiar? Seeing as that he's my ice climbing buddy (see below) and housemate to this day, it should. That was my first big embracing by Bozeman: having great housing. Which is really a nice thing. It's also nice to have great housemates, as well as some great friends, like Chick and Aleece, with whom I continued do stuff.

It would also have been nice to have a great job, too. However, that was not to be... at least not at first.

Stayed tuned for Part III! (I may have to post another snowman photo to keep you entertained for a while.)

The ice is sweet, but the future may be bitter

2007-03-05T09:50:00.000-07:00

By Ray Sikorski

(This article originally appeared in the March 2007 issue of the Tributary magazine.)

The 2006-2007 ice climbing season was akin to the movie Deliverance: One hell of a wilderness outing, marred somewhat by the prospect of banjo-wielding psycho hillbillies doing unspeakable things to your friends.

The season was one of the best in recent memory. “There was ice in places that some people have never seen ice before,” said Joe Josephson, author of Winter Dance, the seminal guide to ice climbing in Southwest Montana. Routes like Narcolepsy, Airborne Ranger, and even the aptly named Smear Today Gone Tomorrow made appearances, as well as routes that had never been seen before. On top of that, an inordinately lame early snow season made the normally treacherous drive to Hyalite Canyon’s frozen waterfalls a relative breeze right into February. Those unwilling to sacrifice their boards to the rocks on the ski hills took to Hyalite instead, with the Grotto Falls parking area filling up right up through Super Bowl Sunday.

But then, of course, was the specter of the banjo-wielding psycho hillbillies — in the form of the U.S. Forest Service — ruining all the fun. Area ice climbers had grown accustomed to negotiating the unplowed, rutted road from the Hyalite Dam to the Grotto Falls trailhead till their trucks and Subys just couldn’t take it anymore, which some years could be as late as March. The Gallatin National Forest Travel Plan, released in December, threatened to change all that. The plan, currently under appeal, proposed gating the road at the southernmost point of plowing on the first on each year, requiring climbers to ski, snowmobile, or walk a minimum of three-and-a-half miles to the ice.

“There’s not many people with the ability, gear, or gumption to ski or walk or whatever it takes from the dam,” Josephson said. “It’s basically gonna eliminate most of the climbing that goes on in Hyalite.”

Which would truly be a shame. According to Josephson, with over 140 established ice climbs within a three square mile radius, Hyalite is one of the top ice climbing venues in the world. “It’s the most concentrated area of consistently formed ice in the country.”

That’s what attracted my housemate Craig Hall and I to ice climbing in the first place. Craig had taken part in expeditions up Rainier, Denali, and other high peaks, and I had done my share of scrambling in the Tetons as a founding member of the Creampuff-Pantywaist Climbing Association (Motto: “If it’s big we can’t climb it, if it’s small we can’t find it”). But there was something about the serene gurgle of a waterfall in winter — and bashing it to smithereens with ice tools and crampons — that drew us to the cliffs.

We attended Barrel Mountaineering’s Ice Festival in November, where top ropes dangled from the cliffs of Genesis I, one of Hyalite’s most accessible routes. The festival was great: Along with trying out first-rate gear and getting instruction from ice pros like local legend Jack Tackle, we gained enough confidence in our abilities to venture out on our own.
Scary! Right? The thing about ice is that it has a tendency to break off when you whack at it, and ice climbing is all about whacking. Constant, repetitive whacking. The key is to have a sort of elegance and precision to your whacking, so that you surmount the frozen waterfall with grace and efficiency. And hopefully you don’t take the whole shooting match down with you.

Despite Craig’s enthusiasm, I was a bit skeptical. Jack Tackle had an icy stare and a determined, no-nonsense way about him. Did we have that? Did we need that? After all, Craig is a jazz guitarist and I’m a sort of silly writer. There’s no doubt we’re climbers, but, really, we’re artists. I sensed that maybe we were just a little too loopy to do this.
Case in point: Our gear, or lack thereof. Ice climbing equipment is not cheap, and we weren’t going to sink hundreds of dollars into a new sport right off the bat. But we each already had mountaineering boots and crampons, ropes, harnesses, and carabiners. Add to that a handful of antique ice screws purchased at a garage sale and a mismatched pair of decade-old straight shaft ice tools we planned to share, and we were raring to go.

Barrel Mountaineering owner Chris Naumann said: “As long as you use good judgment and common sense, there’s nothing really wrong with figuring it out on your own. There’s something to be said for doing it that way – just discovering it yourself, versus being told how to do this or that.”

And figure it out we did. In repeated forays to the Genesis area, we learned all sorts of things. For example, while in other sports helmets are only used in emergencies, in ice climbing that’s not the case at all. The top climber regularly sends down chunks of ice ranging in size from pebble-ish to volleyball-ish (though not nearly as bouncy), and one quickly learns to lower one’s head at the call of “Ice!” for maximum brain-bucket effectiveness. Kicking a crampon too close to your other leg can turn your snow pants into tatters, and you end up looking like you just Hulked out — clearly an ice climbing “Don’t.” Stepping on the rope with crampons is a bit of a faux pas. Tossing the top rope into a bunch of bushes can really delay things. As can leaving the ice screws in the car and having to trudge back for them. If the climber at the top of the climb sends ice tools flying down the rope, which you have wrapped around a tree, it can be really scary. Not recommended.
Ice is weird. On super cold days it becomes hard and brittle, and it’s difficult for a pick to find purchase. In a rare display of temper, Craig hurled an incorrigible ice screw into the snow… but it wasn’t the screw that was at fault, it was the ice. On warm days, the tools slide in with ease, and we find the grace we were hoping for. On a really warm day — like, next summer — we hope to find the ice screw we’re still looking for.

After one great King Midas mood Craig bought more ice screws and brand new ice tools of his own. I inherited the old mismatched straight-shaft ones, which I’ve gained a certain awkward fondness for. Now we’re both lead climbing like crazy: Genesis, Greensleeves, Hangover… and that’s just in the Genesis area of Hyalite. There’s tons more. We just did Pine Creek Falls in the Absarokas, and I experienced my first leader fall. The rope saved me inches from the deck. I was shaking after that, but I carried on.

And there’s always next year, right? Ah, but the plan. In Deliverance, the brave canoers were among the last to paddle the Chattooga River, which was being inundated by a new dam. If I recall correctly, that movie ended with one guy dead, one seriously wounded, and another…

Well, I’m just hoping for a happier ending.

For information about ice conditions, Hyalite road conditions, and finding climbing partners visit MontanaIce.com

Behold, the Mighty Snowman!

2007-03-01T20:22:00.000-07:00

Home

2007-02-23T21:45:00.000-07:00

Why are you where you are? How did you get there? Do you plan on staying? Have you ever visited a place and thought... man, if I could just go back.... Where was that place? IS there a perfect utopia, or are we naively spinning our wheels? Is it worth packing everything up and starting over again?

These were the questions my friend Cassie posed to her friends and family the other day. After a year discovering the trials and tribulations of the all-too-hip city of Portland, Oregon, Cassie is considering moving on... but to where?

I suppose my desire to live here in Bozeman can be said to border on the maniacal. After all, I had a lot of things going for me in Sonoma when I left -- good job, a great deal of respect in the community, a swell new girlfriend -- so a lot of people were amazed that I'd pack all that in and head to... where? Montana? Are you out of your mind?

Yes, I'm out of my mind. The job situation for here has ranged from sporadic to pathetic. The winters are long and brutal. It's a pain in the ass to get to here or get out of here. Housing prices are running amok. And romantically... well, that could be a book in itself. A tragedy, naturally.

So, why? Hell, I don't know. It's home, is all.

Maybe I should tell the story from the beginning.

Summer, 1989. My first summer out west, spent in Jackson, Wyoming. A co-worker, Aleece Erskin, mentions that the town of Bozeman, Montana has excellent thrift stores, good bands, and cheap housing.

May, 1991. I move to Montana. Big Sky, that is, the ski resort 50 miles south of Bozeman. Aleece has since moved to Bozeman with her new fiance, Chick Kurowski, and I spent my weekends couch surfing at their seedy dive apartment on North Black Avenue. As long as I brought a 12-pack of Schmitty's they were happy, and I spent many good weekends mountain biking, hot springing, and sitting on the porch drinking beer. Later they moved to a house (since condemned and demolished) at the foot of Peet's Hill, and we'd watch bikers attempt to launch off the ski jump, usually landing on their heads.

This was my introduction to Bozeman, and what I encountered with Aleece and Chick remain some of its most powerful selling points to me. Chick was a serious abstract painter, working as a line cook at the Cowboy Cafe. Aleece was a backpack sewer at Dana Designs. Both were dedicated to outdoor recreation, art, music, drinking beer, and living on the cheap. They were underemployed but it didn't matter because so was everyone. They were ornery, but usually in a good way. They kept a pistol in the silverware drawer. Although neither was from Montana, they seemed to embody the spirit that I found in Bozeman: as long as you weren't going to wreck it, you were pretty much okay in their book.

But I really wanted to move to Colorado. See, I just moved to Big Sky as a way of getting out west, but when the summer season was over I headed to Steamboat Springs, CO, which my calculations had designated with utopia potential: skiing, artsy, not too big, not too small. I got there in early November, and landed a job as a lift operator before the season opened. I stuck around a while longer, waiting to see if I could get in on the employee housing. I had to stay there several days for the answer, which finally came in: None of us with jobs would get employee housing. They were saving it for the late-arrival employees.

What about us on-time arrival employees? We were out on the street. I was so pissed off I immediately left Colorado, vowing never to return (which I actually managed to do for about five years or so).

I would go where they cared about me. I would return to Montana.

End of Part I

Climb every mountain... ?

2007-02-19T21:32:00.000-07:00

(Photo: The Tetons, with Jackson Lake Lodge in the foreground)

It's that time of year again: the time when I have to figure out what I'm gonna do when the ski season's over.

As many of you know, I returned to Bozeman fully intent on making it as a freelance writer. While I am working and getting paid for that to a certain extent, it hasn't been the flag-waving success I'd been hoping for. So, in January I took up my old job waiting tables at Jimmy B's Bar and Grill at the Bridger Bowl Ski Area.

Which has been great. I'm really happy to be back at work there; I had forgotten what an integral part of my social life it was, much like working at Murphy's Irish Pub was for me in Sonoma. Plus, I come home with my pockets filled with cash, and I get to ski for free on a regular basis.

But the ski season doesn't last forever. It lasts until mid-April. After that, they boot us off the hill and we're made to fend for ourselves.

In the past Bridger Bowl has had a Thursday-Sunday summer season in which the mid-mountain lodge is opened to the public as a restaurant and for weddings, but that plan has already been downsized to weddings only for this summer.

That leaves the following choices: a) Crank up the querying a notch and get more freelancing gigs. Which I should be doing anyway, but I'm having way too much fun with skiing and ice climbing. In the summer I'll be having way too much fun with hiking, rock climbing, mountain biking, and kayaking.

So then there's b) Go back to my old summer job at the Pioneer Grill in Grand Teton National Park. There I'll be able to play in the mountains to my heart's content and then some, and make tons of dough for possible international travel after season's end.

It's tempting, isn't it? But what will happen to the fledgling freelance career I've put so much time into building? Will it fly straight out the window? Will I return to Bozeman starting at Square One again?

What to do, what to do...

I suppose I could work in a regular year-round restaurant in Bozeman... but that sounds too much like a real job. Lame!

If you have any advice, I'd love to hear it.

Leader Fall

2007-02-12T22:22:00.002-07:00

Ice climbing, Pine Creek Falls, it's beautiful but scary. The upper falls is a gaping maw with frozen icicles for fangs. Ice cold water churns and spews. I lead that pitch, sidestepping gingerly in the soft snow-covered ice, careful not to break through.

The ice screws I've inserted form an "S" pattern from me crossing and recrossing the waterfall, and the friction from the carabiners makes pulling the rope difficult. The final stretch is straight up along the left-hand side of the falls. My left foot slips, but I recover.

Near the top, the ice is so thin I can see clearly to the water rushing underneath. It couldn't be more than an inch thick. To break through could spell disaster — it's bad enough to fall, but to fall into a waterfall and dangle under an ice-cold shower could be really unpleasant. I steer towards the far left of the ice, right against the rock wall, hoping for the best. My choices for pick placement are limited, but I'm nearly at the top. Just a couple more picks, a couple more steps.

Left pick. Fine. Right pick. Not so fine. Is it good enough? I raise a foot to test the balance, and feel myself leaning back, the picks sliding...

Oh, shit, I think. Here I go.

And away I went.

I must have fallen about 20 feet. It really wasn't bad at all — I stopped about an inch or two above the snowy ledge. I straightened out, stood up on the ledge, and waved to Craig that I was okay. Really, my first thought was that it was kind of funny. Then I noticed my hands and legs shaking from the adrenaline.

I belayed Craig up to the ledge, and he finished off the final section of the falls. He was a little sketched out by the water flowing right underneath, too, and used the rock wall to support him up the edge of the ice. Picks, crampons, even gloved hands right on the rock. I followed right behind him. I knew it was climbable. It was just harder than the climbs we had done in the past, and a lot scarier, but totally doable. Falling is part of the sport — that's why there's ropes and protection.

I think I'm learning.

Craig Hall on Pine Creek Falls

"Gee, Your Blog Smells Terrific!"

2007-02-06T20:48:00.000-07:00

(For larger photo click here.)

"Pay it Forward Tuesday" is something Deborah Ng came up with on her Freelance Writing Jobs blog. Basically, it's a little of the old "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours, and somebody else's as well" concept. So, today she's plugging my blog. In return, I'll plug somebody else's blog, and so on, and so on, and so on. Which actually sounds like a variation on the "and they told two friends, and so on" shampoo concept. (No one born after 1973 will know what I'm talking about. Basically there was some shampoo that, according to the commercial, was so great that the shampooee told two friends, and they told two friends, etc. I tried Googling this; there were many entries saying what a great advertising campaign this was, but ironically no one could agree on which shampoo was being advertised. Mentions included Faberge Organics, Pert (which I don't think existed yet), Clairol Herbal Essence, Wella Balsam, Body on Tap (made with beer), and my own selection, "Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific!" (Apparently large caches of this are still available in the Phillipines. Along with Tab.))

That was a pretty wild tangent. What I'm getting to is that anyone out there who wants their blog plugged should contact me, and we'll all revisit the 70s together.

Bloom and grow, bloom and grow

2007-02-06T17:37:00.000-07:00

The Sunflower Center puts its heart into its seedlings

(The following appeared in the February 2007 issue of the Tributary magazine, except for the secret parenthetical paragraph that was edited out.)

By Ray Sikorski

“There’s a reason why I chose Sunflower as the name,” said Dean Williamson, founder and director of the Sunflower Center for the Arts. “If you think about a sunflower, it sort of picks the sun, finds its source of energy and life, and follows that. And they look really wispy but they’re actually really strong, and they’ve got interrelated roots underneath the ground…”

This was all fine and good, but my assignment was not merely to report on the new creative writing center in town. Being the February issue of the Tributary, my editor had asked me to try to tie it all in with love.

I looked Williamson in the eye. “Are you in love with sunflowers?”

“I’m in love with sunflowers,” he confessed.

Now we were getting somewhere.

Williamson explained that the Sunflower Center opened in August 2006, offering workshops in poetry, fiction, script, and creative non-fiction. It also has begun a speaker series, in which successful artists are brought into conversation with members of the community. So far potter Josh DeWeese and Equinox Theatre co-founder Katie Goodman have been featured speakers.

“What we’re trying to do is send the ripple out and hopefully inspire more people to be more creative,” Williamson said.

That same ethic is what guides Williamson, a playwright who has taught English at MSU and Bozeman High, in leading the writing workshops.

“There’s nobody bringing along the next generation of David Quammens and Tom McGuanes and Pete Fromms,” he said.

“There’s a rich history here. What I’m fearful of is there’s nobody here to take their places.”

The workshops, which meet on the comfy red couches of the Sunflower office in the Emerson Cultural Center, take place one evening a week over the course of seven weeks. Writers submit poems, stories, or articles prior to each session, to which the others in the group offer constructive criticisms within the secure confines of the room.

The process, Williamson admitted (with a minimum of prodding), is a bit like love.

“I think this whole creative process is one of love and compassion, and trying to nurture something along that tends to be pretty delicate,” he said. “Imagination and creative stuff, these are beautiful things. But they also need to be tended to.”
Williamson wasn’t sure exactly what the future holds for the center, which as of yet remains a solo operation. (While he often used “we” to describe the center’s goings-on, Williamson explained that it’s the “royal” we.) He mentioned the possibility of a spoken-word series, a songwriting workshop, a publication, or even a film incubator, which would help screenwriters turn their scripts into movies.

“I’m purposely leaving a lot of spontaneity in the way this is playing out,” he said. “I like the idea of setting it in motion and sort of watching it unroll and seeing what happens, and not trying to necessarily know everything that’s gonna happen.”

“Is that like love?” I asked.

“I suppose,” he said. “If we must make it like love.”

Yes, we must!

(Note: Although Williamson would not reveal his relationship status in print, at one point in the interview the tall, dark, and handsome 39-year-old did blurt out his astrological sign. “I’m an Aquarius to a T,” he said, explaining that that means creative and spontaneous and also possessing a certain airiness. “Some people would call us flaky. I would choose, ‘interested in a lot of different things at the same time.’ Multi-interests.” He rattled off some of his interests: skiing, kayaking, canoeing, backpacking… “All the good stuff.”)

Williamson’s nurturing of his sprouts has already rendered results. Although the program is still in its infancy, already four of his students have had submissions that had been critiqued in the workshops published in literary journals and magazines.

“Part of the responsibility of the writers here is that they send stuff out for publication,” he said, explaining that he sees a national trend that’s antagonistic to the arts and free expression. “I think the stakes are way too high right now not to be contributing to the cultural dialogue.”

Although he uses his aesthetically crafted SunflowerCenter.org website as a tool, Williamson said he believes the Internet, and its hordes of lonely bloggers tapping at keyboards in darkened rooms, is detracting from the natural interaction of humanity.

“I still firmly believe in people sitting in the same room talking about writing. I still firmly believe in artists sitting in the same room talking about their creative processes. Because a lot happens in community,” he said. He added that conversing face-to-face is part of the idea behind the speaker’s series, as well as the workshops.

“There’s nothing that can replace human-to-human contact,” he said. Then, after thinking about it, added, “That’s kind of lovey. Isn’t it? Maybe that’s good enough for love.”

Ray Sikorski’s astrological sign is Cancer, which means he sits alone in his basement typing away at his blog: raysikorski.blogspot.com.

February Ray Update

2007-02-06T10:41:00.000-07:00

My Stuart Smalley affirmations seem to have garnered some results, although not necessarily the ones I might have anticipated. For one thing, I'm now working three days a week back at my old job at Bridger Bowl, working at Jimmy B's Bar and Grill. And it's been great — it was like coming home all over again. I had forgotten how much working at a place like that — similar to Murphy's Irish Pub, where I worked in Sonoma — was integral not only as a job, but to my social life. Plus, free skiing!

I was a bit concerned that working at Bridger would distract me from pursuing my writing career, but so far I feel like I'm doing really well with both. The summer may pose a bigger question, when I have to decide if I should work back at Grand Teton. That place is like paradise to me, but I'd end up having to start my writing career pretty much from scratch again when I'd return to Bozeman.

In other news, the rail bike project is moving along like a coal train over Homestake Pass. Slow. It's been really warm lately so I should take advantage of it in our unheated garage, where the workshop is. I think I need old school skateboard wheels, instead of the ones I got for free from World Boards. I may have to go on eBay (scary!). Hopefully I'll be done by the time the snow melts.

My Railbike So Far

2007-01-30T23:19:00.000-07:00

Isn't she a beaut?

Yep, I've been toiling away on my latest endeavor: the rail bike. What's a rail bike, you may well ask? It's a bike that rides on rails. Railroad tracks, that is, preferably of the abandoned kind. Mine will be a Bentley railbike, which is a regular bike outfitted with outriggers in the front and side to keep it glued to the track.

I spent today at three different hardware stores gathering up all the nuts, bolts, screws, nails, steel conduit, iron rods, etc. necessary for this thing. I was under the impression that this would be a simple slap-it-together affair, but it looks like it's going to keep me busy for quite some time. Think of the most difficult thing you had to assemble for some small relative for Christmas, and then think of manufacturing all the parts yourself. That's what I'm talking about.

So, as you can see, I'm off to an excellent start. I decided that the fancy sheet metal asked for in Bentley's plans wasn't really necessary (ignoring the plea, "Do Not Modify!"), and opted for a can of crushed tomatoes instead. The cowcatcher is integral to the design, by the way, especially here in Montana. Although a naysayer suggested it might be small for the cows in these parts (actually it's to keep weeds out of the works).

One part down, 789 to go!

Ephemera-Inc loses golden opportunity

2007-01-28T17:36:00.000-07:00

The other day the ol' Freelance Writing Jobs blog came through with what I felt was a fantastic opportunity: writing slogans for Ephemera-Inc, which makes buttons, bumper stickers and fridge magnets featuring snarky, off-color, irreverent and generally hilarious sayings, often featuring retro 1950s-era pictures of women and men.

I immediately went on a crazed slogan-writing jag, transforming myself into a woman, a pothead, a pervert, an atheist — whatever it took to make eyebrows rise and jaws drop. At 50 bucks a pop, I saw a bright future and an early retirement: I would be a professional sloganeer.

I wrote several dozen slogans over the course of the afternoon. But much to my dismay, it took only 24 hours for Ephemera to reject every single one of them, with nothing but a form e-mail by way of explanation. Why, why, why? Who knows. Who cares. The result is, I'm bequeathing them to the world. Specifically to you, my loyal readers (all six of you). Lucky dogs!

So here they are. Be warned: some are rude, some are lewd, some are nasty. They're not really me, of course.

Well, maybe they are. Okay, I can't lie. They're me. Every last one of them.

A "Sieg Hiel" a day keeps the Gestapo away

As a matter of fact, I did get laid this morning!

Dead pets make fantastic doorstops

Plumber: "I wear the Wonder-Butt for maximum butt cleavage enhancement!"

Casual Sex Fridays have really made the office more fun!

Soap - Try it, you hippie!

Tuesday is Go Down on Your Wife day!

(person in bathtub)
Save soap - make your own bubbles

Pubic hairs - the more convenient dental floss!

Marijuana – Stick that in your pipe and smoke it!

Heroin – It’s one way to deal with having toddlers!

Never trust anyone under 13

The Rhythm Method – Another way to say, “Momma!”

Gretchen McCluskey, Woman of the Year: Figured out how to take the stick out of her husband’s ass and get it into his penis.

Oops, I think I sharted!

Sorry, my givashit’s broken

Cucumbers – Superior to men in so many ways

Sorry I’m a bitch – my vibrator’s on the fritz

Butt Plugs – the secret to my success

Let’s swap spit

I have a gold medal in tonsil hockey

I’m so hot, I smoke after sex

I wank because I can

Fellatio – Part of a complete breakfast!

Cunnilingus – Start your day off right!

The Clitoris – Confounding men since 10,000 B.C.!

I know where my G-spot is, and I give good directions

Tantric sex – seemingly semenless

I’m imagining you naked

Excuse me while I pull this rubber hand out of my ass

Babies – Your sex life, out the window!

(woman)
I never give head on the first date – but I don’t mind receiving it!

My girlfriends told me to keep my panties on. I assumed they were speaking of the floor.

No vacancy

Check your dipstick, you look like you’re a quart low

In another lifetime, I was someone who gave a shit.

Be the change you want to find in your sofa.

Babies: One small squirt for man, one giant pain in the ass for womankind.

As a matter of fact, I’d LOVE to have a wild hare up my ass!

Britney: Grow some pubes, please!

Jesus saves; Britney shaves

Jesus is coming – now we can REALLY get stoned!

I’m expensive – Don’t waste your time, Jethro

High Maintenance – Better bring a wrench, pretty boy

I got laid in under an hour using Craig’s List

(you know those fake oval Euro bumper stickers? They need to be mocked)
DA
(tiny print: Dumb Ass)

I found Jesús – He mowed my lawn

Craig’s List – Where even nerds can find a piece of ass

Phone Sex
- Set phone to “Vibrate”
- Insert phone
- Wait for boyfriend to call

All I really need to know I learned in band camp (or: on Jerry Springer; from "Deliverance"; from Abba)

Turkey Basters – The first step towards man’s obsolescence

(woman)
“I found Jesus, then he found my G-spot!”

After the Immaculate Conception, did Mary make God sleep in the wet spot?

After the birth of Christ, the manger was visited by the Three Kinks
(dudes dressed up in fetish outfits, bearing gifts)

“But honey, you know I’m only a bitch [or asshole, if it’s a man] to you!”

“Why are you so chipper today, Wanda?”
“I just started my own three-man harem!”

I actually enjoy having my panties in a twist

Wedgie survivor

“Betty, if you want someone to munch your muffin on a regular basis, you need to get yourself a nerd.”

And, last but not least...

I went to the polling booth but all I got was this lousy president.

And doggone it, people like me!

2007-01-22T00:06:00.000-07:00

In regards to this morning's post (see below), I've decided to take the Stuart Smalley approach. Imagine me pulling up a mirror and saying:

"I want to be a professional freelance writer. I want to do this in Bozeman, Montana. I want to cover people and events I myself find interesting. I want to write for magazines and newspapers, based in print or on the Internet, that have an appreciation and respect for my talent, and that challenge me in ways that I find constructive. I want to be paid well for my efforts."

Okay, that was weird. It better work.

The most brilliant jingle song ever created

2007-01-19T21:10:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you know me as a writer, outdoorsman, and bon vivant extraordinaire. Did you also know that I'm a musician? Yes! Here's a video featuring me singing an original composition during Susan and my recent road trip to Moab, Utah.

I figure it'll be featured on a major commercial soon. Keep your ears peeled during the Superbowl!

Cold? Sorry, I hadn't noticed

2007-01-17T13:34:00.000-07:00

There's nothing like a little brisk weather to make you stand up and say, "Isn't it great to be alive?" Either that, or stay under the covers all day and never come out. One or the other.

But you can't stay under the covers forever. There's stuff to do out here! Last Thursday, for example, I went skiing. It was 16 degrees below zero, which is pretty cold, but there was fresh snow and barely anyone was out there messing it up. I was getting freshies left and right... of course, I was probably also developing frostbite on my left and right earlobes, but that's really beside the point.

Here in Montana cold weather is nothing new, and most people barely seem to notice it. It was probably about -20 when I went to a party on Friday night, but that didn't seem to keep people away... although I think it was close to -30 when I left, which could have prevented me from going home if my car didn't start.

But it did, and the next morning Craig and I set out for a nice sub-zero day of ice climbing. I imagine some readers may never have experienced such frigid temperatures. Basically, think of a seven-layer cake — that's about the right number of layers to be wearing. Generally I went with a thin Duofold Coolmax thermal top, turtleneck, light fleece, heavier fleece, heaviest fleece (bought in extra-large size specifically for such circumstances), then my North Face Gore-Tex jacket. Toasty as a bun in the oven! On the bottoms, thermal long-johns, knit acrylic long-johns, and ski pants seem to do the trick. The face is probably the most vulnerable to frostbite, and my thin balaclava head-covering was essential. That, plus my pull-over neck warmer and ski hat. I also brought ski goggles, but they proved unnecessary. It was only like 10-below, after all.

That evening I went to an art opening in Willow Creek, about 40 miles west of Bozeman. Again, the place was packed; nobody was deterred by the weather. The thick icy rime that had built up on the inside of my windshield was more stubborn, however — all the way there and all the way back with the defroster blowing on high, and it still refused to melt to the edges.

Hardy Bozemanites proved their mettle again on Sunday, showing up in force (well, 50 or so, anyway) for the Martin Luther Kind Day march along Main Street. Ya just dress warm, is all. It's no biggie.

On Monday my friend Sam and I almost met our match. We went skiing at Bridger Bowl, and along with the cold we had to deal with 45-mile-per-hour winds. The skiing itself wasn't bad, but the chairlift rides were brutal... especially when they stopped for the wind, leaving us to be buffeted about 50 feet in the air.

We only took a couple of runs, and rewarded ourselves afterwards with a trip to Chico Hot Springs in Paradise Valley, along with an entourage that included Sam's wife Heather, their 5-year-old twins Ari and Olivia (shown), Heather's sister Mikelle (shown toasting with me below), and friend Suzie, who took the photos. Cold weather, hot water, tasty drinks... if this isn't living, I don't know what is.

Sculptor Gary Bates takes his cues from the land

2007-01-17T12:11:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally published in The Belgrade News)

By Ray Sikorski

“I don’t use mathematics on this stuff. I use physical weight, the actual weight,” said Amsterdam sculptor Gary Bates, explaining the process behind his large kinetic sculptures.

Bates said that to find the balance point of an object, he’ll pick it up with a punch on a big jack, or put it on a balance beam to find its actual center of gravity. He confessed that before building a piece, he has only an inkling of how it might act.

“The reason I build these pieces is to find out what they do. I don’t have the answer. I have the question,” he said. “I guess you could call it visual research, to see how these forms will react to nature.”

Is the soft-spoken artist an engineer? There’s no hesitation in his answer: “No.”
Then, after a pause: “Farmboy.”

Known locally for the giant wind-powered sculpture that twirls elegantly outside Montana State University’s Engineering building (it’s named the “Wind Arc,” but Bates doesn’t mind that most everybody refers to it as the “Noodle”), Bates was raised on the same wheat and barley farm that he currently resides. He spent a large part of his life tractoring that field, and it became the main inspiration for his work.

“Every afternoon it seemed the winds would come up, and that would kind of wreck the day for me when you’re out driving an open tractor,” he said. “So I would build sculptures that I put on the edges of the fields to entertain me while the wind was blowing. So that’s why the sculptures are big; so I could see them a mile away.”

Bates’ first sculptures used abandoned machinery that he found around the farm; one of his earliest works was an homage to the windmill water pumps that dotted the area in his youth. That same spirit inspired later works, such as “Will He Drill,” made from a potato auger and parts of a wrecked train, which spins outside the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings. And Bates gained notoriety in the early ‘90s for his “Lunar Ketcherschmitt,” which was in the running to grace Bozeman’s northern entrance on North Seventh Avenue. Two half cylinders made from a giant boiler, with the top one rotating on the axis of the bottom one, the sculpture was dubbed the “Soup Can” and Bates lost out on the commission.

“I never look back,” Bates said. “Everybody’s lost a public commission; it’s just the nature of the business. Public sculpture is always controversial, and you hope it is because that means someone saw it.”

Bates is optimistic about a proposal he’s made for the new Bozeman library: a 48-foot tall stainless steel kinetic structure for that uses the wind coming off the top of the building to do “somersaults and pirouettes.” He’ll receive news of whether it’s been accepted later this year.
Right now Bates is most enthusiastic about his current project, commissioned by Green River Community College in Auburn, Washington. Called “Rain Scale,” it’s comprised of a massive horizontal stainless steel ring sitting atop a steel-pipe arch. When it rains — as it often does in Auburn — the weight of just 3/8-inches of rainwater will tip the 2000-pound ring into a seesawing motion for 50 minutes, depositing the water into the pond below.

“I think of my pieces as receptors of information from the land, and then transmit it back in a visual way,” he said.
“These are built to heighten people’s awareness … of the world; that there’s something going on beyond the day-to-day stuff that we’re in. If you watch any of these pieces, you’ll get an appreciation for what’s going on on the surface of this planet.”

The trails, the trails they are a callin'

2007-01-10T17:35:00.000-07:00

I'm almost embarrassed to go back and look at my last blog posting, based on the research I've done since then. It turns out that just about everything I proposed, and some things I didn't propose but were just thinking about, are already well underway.

The Key West to the Canadian Border hike/bike path? It's called the East Coast Greenway. They even liken it to a version of the Appalachian Trail, just like I did!

Aiming to connect all the major cities of the East Coast along a continuous, off-road path, the East Coast Greenway spans 3,000 miles from Calais, Maine to Key West, Florida. With the trail now 21 percent open for public use, individuals and communities all along the East Coast are already beginning to enjoy the Greenway's many health and economic benefits. But still, there's much to be done.

Frequently likened to an urban Appalachian Trail, this remarkable trail has the potential to enhance the lives of millions of Americans for generations to come.

I was really impressed by all the work that's been done on this trail so far. They've joined forces with Rails-to-Trails and a myriad of local groups to work out something truly impressive... not the least of which is the route that uses old US 1 along the Florida Keys (which I also suggested in the last blog!) That's the Florida Keys Overseas Heritage Trail, and that's also already underway.

The Florida Keys Overseas Heritage Trail (FKOHT) is a multi-use bicycle and pedestrian facility currently under design and construction by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Office of Greenways & Trails (OGT). Ultimately, the vision is of a scenic corridor extending from Key Largo to Key West that serves not only as a highway, but a recreational greenway that permits hiking, running, bicycling, in-line skating, sightseeing, fishing and kayaking. We envision an integrated system of educational kiosks, roadside picnic areas, scenic overlooks, fishing piers and cat walks, boat ramps, water access points, bicycle and jogging paths as well as a myriad of compatible small businesses and services in the nearby area that support these uses. The Old Keys Bridges serve as a central component of this vision, providing opportunities for fishing, sightseeing, recreation and historical reflection. The bridges will also allow safe opportunities for alternative transportation uses of the corridor by allowing people to get from island to island, linking the different communities and their complimentary character.

The trail will link unique ecological resources such as the Everglades National Park, Biscayne National Park, Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, The Great White Heron National Wildlife Refuge, Key Deer National Wildlife Refuge, Crocodile Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, Key West National Marine Sanctuary, as well as 10 State Parks. When completed, the trail will provide alternative transportation for residents and visitors of the Keys, support facilities for recreation both on land and from the water, and will use public art to interpret the natural and cultural history of the Florida Keys. The trail runs parallel to US 1 and is an integral part of the Florida Keys Scenic Highway Project. The fishing bridges offer a significant and unique opportunity for a greenway/transit system.

One of the nicest surprises was the plan for a route around Manhattan Island in New York: The Manhattan Waterfront Greenway.

I grew up on Long Island with usually nothing more than a bicycle to get around, and I made several wildly dangerous trips into Manhattan. It was fun for the thrills (I wrote an unsuccessful college application essay on what it's like to ride across the Queensboro Bridge during rush hour), but I often envisioned bike paths around and leading into the city.

More research revealed trails all over the country, including the coast-to-coast American Discovery Trail. This trail travels over 5,000 non-motorized miles (6,800 if you count where the trail splits into two parallel trails between Colorado and Ohio), going through 15 states from Limantour Beach at Point Reyes National Seashore in California to Cape Henlopen State Park in Delaware. The first through-hikers did the entire route (east to west) from Feb. 27, 2005 to October 15, 2005.

And last but not least was the humble state of Montana, which seems to have plenty of trail potential but not much has come to fruition as of yet. There is, of course, the , Continental Divide Trail which goes from Glacier National Park down to Mexico. However, only the faintest inklings of an east-west trail currently exist. Which is not to say they don't exist at all. The Rails-to-Trails Conservancy has been doing work along the old Milwaukee Road electric train line, which ran from Chicago to Puget Sound until the early '80s.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION
In 1910, the railroad known as the “Milwaukee Road” stretched over 1,000 miles from Chicago to Seattle; yet by 1980, most of the corridor had become abandoned. Washington State purchased their portion of the corridor at the time of abandonment and today it is known as the John Wayne Pioneer Trail.
In 2002, the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy began work to create a trail along the 500-mile corridor in Montana and Idaho celebrating the historical, natural and cultural richness of the Milwaukee Road. To date, Rails-to-Trails Conservancy has performed historical research, conducted state legal reviews, and gathered funding information as part of extensive assessment and feasibility studies. We have also organized trail groups, conducted training sessions, and provided technical assistance which has catalyzed additional rail-trail projects in the state. This year, 35 new miles of trail will be opened to the public with other sections scheduled for completion in the near future.

They've completed the 145-mile long John Wayne Pioneer Trail in Washington State, and they've completed a good stretch through Northern Idaho. I've been on the Kim Williams Trail in Missoula, which is a segment of the project, and I'm told a new segment will open in Butte in the next few weeks. But there's still huge swaths of open prairie left to go.

But, get this! In my research I came across another trail: The North Country Trail, which begins at Lake Champlain on the New York/Vermont border and travels west to Lake Sakakawea State Park in Central North Dakota.

Hey, North Country people! Why stop in the middle of North Dakota? All you have to do is go a little farther west and you'll be in Montana, and then you can hook up with the Old Milwaukee people!

Then we can all get together and celebrate with a keg of good, cheap beer.

The Interstate Trail System

2007-01-08T14:01:00.000-07:00

Another hare-brained scheme

Enough about cars. I don’t want to write about them, I don’t want to hear about them, I don’t want to see them, I don’t want to ride in them. I just want to ride my bike.

Okay, so Bozeman’s covered in snow and it’s not the easiest thing to do. Ah, well. A few years back I drilled machine screws into my tires, creating studded snow tires for my bike. They worked well on the ice, but they added a good deal of rolling resistance overall. Nowadays I just say winter is for cars, the rest of the year is for bikes.

Bozeman, with its university and masses of adrenaline-dripping outdoor recreationists, never seems to have a shortage of bicyclists plying its streets, even in winter. I’ve even seen a few extra-hardy souls panting their way sixteen miles up Bridger Canyon, a snowboard strapped to their backs. Clearly, some people are insane.

But it’s not like that in other parts of the country. Most notably California, where it’s warm and sunny much of the year (not to mention pancake flat in the places I’ve been). Despite ideal conditions, riders are hard to find. Well, not too hard. They’re all on the bike paths.

I suppose it’s not unreasonable that bicyclists are afraid of riding on streets. The streets are designed for cars, not bikes, and when faced with timed stop lights and turn lanes at every intersection, cyclists are clearly at a disadvantage. Would you want your small children riding around on busy streets? Probably not. Many kids grow up not knowing how to ride in traffic, so never do.

Despite given a great deal of lip service to how everybody ought to ride bikes to work and school and everywhere else, with modern traffic systems it’s highly impractical and unsafe. “Oh, take the bike path,” they say… but where does the bike path go? Quite possibly not where you want to go. Most bike paths seem to be almost exclusively for recreation, and not for commuting. Although there’s been heightened awareness in recent years, rarely do bike paths link communities.

So what’s my hare-brained scheme? An interstate trail system, just for bikes and hikers. It’s based on the idea that there are people who’d be perfectly happy not driving anywhere, if only they could do it safely and conveniently.

My original inspiration for this was the Appalachian Trail, a hiking trail extending from Georgia to Maine. While it’s certainly possible to hike bits and pieces of the trail, every year a few hundred hike the entire distance. I’ve been on parts of this trail, and it’s not easy. Brutal comes to mind, especially considering the size packs people carry with them.

So at first I was just thinking along the lines of an easier A-Trail, one that you could take a mountain bike on — following along the foothills, perhaps, and traveling through the middle of towns when appropriate. Naturally I wanted my trail, which I dubbed the “Bee-Line” (as an acknowledgement of the A-Trail’s superiority, as well as “B” for “Bikes”), to go all the way from Key West to the border of Maine and Canada. Someone suggested using old railroad right-of-ways… which totally makes sense, as the Rails-to-Trails program is already well underway across the nation.

There’s two keys to the Bee-Line: The first is tentatively mapping a desired route, but having a de facto route using existing roads that can be used immediately. It could take decades to obtain rights to the land and build trails, but as long as alternatives exist and people use them, it’ll provide impetus to carrying out the plan.

The second is that dirt is okay. In Calfornia every bike path I ever set wheels on was paved. Why is this necessary? Bozeman has a huge bike/hike trail system that’s completely unpaved, and there doesn’t seem to be any protest at all. Most bikes have tires fat enough to be right at home on dirt. The exceptions are the fancy pants skinny-tired road bikes, but those things go too fast for bike paths, anyway. They’re more at home on streets and highways. Plus, part of this concept is the natural experience, and asphalt takes away from that.

I chose Key West as a starting point specifically because there’s an old road that runs alongside the current highway, which goes the entire length from the mainland to Key West. Originally build as the part of the Flagler railroad, the rails were converted to a highway after hurricane damage. The current road replaced it in the early 80s, but it’s still there. And a lot of it is now used for a bike path, but the old bridges are in pieces — literally, chunks of them are missing.

It would be no small expense to repair these bridges to be adequate for bike and pedestrian travel. But when I think about the Interstate Highway System and the amount of money we put into our automobile roads and bridges, it strikes me as a double standard. Don’t we want people to get around in ways other than cars?

Right now I’m seeing a lot of interest in bike paths and trails covering short distances — which is great. But long distance bike/hike trails could spawn an industry unto itself, perhaps even revitalizing depressed small towns that are on the route. Along with the Bee-Line, there could be routes crisscrossing the nation, just like the Interstate Highway System. That was a bold, monumental idea for its time; I don’t see why this should be thought of any differently.

Chevy Volt needs an EEStor jolt

2007-01-07T23:43:00.000-07:00

Hello, Chevy Volt! Yep, this is GM's offering to eco cadres of the world: a plug-in electric car with a three-cylinder gasoline engine that's not really an engine -- it's a generator to power the electric motor when it runs out of wall-socket juice. Kind of ironic since GM was accused of killing the electric car in the first place, but hey, it's a step in the right direction.

So it's not the most aesthetically pleasing car in the world. Some have suggested that they made it look mean so it wouldn't be associated with cutesy-wutesy bunny loving environmentalists. The fact is this car is just a prototype and won't be on the road for at least three years. The reason? The lithium-ion batteries around today just aren't good enough.

But is that really so? When I interviewed Eco Auto owner Ron Gompertz (see Smart Car article below), he tipped me off to EEStor, a company that patented a battery that's strong enough to power an SUV and can be charged in minutes rather than hours.

The company is contracted with a Canadian electric car company called Feel Good Cars (or Zenn Cars, at zenncars.com), which makes the golf-cart-like Zenn car (I drove one for the article; it's slow and tiny and if you turn on the heat the battery drains). But supposedly much grander things are in the works.

I tried doing a little research, but it wasn't easy because EEStor keeps a very low profile; they don't even have a website. But I did find out a few things.

From Business Week Online:

According to a May, 2004 edition of Utility Federal Technology Opportunities, an obscure trade newsletter, EEStor claims to make a battery at half the cost per kilowatt-hour and one-tenth the weight of lead-acid batteries. Specifically, the product weighs 400 pounds and delivers 52 kilowatt-hours. (For battery geeks: "The technology is basically a parallel plate capacitor with barium titanate as the dielectric," UFTO says.) No hazardous or dangerous materials are used in manufacturing the ceramic-based unit, which means it qualifies as what Silicon Valley types call "cleantech.

From Clean Break:

On top of this release, a reliable source familiar with EEStor had this to say about the company's technology:

* The batteries fully charge in minutes as opposed to hours.
* Whereas with lead acid batteries you might get lucky to have 500 to 700 recharge cycles, the EEStor technology has been tested up to a million cycles with no material degradation.
* EEStor's technology could be used in more than low-speed electric vehicles. The company envisions using it for full-speed pure electric vehicles, hybrid-electrics (including plug-ins), military applications, backup power and even large-scale utility storage for intermittent renewable power sources such as wind and solar.
* Because it's a solid state battery rather than a chemical battery, such being the case for lithium ion technology, there would be no overheating and thus safety concerns with using it in a vehicle.
* Finally, with volume manufacturing it's expected to be cost-competitive with lead-acid technology.

"It's the holy grail of battery technology," said my source. "It means you could do a highway-capable electric city car that would recharge in three or four minutes and drive you from Toronto to Montreal. Consumers wouldn't notice the difference from driving an electric car versus a gas-powered car."

Too good to be true? Who knows? I keep wanting GM to hook up with these folks and go, "Look! Look! There really is a battery good enough!"

If you know anyone who works for GM, please let them know.

The Urban Forest Initiative

2007-01-07T13:08:00.001-07:00

Hare-brained scheme number one

Ah, the ideas that have been bandying about in my head — if only people would heed my advice! Of course, I haven’t told anyone my advice, so I can’t really blame people for being idiots. After this blog, they'll have no excuse.

First, a little background. I grew up on Long Island, in the suburbs of New York City. Within the years of my adolescence I saw the number of farms in Nassau County dwindle to zero. Yes, zero — a sobering thought now that I live in a place with a seemingless endless number of farms, but that number seems to be quickly dwindling, too.

I’ve lived in several places, including Sonoma, California, that never seem to have a shortage of pilgrims willing to set up stakes. And with these pilgrims come problems: We’re growing too fast! We’ve got rich outsiders coming in, and they’re changing things! Real estate values are skyrocketing!

Don’t get me wrong — these are all real issues that I often complain about myself. But there are parts of this country that would love to have these problems. Outsourcing and the global marketplace have shut down factories in the Midwest. In Montana, we’re all familiar with the played-out mining towns, of which Butte is the most notorious example. It always amazes me that the house Bob Dylan grew up in recently sold for the princely sum of $60,000. That’s in Hibbing, Minnesota, which was a mining town way back when, but isn’t much of anything now. And big agribusiness has shuttered small farm towns across the nation. Go to any rural area, from sea to shining sea, that doesn’t benefit from either tourism or a not-too-far metropolis, and you’ll see empty storefronts and empty houses. Those of us who live in places where too many people are moving in don’t have it so bad after all.

My co-worker Tim Omarzu was from Detroit, which is surely America’s most egregious example of a city gone south. Tim would share tales of Devil’s Night, the night before Halloween, in which people would go around Detroit torching abandoned homes. Hundreds would burn each year. The city that once was the greatest testament to American manufacturing might now has abandoned neighborhoods with pheasants and packs of wild dogs roaming free.

Which is horrible in some ways, but full of potential in others. Growing up, I always took solace in that one lone patch of open space, the woods at the bottom of my street, that somehow had escaped the backhoe. It has since been developed, and I look at that with sadness, as if my special place is gone forever. But is it? Is any of it?

Civilizations come and civilizations go. Some cities have been around for thousands of years, but there are plenty of once-great cities that have diminished to near nothing. Wars, disease, famine, floods, progress, open markets, and bad juju all take their toll. A historian might say it’s part of the natural ebb and flow of civilization. The hardest part is the transition from urbane vibrancy to urban blight, suffering through mass unemployment and plunging real estate values, seeing people’s hopes and dreams take off in a moving van.

I know that most of the city fathers and mothers hope and pray that one day the city will return to its former glory. And in some cases they’re right. I know that Cleveland and Pittsburgh have undergone renaissances of sorts, rebuilding themselves from the shells of their former soot-covered selves. But in other places…

Is it really so bad that a place become as wild as it had been a hundred years earlier? That is the dream many of us hold for our new hometowns — that they retain open-space, trees, and maybe even wilderness. We don’t want the builders to come and ruin what we love. But what if they’ve already come, and they’re long gone? Can we get it back?

In the grand scheme of the earth’s history, homo sapiens are but a wink. We have come, and, most agree, we will go. The earth will carry on, with us or without us. All our cities will eventually succumb to the oceans or the forest or the dust. This is not necessarily a bad thing; it just is. And, as nationwide open-space initiatives suggest, we all could do with a little more wilderness in our lives. So why not help the inevitable along a little?

This is what I propose: the Urban Forests Initiative. Basically, cordoning off plots of land — or even entire neighborhoods — that have been abandoned, and planting native trees to make them into forest once again. Not preserving open space, but building it from the ground up. Trails could be built connecting the plots, using right-of-ways through private property of people who continue to live there.

I’ve got a vision for many of the details of this plan, but that’s the crux of it: just helping along what’s already going on. Detroit and other cities can still survive; it’s just a matter of rethinking them as smaller places. It’s time to rethink how we use land.

Eco-friendly transport

2007-01-04T16:00:00.000-07:00

On Bozeman’s streets, it’s getting cool to be green

(The following was originally published in the January issue of Bozeman's Tributary magazine.)

by Ray Sikorski

“You have to be a little bit brave to own a Smart car,” said Ron Gompertz, owner of Bozeman’s Eco Auto car dealership.

True enough. With no established dealer network, third party warranties, and a price tag disproportionate to its diminutive length, the Mercedes-built microcompact may not be for everybody. Not to mention that other drivers will gawk at you as if the head of Jar Jar Binks has sprouted wheels and is rolling down the interstate.

And beyond owning a Smart car, you have to be more than a little bit brave to open a Smart car dealership, especially in the middle of Montana. And you have to be downright courageous to hand the keys to a reporter, and specifically ask him to seek out snow covered streets to test the car’s handling.

But such is Gompertz’s nature. A self-confessed “serial entrepreneur,” Gompertz’s businesses have included an indie record label, a mosaic art supply store, and he’s written two books about a winter holiday he refers to as “Chrismukkah.” He claims to have good instincts for new trends, and is convinced that small, eco-friendly modes of transportation are the next big thing. Hence his showroom on the corner of Grand and Main, which, along with plenty of Smart cars, features the Canadian-made electric Zenn car, and a sizeable showing of Dually Limited’s scooters.

“Al Gore catalyzed me,” Gompertz said, referring to the former V.P.’s global warming revelation flick “An Inconvenient Truth.”
“My goal is to show Montanans that there are other options.”

Hence the Smart car. More worldly Bozemanites may have seen the eight-foot-long runabouts on the streets of Europe or Canada, where they’ve been a fixture for several years. An intro to the U.S. market was balked at due to notions about Americans’ taste for asphalt-roaming grandiosity, but spiking gas prices and what appears to be an evolving national consciousness has scheduled an official debut on our shores in 2008. Until then, however, Gompertz and a handful of other pioneering souls have taken upon themselves the job of importing the cars, retrofitting them to U.S. specs, and presenting them to the public as the must-have item of the year.

The latter of the list may prove to be the most difficult objective. While the odd-looking vehicles garner no shortage of amused stares — Gompertz’s daughter refers to them as “Daddy’s silly cars” — getting people to take them seriously as a transportation choice is another story. Are they a toy? Made in China? Cheap? Dangerous? Gompertz asserts that they are none of the above, that they are real cars with two seats and room for groceries in the back, that are equipped with efficient 3-cylinder turbocharged gasoline engines that get 40-60 miles per gallon. He notes that they can travel 85 miles per hour, that they cost $25,000 (thanks to a strong Euro and the costs incurred bringing the cars up to U.S. specs), and that they can — in theory, anyway — be parked sideways because they are just that short in length.

Gompertz has sold a few of the rear-engine, rear-wheel-drive cars to out-of-staters through his ecoautoinc.com website, but no locals had yet been emboldened enough to make the move.

“They’re just awesome little cars,” Gompertz said, adding that they’re not only cute, but they’re safe and a joy to drive. He likened them to a cross between a VW Beetle and a Porsche Carrerra. And, Gompertz insisted, they handle well in the snow. This I had to see.

The Smart car I tested was already dressed for the part — the ski rack even had a pair of K2’s seemingly ready for action. After a short test run showing off the car’s acceleration and speed on I-90, Gompertz handed me the keys.
And, true to his word, the car really is fun to drive. It has a unique standard/automatic transmission, and after some turbo-induced hesitation between first and second gears, the car took off. You ride high and fast in its tall cockpit, and it can keep up with any car — although crosswinds can make it seem a bit unwieldy.

Gompertz directed me to the northeast neighborhood, and encouraged me to try to get the car to slide on the snowy sidestreets. This is the sort of thing I occasionally enjoy testing on my own vehicle, so being granted carte blanche to do the same on this brand-new, $25,000 weird-looking ecomobile… What’s that? Oh, just the tingling of my loins. Slide away!
It turns out a brave entrepreneurial spirit may be slightly removed from being brave while having an off-the-street reporter try out your baby. I sensed Gompertz’s hands reaching for the Hail Mary strap.

But despite my efforts to the contrary, the little bugger proved to be defiantly steady. Computer-assisted traction control, Gompertz explained.

Gompertz isn’t the only person in Bozeman determined to rattle the environmental status quo. Bozeman Streets Superintendent John Van Delinder has been quietly waging his own municipal eco-campaign for the past five years. Now, the 30 diesel vehicles of the city’s Forestry, Street and Signal, and Street Maintenance departments are running on a 20 percent biodiesel blend.

The city gets the seed-based fuel from Story Distributing, and Van Delinder says it’s a couple of cents per gallon cheaper than regular diesel. He added that despite the views of skeptics, the change hasn’t caused any damage to the vehicles’ engines.

“No problems,” Van Delinder said, explaining that his department regularly takes oil samples to check for aberrations. “None. Nothing.”

The only problem has been convincing old-timers, particularly in other departments, that the less polluting biodiesel is the way to go. Despite Van Delinder’s prodding, Bozeman’s Sanitation, Water, and Parks departments had yet to make the switch. Van Delinder suspected, however, that things would soon change, now that the city council unanimously adopted the Mayor’s Climate Protection Agreement. The Agreement mandates that the city consider an eco-friendly attitude in all orders of business, and Van Delinder predicted that the city would be making some forward-thinking changes in the not-too-distant future.

“I love it,” he said. “I can’t imagine working in a city in which nothing was happening.”

Pinewood Derby tests woodcrafters' mettle

2006-12-26T20:46:00.000-07:00

I’ve been spending the holidays with my sister’s family in Atlanta, and we're now entering into the phase of Pinewood Derby competitiveness -- on the adult males' part, that is. See, six-year-old James has to make a Pinewood Derby car for Cub Scouts. Basically, they give you a block of wood and some wheels, and the kid is supposed to carve it into something resembling a race car, which is then raced. Now, when I was in the Cub Scouts my car won first place in the Pinewood Derby, but it was a hollow victory because my dad did all the work, while I just watched. So, now is Pinewood Derby II, The Next Generation.

First off, my sister’s husband Alan has been more or less written out of the equation. He has no skills whatsoever. Every now and then my dad and I let him kind of stand over James as he sands something, but we don't let him touch tools – he has no idea what to do with them.

I'm surprised my dad let me have any business with this at all; perhaps he realized he had taken over way back when? After all, I didn’t exactly turn out to be a carpenter, as anyone familiar with my experience at Flatiron Mandolins can attest to (I was fired after two days, after destroying several expensive mandolins-to-be).

Anyway, yesterday I helped James with the design and cutting of the block of wood. It's pretty easy to take over, actually, mainly because James is six and it's the first time he's ever used tools like a coping saw, plane, and file, so he's not very good at it yet. But I definitely gave him a lot of file time, and I asked him a lot about how he wanted it to look (he pretty much just said the design I drew was fine, but wanted it blue and white with #53 emblazoned on it). My dad was upstairs working on some other fixit projects, so he pretty much kept out of it, except when he didn't. Like, he'd pop in to the workshop to look for some tool, and say, "Make sure James sands it," or something equally asinine.

It turns out I really enjoyed designing the car, so instead of taking over the whole project for myself, I ended up designing another car on a piece of scrap wood we had been practicing on. I painted this one myself, too, using some of the paint Anne used to paint the laundry room.

James' hasn't been painted yet; I kind of deferred to my dad on this one, since I don't know much about what kind of paint to use. So they went to the store today and bought some paint and brushes just for the car.

It's interesting; I found the design I drew for the car is very similar to the one my dad designed oh so many years ago. I must admit my father had designed a great looking car – much more rounded and smooth than the other scouts’ offerings. The one I designed for James was based vaguely on the Jaguar XKE of the early 1960s, although when the cutting actually started the front end took on stylings more along the lines of later Aston-Martins. James and I didn't actually make any measurements for the design – it was all done freehand – which could account for its evolution.

Of course, the real winner in the generational battle will be found out at the Pinewood Derby competition, which I believe is January 21. After all, my car might look nice, but I can just imagine it losing a wheel on the way down the track. I guarantee I’ll never hear the end of it from my dad.

Here vs. there

2006-12-20T10:43:00.000-07:00

It’s now been three months since I left the warm, Mediterranean climate of Sonoma for the wintry cold of Montana, and it’s time to assess. Did I make the right move?

Absolutely. That’s the short answer, anyway. Just the fact that I’m now an adequate ice climber… Would I be if I stayed in Sonoma? Not bloody likely.

But there are a lot of things that I miss. A steady job with a steady paycheck is one. Although my job at the Sun was really starting to get to be job-like, and that’s part of the reason why I left, right now I’m just scraping things together. I guess it’s sort of a contradiction: right now I miss the security of knowing what’s next, even though that security really got boring for me after a while.

I’m also a bit jealous that the folks at the Sun are now dabbling in video for the website, which sounds exciting. I’d love to be part of something where anyone’s idea is worth trying out, which is what seems to be going on right now. It looks like a really cool scene.

And naturally I miss my friends over there, although I have a lot of friends here. It’s been great being in a house with three housemates, because working in the basement can get kind of lonely. I don’t know what I’d do without them sometimes. I miss the camaraderie of a workplace (although not the politics).

There are some things I don’t miss at all. Hot summers, dreary winters, and just way too many people and cars crammed into a place. Everybody driving everywhere for everything, and always in a rush. And I don’t miss the greed…, which is not to say greed doesn’t exist in Montana, but I got hit with it a few times upon leaving Sonoma.

The first was from Bill Hammett, publisher of the Sun, who refused to give me permission to reprint articles I had written as a Sun employee. Granted, the Sun owns intellectual rights to most of my work, but it’s a commonly accepted practice for publications to grant its writers permission to use their own work once they leave the company, free of charge. Hammett, whose background is not in newspapers and is unfamiliar with this practice, demanded some sort of compensation.

The second was from my former landlady, Debra Ritner of Glen Ellen, shorting me $300.96 on my apartment’s security deposit, despite Deirdre and me cleaning for a solid week prior to moving out.

Here’s the breakdown of what she took out, from the letter she sent me with the remainder of the deposit:

1) 2 plants for front planters and it need more soil.
Plants $11.69
Soil $4.62
(the charge for the plants was anticipated, though not the soil)

2) Living room mini blinds that were broken - size 58x46 from 3 Day blinds
$125.04
(the edges of three blinds were bent, which I don’t think was our doing originally)

3) Broken faucet in kitchen water leaked all over bottom cabinet floor
$39.61
(This one is the most egregious – blatant theft on her behalf. First of all, the faucet wasn’t broken when I moved out. Second of all, she’s the landlady – it’s her job to take of things like broken faucets, not mine. She had called to tell me that the faucet was broken before sending this letter, but she never said she was actually charging me for it.)

4) Re-clean carpet, some stains in bedroom but very large stains in living room, tried to re-clean so we didn’t have to charge you for replacement of L.R. carpet
$88
(Gee, thanks Debra, although the carpet was professionally steam-cleaned, as per the instructions in the lease, and the receipt was put on the counter for you to see. The stains you mention are in your head.)

5) Recleaned outside of refrigerator, kitchen walls had food and grease on it and kit fan recleaned, yard raked leafs, pine needles, trimmed bamboo, pulled weeds
2 hr. @$16/hr. =$32

In the end she writes “Best Wishes on your new home! You were both good tenants and paid us on time.”

Without having taken photographs it’s hard to show just how clean the apartment was, both inside and out, but some of the things on this list are crazy. Some, such as the blinds and the carpet stains, I’m convinced were not our doing, although I don’t have hard evidence. Some things are just natural wear and tear after living in a place for over two years. Suing her would probably end up costing more than I would ever get back.

It just disturbs me that someone would take advantage of me in this way. We gave her almost $24,000 in rent over 25 months ($950/month); we always paid on time, and never had any complaints from the neighbors. Why would she do this?

Sometimes I'm just not in the mood

2006-12-16T14:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, and even talking to people at the brunch party today, I felt my freelance career was going fairly well - slowly but steadily I've been making progress. But every now and then I'm hit with this sense that I'm not cut out for this business and I'll never make it because it's just too hard. I feel like if I let go of the struggle for one moment the whole thing will fall apart... and sometimes I'm not in the mood to struggle. Sometimes I just want someone to say, "This is your assignment, go do it and we'll pay you."

I think it was the winter issue of Outside Bozeman that set me off. I have an article on Nima Sherpa scheduled for the spring issue, but nothing in this one. I had contacted them about writing something for the winter article a while back, but at the time I really didn't have any ideas of my own, and they had enough queries to not be interested in thinking up something for me, so I ended up with nothing. Now the issue comes out, and its full of writers with good ideas and good articles, as well as interviews with several successful Bozeman-area outdoors writers. And I just felt like all those people are better than me. They're motivated, they work hard, they have good ideas which they pursue.

Of course, I'm like that some of the time. I'm about halfway done with my Everglades article, and I don't even have a place to put it. I kind of think that sometimes we have to come to the breaking point before things start to fall into place. That's how it was for me with the Sonoma Valley Sun, when I first started freelancing for them -- I had been working at Murphy's, just filling in, and there was barely any work at all in the winter. I went to the Sun more or less out of desperation, and that ended up working out so well. I could only wonder why I waited so long.

There is an element of lonliness to this life that's probably the hardest part for anyone... but it may part of why I'm drawn to it. And I don't think I'm that different from other writers in this regard. Human interaction is foreign and exciting and fraught with danger. I'm only comfortable with people I'm most comfortable with -- but even that could be a total stranger. God, it's like I'm from another planet or something. Despite the fear, I crave it. People. I must have met tens of thousands of people, waiting tables in so many restaurants, going up cold to total strangers... And interviewing them's no different. I call them, out of the blue, and go into their homes and ask them questions sometimes their closest friends won't even ask.

And yet, here I am, alone in the basement, convincing myself that it's my calling. Trying to embrace my contradictions, as if within them lies some kind of salvation, or at least a paycheck.

Everglades takes a hit

2006-12-16T00:24:00.000-07:00

In April, 2005 I served as Writer-in-Residence in Everglades National Park, living in a National Park Service cottage and trying to learn as much as possible about the park. This past November I revisited the area, primarily to survey the damage done to the park by Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma in the fall of 2005. Most of the damage occurred in the park's Flamingo area, which is the southernmost tip of the Florida mainland.

Most of the damage was done not by high winds, but by the huge storm surges that came out of Florida Bay, covering the entire area with mud. The Flamingo Lodge and its surrounding cottages have been put out of commission indefinitely. The park just finished a public comment period in which people offered their suggestions of what to do about the area; it appears that people overwhelming want to see some lodging and dining facilities return.

I'm working on an article about what happened and what will happen to the area in the future, although I have yet to find a taker for it. I spent about a month in the area when I was Writer-in-Residence, so it's close to me as a subject. Even if I don't find a taker for the article, I'd like to write it anyway, just as documentation.

Here Comes Santa Claus

2006-12-14T18:32:00.000-07:00

Inhabiting the role is key to a first-class Claus

by Ray Sikorski

It was about ten years ago that curly-locked George Carter was first asked to perform as “Santa Paws” for the Humane Society’s annual fundraiser.

“The beard smelled really bad, and the suit didn’t fit very well, and I had a cocker spaniel pee all over me,” Carter says.

Ah, the tinkling of Christmas bells. To add insult to injury, a photo of the rookie Santa and the nervous spaniel was featured prominently in the Bozeman Chronicle.

But somehow Carter was inspired, rather than deterred.

“That summer I had a suit made, and the rest is history.”

Since then Carter’s wooly look has become the stuff of Bozeman Christmas legend. Along with having worked the big chair at the Gallatin Valley Mall for nine years, Carter waves from the sleigh at Christmas Strolls, works private parties and family gatherings, and still offers his lap to the spaniels for Heart of the Valley’s Santa Paws.

“Pets don’t believe or disbelieve,” says Carter, whose alter-ego is the gruff-voiced morning commentator on KMMS-AM. “They just see this weird guy in a red suit. ‘Whoa, he wants me to sit on his lap?’”

Belief is the name of the game for Bozeman’s über-Santas. Like Carter, longtime Gallatin Valley Mall Santa Skip Tinder owns his own red suit, sports a billowing beard, and takes the role to heart.

Tinder, who looks the part right down to the twinkle in his eye and the jellybowl belly, took it as a compliment when friends first asked him to play Santa more than 20 years ago. Now it just comes with the territory.

“Maybe it’s a selfish reason,” he says of his reason for taking on the job year after year. “Maybe it makes me feel good to make the kids feel good – I don’t know.”

Tinder, who will be retiring from jobs with the Montana Highway Department and Kenyon-Noble Ready Mix within the next year, takes a certain amount of joy in the challenges of young believers. Upon being asked his name, a boy with brand-new blue glasses refused to give it to Tinder, on the grounds that Santa already went over that information downtown. Thinking fast, Tinder said he didn’t recognize the boy with his new glasses on. The boy ripped off the frames and declared, “It’s me, Jamie!”

Of course, not all who shop in the mall are young believers. Some are not-so-young wanna-believers, like teenage girls asking for new trucks and boyfriends (“I always ask them if they’ve been good girls, and they giggle”) and the occasional MSU football player. Tinder, who also plays Easter Bunny at the mall, boasts that he hosted two burly linemen at once on his big chair, for a grand total of over 900 pounds between the three of them.

Both Santas spoke of the challenges posed by children who ask for them to cure relatives of cancer, or to bring their divorcing parents back together. “That about does me in,” Tinder says.

But the feeling that Santa can’t bring everyone everything is offset by the simple wide-eyed magic of continued belief. Carter described a little girl who found a rusty bell in a woodpile, convinced that it had fallen from Santa’s sleigh one Christmas.

The girl’s parents secretly explained to Carter that she lost the bell, but they had purchased a shiny new one as a replacement. They gave the bell to Carter to present to the girl.

“I said, ‘I heard you lost my sleigh bell.’ Her eyes just got huge, and she said, ‘Yeah.’”

He pulled out the new bell, which rang just perfectly.

“She was on that age where they’re starting to not believe, but that was probably good for another couple of years. The look in her face was worth everything I ever did.”

Both Santas noted that they could be making big bucks in big city malls, but the idea held little appeal to either of them. Carter donates everything he makes as Santa to the Help Center.

“Santa Claus is a concept, it’s a belief, it’s an ideal. It’s not a sales tool,” he said.

“All it takes to be Santa is a red suit and a beard. What it takes to be a good Santa is making the kids feel like at that time they are the most important thing in the world. You relate to them as complete equals. It’s the way they open up, the way they talk to you. You can see belief in their eyes… which is one of the reasons why I don’t wear an artificial beard.”

And, Carter confesses, that beard gets pulled on quite a bit.

“There’s one spot in particular,” he says, pointing to the left side of his shaggy jawline. “It’s sore by the end of the season.”

All of this begs the question: Do you have to be a little bit crazy to be first-class Claus?

“Oh, yeah,” Carter says. “But it’s the good kind of crazy. It’s like your eccentric uncle.”

Backcountry skiing: The first run of the year

2006-12-10T19:55:00.000-07:00

Okay, I know I’m not going to win any photography awards for this one — aside from my inexplicably stunned expression and golden retriever Mona facing the wrong way, Peach (a yellow lab/golden mix) didn’t even care enough to pose. Heck, if either of them had opposable thumbs we might have got a better shot.

The important thing is that it was documented. After all, it was my first ski outing of the year, albeit an inauspicious one. As you can see, there’s not much snow at the old Bear Canyon ski hill. It’s second week of December, and Bridger Bowl’s still not opened.

When I was in Sonoma I bought a pair of really nice Volkl skis from the old Goodwill store for $17, having in mind moving my randonée (also known as alpine touring) bindings on to them. Which I did about a month ago, and I’ve been anxious to try them out ever since. Well, okay, not that anxious – there’s been snow on the hills for a while now, but I’m just getting around to it.

Anyway, I got my climbing skins (for the uninitiated, these are fabric sheaths affixed to the bottom of skis so that you can ski uphill – yes!) sized up with the shorter Volkl shaped skis, and I took them and Mary Anne and Craig’s dogs out to the Bear Canyon/New World Gulch trailhead. Going up wasn’t bad at all, although I was truly out of shape – huffing and puffing all the way up, and I didn’t even go up that far. Strangely, the snow seemed to be getting softer and more scarce the higher up I went, so I called it good about halfway up the hill, then bushwhacked (not easy to do with skis on!) across the hillside till I got to this, the main slope.

This is an old ski hill that isn’t really operational anymore, except for the occasional private chartering. There was only a few inches of soft snow on it, so getting down could hardly even be called skiing. It was ugly – I was paranoid about rocks, so I made big traverses, and then had barely enough speed to make a turn. Extremely inelegant, but somehow I made it down. The dogs had a great time chasing me down.

Hopefully we’ll get some real snow soon so I can do this sport properly!

They shoot turkeys, don't they?

2006-12-08T17:27:00.000-07:00

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Wild, wild turkeys
I will ride them
someday

Wild turkeys
Clever, scheming, and perfect for a Thanksgiving feast

(The following was published in the November 2006 issue of Bozeman's Tributary Magazine)

By Ray Sikorski

We all know the story: Ben Franklin wanted the turkey to be the national bird, but the arrogant bald eagle won out.

So the bald eagle flies high and looks tough — big deal! The turkey is humble yet wiley. The turkey is sensitive and alert. And the turkey tastes good.

Which is why we eat ‘em on Thanksgiving. I suppose it wouldn’t really be cool to go the supermarket and pick up a frozen hormone-laden 20 pound bald eagle to roast and eat with giblet gravy; national birds are for looking at and putting on Express Mail packages, not for eating.

Turkeys, on the other hand…

Wouldn’t it be nice, just once, to forsake the insipid store-bought bird and go out and find a real bird — the svelte turkey, who’s out there every day running around, gobbling, struttin’ his stuff? Sure, it may not be as tender and juicy as Butterball’s best, but it would be wild and it would be yours. There, on the dinner table, with the good plates and the fancy silverware. That dead thing in the middle, surrounded by the candied yams — you did that.

Of course, it’s not so simple. Wild turkeys aren’t just standing around, waiting to be shot. Well, sometimes they’re just standing around, but chances are it’s not when you’re toting your shotgun. Turkeys know. They have that sense. Incredible eyesight is part of it; with its side-set eyes, a slight movement of the head is all the turkey needs for 360 degree vision. Some hunters claim wild turkeys can see through rocks, while others sense they merely see around them. The camouflage industry as we know it today exists because of turkey hunters. There’s the patterns — mossy oak, forest floor, hardwoods, pine straw — the camo shotguns, the face paint.

Some wear “more camouflage than a walking tree,” said Greg Byrne of Powderhorn Sporting Goods. Byrne said some hunters go so far as to camouflage their own smell, with oil of pine or something called “Earth Smell.”

But finding the turkey is only part of the game. The rest of it is getting the turkey to come to you. The Powderhorn’s George Dieruf explained that this is what makes turkey hunters some of the most crazed, obsessed hunters out there. It’s not about finding your prey and blowing it to smithereens. It’s about coaxing your prey into coming out of hiding, just for you. Then blowing it to smithereens.

Dieruf said that Montana regulations don’t require hunters of the native Merriam’s turkeys to “call in” their prey, but said the satisfaction gained from seeing a gobbler come towards you over a hill is what died-in-the-wool turkey hunters live for.

Some use decoys to bring in the birds, but no serious turkey hunter goes into the wild without at least a few turkey calls at his or her disposal. The cluck. The putt. The yelp. The cackle. The kee kee. The purr. The entire gamut of the sensitive bird’s emotional states: Content. Excited. Horny as a hound dog. Feeling like sitting on the couch all day and playing sad songs on the stereo. The seasoned turkey hunter knows these moods, and can replicate them using a variety of devices, some of which can be made at home. Turkey wingbones have been used by Native Americans as a “yelper” call for over 4,000 years, and they’re still used today. According to Dieruf, wooden box calls are among the easiest to master. Other calls can be made from turtle shells or pieces of slate; a film canister or prescription pill box with a bit of latex over a hole can make a respectable gobble.

Merriam’s turkeys aren’t found around Bozeman; hunters have to trek as least as far east as Big Timber to find the birds. The good news is that turkey hunting has two seasons, spring and fall, so hunters have something to do when they’re not able to go out after the big game.
Of course, for serious stalkers of the wiley bird, there’s only one prey that matters. Although Dieruf claimed that Montana’s Merriam’s aren’t as skittish as some of its counterparts farther east, some wild turkey hunters are so obsessed that they’ll stalk the same bird — unsuccessfully, apparently — year after year.

This time of year, there’s more at stake than just your pride — there’s Thanksgiving dinner. Sure, the wild bird may be a bit drier than the puffed-up supermarket variety — the wife of one local hunter said she stuffs the birds with fruit to moisten things up — but that’s because it’s busy running around outwitting hunters like you.

And even if you can’t put one on the Thanksgiving table, you’ve got to admit it deserves your respect.

Ice Climbing in Hyalite Canyon

2006-12-07T23:33:00.000-07:00

(I'm in yellow helmet, Craig's in white helmet)

While shimmying up a frozen waterfall might not be everyone’s idea of a day well spent, for my housemate Craig and I it’s been a longtime goal. Well, a month-and-a-half long goal, anyway.

Craig and I started immersing ourselves into rock climbing in October, and as winter’s chill descends on Montana, ice climbing is the next logical step. We both see it as step in the larger process of becoming proficient all-around mountaineers, in which we’re able to take on any peak. Craig outlined goals for the next year and a half that include increasingly harder routes in the Tetons, the Gallatins, and the Absarokas.

So we better figure this stuff out! On Sunday we participated in Barrel Mountaineering’s Ice Festival, in which we were given top-quality gear and taught by world-class ice climbers, including Bozeman’s Jack Tackle. It was kind of a trial by fire for us; we had both dabbled in ice climbing a little bit, but really are beginners. The guys set up top-ropes and sent us up some pretty crazy stuff right off the bat, trying to teach us good technique… which was great, but what we really needed were the fundamentals. I mean, we were dangling 50 feet above the ground, with the only things holding us up being the tips of two metal picks and the front-points of our crampons. That takes a little getting used to!

We got better as the day went on, and as the guides tossed the ropes down we knew we wanted more. So Craig and I ventured back out to Hyalite today to get back on the ice. This time we weren’t carrying brand new, state-of-the-art demo gear; just our own boots and our own mountaineering crampons and Craig’s two old-school, straight shaft ice climbing picks, which we agreed to trade off. Plus, we had to figure out how to anchor the top-rope on our own — something we’d been studying in books and magazines, but hadn’t had much hands-on practice with. Plus, Craig had to get back to a music rehearsal at one, so we didn’t have much time.

But, boy, did we make the most of it. We left the house at about 7:15 a.m., and of course there was the obligatory stop at the bagel shop… by the time we got all the way down Hyalite, dropped the gear off at the Greensleeves ice route — next to Genesis I — hiked up to the top to set up the anchor, and rappelled down to the foot of the climb, it was 10:30. Wow! Some folks like sports in which they just have to lace up a pair of shoes and go. Climbing, as a sport, is 80 percent lacing up of shoes and 20 percent actually on the rock.

Once we got going there was no stopping us. Greensleeves is a relatively easy climb, starting off steep and then easing out to a lower angle. Short and sweet, which was perfect for getting our fundamentals down. We were both a little concerned about our equipment, but everything worked great, including my strap-on crampons and Craig’s ice tools. In fact, we seemed to have better luck swinging Craig’s heavy tools than the lighter-weight ones we were lent on Sunday — one nice solid swing was all it took to get good purchase. And I felt more at ease hanging off the tips of my crampons.

We each took three turns on the ice, slightly varying the route each time. The last one took me right over the main stream of the cold, dribbling water; it was warmer today, and the water sprayed over my ski pants as I climbed.

Back when I worked in the Tetons I had done a lot of mountaineering, but I had stopped for a while. A friend had slid on the soft snow of Diappointment Peak’s Spoon Couloir, and all I could do was watch helplessly as she flew past, unable to stop herself. Miraculously, she survived with only scrapes and a concussion, but it made me overly cautious in my outdoor adventures. Now, climbing with Craig, using ropes, being careful about our protection, I feel little I’m getting back into it at last.

Batgirl

2006-12-06T16:08:00.000-07:00

Fiction by Ray Sikorski

She’s an evil batgirl genius and I want to have my way with her. I would like any woman who’s any one of the three, evil or batgirl or genius, but to be all three at once, well, that’s something special. Of course all the other guys think the same thing and they all want to have their way with her too, but being an evil batgirl genius she can simply take her pick, and she gleefully picks nobody.

She’s not a skintight leather-clad batgirl like in movies and TV, she’s a feather-weight aerospace skisuit batgirl. Her batsuit is a set of wings of her own design, super-light space-age fabric wings going from her ankles to her wrists, spreading out wide as she raises her arms above her head.

She does this on short skis on windy days, and one day she’ll ski uphill, and one day she’ll fly over the engineering building, over the heads and hearts of me and all the others who have taken a number. We know this will happen soon, and we either want to stop her or join her or sleep with her before she flies over us all and we never see her again. We all know she’s evil, or think we know, and once she flies she’ll patent her batsuit and make millions and never talk to us again. So we all hate her desperately, and long to get in her pants.

I offer to accompany her into the woods, to carry her wings, her notebooks, her pencils, her snowpants. Of course, so do all the others, but perhaps she pities me. “Can you conjure a wind?” she asks when we get there, and I try, I pray, I blow, I hope and I wish, but I don’t think she cares. Does she need a squall, or a hurricane? She just wants me to sweat, I’m sure of it. It’s ugly, the power she has over me, over men. It is a thing of beauty, a mind, and when it is so beautiful as the wings she wears, it is blinding. I pray, I wish, I huff and puff… how does one conjure a wind? Alas, I am no witch.

But her. Once she’s prepped, her skis on, her wings spread, her body perky and cute in her snowsuit, a wink is all it takes, and then there is… a breeze. Certainly not a squall or a hurricane, and certainly it defies reason and gravity and friction, biology and physiology and even the kinds of loaves and fishes miracles you read about in sacred texts, because she’s quite a way uphill before I can make any sense of it, and I’m still not making any sense of it. I’m supposed to be recording my findings in the notebook, but really I think she’s just showing off. This isn’t engineering! It’s magic and it’s pissing me off.

She ends up at the top of the hill. “Are you coming back down?” I shout up at her.

“No,” she shouts back.

“Am I supposed to go up there, too?” I don’t want to climb all the way up there, I want bat wings too, I want to just wink and shoot up there like her and then have my way with her, but of course that’s never going to happen.

“Just stay where you are,” she shouts down. “Make sure the notebook’s ready!”

“Oh, it’s ready.”

“Have you been taking notes?”

“Oh, yes!” I say, and then quickly jot down the time and the date and “Subject defies all laws of physics and gravity and compassion for I am smitten and she doesn’t care.” And before I’m done scribbling she’s skiing down the slope and lifting up her wings and going over a jump and flying… and I know it’s over. It’s over for me and for all the others because she’s flying over my head and circling and spiraling and going up and swooping down, and I know that now we’re all screwed because she’s magic and she’s a genius and she’s evil and she’ll win the Nobel prize for it all, all of it, and we’ll never see her again and she doesn’t care. And I jot that all down in the notebook along with the time and how long she’s been in the air.

If she goes too close to the sun, like Icarus, will she come crashing to the ground? One can hope, one can pray, but she’s no Icarus. She’s much, much better and smarter and cuter. I know it’s over and we’ll lose her and she’ll be famous and we’ll have no one to lust after who’s evil and a genius and a batgirl. I write this in the book as well.

So the next day there are TV cameras and newspaper reporters and the whole enchilada, even more because there are Nobel people from Sweden, and there are people from Ronco who want to sell batsuits on TV. But she just says, “I’m glad I can fly, it was fun. I’ll do a demonstration for the TV cameras because my assistant was nice but not very good at recording.” So everyone, the TV people, the newspaper people, the Swedes, the Ronco people, my fellow engineers, and myself all truck out to the woods for the big demonstration. And this time she doesn’t mess around with the shenanigans, she just gets up there, winks for the breeze, skis around for show, and flies. She flies over our heads, and up and around and down and up again and barrell rolls and nosedives and pulls out and goes very, very high, and… flies away.

Me and the engineers and the TV people and the newspaper people and the Swedes and the Ronco people look and look and look and look, but she’s gone. We titter: “Where did she go?” “Is she still up there?” “Is this a trick?” “Will she surprise us?” The concensus is that she’s pulling some kind of clever stunt, to show how long she can fly for, and at any minute she’ll zip by with with a big smile on and land and have a nice speech and a good laugh and accept her Nobel prize and have Ronco make batwings for everyone in TV land. So we wait.

But she doesn’t come. We wait until we’re hungry and we order pizza and the pizza guy comes and waits too. We have all fallen in love with her, now everyone, not just the engineers, everyone even in TV land knows of this horrible evil-batgirl-genius-unrequited love that I have been tortured with for so long. And because I have acted as her assistant I feel I know better than anyone that she won’t come back.

It gets dark and we finish the pizza and we keep waiting. The TV people play back the batgirl video, over and over, and we watch, we can’t stop watching. She is so beautiful when she flies, she is so evil, such a genius, such a batgirl, that she can’t help but be beautiful, and everyone hates her so much for leaving, for abandoning us, and for being beautiful. We wait some more, even though it’s dark and there’s no more pizza. We wait because we want to have our way with her, even though she has already had her way with us.

Write a novel in a month? No problem!

2006-12-05T19:18:00.000-07:00

Damn Good Padding

At last, it's finished. "Tinker Visits the Woods," that is, or," Thoreau, I Like a Girl." All 506 chapters of it, and it only took me 30 days to write.

Yes, it's my NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) novel, started on November 2nd (so actually 29 days) after I saw a mention of the competition in the Montana State University Exponent. It's not really a competition, in that there aren't really any prizes... I like to think of it as the equivalent of running a marathon for writers.

Me and 80,000 others from around were involved in this marathon, including about 130 or so from Montana. There was plenty of camaraderie in our little bunch, which included NaDruWriNi and a cut-throat battle for wordcount with Saskatchewan, in which we kicked their Canuck butts.

See, the trick to writing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days is to concentrate on quantity, not quality. None of this editing nonsense, just crank out the words. Don't even look back, there'll be plenty of time for that in December. As for me, I didn't even have an outline going into this thing. All I had was the character Tinker, who made his first appearance in a story in my book "Driftwood Dan and Other Adventures." I just wanted to take Tinker and roll with him, and roll we did.

Undertaking the writing of a novel while having no idea of what the plot will be is admittedly a little strange. With Tinker, I handled this issue by making him a writer (which he was in the original story) who's writing a novel and searching for a plot. Clever, huh? That enabled me to essentially free associate the first 10,000 or so words, i.e. "I need a plot, Tinker thought"; "This sucks, not having a plot"; "I wonder how I can find a plot"; "Every other writer must have a plot by now"; etc.

The problem revealed itself when I was eventually forced to find a real plot, which ended up being something in which the character Tinker created became his antagonist, and for some reason Tinker felt compelled to have sex with a bunch of different women, some of whom only existed in his imagination. I should note that on the NaNoWriMo website they included interviews with authors who had successfully written NaNoWriMo novels in the past, who offered helpful advice on padding: when in doubt, bring in a new character, plot twist, sex scene, or have all the characters sit down to a gourmet meal. I repeatedly did all but the last one, and that's only because if I think about food when I'm writing I get hungry and the whole thing goes to hell.

So, basically, I ended up with 47,000 or so words worth of padding. And I think there's something to be said for that. It's damn good padding. Sometimes I thought the whole thing sucked and should be drop-kicked into the landfill, but when I actually got around to re-reading some of it (I separated it into 506 micro-chapters, and since finishing have made plans to name each one -- I'm up to Chapter 94 so far), I sensed that it wasn't that bad. Not good, mind you, but not bad.

I've only shown it to one person so far... but that's mainly because I'm embarrassed by all the raunchy sex scenes that ended up in there. It's amazing the things writer's block will make you do.

Does anybody want to see it? Let me know!

Is it evil?

2006-12-05T19:06:00.000-07:00

The other day my housemate Craig was vacuuming up ashes around the wood stove, and apparently some weren't quite out yet. Ross and I saw smoke coming out of the vacuum; the stuff inside the bag had caught on fire. So Craig fumbled comically with that for a while, finally wrestling the smoking bag out of the vacuum and out of the house. Oddly, in a few minutes he came back in the house with the bag and said, "I know what to do with it, I'll burn it in the woodstove!" See, he didn't want to put the smoldering bag in the garbage and catch that on fire, too. (Later I asked why he didn't just throw it in the snow. He didn't have a very good answer to that one.) Anyway, after throwing the bag in the woodstove it became apparent that the bag wasn't just filled with dirt; it was filled with dog hair, which really stank when it burned.

Yep, just another day in the life.

Requiem for a bridge

2006-12-05T15:14:00.000-07:00

Fond memories for the sleepy neighborhood that is no more

October 2006

(Note: The following was written for the Sonoma Valley Sun, but was never published. The reason given was that it wasn't pro-automobile enough.)

There it is, all shiny and new, multi-laned, striped and solid. The champagne has popped and fizzed and bubbled over, and the traffic nightmare is gone. The new Ig Vella/Riverside Drive bridge has come to save our motoring souls.

Remember the old bridge? Narrow and curved, it was more fit for Medieval oxcarts than the crush of automobiles that plied it daily. A labyrinthine footpath flanked its southern side, with giant "Walk Your Bike" signs admonishing from either end. When riding from El Verano to Sonoma, I often avoided the path entirely, preferring to squeeze tightly alongside the cars.

And then that old bridge was gone, and the detour signs went up... and a new, even narrower bridge appeared next to where the old one lay. This bridge didn't have a ribbon-cutting to welcome its arrival; it wasn't named in honor of any local luminaries. I suppose it was something of a secret bridge. After all, it wasn't a bridge for cars, so that cut out pretty much everyone traveling around Sonoma. It was a bridge reserved solely for those of us who preferred self-propelled transport: pedestrians and bicyclists.

This was a humble, friendly bridge. Located just south of the construction work, the span provided a viewing platform for both the work and Sonoma Creek below. It was a place to nod hello to fellow conspirators in our little anti-petroleum plot. And it totally transformed the neighborhood.

Sure, right now most El Verano residents are celebrating the end of the half-hour commute to get to a place that's just right over the creek. But it won't be long before some of them miss the peace and quiet.

Ah, the good old days of... when? A week ago? Those were the days, indeed. Riverside Drive and Petaluma Avenue were sleepy little back roads then, where dogs and cats could freely roam the neighborhood — heck, they could have even laid down to rest on the double yellow line. Children could wander along the shoulders, or play on the side streets, free of fear from being mowed over by the constant onslaught of racing vehicles. And bicycling was a joy, not a dangerous chore.

Those days are no more. Riverside Drive and Petaluma Avenue are thoroughfares once again, shortcuts out of town. Sure, it's great to have the construction work done and the traffic snarl over with, and it's wonderful that the new bridge has wide sidewalks and bike lanes on both sides.

But, for a while, El Verano was a peaceful place. The new bridge is nice, but I'll fondly remember the secret one.

Former Sun Features Editor Ray Sikorski returned from Montana to collect the rest of his stuff, and couldn't help himself from writing one more thing.

A Hike in The Narrows

2006-12-05T14:33:00.000-07:00

October 2006

For years I've been thinking about The Narrows, the slender cleft of the Virgin River in Utah's Zion National Park. It's supposed to be one of the nicest hikes in America... of course, it's not exactly a hiking on a trail as it is just wading through the waist-deep water of the river, sandstone cliffs towering over you on both sides.

And finally, it was going to happen! Susan and I had a road trip planned to Southern Utah for a friend's wedding, and Zion was only a couple of hours away. Everything was set. Sunday, October 15 would be the day.

Of course, on a trip like this, one should expect the unexpected. But rain in the desert? I mean, I know it rains in the desert from time to time. A little sprinkle here, a little sprinkle there. But in Escalante, where the wedding took place, it rained for three days straight -- hard, pouring rain. Definitely not the kind of conditions you want to be wending through a narrow slot canyon in. Drowning in a flash flood is not my idea of a good time.

The morning of the 15th looked just as dreary as the day before. Dejected, Susan and I took our time over breakfast, realizing we'd just have to do it another year. We decided to take in Bryce Canyon instead. But when we saw that canyon's pink and orange hoodoo towers, we saw something else, too: blue sky peeking through the clouds. We inquired at the visitor's center, and got a phone number for Zion's backcountry office. It wasn't raining at all in Zion! The ranger said the water temperature was 56 degrees and the river was flowing at 98 cubic feet per second. We had no idea what that meant. But other people were going for it, so we decided we'd go for it, too.

Of course, Zion wasn't as close as it looked on the map. Windy roads abounded, plus we decided to stop for lunch at perhaps the slowest restaurant in Southwestern Utah. On top of that, in order to alleviate traffic in Zion Canyon, the park has a mandatory shuttle bus service -- which worked great, but it didn't get us to the Temple of Sinawava trailhead any faster. It was 4 p.m. when we finally got to the river's edge. With the sun setting around 7, we wouldn't have time for much of a hike.

Susan and I hadn't come all this way for nothing. We had come prepared for action: shorts over thermal long johns, telescoping ski poles, and I had gone so far as to glue carpet remnents to our hiking shoes for better traction on the slippery rocks.

What? You've never glued carpet remnents to your hiking shoes? Okay, so it was new to me, too, but a guy in the fishing store in Bozeman said fishermen did it all the time. Well, some fishermen did it some of the time, anyway. It sounded like a cool project to me, so I went to the carpet store, got some nice brownish swatches of low-level wool, cut out the outline of our shoes, and glued them on with Barge cement. Did the people on the shuttle bus eye us strangely? You bet. But hey, I had read that walking in The Narrows was like walking on greased bowling balls. Looking a little dorky on the bus wasn't much of a trade-off if it meant our ankles would be spared.

We planned to do a "bottom-up" hike, wading upstream as far as we could get before turning around and heading back to the beginning (some hikers take a shuttle to Chamberlain's Ranch and do a 16-mile, one-way hike). As soon as we waded across the first stretch of the Virging River our big questions were answered. Is 56 degrees cold? Yes, but it's possible to walk from one little canyon bank to the next where you can warm up before the next plunge. Is 98 cubic feet per second swift? It is at certain river crossing points. After a couple of inelegant crossings we taught ourselves the best way: me taking both ski poles and taking the lead, with Susan holding on to me with both hands from behind.

The result was one of the most unique and exciting hiking experiences I've ever had. Wading up to your waist through a river may sound like hell, but it's a fully-involving event. You're wet. You're cold. The current is trying to push you down. Fun! Plus, the canyon is spectacular. You're hiking in a place only the most courageous dare to tread. Pockets of other stick-wielding, soaking wet hikers waded downstream as we waded up. No one was crying in agony; most of them even had smiles on.

We hiked a little ways past the junction of Orderville Canyon into the Virgin River. Not much of a distance -- we averaged about one mile an hour -- but hey, we're hiking upstream in a river, for crying out loud! We had a bite to eat before turning back. Downstream was noticeably easier traveling, and we had gained valuable greased bowling ball technique in our short experience.

Oh, yes. The shoe carpeting. It worked! Well, it sort of worked. The outer wooly layer of carpeting wore off in the water in the first half mile or so, but the base layer stuck on relatively well. It helped a little bit with traction -- I know, because my base layer eventually wore completely off one shoe but not the other, so I could compare. And, by the end of the hike only the faintest sheen of carpet base remained. A worthwhile experiment, but I can't say I recommend it. I don't know how the rangers would feel about huge clumps of carpet residue floating down the Virgin River. Until they make river shoes with built in carpet bottoms, I'd recommend just going without.

Living On Teton Time

2006-12-04T23:21:00.000-07:00

September 2006

I haven’t been gone from Sonoma a week and already I’m in a different world.
I’m working the tail-end of the season at my old job at Grand Teton National Park’s Jackson Lake Lodge, a place where cell phones barely work and few people seem to care. There’s so much to write about — details, like unlocked bicycles and unlocked doors. They’re everywhere.
It snowed the other day — big, puffy flakes, coming down for about an hour. I’m not sure how the hotel guests felt about it, but I know my co-workers were excited. Many are university students from Turkey and Bulgaria, and they snapped photos from the restaurant’s back door. A similar sense of excitement happened later in the evening, when a large bull moose ambled along the patio outside the Mural Room — a flurry of employees descended on the windows, vying for the best viewing alongside the guests. The managers, rather than telling their minions to get back to work, encouraged workers to stop what they were doing and take in the sight.
Heavy and wet that night, the snow was gone from the valley floor the following morning. I had the day off, so I ventured into the mountains, up a lonely trail called Hanging Canyon. The trail is lonely because it doesn’t exist on most maps of the Tetons, but it was made lonelier still because of the lateness in the season and the cloudy, cold weather.
And because of the snow. At the lower elevations there was none, but once I climbed a thousand or so feet above the valley floor, it was everywhere. For the first time in years I was wearing my heavy leather hiking boots, sporting my trekking pole, my instep crampons, my ice axe. The snow was too soft and shallow for the ice axe to be of much use, but I felt proud with it strapped to my pack. Just as some affect a cane or a pipe, I felt my ice axe presented me with an air of importance — or perhaps just silliness, to those who know better. Either way, I liked it.
I had hiked this trail many times. It was never easy to follow, winding over boulders with small rock cairns marking the way, and it was made even harder with six inches of snow obscuring the route. No footprints marked the trail, unless you count those of the elk.
But really, the trail didn’t need much marking — just head straight up, 3000 feet in three miles. The occasional slipping was made worse by the snow-covered gaps between boulders, and the weather was cloudy and damp. I should have dressed warmer. I was still used to Sonoma; I hadn’t anticipated pulling out longjohns this early in the year. I considered turning back, but… no. This was my first hike back in the Tetons. This was my home, or at least one of my homes. I was determined to go on.
After much trudging and slipping, I reached Ramshead Lake. I had hoped to make it to Lake of the Crags, only a hundred or so vertical feet higher, but a large boulder field stood in the way. With the soft snow covering the gaps between the rocks, I knew it was a sprained ankle waiting to happen. And then what? I was alone. Really alone. I realized I hand’t been this alone in years. Alone, in the cold and snow, with darkness approaching… it was exhilirating. There is a certain feeling you get when you realize your life is fragile, but you continue to live: Relief? Emancipation? Accomplishment? Luck?
Something. Perhaps it’s just the feeling of something that cannot be bought from a store with a credit card and plugged in. For me, it’s a sense of returning home.