Finding Nima

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?

The Interstate Trail System

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.

The Urban Forest Initiative

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.

Here vs. there

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?