Mountains

National Parks (Con’t.)

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

I’d like to take a moment to thank each and every one of you for sharing the post from a few weeks ago. My heart has been warmed over the last month, here in western Montana, as visitors from across the globe have really embraced the Spirit of the Parks.

I’d like to tip my hat to a few honorable mentions.

The Bison Petter – I suggested last time that as long as you’re in a Park, you should probably pet the wildlife. Well, this go getter right here embraced the challenge. You’ll also notice that she has participated in an age old National Parks tradition that I completely forgot to mention before: shopping. Notice the plastic bag, and join me in quietly speculating at the Yellowstone National Park(TM) bounty that she has received. Could it be YNP shot glasses? Ironic post cards? Coasters? COULD SHE HAVE COASTERS!?!? We may never know. The only demerits worth mentioning in this video are the idiotic filmers who have the gall to wonder where the rangers are. We can govern ourselves, thank you very much.

The Good Samaritans – Yellowstone National Park really does bring out the best in people. Just last week these attentive citizens noticed that a bison calf appeared to be cold. It’s well documented that bison fare poorly in cold weather, and these good people were concerned. Like any good Christian they immediately dismounted from their rented SUV (another great reason to upsize the family car!), tackled the calf, loaded it into the Sequoia, and drove the creature to the nearest ranger station. I’m just glad these people stepped in, or that baby buffalo surely would have died*.

Someone please help this suffering animal. Photo from Today.com, of all places.

The Greatest Generation – Tom Brokaw would have us believe that those Americans who grew up during the Great Depression, told Hitler to kick rocks, and pioneered the cul-du-sac “neighborhood” made up the Greatest Generation. Well, Tom Brokaw clearly had never met these fine specimens. They managed to bring together everything that’s making this country great again. I mean, anyone can skinny dip, or drink ’til they puke, or shoot up signs, or rally a dune buggy through sensitive ecosystems, or kill an endangered species. Alone, each of those things is elementary. But to do them all at the same time? In a National Park? Well, someone get these guys a medal. Ladies and gentlemen, I believe that Donald Trump has found his running mate.

#TShirtGuy4Prez Photo courtesy of the Park Service

So keep it up, America. The Park Service only turns 100 once. Get out there and enjoy it!

 

*Oh wait actually they killed it.

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Your Guide to the National Parks Centennial Celebration

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 2 Comments

You may have heard by now that this year, 2016, is the National Parks centennial celebration. The Parks are known as America’s best idea, and this hundredth year is the perfect excuse to tick a couple off your bucket list. You can count on meeting plenty of other people to celebrate with, so hop in the Suburban, crack a beer, and check out these tips to make the most out of your summer vacation.

Timing is Everything – You would hate to turn up in Rocky Mountain National Park and find it choked with smoke, or Glacier National Park only to find that Going to the Sun Road is still covered in snow. The best days to visit the Parks are Memorial Day and Labor Day, and of course the most patriotic time to visit is Fourth of July. I recommend that you pick one of these occasions to make it out. Ten million people can’t be wrong!

Drive Your Car – Most of these Parks are outside, and so you should plan on bringing your own roof, walls, and windows if you want to remain indoors. Riding a bicycle is both suicidal and un-American (there are maniacs out there!). The best, most comfortable, and safest way to visit your Parks is from the air conditioned cabin of an automobile. If you don’t currently have the high clearance, four-wheel drive, and integrated DVD player that’s required to safely traverse our American wildlands, be sure to check out this buyer’s guide.

Bring a Gun – Those of you who have been paying close attention know that firearm regulation in the National Parks was recently relegated to the jurisdiction in which each Park resides. That means that in most western states you can probably carry a loaded firearm without a permit*. I encourage you to take advantage of that God-given right. Always remember that bear spray is for pussies and statisticians. Real men know that safety is spelled, “three-five-seven.”

Lisa managed to get close to this noble beast, but not quite close enough to throw a leg over. It seemed poorly trained. Photo Credit: Tom Robertson.

Pet the Wildlife – As long as you’re sufficiently armed (safety first!), you should capitalize on the great opportunities that the National Park system provides to pet the wildlife. Herds of bison and packs of wolves in these Parks tend to be comfortable with a human presence, and will not run away when approached. This is your best chance to get a photo of your child sitting on a buffalo or having his face licked by a grizzly bear for the Christmas card. If the animals were dangerous, the Parks would have put up fences. It’s common sense.

Have a Bonfire – Nothing builds camaraderie and esprit-de-la-nature after a full day of driving around and petting mule deer like sharing a bonfire. It should be a real face melter, too. If your fire can fit into one of those flimsy little rings, throw another log on there. I usually bring a few pinewood pallets in the back of the Expedition to get the thing roaring, and then throw on any small and medium trees that are nearby. Evenings can get chilly for much of the year, so I really recommend late-July through early-September to get the most out of the day. Pro tip: Don’t forget fireworks for the 4th!

Bury Your Garbage – We really appreciate that you’re out enjoying your public land, but let’s be honest: no one wants to see your beer cans and used condoms floating in the Boiling River. Please bury your garbage. Remember that bears eat really weird stuff, and they might even want your bacon grease and old banana peels. To keep the wildlife from digging up your refuse, it’s best to bury it under at least six inches of topsoil.

Ignore the Rangers – You may find that the Granola Police will advise you against some of the pointers in this guide. Just remember that those jack boot thugs are the epitome of government waste and bureaucratic inefficiency. Please try to be polite, though, because some of them have guns too. This will be easier to do if you remember that they’re only around until President Cruz defunds the Park Service and returns our public land to the proper hands.

*White dudes only.

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Spring Traditions

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

It has taken me about 20 years to conclude that ham is bullshit. Regardless of whether you’re peeling slippery pink sheets of the stuff from an Oscar Meyer package for lunch, or piling steaming slabs of it on your plate at some fancy brunch buffet, it’s always kind of the same.

Ham is an exercise in paradox, somehow simultaneously too dry and too rubbery. Too fatty and too sweet. Unsettling and somehow ubiquitous on tables across the Christian world two or three times a year. Ham is without question the worst kind of pork.

Yet each spring, millions of families clamber to the fluorescent humming of the grocer’s meat isle to return home with a dense, sickly, uninspiring lump of flesh, vacuum packed in some kind of industrialized brine. Delicious. Happy Easter.

“Traditions,” I finally concluded a few years ago after finally eschewing ham, and while working on our family’s first Easter dinner of tacos al pastor, “are for those who lack imagination.”

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We can agree that this is the better pig, right? Photo: Kenji Lopez-Alt of Serious Eats. Recipe here. It’s worth the effort.

I’ve held on to that declaration for a number of years: Thanksgiving lamb. Mediterranean Christmas. Breakfast for lunch.

But then a few days ago something funny happened. I woke up to the sound of rain on the windows and the sky was still grey much after dawn. It was a wet, cold, drab morning and I had this odd impulse to race my bike.

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In April things are turned upside down for the Classics. These one day bike races fall in the spring, and are somewhat removed from the popular American sporting landscape, especially compared to the Tour de France and Giro di Italia (probably because Lance was always too afraid to race them).

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The Classics are different from the grand tours. They only last a day. They cover extraordinary distances. The weather is usually awful. For better or worse, they’re steeped in tradition. The Tour de France gets coverage now on NBC and the New York Times, but it’s names like Ghent-Wevelgem, Liege-Bastogne-Liege, and Paris-Roubaix that make the hearts of cycling fans race.

The grand tours are competitions of organization and efficiency; the team that can ride for a month without making a mistake wins. But the spring classics are one day events that frequently feature long stretches of cobblestones or dirt roads and terrible weather. Course conditions routinely affect the race outcome, and these early season races carry an excitement not unlike the NCAA basketball tournament, where the prospect of a Cindarella story is always hanging in the air.

The Paris-Roubaix is the crown jewel of these races, and as a kind of celebration, each April hundreds of classics style events pop up across the world.

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In western Montana we have the Rocky Mountain Roubaix. The race bounces along farm and forest roads west of Missoula for a couple of hours before racers return to a rainslick school parking lot to change at their cars and shiver until results are posted. There is no glory. There is no prize money. Their bikes are probably broken.

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But at the Rocky Mountain Roubaix there’s something a bit more than a finishing order scrawled on a soggy notepad. The Monuments of European cycling are more than 100 years old. They’ve survived world wars and transcend national boundaries. They are older than we are and will exist long after we’re gone.

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Even, or rather, especially when the weather is lousy and there’s no real reason to be out there, toeing the line at a spring classic is being a part of something much bigger. It’s an embrace of cycling history and a toast to the heroes of the sport.

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And so while ham still has no business on the dining table, some traditions might be worth keeping around.

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Jackrabbit Country

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 2 Comments

They say the desert resonates with dreamers. Post cards from here are plastered with arches and great red walls of stone, but the American southwest has no monopoly on dramatic scenery. There’s something more in the scrubby brush and mesquite smoke and frigid starry nights. Thompson called it jackrabbit country.

Maybe it’s a sense of scale.

On the first day of school in the 4th grade, Miss Fogg announced to the room that the class would embark on a yearlong project to visualize One Million. It’s a big number, and Miss Fogg thought that it would be compelling for the children to behold one million of something tangible.

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Each day, as often as we could remember, we were to collect and bring to class the pop-tabs from aluminum cans from our lunch, or from around the house, or from a neighbor’s trash. A string was suspended around the perimeter of the room, and every morning we would count the tabs and add them to the string. A counter on the chalkboard kept us up on our progress.

I don’t remember how many pop tabs we collected, but I do remember that it fell far short of a million. The project was designed to help children conceptualize a large number, and, ironically, failed on account of the responsible adult’s inability to conceptualize the magnitude of that number.

In spite of the project sort of falling apart, the idea was a good one. To this day, when I’m confronted with more than, like, a couple hundred of anything, I begin to lose track. Numbers in the millions, and billions, and trillions are thrown around in headlines and policy discussions in a way that borders on disingenuity. Try changing “billion” to “thousand-million” next time you read the news.

Hearing that the national debt is 17 trillion dollars, or that the sun is 93 million miles away, or that the jagged peaks of Glacier Park were carved out by glaciers some time in the last two million years is not helpful. But in the desert the geologic record is clear and profound. In the Grand Canyon, a reasonably fit person can walk through nearly two billion (two thousand million) years of earth history before lunch.

The desert provides a missing bit of context. It’s a place to feel small. And not just physically small, but cosmically infinitesimal. Simply being amid the sandstone and paying attention weaves two truths: that nothing we do, as individuals or as a society, makes any difference in the light of an honest discussion of scale, and that living well for the inconceivably brief time that we occupy this place is the most important thing we can do. (I’ll allow you to define “living well” for yourself.)

The dreamer is drawn to an inhospitable place. To sandstone cliffs and scabland where the climate can kill him in a day. To prickly pear and mesquite and that low, scrubby juniper that leaves his ankles bloody. He’s drawn to jackrabbit country in a search for something intangible, for context.

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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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