On Semester's Border

Mostly I love school. But this last slurp at the trough of learning has been a long swallow. It coincided with an ugly rotator cuff tear on my left shoulder which eventually required surgery. Yep, it's as painful as you've heard. And very instructive on how much humans depend on being symmetrical.

I spent the winter in the mistaken belief that I had a small tear that could be overcome by exercise. Exercise,
San Rafael Swell to Wasatch Plateau

though, had the effect of making things worse. Eventually I got the message and opted for surgery. The doc said hey, that was way worse than we thought! Not at all like it looked on the MRI. Just more confirmation that medicine and car mechanics are the same line of work separated only by the color of grease on your fingers.

My classwork is online from the University of Missouri. In some explosion of short-sightedness I decided a Masters degree in Media Management would be just right for me. That was a few years ago when I thought I would always own newspapers and just drift into fewer hours of work for retirement. Hell, I thought, if James Russell Wiggins could do it so can I. But - like I didn't know - there is no forward track less known than your own.

My business partner, who was always healthier and carried a tenth of the body fat I do, gets Lou Gehrig's Disease. And declines. And dies. We barely get our papers sold before his ability to communicate pretty much stops. Unlike many business partners this one was a gem, probably because we seemed to compliment each other's missing pieces. You know, what I lacked he had and vice versa. We weren't alike at all, really. The only thing we shared was an abiding respect for the other guy's strengths and some discretion about weaknesses.

So anyway, I was talking about school. My experience has been to learn about stuff I've been doing all my life with a whole bunch of people who have done it better than I did and who are mostly a hell of a lot younger. It is damn depressing when you think about it. I feel like Max Evans, who wrote The Rounders and a handfull of some of the best books about the real West you can find. I've had some beers with Max and here is what he'll tell you: It's all a con game. The whole thing. Them that learn the con and do it well have a measure of luck more than those who don't. But the con ain't being run by the folks around you, or by people at all. Nope. And even if you figger out what or who IS running the con it won't matter a spit or a lick.

I've got one more paper to trim up to end this semester and two days to do it. After that, by god, I'm not playing for a while.

Four Corners Is Not

This just in. The only place in the United States that allows you to have parts of your body in four states (Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico) at one time - appropriately called four corners - has been tricking you.If you thought you did this trick you didn't.

That is, if you stood on the X at the elevated tourist marking of that boundary. Turns out it is 2.5 miles or so from the actual place. A 2.5 mile error these days is huge. My GPS unit says it has a rate of error of 20 feet. When I post my border way points, I have noticed a fairly consistent error of about that much when I'm trying to track right on a state border.

I have wondered though if that wasn't more due to the large, triangular pointer on the GPS screen itself. Put the way point on the interior cross hairs of the pointer and the actual is slightly off. Put it on the exact tip of the pointer and it is more often than not dead on.

But 2.5 miles off? For a landmark border like this? This deserves looking into. Even older survey techniques couldn't stand that kind of error factor. Somebody is laughing up their sleeve.

Lost On The Evolutionary Border

I really wanted to leave a tribute to Charles Darwin on his birthday in February. I could just never fight my way all the way through the damn thing. It was like the nerve block they now use in some surgery that keeps every feeling dead on the downstream side of the block. I couldn't finish it and I couldn't write anything else.

The idea I had was that dying daily newspapers were a demonstration of Charlie's principle of survival of the fittest. If you don't adapt to your environment, you die. Daily newspapers are dying, ergo, they did not adapt. Between Charlie's birthday and this date, our own loved and eclectic Seattle Post-Intelligencer died. It is more than ironic that its final issue sold out and went into reprint. Not enough people wanted it until it was dead.

Smarter people than me have talked (and still are, and will into the unforeseeable future) about why these formerly strong enterprises are a disappearing medium. I don't want to talk about business models today, or consolidation, corporatism, bowling alone, N2, media 3.0, journalistic arrogance or communication theory period.

I'm posting this and moving on.

Air Borders - Spoon Popping Your Eyes

Winter away from borderwalking is a strain. It must be my age but sleep is not a constant companion or even a regular visitor much anymore. When I'm walled and roofed in I twitch and crackle on the bed. It's not quite as bad if I'm in a tent or trailer. Ambien helps but it stops all dreaming or promotes the horrors. That little white pill is my bedtime snack most nights. Then I'll read until I fall unconscious.

Where do you suppose that phrase came from? I'm not aware that humankind has historically been in the habit of standing to sleep and would therefore fall unconscious. Or drop off to sleep. Drop off the tree? We American English speakers have strange constructions that describe implausible literal actions and we say them with serious intent and expect them to be understood and not ridiculed.

That aspect of our conversation was one reason I started writing dialogue poems 30 years ago. They may be poems or just doggerel, I'm not sure. I am fairly certain it is impossible to say which from inside them. This one, for instance:

Those Who Have Ears
"I see what you mean."
"You see what I mean?"
"Sure. I see what you mean."
"How can you do that?"
"Do what?"
"See what I mean."
"It's just a figure of speech."
"What does that mean?"
"A figure of speech."
"Come on!"
"No, have you ever thought about it?"
"Thought about what?"
"That we use precisely that word: figure of speech."
"So what?"
"So, you have to see a figure."
"You mean a figure is something you have to see."
"Yes."
"So you have to see a figure of speech."
"Yes!"
"I see what you mean."

I have a friend, Alex, who has taken up rock climbing. Rock climbing deserves an essay all to itself and much more but it is not what you would call virgin ground. Rock, I guess, in this case. Many folks have already written about it. And I'll eventually get around to writing some too. But today, as a climber myself, although some retired, I wanted to tell you to your eyes that the more you do it, the more you see what it means. The picture here is me in a very difficult (at least for me) 5.10b jam crack on the granite of Gate Buttress in Little Cottonwood Canyon down from Alta and Snowbird ski areas. Of course it was summer and I could easily have just said the canyons east of Salt Lake City. But Salt Lake City is a nervous name for me. Someday I'll go into that, too.

The climb pictured here with with that 'natural athlete' photo of me apparently imitating someone with a wooden leg, is a narrow vertical jamb crack just under a single 150 foot pitch. You progress upward by jamming your toes and fingers into the crack and twisting to achieve the frictional torque necessary to hold your toes and fingers in place. It is awkward and painful to a degree. The width of the crack varies making the necessary depth and twist also vary. Progress upward can make you look like a praying mantis.

A trick of the canyon wind also mutes your rope-mates' voice. Rock climbers on long, exposed vertical pitches like this talk back and forth a lot. The climber above needs to keep just the right amount of tension on the rope. Too much affects your balance. Too little and the rope can get in the way at a critical time. People who haven't done it think rock climbers use the rope to climb with. They don't. They use it to fall with - 'coming off,' it's called. A climber fell to his death here the day after this picture was taken, so you can see having a rope to fall with is not always a successful strategy. The technical explanation of all this is complicated.

I spent a very long time in a position about three feet above the one shown in the photo. Briefly, I could not remove the piece of protection, called a hex nut, and the slings and carabiners attached to it from the back of the crack. I could not pass it and go on without untying from the rope and retying in, nor could I descend. My right ankle was turned at 90 degrees with all of my weight on it - like pogo-ing on a sprained ankle. The cliff face was slightly overhung and kept pushing me out of the crack.

When I finally joined my partner, Gordon Douglas, he said one thing. "You look like you been popping out your eyes with a cold spoon."

So I replied, "I see what you mean."

Cure for the Right Brain - the Z-Word

So, if you're a regular reader here (an admittedly valiant few), you have intuited by now that I am the victim of a two-pronged conundrum. The right-side prong is that I cannot yet get away again to the sanity of far border places. The left-hand prong is my vow of disciplined contribution here. One result is I see borders to 'walk' almost everywhere. The other result is that 'walk' has those single quote marks around it.

My latest 'walk' has to do with the border between the hemispheres of my brain. The model of distinct left brain and right brain attributes works in my stimulus reaction. As a wee lad people around me noticed I had two distinct gears: one very linear, the other very abstract. They also mostly said I was in neutral anyway so any progress made was invisible in the short term. Many would also argue that 60 years hasn't shortened the gap either. I say different, but then only to people with a good gap of their own.

The actual working of math problems for me is a very linear, teeth-gritted process. The understanding of math dancing however, is a gap-mouthed, slobbering enlightenment somewhere behind my eyeballs. The writing process brings the two sides much closer together. Some kinds of writing can be absentee -- you can sit in your chair and watch your fingers going on the keyboard. Not always, but sometimes. It's a guilty pleasure that feels like cheating. Where the hell is this coming from, you wonder. You may have run across something you wrote years ago and said to yourself, wow, did I write that? And sometimes you say it because you're surprised it's so good. Other times because the stink is rolling off it in waves so large you wonder that people in the same room aren't knocked over and suffocated.

The actual working of research and writing it is horribly linear and hard on tooth enamel, like math problems. Neither does it bring the analytic left closer to the abstract right of my brain processes, as do other types of writing. I was tutored in research by such greats as Mrs. Wheeler and Mr. Waterson, scourges of the upper elementary grades whose students left their classes with 3 x 5 index cards protruding from every possible bodily orifice. Summaries only. Lifting material directly onto index cards was punishable by being killed twice. Use of encyclopedia articles was controlled by a requirement that half of those used must refer both to the article's author and background authority to write such an article. A sensible and short topic paragraph. Logical progression of the argument. Citations clothed with explanations of your own making. A badly done research paper was a suicide bomb. Hard days. Hard days.

Now, having been reincarnated as a grad student, the days are much better. Oh wait. Grad students do research papers. Crap! For a while there I was saved by software. First Reference Manager, then ProCite cataloged my reading and allowed me to tie electronic strings between sources and notes. But Vista and Word 2007 killed that. My research world was once again being blown apart and my right brain permanently fenced out by my left - anal retentive, plodding, tentative side that it is. Software no worky. Krikey!

ProCite was never too good, maybe even as good, as 3 x 5 cards in note-taking and connecting notes to sources. But at least the "CWYW" feature (which I always accurately misunderstood to mean see what you write, rather than cite what you write) worked through Windows XP and Word 2003. But since Vista? Poof!

The cure - the hedline teaser - for this mental urban rubble comes courtesy of a bunch of do-gooders at George Mason University in the Center for History and New Media. It is a Mozilla Firefox FREE plug-in, Zotero. It is ohmygod stuff. That link you just passed takes you to a video explaining Zotero's capabilities. As I write this there is a friendly little link down in the right-hand corner of this screen, zotero. And it will free the right side of my brain.

Will it make my research papers better? Hmmm... I'd settle for harder to detonate.

Coastal Borders: Mysterious Science

I worked in Maine once. I found it a singular borderlands. Native speakers have a language of misplaced Rs. Stories and their tellers wait just behind every grimace, every sigh. Maine was another country to me, somewhere between Carolyn Chute and the Boston Symphony. You might run into characters from either down any road.

I once did a story about a little-known lab at McKown Point in Boothbay Harbor. I posted it over on the Walk the Lines, Tell the Tales sister blog. [SINCE I WROTE THAT I HAVE TAKEN IT OFF WALK THE LINES BECAUSE IT WASN'T A TALL TALE, IT WAS TRUE] Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Science. That was 1989. It's still there, still doing ocean science perched on the coast of a place of such beauty it makes you hurt.

There was a guy there, a scientist, who didn't make it into that '89 story. He had a grant from the Navy to study ocean calms. You look out over a big expanse of water - a lake or reservoir say - and you see ripples and waves and you see those places where it is smooth as glass. Those are calms, places where the water doesn't seem affected by the wind or currents. On Chuckanut Drive between here and Bellingham, you can park and watch these calms shift and dance like bubbles in a lava lamp.

Well, this guy, this scientist, had a grant from the U.S. Navy to study calms. He was going to find out what caused them and how to predict where they would start and where they would go. He would find out if maybe they resulted from a convergence of currents, or maybe the sea floor topography, or upwelling of warmer water, or whatever.

He had a small office in the upstairs looking out over the bay. When I met him he had been looking out his window through a pair of binoculars. When he put them down to talk with me he rubbed his temples with his fingers and then placed the heel of each hand over one eye and just held it there for almost a full minute.

"I've got to push my eyes back into their sockets," he said. "Damn magnification sucks 'em right out of my head."

Finally I got around to asking the question.

"No, fuck no," he said. It's not a dumb question. Satellites can track a nuclear sub very easily in an ocean calm. Their propellor cavitation leaves no footprint in most conditions but they travel through a calm and they pop out like flashing neon. So the Navy would like to know how to predict and avoid them. They are paying me to find out. The Bay bottom is mapped to the centimeter. I've deployed instruments for temperature and currents. I can tell when a lobster wiggles its butt. I'll find out.

So here was a guy - a plainspoken, clear, concise scientist - and looking back I can't even begin to count how many borders he was looking at through those big glasses.

He also did much of his research in the Gulf of Maine so asked him if I could tag along with him one time. He said sure. But I never got around to getting back to him before I left Maine and returned west.

In and Out of Ruts

Both the Oregon and California Trails, with cutoffs and alternates, have left a physical and chronological mark on the borderlands of Utah, Idaho, Wyoming and Nevada where- hope to God - I'll be walking again soon. Those were the interstates of the times though. Wagon tracks criss-cross the real West. In some places the country is sensitive, despite its best efforts at putting on a contrary face. Any place where more than 100 knife-wheeled wagons passed or re-passed in a season tells that tale to educated or experienced eyes.

This map from Chaco Roads, John Kantner

Any time spent walking arid western deserts qualifies as class time, although some preconditions have to be met. The first is you have to think about how you would get a wagon across the country you're looking at. The second is you have to be looking at country not already populated by dirt, gravel and tarmacked roads - not so common these days. The third is you have to know where things are or were. Rivers, ravines, and ranges need crossing if there are between point A and B. Box canyons with no water, pasture or ore don't get many visits. Traffic lines are actually fairly predictable if you ponder on it for a while.

There are some historical exceptions - at least one that I know of - that maybe work to prove the rule. That exception would be the Anasazi roads around Chaco Canyon around the 4-corner borderlands in northern Arizona and southern Colorado. For reasons only guessed at the Anasazi built straight directional roads, sometimes in pairs only yards apart, through redrock country. They carved steps on cliff faces to keep to a true direction. From the time they stopped being used in the 12th century or so, until just some decades ago, the Anasazi roads were invisible to the logic of travel.

A satellite filming vegetation in the infrared spectrum prompted the first official investigators. Amazingly straight lines appeared in the desert where such lines are unnatural. They had to be vegetation as only living matter would show in that hue of red. When human eyes reached the spot they found curb-like structures of laid stone 30 feet wide that trapped what little moisture there was in parallel troughs. More water, more plants. Stone roads in the desert, hundreds of years old. Some straight as a compass reading where no known compasses existed. Straight in defiance of topography and good sense.

The Anasazi roads are still a puzzle. The current take is that they are religious in nature, rather than functional. I don't know. Many of Chaco's mysteries are put on the altar of ancient religion. I know a lot of people around here pray about roads.