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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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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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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.