Author: TheGentlemanAtLarge

Timing is Everything

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 1 Comment

I don’t remember much about the request except that it was probably objectively reasonable. I remember feeling slighted at his response that if I needed an answer right that moment, then it was a no.

He was under the thumb of some looming work deadline, probably, or another of the banal inconveniences of adult life that are unfathomable to an eight-year-old. If I’d asked earlier in the day or at dinner it would likely have yielded a quick permission.

“Timing,” my father still reminds me, “is everything.”

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That pithy phrase is one of those paternal legacies from growing up that is simple and neatly packaged enough it might have come from a shitty action movie: A child is told “timing is everything” by his father, and as a man, now a secret agent, remembers that bit of advice and uses it to defuse a bomb or something. [Father’s voiceover, flashback montage, etc].

But it extends well beyond the demands of some impatient child.

A moment’s delay in telling a joke is the difference between laughter and one of those awkward pauses where everyone looks at their shoes. An hour in the sun can turn a couloir from an icy death-gully to an avalanche hazard, and for a few minutes in the middle that otherwise dangerous place might hold blissful corn skiing.

There’s a Tom Waits album that rattles around in your head, and at home it’s background music while you finish the dishes. But as the sun sets around you behind the wheel and the miles tic by it means a little more. His growl sounds off through the tinny speakers in the dash, but there’s no denying Diamonds on my Windshield is the American anthem for a long drive. The radio’s gone off the air, it gives you time to think … and blazing through this midnight jungle remember someone that you met, and one more block, the engine talks, whispers ‘home at last,” it whispers, ‘home at last.’

It’s not so different from Desert Solitaire, that book they told you to read in college by that guy who measured driving distances in six-packs of beer (litter isn’t ugly, the highway is ugly). I guess it’s a better influence than The Monkey Wrench Gang. Maybe you didn’t read it, or maybe you’ve forgotten. But somehow when you crack that book while coffee steams around your bare feet and a new day paints the Kaibab red it becomes our greatest and most heartbreaking ode to the natural world.

And sometimes people come into your life only to fade away again by no fault but that you crossed each other’s paths a bit too early or a bit too late.

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The Sustainable Trails Coalition: Our Narcissistic Relationship with Wilderness

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 3 Comments

“Show me a picture of myself,” she said. He acquiesced. She looked at the photo on his cellphone and for only a moment was mesmerized. “Show me another one.”

The dinner party nursed stemless glasses of Turkish red wine and laughed. Of course her narcissism can be excused: she’s two years old. We brandished our glasses and wondered together when in life a person grows beyond self interest, and settled on some time between two and our own respective ages.

A while later the friends left. Sometimes a room can be overcrowded with  loved ones so that after they go away laughter radiates from the walls and furniture the way a pan is still hot after it’s been removed from the stove. (Maybe I was just drunk?)

But there was a glow to the kitchen while I washed a few dishes before putting off most of them for the morning. I felt warm, and loved, and my mind wandered a bit to a short piece I’d read earlier in the day about the Sustainable Trails Coalition.

If you haven’t heard of the Sustainable Trails Coalition (STC), it’s a proposed piece of legislation that would allow regional land managers the discretion to open designated Wilderness areas to mountain bikes, where they’re currently banned. It confronts a long simmering issue head on, and is controversial to say the least. The issue has pitted sandals-with-socks traditionalists against the loud talking, neon wearing new schoolers that are positioned to inherit a legacy of land stewardship in the west.

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Photo: Anders Broste (I found it on the Facebook) – Thanks Anders!

While the article itself is perhaps a fair treatment of one point of view, what’s interesting is the larger sample size of opinions that come to light in the comments section:

“Personally, I hope I never see a bicycle on the trail I am hiking.”

“I thought a fair portion of the [Wilderness Act] was to get people outdoors into the land, be active and not fat. Many people like biking and think hiking is boring.”

“I like seeing wildlife when I hike, but bikers make that hard to do since they scare them away.”

“My family enjoys all these types of quiet recreation, including biking. We enjoy it without conflict.”

There is a prevailing use of the first person.

Whether we agree or disagree with the premise that bicycles should be allowed in designated Wilderness areas, the real issue at hand is the personal and emotional response to such a far reaching piece of legislation.

Some outspoken citizens appear to believe that Wilderness management policy should somehow be based on how they like to spend their Saturdays, which is about as narcissistic as truly believing that God (architect of the universe) was watching your football game and helped you throw a touchdown.

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Regardless of how we recreate, I like to think that most of the people in the room for these conversations feel strongly about the value of open space and public land.

Which brings me to another comment that I read:

“This is when I sympathize with the states’-rights-take-over-federal-lands movement.”

Both advocates for the Sustainable Trails Coalition and more resistant conservation groups are right in some of their talking points. But the conversation needs to be about strengthening Wilderness, not about individual user experience.

In this election cycle it’s easy to get distracted from the fact that public lands are under attack. Headline grabbing standoffs like in Burns Oregon or on the Bundy Ranch in Nevada are sensational, but really serve to highlight an underlying resentment of protections that we’ve come to take for granted.

The public land debate is not so different from the anti-vaccine movement. Those people out there who refuse to vaccinate their kids don’t know anyone who is paralyzed from Polio. They haven’t lost a loved one to Smallpox. The horror of the diseases that we’ve eradicated are alien to most of the people alive today.

We take vaccine protections for granted the same way that a discussion of land management policy can so quickly be reduced to how it suits our own hobbies. It’s apparently so secure in our minds that we can’t imagine it ever being taken away. The only thing to discuss, it seems, is how we should go enjoy what will always be there.

This approach to policy making is no less narcissistic than a toddler who is only interested in pictures of herself, and only slightly less so than that Tebow guy.

Both sides of the bikes-in-Wilderness issue have valid points for how their proposal serves the greater good. It’s our responsibility as citizens, and yes, as recreators, to keep the conversation on the resource and away from our next vacation.

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Lifestyle Inertia

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

Precisely one week ago I was sitting in a canvas yurt filled with strangers. By the time the sun went down the woodstove was hot, the beers were very cold, and we were starting to make friends with people we’d never met before.

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Each of us knew a person or two before we met for dinner in Ketchum, but no one knew everyone. Avalanche conditions in this little corner of Idaho were spooky, and feeling out risk tolerance as a newly formed group forged a kind of bond early on. In the first twenty four hours we became friends over card games, stories, and private jokes.

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We also shot a lot of photographs; at least half the group identified as a photographer in some way or another. I’ve spent the last few afternoons sorting through pictures of a ski trip that fit even the most rigorous definition of fantastic. The weather was perfect, the skiing was tremendous, and living in a yurt is about the best way you can spend a week. But while I was sorting through photos my mind wandered to what might be next. I’ve been back in the groove of life in Missoula for fewer than 72 hours, but can’t help but scheme on the next thing.

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I may have a predisposition to restlessness. I’ve at least got a bad habit of quitting good jobs to leave the country. But I plan hundreds more trips than I take. Since we shussed out of the Pioneer mountains a couple of days ago I’ve laid plans for a ski trip in the Sawtooths and another in Kootenais. I’ve penciled out ski tours across Switzerland and Poland. I’ve researched and begun writing proposals for a month in Japan, and, because of course it stands to reason that a month in Japan will segue smoothly into a bicycle tour of Thailand and Laos, that itinerary ballooned to approach three months.

Twenty minutes after sliding out of my ski boots at the end of this last trip I was racking my brain on the best way to reorganize my assets into a sailboat worthy enough for a year long cruise in the Pacific. Never mind that I get seasick.

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Looking back through pictures and journal entries from trips of the last year or two scratches a certain itch. Memories of  loneliness, mosquitoes, and diarrhea fade and are replaced by the sunsets and powder turns that we photograph to remember. There’s a nostalgia for time we’ve spent on the road and friends we’ll never see again. But in planning the next thing there’s excitement and hope.

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I don’t pretend that even a fraction of the adventures I scheme on or plan will happen. That’s part of the fun. If you reject the real constraints of budgets (money, time, and responsibility in equal parts) and imagine a trip unfettered by an anemic checking account or a 2,080 hour work-year or a dog you adopted from the pound in the midst of an existential crisis (bless her heart), you get comfortable with thinking beyond the back yard. If you allow your mind to wander enough you might find, eventually, that an idea or two resonates and begins to ache.

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If that idea aches for long enough, you might allow yourself to think about the next step. You might find that you can eek out a living while working from the road. That the 40 hour work week is something that’s best left behind. And even that you really can just drive across the border while your mangy pound dog glares at you from the back seat. You might even swallow the hard pill that inertia is not confined to objects with mass, and that the only way to make tomorrow different from yesterday is through deliberate effort.

And who knows, maybe I’ll see you in the south Pacific.

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Why So Angry?

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 1 Comment

It’s one of those days. You know the ones. One of those days where you lurch out of bed to find that the hot water’s gone out, so you grit your teeth through a cold shower and take your coffee dry. Traffic is snarled and it’s that time of year where your phone rings off the hook with robots telling you to vote for the conservative alderman on your city council ballot.

It’s one of those days where you excuse yourself to the restroom at work, lock the door, and cherish one of those little airline bottles of Jim Beam that you save for emergencies. You haven’t even gone to the Verizon store yet. You look at yourself in the mirror and ask, “Why so angry?” between nips on that tiny little bottle.

Fortunately for you, my friend, smart, observant people have been wondering about that for years. Of course we’ve all heard of Murphy’s Law, but the pudding is murkier than that. Here’s a few rules of thumb for why you’re always angry.

  • Peter Principle – Employees tend to be promoted to the limit of their incompetence. It stands to reason that when a person performs well at work, they are promoted. When a person performs poorly at work, they are not promoted. This is a kind of conveyor belt to mediocrity. It funnels workers past the jobs at which they excel and deposits them at a job in which they don’t excel. And it happens everywhere, all the time. Ever wonder why you’ve never had a pleasant experience at the Verizon store?
  • Claasen’s Law – Usefulness = log(Technology). In 1969 NASA either put a man on the moon or staged the most influential hoax since those jolly pranksters pulled Jesus of a cave. Either way, they did it with the processing power available on a $3 pocket calculator. Now we all walk around with powerful computers in our pockets and mostly what we’ve got to show for it is an expansive character set of emojis.
  • Parkinson’s Law – The time required to complete a task will tend to fill the time allocated for that task. I got a call from a supervisor at work once. He said, “how’s that [project] coming?” I swallowed hard and replied, “IS IT DUE!?” This triggered a semi-pedantic conversation/lecture about the nuances of Parkinson’s Law which, in retrospect, is not one that I recommend having with your boss.
  • Hofstadter’s Law – It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. In conjunction with Parkinson’s Law, Hofstadter’s Law seems to cause a lot of stress.
  • This being an election year, there are a number of eponymous laws that seem particularly relevant. Of course if you notice a trend, it’s probably a product of confirmation bias.
    • Benford’s Law – Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.
    • Cunningham’s Law – There are those who give and those who take. You can tell [them apart] by what they write.
    • Dunning-Kruger Effect – “a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority,” as well as it’s corollary that, “highly skilled individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.”
    • Reilly’s Law of Retail Gravitation – People generally patronize the largest mall in the area.
    • Shirky Principle – Institutions will try to preserve the problems to which they are the solution.
  • Wiio’s Law – Communication usually fails, except by accident.
  • Hanlon’s Razor – Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity. The silver lining in all of this is to remember that the world is probably not out to get you, specifically.

Case Study on Balance

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

Charles Novotny is in a bit of a pickle. He is sitting at a cubicle desk, a few feet back from his computer. His tie is loosened and Rorschach-esque dabs of perspiration are growing under his arms and at the back of his collar. A photograph of two young children rests on a shelf above his monitor and is obscured by smoke from the two-stroke engines flying around his head.

He is wearing a freshly pressed pair of Dockers khakis (with a little bit of spandex in them) and a few drops of bar oil have fallen and left stains. He does not notice. He is focused intently on juggling four running chainsaws and three live kittens. They appear to be tabbys.

A teenage boy of about sixteen pushes a mail cart through the office. One of the wheels squeaks, but Charles does not notice. He is wearing earmuffs; the motors are very loud. The boy behind the mail cart stops at Charles’ desk and pauses for a moment. He furls his brow before reaching into the cart to produce another chainsaw. He flicks the choke and pulls it to start. He and Charles make eye contact, and the boy tosses the saw with one and a half backward flips so that it blends seamlessly into the seated man’s rotation. Charles Novotny is now juggling five running chainsaws and three small tabbys.

The boy moves on with the mail cart. The wheel still squeaks.

The ease with which Charles Novotny keeps the saws and kittens in flight is hypnotizing. His eyes are cast upward and  do not blink. He does not move his head. Muscle memory and his periphery track the saws and cats that fly through the air.

And these are not small, top handled arborist’s saws. We’re talking, like, full on Stihl 661s. Each time he catches one and tosses it aloft again, the 20″ bar swings toward him, and he extends his arm fully to ensure that the blade does not land on his shoulder and sever his arm. Vibrations from the engines have numbed his hands, and his arms ache. It is not yet eleven in the morning.

He catches and throws one or two running chainsaws for every kitten. To use the same strength and force he needs to keep the saws in the air when it comes time to catch a small cat would certainly crush the animal. Yet each tabby looks calm. One is sleeping.

There is no display of stress aside from the sweat.

His underarms are wetted through and his shirt is stuck to his back. Each vertibra is visible through the cheap microfiber cloth. A droplet has formed on his nose and is hanging from between his nostrils. He twitches his face and the droplet falls to the tile floor below his chair. His eyes do not move.

The phone rings. He does not answer it because doing so would mean dropping a saw or a tabby. There is a pause before the phone in the next cubicle rings. The woman there answers it. She steps into Charles Novotny’s small office with another saw. She chokes it, rips the cord, and it putters to life. She opens the choke and gives it some throttle and it roars. She throws it to him and he catches it. A pool of sweat is forming around his chair.

It is three in the afternoon. One of the saws sputters and when it comes through its next rotation the engine has run out of gas. He throws it again and the next time it comes through he sets it next to his chair without breaking the stride. By four pm two more saws run through their fuel and are sitting askew in a pile. He is now juggling two running saws and three kittens.

The lights in the office begin to go out. The first one darkens at 4:57. Precisely at 5 most of the lights darken. Charles Novotny is still juggling three cats and a saw.

It is nearly 7pm when the last saw goes quiet. He lays it in the pile of the others and gently catches the kittens. He tucks one into each pocket of his coat, shuts off the light, and locks the door as he leaves.

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