Thursday, February 24, 2011

Mike Rosen is at it again.

I broke a promise and read Mike Rosen's column today. Today's topic was an attack on all of those evil liberals out there protesting in Wisconsin. Is anyone surprised that Rosen has taken a stand against teachers? I'm mad at myself because the main reason I have stopped reading his stuff is that it is so predictable. He uses the word "liberal" as a perjorative with such frequency that it actually begins to sound like a bad thing. Then he peppers his argument with half truths and loaded language because he knows he has an audience that eats propaganda and political naysaying like mother's milk.

His article is titled "Push has come to shove" to suggest that all the largesse our country has irresponsibly showered on public employees has finally reached critical mass and the world as we know it is on a fast track to Hell. Using illegal immigrants as the source of all ills has lost some of its clout, so I guess right-wingers like Rosen and Governor Walker in Wisconsin have shifted their focus to public employees. Conventional wisdom says that government is too big; the obvious solution is to weed out those people employed by government. You know, the ones who sit back doing nothing while collecting exorbitant salaries and obscene retirement packages.

At least that is what Rosen would have us believe. He admits that "once upon a time" a person entering public service (Rosen, apparently incapable of straight reporting, derisively put the term PUBLIC SERVICE in quotation marks) expected to trade lower pay for job security and benefits. But that is not the case any more, Rosen argues, stating that "government employees are better paid than the private sector average. . ." He even goes on to say that these ever increasing compensation packages are the result of the "incestuous" relationship unions have with the "politicians they fund and elect."

It would be a great argument if it were true. But it is patently false. When you compare public sector employees with ALL private sector employees, taking into account both salary and benefits, as The Wall Street Journal recently did, you will discover that the public sector does indeed receive more compensation on average. But hold on a minute. Public sector employees as a group have more education than the average private sector employee, so it stands to reason that they would make more money. When you compare public sector workers with those private sector types who have equivalent education and experience, as The Wall Street Journal also did (but which Rosen failed to point out), the private sector wins the compensation comparison handily.

How do people like Rosen get away with these blatant errors of omission?

He expands his argument to say that since states are not allowed to run budget deficits like the EVIL federal government under Obama, they are facing a shortfall crisis--fueled by public labor unions' increasingly unfair demands--that is becoming so huge that tax increases will not close it. I guess he said that as a sop to his conservative friends who see anything resembling a tax increase as anathema, but again his statement, while having the ring of truth (conservative pundits are good at that), is not true. If state income taxes were raised in California, the most beleaguered state deficit-wise, by just one percentage point, California's deficit would disappear. Again, Rosen conveniently ignores this fact because presumably, since it comes from the Congressional Budget Office, it can't be trusted.

Isn't it interesting that republicans scoff at the CBO's findings when they don't support republican positions, but never fail to cite the CBO when it projects economic doom for anything Obama proposes? For example, toward the end of his column he mentions that Obama's forecasts for economic growth are unrealistically optimistic. For support, he cites the CBO's estimate of 2.2 percent, a slightly more pessimistic forecast than Obama's. That is why I sometimes envy conservatives. They can believe anything they want and still sleep at night.

He says some more outrageous things. He points out the "theatrical" nature of the protests and directs our attention to protest signs and placards with swastikas and comparisons of Walker to Mubarak. He thinks it ironic that it is okay for liberals (there is that "L" word again) to use hateful slogans and signs, but those same liberals jump on any incivility among Tea Partiers. I don't disagree, but I find it even more ironic that Rosen calls the hateful tea party slogans and the rifle sight graphics examples of "incivility." It seems me that they are at least as "theatrical" as the Wisconsin protestors.

He makes two more patently dishonest points. The "angry throngs in Wisconsin are self-righteously delusional, paying no heed to their state's fiscal reality." Has he been reading the papers? The unions have agreed to all the components of the financial package. Their salaries will remain frozen. They will pay more for their benefits. The only thing they are not agreeing with is the systematic attack on collective bargaining, as if collective bargaining is the reason Wisconsin's budget is in dire straits.

What is happening in Wisconsin is clearly an attempt to scapegoat public employees and break unions. If it was only about money it would have been resolved weeks ago.

Rosen ends with two statements. In his second to last paragraph he maintains that we are all going to see a decline in our standard of living in the future. "We'll still enjoy one of the best lifestyles on the planet, but we'll have to get along on a little less. And that includes those who work for the government." He fails to add that it doesn't include those of us who are clever enough to be in the top one percent. Those folks, as long as they have apologists like Mike Rosen, will just keep raking in the money.

Finally, he says that we will be in for some tough times if the "virus" in Wisconsin spreads and unions in other states "go to war with taxpayers. But they'll ultimately lose that battle. They're greatly outnumbered by those in the private sector on whose taxes they feed."

He makes public sector employees sound like ravening wolves feeding on the unwary private sector tax payers and then blatantly lies when he suggests that the majority of the country are against the unions. Not true. A recent Pew survey showed that over sixty percent of the country favor unions and decry the blatant political power play that Governor Walker and his republican cohorts are trying to push.

I wonder, does The Denver Post employ fact checkers?

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Technology: The Perfect Storm

We've just undergone a major technological perfect storm at our house. I am typing this on a new iMac. Next to me is my new iPhone. Kathie is in some school classroom typing her observations on her new MacBookAir. We have signed up and paid for a full year of lessons that we can schedule as needed. We have already taken three and I am building up a reservoir of questions for another session next week.

This is an uncomfortable feeling--this obsession with technology--because I have always had a shaky relationship with it at best. When VCRs were first becoming prevalent I thought they were a work of the devil and proclaimed that certainty at every opportunity. Then we got a new VCR to go along with our new Fisher stereo television and I changed my tune. The video tapes in our house multiplied like rabbits, until CDs came out and then the burgeoning CDs in our house pushed out the tapes. I'm still not sure where they all went. Now we have "My DVR" on our 60" Panasonic plasma and so CDs are quickly going the way of the tapes. I think we have managed to avoid the Blue Ray stage.

Since I am and will continue to be an English teacher, computers have always posed a special problem. There are spell checks to contend with and grammar checks. My great lesson plan about using the card catalogues and Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature have been made irrelevant by Google and Data Bases. The mindless hours I am now spending compiling photo slide shows have happened because of my new computer. I'm not reading as much. I'm not playing the guitar as much. Just imagine how much worse that wasted time must be for a high school kid.

I remember way back in the fledgling stages of our technological storm, I brought one of those miniature arcade game things you could buy with Frogger on it to the Fite-Garland household to mess around with before and after dinner. Jerry, who is even more of a dinosaur than I am (he is horrified if high school marching bands play anything more avant garde than "On Wisconsin"), didn't much like Frogger and the constant attention it demanded. "It's relentless. Like life," I told him.

Anyway, here I am bathing in my technology. Yet I am worried that it is doing bad things to my brain which is already slowly eroding because of the mental indolence I am enjoying in my retirement. I read Marshall McLuhan. There was even a time when I thought he was on to something. The Medium is the Message and all that still holds true for me.

I read a great article in this week's New Yorker by Adam Gopnik ("The Information") where he cautions us to be aware of "How the Internet gets inside us." It is basically a group review of a lot of books that all discuss how books are obsolete. He groups the books into three categories based on their reaction to the proliferation of technology: The Never-Betters; Better-Nevers; and "Always-Wasers."

The Never-Betters maintain that we are all privileged to be in the midst of a world that becomes more accessible by the nano-second. So what if no one reads Tolstoy anymore, they say. Tolstoy sucks anyway. We dinosaurs have to get over it. Sorry Jerry, the days of college fight songs and "Hold that Tiger" are over.

There are obvious problems with this approach. Part of the Never-Better argument is that each new wave of technology brought with it positive progress. The printing press is this group's most reliable example. But, according to Gopnik, the idea that the printing press brought about all that is good about western civilization is intellectually dishonest. Sure, the printing press might have propelled the Reformation, but it also propelled Martin Luther's anti-semitic writings. For every free thinker who used the printing press, there were plenty of petty despots and opportunists who used it to suppress rights every where.

The Never-Better position maintains that contraptions (printing presses, televisions, computers) don't change our consciousness; contraptions are part of our consciousness.

My computer and all of its connectedness is like, Gopnik explains, a spouse or a friend who you ask for help if you can't remember the first episode of The Lucy Show or the major exports of Brazil. It is like we are living in a library with everything in its collection. This might be bad if you never get out of the house or talk to someone with a differing point of view, but that is certainly not caused by the medium itself.

As Gopnik says, "Our trouble is not the over-all absense of smartness, but the intractable power of pure stupidity, and no machine, or mind, seems extended enough to cure that."

The Better-Nevers write more emotionally powerful arguments. They are, after all, wallowing in nostalgia for a world long gone. The Net seems to parcel out information in short spurts and bits and pieces of data. At first search there isn't much depth and this medium, the Better-Nevers warn, alters our brains at the neurological level. Well of course it does. How else would the brain be effected but on a neurological level. Gopnik uses a clever comparison to make his point. Lamenting the fact that the Net affects changes in how our brains work is like complaining that football doesn't just affect a kid's fitness, but the muscle tone that creates his ability to throw and catch a football. DUH.

Even though Gopnik does a nice job of pointing out the absurdity of their position, I find myself allied with the Better-Nevers. Kids don't read as much. People who go to the YMCA to work out go home frustrated on those rare days when the computer keeping track of their progress is down. Families gathered around the table for dinner are all looking down on their tiny screens, texting a message, catching up on that day's scores, or checking on a stock. Where parents used to tell the kids to pry themselves from the TV screen to join them around the fire for some family time, now they tell them to get off their computers or cell phones and join the family around the TV screen to watch Survivor or something equally horrible.

The problem is progress. There has always been some new machine that acts like our mind and there has always been some entertainment derived from that machine which threatens our mind.

Which brings us to the Always-Wasers. Their argument is self-evident and probably more than a little true.

Gopnik ends with a terrific thought:

"Thoughts are bigger than the things that deliver them. Our contraptions may shape our consciousness, but it is our consciousness that makes our credos, and we mostly live by those. Toast, as every breakfaster knows, isn't really about the quality of the bread or how it's sliced or even the toaster. For man cannot live by toast alone. It's all about the butter."

Mockingbird and the NRA

Have you ever wondered about that part in To Kill A Mockingbird where Scout and Jem and Dill sneak under the Radley's fence and Jem gets his pants caught in the barbed wire? He goes back to get them because it would be too hard to explain his lack of pants to Atticus, and Mr. Radley fires a shotgun at him. Of course, all the houses on the block empty to find the reason for the gunfire and Mr. Radley simply says that he heard a prowler. Everyone accepts this explanation and, satisfied, walk back to their houses. Even Atticus lets it pass as if to say any sane man would have acted just as Mr. Radley had and emptied his Winchester into the hydrangeas.

Nothing like that scene could happen today, or if it did it would supply talking points for both sides of the gun-control debate for at least two or three news cycles, or until Bret Favre announced his un-retirement.

Being steeped in a liberal tradition of wanting to register and regulate, I would have reacted differently than Atticus in that situation. YOU DON'T JUST GO FIRING YOUR GUN INTO YOUR BACKYARD WHEN YOU HEAR A NOISE! Maybe the neighbor kids are playing hide and seek. In any event, that kind of behavior ought to be regulated and controlled.

It is like a similar scene in Hoosiers. Gene Hackman goes out to Dennis Hopper's place to ask for coaching help and Hopper fires a hunting rifle out the back door. Gene Hackman's response was to raise his hands and laugh. I would have whipped out my iPhone and called the cops.

What is someone like Dennis Hopper doing with a gun anyway?

I have a feeling that the "idyllic" small town America depicted by the Indiana and Alabama of those two films is the very America the NRA is so desperately keeping a grasp on, an america with the values the Tea Party is so nostalgic for.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Hick's New Cuts

When I first started teaching at Green Mountain High School in the mid-seventies, I remember being struck by the relative largesse of the place. The place had a new building smell; the carpet was orange and clean and cheery; the library was well-stocked and centrally located. The language arts department had its own secretary. So did every other department. There were secretaries in the library and the main office and the counseling department. And to top it all off, I was pulling down a cool $8500 a year. This, compared to the $6300 I was making at Marycrest, a catholic girls' school, was almost too good to be true.

Things didn't stay that way. The story of my 34 years as a public school teacher is the story of yearly emergency budget talks responding to potential or real cuts. It was only a year or two after getting hired that we lost our departmental secretary. A new ditto machine was placed on top of her old desk where the pictures of her family used to sit. Pretty soon the number of library secretaries was pared by one. Eventually, the wonderful lady who acted as the single secretary for the entire factory, her position having been cut by yet another budget crunch, was moved into the main office as a secretary for one of our four assistant principals and two administrative assistants. When I first came to Green Mountain, we only had three A.P.s and one of them just sat in faculty lounge all day. All through this succession of lean times where we were annually enjoined to pitch-in and share the burden, I noticed that as faculty secretaries shrunk in number, the number of secretaries and administrative help in the main office--you know, the one that is the furthest away from kids--grew.

Other things grew during this constant cutting back. The list of teacher responsibilities grew. The time it took to do the paper work that our departmental secretary used to do grew. Our constantly evolving computerized system for taking and tracking attendance made the time it took to do the reporting grow. The amount of blame teachers got for low test scores or the apparent lack of preparation of our students grew. The worries about getting sued, monitoring email communication, being careful not offend any one, or drive anyone to suicide because of too much homework, all of that stuff grew exponentially.

And every year we would read in The Denver Post or Rocky Mountain News that Jeffco was in the worst budget crunch of its history and we were given a list of options for cutting costs that we needed to prioritize, first in private, and then in groups during a day long faculty meeting complete with coffee and donuts in the morning, pizza and soft drinks for lunch, and enough butcher paper to stretch from West Alameda Drive to the Ad Building.

Then we would have emergency union (oops I meant to say Association) meetings where we were told how this was yet another example of the powers that be trying to balance the budget on the backs of teachers. And we were told about phone banks to man and strike plans to create. We would root for our negotiation team and spread nasty rumors about the administration's negotiation team and something would get settled--always too little money, too few benefits, and too many concessions. We would, amongst lots of loud, tough talk, finally ratify the thing and get back to the business of teaching kids.

Here I am many years removed from the whole thing looking at the front page of The Post: "Schools bear brunt of Hick's new cuts." Since school spending amounts to some 40% of Colorado's budget and since states, unlike federal governments, can't run deficits, something has to go. Three hundred and thirty-two million slashed from k-12 funding. Another $36 million from higher ed. According to the article, that translates to a $497 cut per student in k-12 and $877 less for each college student. We're talking 40 kids in first grade classrooms. Hundreds of teachers will join the ranks of the unemployed. But as Hickenlooper said "balancing this budget would be a painful task." Painful for whom? Hickenlooper also said that "we have to find ways to make the entire culture more pro-business." Call me stupid, but I don't see how cutting funding on a higher educational system that already ranks in the bottom three in the country is a pro-business decision. I see it as a decision that will convince even more companies (like ProLogis for example) to move their headquarters elsewhere.

Will there eventually be a politician out there with the guts to point to what is fast becoming the only budget fixing alternative left? Will Warren Buffet continue to be the only public person out there to say we need to raise taxes, particularly on the rich, the very people the budget cutting republicans in Washington fought for when it came to rolling back the Bush tax cuts? How can these people sleep at night when they take funding away from schools, but don't tax the wealthy. Yeah, yeah, yeah I know that the wealthy currently pay most of the income tax in this country. Why should I apologize for that when the top 1% of the country account for more wealth than the rest of us put together. Adam Smith, all you neo-cons out there, said in The Wealth of Nations that the wealthiest would have to contribute more than their share for the benefit of society. Smacks of socialism doesn't it? I suppose Smith's masterwork is now part of the liberal plot to ruin the country.

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to pay more taxes any more than any one else does. I also don't like going to the dentist (no offense, Dr. Arendt) or waiting on the highway for lane painting, or having to spend ever increasing amounts of money on food, but somethings are simply necessary.

Why do budgets get balanced on the backs of those groups least able to pay? For the third year in a row Colorado government workers will get no cost of living raise. On top of that they are facing the second year in a row where more money will be taken out of their checks to pay for rising health insurance costs for retirees.

Hickenlooper's reaction: "There are people all over the state that have no job."

What does that have to do with anything? That answer doesn't work for the wealthiest 1% does it?

I wouldn't mind trading places with one of the wealthy one per centers, even if I did have the threat of a tax hike hanging over my head, keeping me from hiring, ruining all my plans for innovation, research and development. I know it would be tough, but someone has to bear it.

Friday, February 11, 2011

The Sputnik Moment

Two recent articles, one by James Surowiecki in The New Yorker and the other by Andrew Hacker in The New York Review of Books, cite Alexander Hamilton's urgings for a central government to do what is necessary to encourage the innovations of "ingenious and valuable workmen in different arts and trades" as support for their analyses of our current financial and employment picture. Hamilton, technically an illegal immigrant in his own right, pointed out the benefit our country would accrue "to open every possible avenue to emigration from abroad."

The thrust of Surowiecki's essay, "Sputnikonomics," is that, in spite of the cries coming from all sides to cut spending, we should be actively investing in research and development at a much higher rate than is our current practice. In fact, Surowiecki explains that the investments Obama's State of the Union Address called for in infrastructure, technology, and education are not just added on stimulus spending, but in fact a supply-side plan. Ronald Reagan would be proud. Increasing the pace of innovation and making workers more efficient improves our long-term growth rate by increasing supply.

Cost cutters will say we can't afford to spend money on anything. We can't afford not to. History tells us that spending on research and development (R&D) potentially creates more value than it costs. The creation of the interstate highway system under Eisenhower has returned an estimated 35% of the initial investment annually. The actual Sputnik moment spurred R&D that has changed the way the world works: GPS, microchips, the internet, satellites.

One of the reasons that we are in this financial malaise is that as our investments in R&D have shrunk (currently at only 60% of their 1960's level as adjusted for cost of living), our long term growth rate has slowed and with that so has our competitiveness.

The current climate of credit default swaps, stock holder pressure, and the unadulterated lust for profit has made private sector investment in R&D focused almost exclusively on the development side. One of the main reasons for this is that private companies don't like seeing their research creating "spillover benefits" that allow other companies to reap SOME of the profit that results from their innovation. For example, other companies are getting rich selling apps for the iPhone and iPad. That's the whole problem. So called "spillover benefits", while not necessarily helpful to Apple, are a huge benefit to the economy as a whole. Current business models don't seem to take much stock in benefiting the economy (read: society) as a whole.

Therefore we have the cancelling in mid project of a tunnel under the Hudson River. The "spillover benefits" would be huge: Less congestion, employment of thousands of construction workers, the little businesses that will crop up on both sides of the river, etc. But the recent election says that people are not in the mood to think long term. They would rather "eat their seed corn" and stick their money under an ideological mattress.

Hacker's essay, "Where Will We Find the Jobs," looks at the root of most of the electorate's outrage, the lack of job production. He makes a case for increasing our investment in education, but also stresses the changes that are currently besetting education.

He makes the rather tired point that the times they are a changing and we must change along with them. People have to rethink their educational goals. There will have to be some retraining. Colleges and universities need to rethink their approaches to vocational training.

And he tells us all sorts of disturbing facts: Even though the majority of growing careers of the future say they require college degrees, they really don't; even though everyone (read: high school counselors) say if you don't have math skills you won't be able to compete in the new technological age, that simply isn't true; the United States no longer reproduces itself and therefore relies on immigration to sustain the population; nonnative workers comprise 16% of the labor force; twenty-six per cent of U.S. physicians are foreign born; twenty-eight per cent of U.S. Ph.D.'s are also foreign born; and the list goes on.

In a nutshell, the fact is that by 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, our country will suffer from a labor shortage. Partly from lack of proper training, but also from the fact that our work force will be smaller as the Baby Boomers all go off to retirement. To fill that gap we need to graduate tons more people. To do that we will have to invest tons more money in education. Short of that, the innovation that has always fueled and sustained our economic engine will go someplace else, some place like India, or China.

Contrary to what the Tea Party types would like you to believe (They've probably seen Dave too many times.) balancing the federal budget isn't the same as sitting around the kitchen table to figure out the household finances. That's the difference between micro- and macro-economics.

Thursday, February 3, 2011

When Vacations Attack

I am a little concerned about the new reality-type show being hyped all over television, "When Vacations Attack." The promos show a collection of horrifying scenes: A whale jumping into a small fishing boat; a jeep driven at too high an angle falling backwards down a cliff while a horrified woman looks on; a mountain biker running headlong into a small SUV, the dismounted biker hurtling toward the windshield; a climber losing her hold and plummeting down a steep and rocky embankment. And there are lots of testimonials from people we can only suppose to be survivors of these various mishaps: "Everything started moving in slow motion. . ."; "I saw my whole life flash before my eyes. . ."; "I knew I was dead. . .".

After shuddering through all of this I have been forced to admit that our vacations are pretty boring and pedestrian by comparison. I mean a whole episode about me getting food poisoning from some bad ceviche in Cabo San Lucas just doesn't stack up to getting jumped by a whale off the coast of Puerto Vallarta.

I have caught numbers of barracuda while on vacation and waded through choppy, fish-infested waters to wait for our guides to cook them up over a beach fire. There was always a risk that I might get a bone caught in my throat, but I figured that every once in a while you just have to take chances. Those barracuda were big, I hasten to add, and when Felipe held my first catch up I noticed the rows of sharp teeth. I remember being pretty proud of myself, but then just the other day there was a piece on the 4 o'clock news about a barracuda actually jumping into a couple's boat and piercing the woman's lungs. Her husband somehow managed to get her the medical help she needed in the nick of time. It'll be just my luck that we'll go fishing this summer in Belize and I'll get jumped by a barracuda but no one will have the camera going.

That's what happened when Katherine and I almost drowned in the freezing torrent of Cascade Creek as it fed into Jenny Lake. We were quietly paddling around the lake, a yearly tradition, when we decided it would be cool to paddle up the creek as far as we could go. The plan was to get upstream a bit, turn around, and "run the rapids" back to the lake. It was early in the morning; there was nary a ripple on the lake; and we had the whole place to ourselves, so there was no one to TALK US OUT OF IT. We made it maybe twenty-five yards upstream when the current got too strong (It wasn't called Cascade Creek for nothing, a fact that had somehow escaped us.), so we decided to turn around. Turning your kayak around in the middle of river cascading from 13,000 snow filled feet is a bad idea. The kayak hung up on a rock and "everything started going in slow motion" as the kayak slowly filled with water and flipped over, Katherine and I still aboard, into the stream.

We both, thank God, managed to get out from under the boat. Katherine scrambled to shore and I managed to stand in the chest high water clinging to the rock with one hand and to the front strap of the water-filled kayak with the other. After a few minutes we managed to get over our initial shock and somehow wrestled the kayak on shore where we dumped out the water, put it back in with it headed in the right direction, climbed aboard and shot back down to the lake where we managed to catch up to our paddles. All collected, we looked at each other, at the inlet in question, and laughed with a mixture of relief and pride. Hey, this was one of those wilderness moments for us, but like I said no one was on shore taking pictures and I don't want to go through it again.

There was also the time Katherine almost killed a trumpeter swan with a paddle. I will admit that this can't compare with capsizing jeeps and mountain bikers splashing through windshields, but it seemed life and deathish at the time. We were kayaking around Two Ocean Lake in the Tetons and were making a bee line for a family of trumpeter swans hanging out at the other end of the lake. We had seen them there every summer, so we were just intending to say hello. When we got close we noticed the baby swans swimming in formation behind their proud parents, so we just kind of coasted and watched.

Just when we noticed that we had somehow gotten between the adult swans and one of their offspring, the male swan got up on its legs, flapped his wings and started "running" across the water, clearly charging our boat. I was preparing myself for a feathery death when the swan skid to a halt, still flapping and honking, just a few feet from the boat. Immediately the female made the same charge. I noticed that Katherine had picked up her paddle, ready to do battle with the beasts.

They stopped their charge and we got the hell out of there. The swan family quickly reunited and I just remember being relieved we didn't have to explain a bludgeoned swan to a park ranger.

There were other moments that weren't so dramatic looked at in retrospect, but at the moment surely the stuff of reality television. I was sitting on the porch of Bluebell, our Jenny Lake cabin, drinking a gin and tonic when I noticed a line up of cars on the scenic drive around the lake. I got up to see what was happening and ran into a mama bear and two cubs walking up the side of our cabin just a couple of feet away. I backed up and told Katherine to grab the gin and tonics and get inside. I followed her in and we watched as the bears lumbered off in the direction of the main lodge. Katherine always gives me a hard time about wanting to SAVE THE GIN AND TONIC, but I figured gin came from juniper berries and bears liked berries. If we had left the gin and tonics out there is no telling how long the beasts would have stayed. Plus we were running low on dip,

There was also the no-good, terrible, very bad day when I skinned my knee on the way down Granite Canyon. We were walking around a forested bend that opened up to a view of the river below. As I made the turn, I saw a naked girl standing in the current cooling herself off. It was like a scene out of a movie where all of a sudden a pretty little fawn appears in a splash of light. I wrecked the moment by tripping on a rock and tearing a gash out of my knee. I still have a scar. The good news is that every year Katherine and I have a wild-life spotting contest to see who finds the most. We assign points to different breeds. The ubiquitous antelope is worth a point. Elk, almost as numerous, are worth two. A bear is worth five. I gave myself fifteen points for the girl, helping me win that year's contest.