Sunday, June 18, 2017

Father's Day


I have major father issues.  My parents divorced when I was six or seven, right after I recovered from a year spent in bed with rheumatic fever.  My mom packed us up and we--my two sisters, little brother, grandmother, and aunt--moved from Freeport, Illinois to Estes Park, Colorado.  I vaguely remember my father coming to visit in the summers, but I have no memory of any details.

I do remember that, even as a seven year old kid in second grade, I was deeply embarrassed by the fact of my parents' divorce.  I explained my father's absence to my new friends by telling them that he was an assistant football coach at Notre Dame and had to stay in South Bend for his work.

Mostly, I have almost no concrete memories of my father and the few I do have I have already shared in these pages.  Therefore, I have always been surprised when I hear men talking about their father issues.  I have heard and read reports of men my age with their eyes brimming talking about going to ball games with their old man, going fishing with their old man, learning to use tools with their old man, getting disciplined by their old man.  I have nothing like that in my memory bank.

I know that when I watch a movie like "Field of Dreams," I'm supposed to cry when Kevin Costner "has a catch" with his father's apparition at the end of the movie.  I know I'm supposed to read father/son memoirs that inevitably crop up on days like this and be moved.  I'm not.  I'm also supposed to worry that, since I don't have any of these feelings, I am avoiding my problems by not facing up to them.

That might be so.  But I developed my own coping mechanisms when I was a kid trying to grow up in a house with one little brother and five older women.  Instead of having one father, I had an endless supply of father figures.  I never much gravitated toward any of my mother's dates and subsequent husbands, although Stewart, a salesman from England, taught me about poetry, John Donne in particular.  My Aunt Annie's husband, Carl, acted like my friend.  We talked about politics and business and sports.  He taught me--tried to teach me--to play baseball.  I spent a summer with him in Oklahoma City helping him put in a yard in his new home.  My sister Mary Jo's husband, Dick, taught me how to drive a tractor and a back hoe and generally how to act like a man.  My sister Jeri's succession of husbands combined to teach me how to smoke a pipe while driving a Mustang convertible, play basketball, read Joseph Heller, play guitar, and drink.  I was like a little pack rat and I took something from every man who came along.

The bottom line here is that no one really taught me how to be a father first hand.  I had Jim Anderson, Andy Taylor, Ward Cleaver, and Fred McMurray for that.  All those guys handled fatherhood with aplomb.  They never felt overwhelmed, or when they did it was always a funny kind of overwhelmed, something to laugh about in retrospect.

But being a father is in fact overwhelming.  Sure, one can still find things to laugh about, but not necessarily at the end of every episode.

That's how I feel today.  That's why I'm writing this even though I smashed the hell out of my right middle finger while working on a deck the other day and it hurts every time I hit the letter I or K.  Everybody says that when you get older, your worries get fewer.  That just hasn't been my experience.  When I was a young man, I had the same worries and concerns and dreams as all the other young men I knew.  When I had children, those worries doubled.  When those children had children, those worries tripled.  I don't think my worries are going to quadruple because I will be too old to remember who anyone is once I have great grandchildren.

Without going into gruesome detail, there are many things weighing me down today.  A leak developed in our kitchen while we were in Puerto Vallarta and now we are in a construction site with plastic sheets covering up our kitchen while folks get rid of mold, redo floors, and replace dry wall.  I feel like my house is being slowly raped.  That's the first thing I think about at night when I can't sleep.   I also lie awake worrying about Nate and Ashley in Los Angeles.  I worry about Chris and Christine's latest business venture.  I worry about Franny and Ken and their long term goals.  And of course, I rotate through the grandkids and all the worry that entails.

I just want everybody I love to be happy and wildly successful.  Whenever one of them gets sick, or frustrated, or angry, or sad, I get sick, frustrated, angry, and sad too.  So tell me again, why do we celebrate this day?

Please don't!   You're thinking about all the rewards of fatherhood.  The cute moments.  All the nights watching the kids perform.  The warm memories.  The laughter around the table.  The grandchildren shivering with excitement over new possibilities.  You don't have to tell me about all that.  Those rewards happen all the time.  I can't stop them.  I celebrate them daily, hourly.  So, tell me again, why do we celebrate this particular day?

Wednesday, June 7, 2017

The Yellow Kayak

That is Sammi in the front of our kayak paddling around one of the ponds at Chatfield.  You can't tell here, but Sammi and I are singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" and Sammi is about to do her big finish:  "Gently down the STREEEEEAM."  We time it so she gets to that final note just as the kayak lands.  It will be Brooklyn's turn next, then Willa, and then Jaydee.  Meanwhile, the rest of the family is up on the beach commandeering a picnic table which is home base for our impromptu picnic.

Kathie and I bought the kayak around twenty years ago for four hundred bucks so we could have it to play around with in the Tetons.  It was the best money we've ever spent.

I should add here that neither one of us likes getting wet and we are not particularly eager about shooting the rapids on the Snake.  We just like to paddle around the lakes near Jenny Lake Lodge as a way to rest from the other days we spend hiking.  The second day of our stay we always put in at the boat launch at Jenny Lake right after breakfast.  We do one lap alternating between a gentle float while looking for critters and RAMMING SPEED when we are trying to impress the tourists looking out at the lake from the trail.  Our Jenny lap takes about two hours.  Then we pull the thing out of the freezing mountain lake, hoist it on top of the car, and head back to the lodge to hang out on our porch with good books and a bottle of wine.

After our kayak break, we try to head up to Lake Solitude the next day.  The day after that we generally take our kayak to String Lake.  String Lake is actually more like a river that connects Leigh Lake to Jenny Lake, so it has a light current and killer views of the Cathedral Range.  When we get to the top of String, we take a two hundred yard portage over to Leigh and put in there.  Leigh is our favorite kayak destination because once we get past the portage, we have the lake pretty much to ourselves.  Occasionally there will be a fisherman in a canoe and the buggy campsites along the shore will be filled, but that is the extent of human traffic.  Leigh is a gold mine for critter spotting.  We have seen otters playing on an outcropping of rocks, an eagle stripping a fish, two eagles having sex in the sky just off shore (If we had been Native Americans conceiving a child at that moment, we would have named the kid "Two Eagles Fucking"), and once a moose was rude enough to impede our progress by wading across the lake directly in front of us.  The lap around Leigh is almost always a thing of wonder; however, the weather does roll in with alarming speed and we have been caught in the middle of the lake as the whitecaps swamped our little craft.  Those times are always Jack London moments.

We used to put in at Two Ocean Lake on the continental divide, but the put in there is swampy and leech-ridden.  We don't go there anymore.  We did have one memorable morning where we somehow got between two trumpeter swans and one of their babies.  No sooner had we noticed our mistake then one of the big birds stood up on the water, wings flapping, and ran toward us, coming to a skidding stop right next the kayak.  Then the other swan attacked and skidded to a stop in front of us. It was more than a little terrifying.  Mostly, I was trying to figure out how we would explain to the rangers that we just killed two trumpeter swans with kayak paddles.  Luckily, we extricated ourselves from the situation and made a bee line back to shore.

We always spend two days paddling along the south shore of Jackson Lake from Spaulding Bay all the way up to Moran Bay.  Great eagle spotting along this stretch and a whole new view of the mountains.  Once, we paddled up the north shore from Colter Bay to Leek's Marina.  We put our kayak up on shore about the same time a busload of Japanese tourists (I don't mean to sound racist, but the bus was in fact filled with Japanese tourists all armed with cameras) emptied into the parking lot.  When we came back for our vessel, two of the tourists were in the boat, holding our paddles, pretending to row, while one of their friends took pictures.  We politely told them that our kayak was not part of their tour and quickly got back on the lake.

We also put in on the Snake right below the dam.  Sometimes we team up with Jim Friend and his red canoe and go all the way to the Pacific Creek access.  One time Kathie and I floated down to Oxbow Bend, played around, and paddled all the way upstream back to the dam.  Paddling upstream on the Snake gave us both a more reverent regard for Lewis and Clark paddling and portaging all the way upstream to the Columbia River and their boats were probably heavier than our yellow kayak.

We don't use the kayak for family picnics at Chatfield any more.  It got to be such a drag hauling the thing on the top of our car with the Wyoming winds buffeting us all the way, that we asked the folks at Jenny if they would let us store the kayak there over the winter.  They were nice enough to say yes.  The nine hour drive to the Tetons became a lot more pleasant.  I'm sorry that Sammi and I won't get to sing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" at Chatfield anymore, but I'm hoping that sometime in the not to distant future we can all go to the Tetons together.  Her big finish would echo off the canyon walls impressively.

Here's what I'm hoping will happen when we arrive at Jenny next month.  We will be greeted with smiles and hugs like always.  I will ask for a bottle of Veuve Cliquot on ice for our porch and when we drive into Bluebell's driveway, some enterprising bellman (Connor are you reading this?) will have already put our little yellow kayak along the side of the cabin.  I can't imagine a better welcome than that.

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

You know what our motto is here at camp. Hubris or Ennui, take your pick.

The Two Great Greek Sins

Since Trump has pulled us out of the Paris Accord, I've read at least two analyses of why the GOP has abandoned its once firm belief in climate change.  The articles attributed the position change to massive amounts of money coming from fossil fuel champions like the Koch brothers and also to "Democratic hubris."

According to these articles, it was hubris that led President Obama to issue a flurry of executive orders that recognized the threat of climate change to our planet and future generations and attempted to put in place policies that would ameliorate that threat.  So what happened was that even though the majority of Republicans are aware of man's role in climate change, they reflexively blocked any legislative attempt to get it under control because those attempts were Obama initiatives.  Voting for ANYTHING Obama wanted was, in effect, treason against Republicanism.

So, in his second term and saddled with a Congress completely under Republican control, Obama abandoned any hopes for partisan consensus in the legislature and started issuing orders.  Now the Republicans had another reason to block any attempts at climate change mitigation:  They were standing firm against Obama's hubris and by extension the arrogance of the Democratic Party on all issues relating to the environment.

We can take that a step further and look at the plethora of Trump's executive orders as a "Fuck You" to anything Obama accomplished.  It makes no difference, for instance,  that Obama's recent detente with Cuba has injected billions of extra dollars into our economy--dollars that mostly help out farmers mind you--has helped normalize relations with one of our neighbors, and has helped the living conditions of Cubans.  Forget all that.  Detente with Cuba was an Obama thing.  Let's dismantle it.  Paris was an Obama thing.  Let's dismantle it.  Clean air and water is an Obama thing.  Let's get some good old American brown clouds back, just like the good old days when America was great.  Obama pissed off middle eastern powers by pointing out their records on human rights, let's stop that right now and assure Saudi Arabia that they can do whatever they want to their people because we won't lecture them anymore, especially if they give tons of money to Trump's going concerns.  We will, however, lecture our allies in NATO.  We will, however, be horrified at Cuba's human rights violations (of course, we have to find some first).  Let's make sure everything we do teaches Obama a lesson for having hubris.

My question is that in the face of the GOP's inflexible position on every issue, is there anything Obama, or any Democrat, could say or do that would not have FoxNews yelling "hubris?"  When confronted with an individual or a group willing to reject fact, logic, and the underpinnings of western civilization if they get paid enough, shouldn't we attempt to fight back?  Climate change is real.  Fully 95% of the scientific community understand it is real.  They have the data to prove that it is real.  And because they have that data, that proof, they tend to scoff at the notion that climate change is a hoax perpetrated on the world by the Chinese in order to get an economic advantage over the US.  That doesn't strike me as hubris.  It seems more like realism.

I've got two YMCA stories to illustrate this point.

A few years ago, right after Al Gore stormed the country with "An Inconvenient Truth," Dennis, a FoxNews Republican and small time entrepreneur, walked up to me as I was getting dressed after my shower, and told me that Al Gore and his push for climate change awareness was the biggest threat to American sovereignty.  It was undermining a healthy business community, costing jobs, making us less competitive with China, etc.  He further said that "An Inconvenient Truth," both the book and the film, were examples of communism at work.  I, of course, asked him if he had read or seen either version.  Guess what his answer was?  He certainly was not going to waste his time reading liberal spin.

"C'mon, Jim, don't you know you can spin anything?"  His tone was almost fatherly.

"Yes.  All I have to do is watch FoxNews to know that," I answered.  That was the end of our conversation for that day.  We would have more.  Was my flippant dismissal of a FoxNews speaking point an example of my hubris?  I don't think so.  It was almost nothing like Oedipus' refusal to give way at the place where three roads meet.

Another time.  Dennis again.  He came up to me while I was getting dressed (I can only assume that FoxNews Republicans like confronting people just when they're stepping into their shorts.) and asked me if I wanted Socialism (insert Gasp).  I laughed and said no.  I think capitalism works, but like the Pope, I think the excesses of capitalism, something that our (ahem) exceptional country is so good at, are evil.  Yes.  Evil.  I then asked him to give me an example of something, anything, that Obama had instituted that constituted Socialism.

"Well, everything," he fired back.

"That's no answer," I said.  "Give me one thing that in your opinion is creeping Socialism."

"Opening the borders," he instantly responded.

I finished up packing my stuff and slung my backpack over my shoulder and started walking out of the locker room.  Just as I was about to turn the corner, I went back (I couldn't help myself) and said to Dennis and the other FoxNews types gathered there in various stages of undress, "That's why I envy conservatives.  You get to believe anything you want.  You never let facts and logic get in the way.  Oh, and have a nice day."

I'll bet Dennis and the rest checked my comment off as just another elite liberal arrogantly telling everyone else what to believe.  If I had pointed out that Obama had not, in fact, opened borders and furthermore, opening borders has at best a tenuous link to Socialism, would I have been even more arrogant, more filled with hubris?

The alternative to hubris is ennui, a listlessness bred by indifference.  The constant lies, the misinformed certainties, the worship of the bottom line over anything else, all those things are designed to create indifference, ennui.  Everything is so up in the air that any reaction other than indifference is too depressing, too infuriating.  I can see the whole country slowly settling in for the "banality of evil" that Hannah Arendt described so eloquently.

If Obama's executive orders, if things like the recent Women's Marches all over the country, if our shared outrage is hubris, thank god for it.

It might be our only hope.