National Parks (Con’t.)

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.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail


 

 

The Animals

From my vantage point of twenty feet off the ground, it was clear that the animals had gained a strategic advantage.

In my left hand I gripped the frame of a cheap fiberglass ladder. In the other I clutched an orbital sander, and my feet were placed carefully so that they would optimize my balance and obscure the words “Not a Step” that were cast into the highest aluminum rung. I was trying very hard to remain composed as a dozen wasps crawled from behind the rotted fascia board and hovered around my head.

This dance with the insects was only the most recent skirmish in an effort to reclaim our home from the resident wildlife.

See, I’m one of those few Millennials to whom home ownership seemed like a good idea. Before I’d spent much time on the market, though, it became clear that houses within my means tended not to be houses at all. Most of the addresses in my price range were either decrepit trailers or condos that felt more like the dorms than a home. The occasional meth den made the list, and eventually fine print like “some smoke damage from grease fire” and “structurally questionable” stopped making our blood pressure rise.

Then we found a gem. It’s a little bungalow in an up-and-coming neighborhood, with a pleasant wooden facade and a yard for the dogs. “It has good bones,” my agent assured me, and collectively we chose to see the rotted soffets, unlivable decor, and eyewatering odor of cat urine that greeted us at the door as low hanging fruit to build sweat equity. The price was right and I pulled the trigger.

I’m not particularly gifted with my hands, but came into the project convinced that with confidence and enough YouTube videos, anything is possible. We built a fence. We tore out the carpet and refinished the floors and stripped the floral wallpaper that reminded me somehow of Nurse Ratched and Mr. Rogers at the same time. After a month of work the house was livable, and only once we started sleeping there did we realize that the place was overrun by animals.

A few days before prepping the gables for painting I engaged in close quarters combat with a family of squirrels who’d made themselves quite at home. It was sunny out, and warm, and I ran a garden hose into their den while I had my coffee. I was delighted to see them run across the fence to seek refuge in the neighbor’s peeling fascia.

DarbySleep-1
Nominally domesticated.

The squirrels seemed to have maintained a tenuous peace with the nominally domesticated but actually feral cats that take their station beneath our parked cars as the sun sets and the shadows grow long. These feline bandits don’t seem to have desires beyond raiding our trash, and we’ve outsourced their harrying to the nominally domesticated but actually feral dog that sleeps on the couch while we’re at work.

Another sect of stinging (biting?) insects erected the flag of their people amid the old paint cans and used motor oil in the shed, and we made quick work of them with $40 worth of Raid. I trust that my descendants will sing songs of our heroics – we charged into the frey brandishing a can of aerosolized poison in each hand and with only a paper mask to keep ourselves safe.

Our home grown war against the wildlife was moving along well. We had technological superiority and advanced brains. Tool Using Man outflanked the insects and rodents at every step.

But then the momentum shifted. It came time to paint the upper reaches of the house, and from the top of the rickety ladder I feared this bestial insurgency was making up ground.

The sight of a man atop an extension ladder is banal. Tradesmen and window washers and homeowners use these crude tools every day. What’s less clear to a passerby is that the asphalt in our alley is uneven; the ladder was leveled with bits of scrap wood and tiles. It was extended to its longest span and I was standing on its top step, going to great lengths not to touch the large diameter power lines that entered the house. Hanging from my belt was an orbital sander, a hammer, a caulk gun, and my trusty can of Raid. The view from there felt much more precarious.

The sander shook these insects loose from their hive, and the Raid was quickly empty. It became clear that we humans could not enforce a no fly zone. Political influence over upper reaches of the house are much more capricious than down low. The chimney is in need of repair soon and the shingles need a cleaning. The gutters either leak or don’t exist, and the future of this conflict will take us off the ground.

The days are growing longer now. Warm weather and the smell of grilling meat herald the dawn of home improvement season. Winter gave a brief reprieve from combat, like Christmas on the western front, but soon we’ll take up arms again.

Your Guide to the National Parks Centennial Celebration

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.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail


 

 

Spring Traditions

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.”

tacos
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.

Roubaix2016-8
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).

Roubaix2016-13

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.

Roubaix2016-16

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.

Roubaix2016-20

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.

Roubaix2016-33

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.

Roubaix2016-12

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

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail


 

Jackrabbit Country

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.

hillside-1

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.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail