Born on a Mountain, Raised in a Cave: A Rocky Mountain Memoir

By Bill Shaw

In the years between the assassination of JFK and the selling out of America by an actor playing the president, a generation came of age. Too late for Woodstock or to feel like legit Boomers, and too early for glam, grunge and Gen-X, the kids of the seventies went about the business of growing up and figuring out how to fit into an America that was beginning to lose its grip. In a small town in the central Colorado Rockies, the stunning natural landscape abetted one young mans struggle with boredom and lifes questions. Here is an incomplete record of that boys early years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493156047

Bill Shaw

Conspiracy of Dunces is the third novel in the author’s Pistol Thicket trilogy. Bill and his wife of 46 years, Monica, live in Austin, Texas, close to their three daughters and five grandchildren. Bill is the retired Woodson Professor of Law and Ethics in Business at the McCombs School, University of Texas at Austin. He holds B.S. and MBA degrees from Louisiana Tech University, a J.D. from Tulane, and a LL.M from the University of Texas at Austin. He taught graduate and undergraduate students at Texas for over 30 years, retiring in 2007. Professor Shaw published over 50 scholarly articles on law and business ethics during his career as well as four texts. He served as President of The Academy of Legal Studies in Business, Editor-in-Chief of the American Business Law Journal, and on the editorial board of The Journal of Business Ethics.

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Born on a Mountain,

Raised in a Cave

___________

A Rocky Mountain Memoir

Bill Shaw

Copyright © 2014 by Bill Shaw.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 01/08/2013

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Contents

Prologue

Earth

Origins

On Foot

On Wheels

Mischief

Outdoor Life

Child Labor

Water and Wind

Fish Hunting

Frozen Water

Thawed Water

Fire

Friends

Sacred and Profane

Sport

Beer Drinking,

Hell Raising

Climax at the Brown Palace

The Cave

Epilogue

About the author

For Colleen and Kayleigh; but mostly for Margie, who went to Colorado to ski and study and meet interesting people in the mountains, and brought one back to California.

Prologue

O n a clear night in mid-summer, 1979, five college students sat in a campground at the base of Long’s Peak, the premier peak in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. A few minutes from Estes Park, Long’s is one of the first landmarks seen from out on the plains of Eastern Colorado as you approach the Rockies. Four of the young men were roommates sharing a house for the summer in Fort Collins, killing time waiting for the start of fall semester at Colorado State University. The fifth was a friend of two of the roommates. It was a weekday and the campground was moderately populated but not full. The trailhead for the path that led to the summit of the peak was a mile down the road, sufficiently close to launch an ascent in the morning.

These five were not mountaineers; they were not getting psyched to use ropes or to get technical when dawn broke. They were there to enjoy the evening, to roast marshmallows and drink a few beers, then rise early and walk along the beginner’s trail to the top and enjoy the view. It was a simple plan to bag a Fourteener during the summer break, no excitement or drama expected or sought beyond that. But these were young American college males on summer break, so a few beers led to a few more beers, which led to no more beers, which should have led to lights-out, but instead instigated a trip to Estes Park for additional beers. So three of the five jumped into a Ford pickup for the run.

Along with the public campgrounds at the foot of Long’s Peak in the summer of 1979 there were a few private campgrounds and retreats. One of these was accessed by the turnoff right before the campground in which the five were staying, and on the dark road coming back from the Estes Park beer run the driver mistakenly turned into this driveway. After a few hundred feet the riders began to get the sense that they weren’t on the right road, but the dirt track was quite narrow, offering no place for a U-turn. About a quarter of a mile up the road the pickup stopped in a cul-de-sac that was smack in the middle of a compound. On all sides there were barracks and bungalows. The occupants of the truck were definitely certain now that they were not where they should be—their tents and companions were not in this campground. Since all were flirting with the limit for legal intoxication, the two passengers strongly advised the driver to turn round and exit as soon as possible. The young man at the wheel threw the stick into reverse then let the clutch out too quickly and killed the engine. His truck had a habit of not starting right away sometimes when it was hot, and this was such a time. So there sat the truck, in it were three moderately-buzzed college boys and a case of cheap beer, and the one sitting in the middle of the cab recalled from a sign seen on the main road during the afternoon trip up that it was quite possible that they now sat in some type of Christian Bible camp.

The young man in the center was me, and I watched as first a handful, then a horde of people began to exit those barracks and bungalows. We had all seen a few zombie movies, and this scene was exactly the same, the bodies saying nothing, just shuffling silently toward us, backlit by the glare from lampposts near the structures, faces unidentifiable. The truck was dark, the headlights out as our driver desperately cranked the engine. One figure walked up to his side and spoke over the half-down window. He inquired—in a serious, solemn voice that contrasted severely with the level of attitude and intoxication inside the truck—as to whether we needed some help.

A few words should be inserted here about our driver. Tom looked a bit like Elliot Gould, liked to drink heavily and toke the weed, and took very little seriously. Everything was funny to Tom, so the current circumstance was undoubtedly off the scale: a Jesus-Camp elder making a serious query about whether we needed assistance was too much for him. Wild laughter exploded from inside the Ford’s cab, accompanied by intermittent screaming and profanity, and just then the engine turned over. Somehow Tom backed the truck up without driving over any of the campers, turned it toward the way we’d come and tore down the road spitting gravel and dust, all of us shrieking like crazed hyenas most of the way back to our campground.

The scene was recounted a dozen times around the fire, and each time the possibility that we had encountered the living dead, or vampires, or some similar other-worldly beings rose a bit higher, matched by the level of mad laughter. At midnight we were mildly drunk, at one we were completely shitfaced.

The sun rose over the plains early, but did not make its way down through the dense forest shielding the tents until around 7:30 or 8 a.m. We got to the trailhead at about 9:30, and the ranger there advised us that starting this late was dangerous because every afternoon thunderstorms formed up over the peak and the risk of lightning strikes was very high after about 1 p.m. How long does the climb take? we asked. At least four to five hours, was the reply. We started anyway.

Tom was from Ohio, had been in Colorado not quite a year, and liked to suck tobacco as well as marijuana smoke into his lungs. He started puking about an hour into the hike, in a meadow at about 9,000 feet. One other roommate and I stayed with him for a while, then when he did the sensible thing and dropped out of the trek to spend his day there in the shade with his inhalants we proceeded.

The other fellow left first and I followed a short time later, but long enough to lose sight of him and anyone else I knew. Alone, I approached a fork in the trail. There was a sign that indicated there was a lake to the left, and on the right was the direct path to the summit. I wanted to catch up to the other three, and could think of no reason why they would’ve gone left, so I took the trail on the right and started walking as quickly as possible. As I marched briskly along I was amazed that the others could have gotten so far ahead of me in such a short time, especially with hangovers. I began to feel wimpy and inadequate, and stepped up my pace. I’m a pussy! I thought as I pounded along, After Tom I’m the next one who can’t hack this shit! I was embarrassed, and soon I was damn near running up the trail, taking huge steps. My thighs and calves began to burn.

I passed very few other humans on the trail, and began to get a sense of genuine isolation. Everyone else is at the top, I kept thinking, so I relentlessly hammered away at the narrow path as it switched back and forth along the right flank of the mountain. I reached and hopped up across a boulder field, making long leaps from rock to rock. At about 11:30 I popped through a gap in the main ridge onto the back side of the mountain and was greeted by a wind that nearly blew me back down the front, followed by a ranger heading down. He stopped and asked if I was aware of the lightning danger on the mountain in the afternoon. I replied yes, I was, but that I was determined to summit. Besides, I pointed out, there was no sign of heavy clouds moving in yet. What time did you start? he asked. I told him, and he stood there with a puzzled look on his face. Then he wished me luck and headed down.

On the back side, as the summit drew closer, the trail got much steeper. It became like a vertical staircase at what must have been about the 13,000 foot level, and here I found people—lots and lots of people, bunched up, dragging their butts up the trail one slow, breathless step at a time. But I did not see my companions, so I marched up past the crowds as quickly as I could, stopping now and then to slow my breathing a bit. I didn’t look around much, but the conversations between those I passed indicated that the daily brace of thunderheads was moving toward the peak from the west. I was not tired, and I felt pretty good, though I knew my thighs would be talking back to me the next day. I’d been a bit winded initially at the beginning down at the trailhead, but after the delay in the meadow I hadn’t seemed to be affected much by the altitude, so I pushed on to the top.

The summit of Long’s Peak is flat, like a small mesa, looking like someone had lopped the peak right off. On this flat top I found at least fifty people, maybe more. But no roommates. I was puzzled—clearly they hadn’t summited then started back down because no one had come down while I was going up. There was nothing to do now but hang out and see if they appeared. It was about 12:30, so I figured I’d wait until one.

I walked over to the east side of the mesa. The East Face of Long’s Peak is famous in climbing circles. If I stepped out past the edge here, I would fall for a good long time before I began to splatter and bounce—it was as much sheer cliff as you could find anywhere in Colorado. From the edge of the East Face I could trace the curve of the earth out on the plains. I was sure I was looking at Kansas, and the size of the view was remarkable. There I was, not quite twenty-one, on one of the highest points in the lower 48, with a slight hangover, running on maybe four hours of sleep, and I felt good. I had summited far more painlessly than I ever remembered on any of the times I’d climbed above the treeline growing up.

My companions arrived about a half hour later. They (and just about everyone else, it seems) had taken the left fork because there was a ranger standing at the sign when they reached it who told them to go that way to the top. And as they made their way up the last couple hundred feet—on the staircase part—people were buzzing about some dude who had raced right by them earlier—a wild-looking guy with long hair blowing in the wind walked past them like he was on an escalator, and he didn’t pause long to rest anywhere, just marched right on up. The roomies realized upon making the summit who that hiker was, and they were puzzled by how I could have gotten to the top so far in front of them, and, like the rest of the folks wheezing up the slope, confused about how I could have blistered the trail like that after drinking every bit as hard into the wee hours as they. I was confused about it myself, but I figured what the hell, how many chances did you get in life to look like a god? So I summoned up as cool a countenance as I could, shrugged and offered, Well, you know, I was born on a mountain.

Earth

Yes, make it a playground, but walk with reverence and respect over these sanctified spots, but never again… will history record such a galaxy of colorful characters as once roamed the fastness of the Gold and Silver West, and believe not those doubters who tell you the wealth has all been extracted (rather confidence detracted) for still undiscovered and far beneath those mighty peaks, lies riches beyond the wildest dreams of Midas.

F. E. Gimlett

The Hermit of Arbor Villa

Over Trails of Yesterday

image1-earth.tif

Origins

W ell, I wasn’t really born on a mountain, but the first time I saw this phrase I liked it and it seemed to sum up where I was from and who I was. My title is lifted from the surface of an interior space—it’s one of those bits of fabulous poetry that can be found on the walls of remote and/or private places. I make no claim whatsoever to originality, but I will say that it’s not from a toilet stall. I remember bits of verse from all over, many of them from bathrooms, but not this.

In any case, I got my first view of the world not from a mountainside but in the Carbon County hospital in Rawlins, Wyoming. An oddly-placed town in the broken hills and open range leading from the great plains in the east up to the Tetons and Great Divide in the west. Home to a territorial prison and most likely some colorful individuals back in the day, think High Plains Drifter and you get a sense of the locale. High plains, yes, but not really qualified to be called alpine. Dotted with remnants of volcanic activity, including hot springs and deposits of interesting but not really all that precious minerals, the middle part of Wyoming is a strange landscape. I’ve been through there a couple of times since the start, including a beer-fueled jaunt through the night with another college roommate in his canvas-topped Jeep to Lander for a weekend. I suppose it may be even slightly cooler to be from Wyoming, because not many people are, and it’s still kind of wild and desolate. But if you’ve been to central and southern Wyoming and had a chance to compare it to any of the towns in the shadow of the Divide in Colorado I think you’ll see why that, although I intend no offense to the folks who live in Big, Wonderful Wyoming, I’m damn glad my parents moved before I reached my first birthday.

My parents didn’t actually live in Rawlins, but the hospital happened to be there. The address listed on my birth certificate indicates that a town called Medicine Bow was where my parents called home. I’ve never been back to Medicine Bow. I remember watching a television series called The Virginian when I was a kid, and I think the setting for the cowboy drama each week was a ranch on the high plains located near a place called Medicine Bow. That kind of made me feel good—to be from somewhere that appeared on TV—although according to my parents it consisted of about one gas station and one store at the time of my birth. Fortunately my parents moved to Colorado before I was even a year old. So although in a purely technical sense I am a Wyoming native, I never felt like anything but a Coloradoan. I breathed the crisp air and looked upon skies so blue most visitors swear they can’t be real since before I could walk. The spirit and magic of alpine terrain and wild white water rivers; of blue-green stands of lodge pole pine and Douglas fir and blue spruce, and quaking aspen turning gold in the autumn sun; of night skies so soaked with stars they made you squint from the glare; these were the backdrop for my childhood and adolescence.

I wasn’t really raised in a cave either. The first house I remember was a very small three-bedroom on the outskirts of town, a bit dark at certain times of the year, and cold when the propane tank ran empty in the winter. My older brother and I worked hard to make it look like a hole in the side of a mountain a lot of the time, tracking in dirt, cluttering the place up with junk, burning incense, burning candles, burning the furniture and the floor and ourselves. But my mom kept it neat and tight, and it was most certainly not a cave. Which is too bad, because I’ve always had a strange affinity for caves.

Growing up in a landscape that was essentially one big scenic postcard was a nice thing to do. Of course I took it for granted—I still do. But over the years that terrain, those geographic features and the climate created by them offered a remarkable variety of opportunities to do things that not all kids in the sixties got to do, and me and my friends took advantage of most of them. Not only in the ordinary ways that you’d expect, though; we didn’t just fish with lines and hooks—we fished with our hands, with our feet, with clubs and slingshots and anything else we could think of. We didn’t just hike in the mountains. We dug in them, we rolled down them and rampaged through them and laid drunk on the sides of them. We didn’t just take in the scenery, we were part of it. It could be argued that we detracted from the beauty, and I’d have a tough time arguing with that. But it was fun and it seemed normal at the time. This is an account of a normal life of one kid in the Intermountain West of America from the sixties through the seventies.

A few words on veracity. The events described are true in that I was usually there when they happened, and when I wasn’t I heard a first-hand account. I think I have a reasonably accurate remembrance of what went on, but I don’t doubt that if someone played a video back for me today I’d be surprised more often than not by what really happened on the recording. I think it’s the same for everyone, but how this works for me is simple: something happens, I see it, I walk away with a memory of the events, and I trust that my version is what happened. Does my brain embellish the memory, or adjust details to make it go more the way I want to remember it? Possibly, but not to the point where the memory is completely wrong. If I get together with some of the participants sometime later, it’s not uncommon to have stories that differ slightly. I don’t expect their accounts to match mine exactly, and I would not call them liars if theirs do not.

The following statement is by William Todd Schultz, author of Tiny Terror, a psychobiography of Truman Capote:

In some ways the lie is more important than the truth. The lie is fantasy, and fantasy is creative product, yet another work of art to dissect and interpret. People kill themselves over false memories. That fact alone makes it clear that false is anything but. It’s a question of the value of the memory, not its accuracy.

I do not believe that I have made up any of the core events in what follows, and I think that the accuracy is important. But the value of the memory to the teller of the story—hence the perspective from which it is retold—that is the kernel that makes a memoir interesting, that provides insight into the teller’s world. This is how it unfolded for me, as well as I can recall, filtered through my lens and colored, no doubt, by my experiences before and after. The things I thought were big, maybe to my friends weren’t so big, and maybe they didn’t think they happened the same way. Surely what I thought was funny isn’t necessarily funny to others. So it is with life—your results, as they say, will vary.

Many events, they were so funny, or so odd, or just seemed so plain nuts at the time, that we started retelling them right away. They sort of got recorded right into our personal mythology on the spot. For instance, a kid blows a huge bubble gum bubble, the wind blows it onto his face, he can’t breathe, he panics and then he sucks that gum membrane into his nose and makes a sound that no one’s ever heard before. Everyone falls down laughing. Later that day everyone starts retelling it, probably embellishing some parts. Perhaps the story starts to diverge from truth a little bit at each retelling. Does that create an accurate record of the event, or a tall story? It’s hard to make the call, but that’s how a lot of the events in my young life went. And a lot of it was just like the example: it wasn’t important stuff or even particularly interesting stuff. But for some reason it has remained important to me—it’s something that my psyche has latched on to and held. Some might think it’s stupid, and that’s fine too. I think it’s worth remembering, and so I have.

A few terms and definitions will be helpful, too, before I move on. There are some actions that are predictable in humans, and a few others that kept appearing over and over in my young life. Others may have their own little set of idioms for things; here are mine:

Laffing Pile—What a human being becomes when something is so funny that s/he can’t even stand up due to out of control laughing, usually accompanied at some point by fears that bladder control will be lost and/or that one will actually not be able to get a breath back in, and will actually suffocate and die.

SQOAK—Standard Question from an Outraged Adult to a Kid. Usually, What the hell do you think you’re doing!? but sometimes, Who the hell do you think you are!? Many specific tenses and constructions of these exist, but you get the idea. Nowadays we usually will hear the F-word in there, e.g. some variation of WTF, but what I’m talking about always has a personal component directed at the target. These questions arise without fail in any situation in which an adult encounters a kid doing something that the adult doesn’t think s/he should be doing. For instance, a farmer is standing in his field trying to figure out why his gate is open right when you fall out of a tree in which you were hiding and land next to him. The first words out of his mouth, I guarantee, will be, What the hell do you think you’re doing? (I always thought about the answer when this query arose, and wondered whether the person really wanted to know what I thought I was doing versus what I actually was doing, which weren’t necessarily the same.)

Sa • LYE • da

Salida, Colorado. It’s the Spanish word for exit, but the locals pronounce it Sa-LYE-dah instead of the Spanish way. The idea is that Salida is the Exit to the Real Rockies, because a traveler exits from the canyon to the east of town after he’s snaked his way around for about 50 miles on the way up from the plains. Salida sits at the lower, or southeastern, end of the Arkansas River Valley. The Arkansas River has its source about 70 miles NNW of Salida just above the town of Leadville. It runs through a valley of varying widths that is bordered on the east by foothills and occasional peaks that extend from the Front Range, and on the west by the most awesome range of peaks in the entire Central Rocky Mountains, along which runs the Continental Divide. Right before the Arkansas thunders into a tight little canyon that winds for those 50 miles and culminates in the Royal Gorge before heading out onto the plains as a flat, muddy river, it cruises right through the town of Salida.

The valley itself has quite a slope to it, which can be plainly seen when coming down off Poncha Pass, a wimpy pass by Colorado standards that enters from the San Luis Valley to the south. As a result of this grade the Arkansas is a white water river. There are slow areas, of course, with deep pools as it flows around long bends. But lazy is not a descriptor you’d apply to it, for there are also rapids as gnarly as any you’d care to hit in a raft. At flood stage the Arkansas doesn’t meander anywhere; it rolls and roars like any chocolate-milk monster flood you’ve ever seen on the real stories television programs.

The elevation of Salida is just above 7000 feet. Not dizzying height for natives of the Rockies, and downright silly for those from the Andes, but respectable and quite impressive for flat landers and sea level people. Just 25 miles up the highway is Buena Vista, a smaller town with a Spanish name also mispronounced locally as Bewna Vista (Bewnie for short). The elevation there is about 8500 feet, so you get an idea of the slope of the valley.

Why is Salida there? In the early part of the century it grew up around a large railroad switching yard. Old pictures show a number of tracks and sidings on the north side of the river that I can’t even imagine, because I don’t see where they fit them. As the railroading business died down, agriculture and mining took over. Some of the best alfalfa in the world, I was told, comes from the high pastures of the upper Arkansas Valley between Salida and Buena Vista. With the river providing the irrigation water, ranchers ran cattle and sheep in those pastures, with hay and honey as sidelines. There was some mining in the local area, but the presence of Leadville to the north and of the Climax Molybdenum Mine just above it provided the real mining center, and accounted for a lot of jobs in the valley. Then, of course, the tourism business became the big hitter for the economy in the late fifties and on through the present. The management of forests and federal lands and the cultivation of parks and campsites and recreational spots for the thousands of flat landers dragging airstreams and boats and motorcycles up into the mountains on the lee side of the divide became a major industry. And of course in the winter some people pay money to stand in lines to ride up a mountain and slide back down it on a pair of boards, and Salida is on the route to one of those mountains.

I used to subscribe to Outside magazine, and in one issue with a list of the Ten (or twenty) Best Small Towns for Something or Other, there was Salida. The hip people who spend lots of money on mountain bikes and outerwear and carabiners had discovered it, and of course the artsy-fartsy, (as some of the elders call the creative people and artisans) along with those looking to escape and commune with nature, have been roosting in it for some time.

Salidans like to say that they live in the Breadbasket of the Rockies, because the climate in the valley is very mild all year long. Being on the lee side of a range of Fourteeners, (fourteen-thousand foot high peaks), the Arkansas River Valley is an arid landscape, nearly a desert if not for irrigation. The storms from the Pacific hit the windward side of the divide and drop all their moisture on the high peaks, leaving Salida dry and protected. The same goes for temperature. To the west of the divide you have Gunnison, which often chalks up the coldest winter lows in the lower 48. It can be minus 15 degrees F in Gunnison on the same night that it’s +30 in Salida just on the other side of the divide. There was little in the way of the life-threatening cold that you get in the Midwest in Salida. We didn’t travel with sleeping bags and survival supplies in our car, although it would’ve been a good idea when going over the passes in the winter. We didn’t carry chains or get all sweaty about needing four-wheel drive and such. Studded snow tires were about as macho as your average Salidan got when it came to winterizing the traction on his car. I drove rear-wheel drive cars and trucks all my young life, and had very few incidents that I did not intentionally provoke in winter driving.

The one thing Salida did offer in abundance was boredom. With a population of around 5000 in town and maybe 8000 to 10,000 total in the county, certain kinds of businesses and entertainment just didn’t make sense economically. Things like a theater that ran current movies, and hangout places for kids. There were no Family Fun Zones in Salida, shopping malls were just starting to develop in large cities, and even 7-Elevens weren’t invented in small mountain towns in Colorado until I was well into junior high. A busy night for law enforcement was trying to get one of the town drunks to stop singing too loudly near downtown apartments. At midnight on a Sunday you could fall asleep on Main Street and not be in danger of getting run over.

The effect of all this small town sleepiness was that it forced us, the current crop of restless youth, to find ways to amuse ourselves. I’d guess we batted about .300. Most of the time we gave up and lived out our lives playing Monopoly, mowing the lawn and watching Gilligan’s Island and the Midnight Special. But during that other third we engaged in interesting, occasionally crazy, often weird and always entertaining activities; and we had as much fun, I think, as any kids could have in America as the sixties staggered into the seventies.

The Seventies. There is no cute descriptor for the decade with which I identify the most. They had the Fabulous Fifties and the Sensational Sixties, but nothing for the Seventies. And many argue that that’s the whole point: nothing really happened in the Seventies. The Nothing Generation, the Lost Generation, the decade that time forgot. There are many jokes made about those days, most of them made by those of us who came of age then. And it’s true; nothing much happened. A film called Dazed and Confused was released in 1993. We rented the video and attempted to watch it, but it was boring and hard to get through. In other words it captured the period pretty well. One of our daughters saw some of it too, and commented that it was boring and stupid, a movie in which nothing happened. And I said, Yes, exactly. Nothing was happening, and there was nothing to do, especially in a little town in the mountains. Was that a bad thing? Maybe not. For instance, there was no draft happening. Gerald Ford canned Selective Service registration when I was 15. The last chopper to leave Saigon pretty much took the desire to go waging large scale warfare with it and out of the American Psyche for a while (alas, not long enough). Nothing wrong with that as far as us 15-year-olds were concerned.

What happened in the remainder of the Seventies, I think, was that America sat back on its collective heels to catch its breath after the final ugly end to a period of disaster and tragedy that we still haven’t fully understood. The people who knew what had gone down—and why—were hiding out pretending they didn’t know anything—that they weren’t guilty of sending a generation of America’s underprivileged male youth off into madness and death. The rest of us just kind of milled around and waited for something to happen. Of course something eventually did happen, as an actor got in the White House and started reading from a script that said making as much money as fast as possible was the right thing for Americans to do. But in that lull between the Summer of Love and the Reagan Revolution a new generation of American youth came of age. We were apathetic, but could you blame us? Everyone in positions of authority—our parents, our teachers, the so-called lawmakers—looked tired and burned out. We were not very inspired or motivated, and not much was happening politically to get up in arms about. So we passed the time as the next threat incubated—big banking and marketing and consumerism, which, in hindsight, has proven to be a much more powerful and deadly threat to culture and civilization than any army.

We came of age at the launching point of the hyper-commercial globalized mess we now call modern living in a little town in the Colorado Rockies, buffered by location and a slowness in our own small town culture. Blockbuster movies made their way to the little theater downtown about eight months after they appeared everywhere else. There was no cutting edge outlet for anything. We had to work hard to stay amused in the period from roughly 1962 (when an afternoon of boring errands with my mother was shattered by a woman who dashed into Woolworth’s shouting, The President has been shot!) until the early eighties, when I exited to reside permanently in places other than the Exit.

On Foot

M any pre-modern cultures had some set piece of travel on foot mixed with experiential learning and communing with nature, and they had many useful explanations for it. Rights-of-passage, soul cleansing, communing with the