Tag: Black Canyon

I Have No Thought Of Time …

jono55

Sandy Denny was an English folksinger and songwriter with a gorgeous voice who sang with several groups including Fairport Convention and Fotheringay, and who put out a handful of solo albums as well. One of the most enduring pieces she wrote was Who Knows Where The Time Goes, a marvelously thoughtful and melancholic song about the passage of time.

I first listened to it as a much younger man and was instantly caught up in the lyrics, which seemed to speak directly to me and I thought How could Denny have written such a personal song when I had never met her and there was no way … but I imagine that’s everyone’s reaction to this lovely musical meditation. At every age I’ve been through since then it has spoken to me with an even clearer meaning, until at my present time of life when I listen it seems just the perfect fit, carrying the message of one of life’s most constant truths.

And yet she was only twenty when she wrote it. Amazing. Breaks your heart, really. It was the last song she ever sang at a public performance. Denny died after a fall down a flight of stairs, at the age of only 31. But even if this piece of music had been her only legacy … aahhh, love … it is timeless.

“Who Knows” has been covered by so many people. Each one that i’ve listened to beautifuin its own right, but none eclipsing the original by Sandy Denny herself.

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Who Knows Where The Time Goes, by Sandy Denny

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There are three people whose clear-minded writing about our present national political manure pile that I read regularly. They are Robert Reich, Heather Cox Richardson, and Timothy Snyder. There are many others producing worthy material, but the day is only so long and, alas, my attention span has its limits.

I marvel at each piece they post, and especially in the case of Richardson and Reich, they post nearly every day. E.v.e.r.y d.a.y they produce an essay that would get an “A” in Civics class. All three are available on Substack and can be followed on its app. I find that they cut through the clamor and smoke very well, pointing out over and over the lessons of the Andersen fairy tale: The Emperor’s New Clothes.

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Upon reflection, I have found that an almost perfect metaphor for the present-day version of the Republican Party would be the Freudian concept of the Id. I was going to ask Sigmund if he agreed, but was disappointed to find that the man was completely dead.

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Who Knows Where The Time Goes, by Nina Simone

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Yesterday I made a fine meal of New England Clam Chowder, which Robin and I wolfed down with much lip-licking and slurping. It was only later when washing the dishes that I noticed a stinging on the tip of my right middle finger, and found that it was missing a bit of tissue measuring about 2×2 millimeters. Apparently during the slicing and dicing of the vegetables that went into the mix I nicked the finger but didn’t notice at the time. There exists the distinct possibility that the missing piece of me went into the chowder.

It’s a tiny thing, I know, but I have chosen not to share this information with my wife. She has a tender stomach, poor dear, and this might affect her attitude toward me and my meal preparations in general.

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From The New Yorker

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I visited the Black Canyon Park on Monday forenoon. It is only partially open, and there is no walking about in the burned areas at all, anywhere, said the burly Park Ranger to me as I came strolling back down a charred hummock. He also said that my hiking where I had no business being would encourage all the other people who were presently in that same parking lot to start doing it. And he definitely implied that this could be the end of civilization as we know it.

I assumed the humbled, craven posture that is my best weapon against angry authority figures and skittered away.

But even such a tense situation couldn’t hide the fact that only 40 days since the onset of the fire, there were one-foot tall Gambrel Oak seedlings already coming up from the rootstocks of the burned trees.

Hallelujah, brothers and sisters. Nature holds the cards. She started the whole mess with those lightning strikes, and now shows that she is repentant and can put it right again.

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Who Knows Where The Time Goes, by Judy Collins

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Across the evening sky
All the birds are leaving
But how can they know
It’s time for them to go?
Before the winter fire
I will still be dreaming
I have no thought of time

For who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?

Sad deserted shore
Your fickle friends are leaving
Ah, but then you know
It’s time for them to go
But I will still be here
I have no thought of leaving

I do not count the time
For who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?

And I am not alone
While my love is near me
I know it will be so
‘Til it’s time to go
So come the storms of winter
And then the birds in spring again
I have no fear of time

For who knows how my love grows?
And who knows where the time goes?

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MADJB

jono55

I was leafing through a small-town newspaper the other day and came across this reference to a group of comics that liked to play music together and eventually got together and formed a band. Because they were all middle-aged dads they called it the Middle Aged Dads Jam Band, or MADJB. Eventually they began playing gigs, developed a YouTube Channel, and are living the dream.

Kind of a hoot, it is.

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Robin and I went driving to see how far up the road to the Black Canyon National Park we could go without being arrested. Just before the gate entrance we encountered a very polite park ranger whose pickup was blocking the road and who instructed us that we had gone far enough, thank you very much. But from that point we could already see a large swath of burned-over rolling hills, our first view of the damages from the fire.

On the way back down the hill from the Black Canyon entrance we found this large herd of elk grazing in Bostwick Park. In the photo you can see that there are two groups of animals, one near and one far away, totaling close to 100.

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Have you ever visited a fish hatchery? If not, here’s a brief description. There are large open concrete “ponds” of various sizes, each filled with small fish of a uniform size.

When you toss in any food, there is a great commotion as all of the fish compete with one another blindly, with so much swirling and splashing that you can no longer make out individual creatures.

That, my friends, is my metaphor for today’s Republican Party. A large group of undistinguished organisms largely inert until Cluck tosses out some random outrage or idiocy into the pond, and then there is pandemonium as they compete for scraps.

Right now, there is only one place for an up and coming member of the GOP to be, and that is with their nose planted firmly between the two rear pockets of the Generalissimo’s XXXL trousers. What they never seem to do is to look back behind themselves at the trail of bloody career corpses he has left in his wake. To Cluck, each of them is little more than a paper towel, to be used once and then thrown away.

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From The New Yorker

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After much reflection, I have come to a conclusion that I am certain many of you have reached before me. And that is the disturbing absence of fennel seeds in what passes for food in Italian restaurants. (And that includes pizza joints, which may or may not have Italian lineage).

To me, any red Italian sauce that doesn’t ‘t include a sprinkling of those delicious licorice-y and crunchy seeds is nearly always disappointing. Tonight I heated up a frozen pizza (confession time, here) and not only were there no fennel seeds but there was no basil or oregano, either. Which indicates that if one lets these commercial vendors get away with one thing that soon they are trying to get away with several.

There’s only one remedy that I can see, and that is legislative. Inclusion of fennel should be mandated, and let’s get it done. I will admit, although I have never heard of a case, that there might be people in this country who are violently allergic to this spice. Without having a choice there might be the rare bad spell for those folks in the new world I am describing. But in society some of us have to make sacrifices for the greater good, and this is one of those times.

Should Mom or Pop or Gramps perish as a result of being poisoned by Foeniculum vulgare we could all send something nice to the funeral and to the charity of their choice.

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Volare, by Domenico Modugno

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From The New Yorker

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Over the next several days we will become a family of ten at table. Amy and Justin and their families are coming for a visit. The adults will be staying at a local motel, while the children will bunk here at Basecamp. The whole thing promises to be messy and fun and is a rare event these days, when that curious creation called family is spread thinly over thousands of miles.

Our own anxieties are pretty much of the “what will we do all day when the temperature promises to be in the 90s and the mountain sun is so unforgiving?” variety. Much food has been prepared in advance, beds are assigned … what could possibly go wrong?

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Wicked

jono55

I liked Chris Isaak, even before his video “Wicked Game” came out on VH1 in 1989. He seemed like a good guy, played beautiful guitar and worked with good material. And then Wicked Game came along, and my appreciation of the dramatic possibilities of sand sticking to skin rose to new heights. The video also showed how good a pair of men’s white skivvies could look when worn by the right woman.

Moments like that are why I look back on the MTV era fondly. MTV didn’t invent the music video, but they knew what to do with them and made them the background music for our lives for a few years. And then they stopped showing them and nobody picked up the concept and ran with it after that.

Everything changes. Things arise and things fall. This is the way of the universe. However … I wasn’t done with MTV yet when they quit the scene. It left me with a musicus interruptus sort of feeling.

(Don’t bother looking up that last phrase. It only looks like Latin).

But these creative short films are still out there. You just have to look for them. Being passive and spoon-fed (my favorite approach) doesn’t work as it did in the past. We have to do a little work.

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Note: the dramatic header photograph is not my own, but weakling that I am it was so striking
that I simply couldn’t avoid borrowing it.

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Finally broke out the electric bike. Many, many others with more fortitude than myself have been seen cycling around town since early March, so I am rather late to the party. It’s those chilly breezes that hold me back. But the machine itself needed no encouragement, all I had to do was turn it on and off we went.

Each summer I put about 600 miles on the bike just going to the grocery store and running errands. It replaces the missing second car very nicely. Especially in a country where rain falleth on many fewer days than it did back in South Dakota. Robin and I have panniers to carry stuff on the lighter errands and a Burley Nomad trailer for bigger loads.

We’ve had our Burley trailer for sixteen years now, so I haven’t looked at that market for a long time. I was pleasantly surprised to see how many brands and styles there are to choose from these days. When we picked up ours back in 2009 there might have been three or four brands to choose from, but that limited selection is history.

There are trailers for hauling kids, cargo, dogs, and even stand-up paddleboards. Teensy camper trailers . One-wheelers, two-wheelers, homemade ones … it’s a brave new world out there.

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The presidents of the United States and El Salvador have told us that there is nothing they can do about the innocent man now incarcerated in an El Salvadorean prison.

Do they think that the matter is thus closed? That we will accept this Alice in Wonderland brand of insanity? Are they so dangerously removed from reality?

Who would have thought that we would now have our own version of Los Desaparecidos here in America? If this man is not returned to the United States and freed, we are none of us safe. None of us.

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Mothers of the Disappeared, by U2

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I count myself a lucky man. To have had delivered to my door a problem I can sink my teeth into at this stage of my life. And I have Donald Cluck to thank for it. He has brought fascism home to us, with all of its colorful horrors intact. It is possible that most of the people who voted for him still think he’s a good guy and when the dust settles all will be well. But they are daily being disabused of that quaint notion, because this particular “good guy” has used them to get what he wanted and doesn’t need them any more.

He has taken a functioning economy and thrown it into the Vitamix. Of course there will be a little pain for awhile, he admits, but eventually this will pass and there will be endless possibilities of getting richer ahead of us. What he leaves out is that the pain is to be borne by the 99%, and the increased wealth will go to the 1%. Not a good sound bite, that ending, so he leaves it off.

Like all fascist leaders before him he has employed the tactic of providing us with enemies who are at our doors and who are reaching for our throats. And what an abundance he provides. People of any color other than white. People of any faith other than Christian Nationalism (which isn’t a faith at all). People who won’t do what he tells them when he tells them to do it. People who don’t lick boots or kiss behinds with enough fervor. Facts and truth being inconvenient, he has dispensed with them completely.

So what is my new job? To join with others who see clearly the tragedy unfolding in front of us. To work for the removal of Cluck from office. To work with others to address the injustices and inequalities that allowed someone as unworthy as Cluck to get power in the first place.

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Find the Cost of Freedom, by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young

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It was a blue sky day. The temperature was around seventy degrees. The road through the Black Canyon National Park was still closed to automobiles two days ago, while open to bike and foot traffic. Sooooo … I loaded our machines on the rack and off we went.

When we reached the park, we found the road had unfortunately just been opened to cars, but we decided to head out anyway. Shortly thereafter a wind came up, the blue sky disappeared, the temperature dropped 15 degrees, and a light rain set in. When we finally reached the end of the road and our halfway point, we went into the only shelter, an outdoor privy, and stood there for a while to warm up a bit.

The rain finally quit and we returned to the bikes to finish the trip. But, oh what a ride this few miles of highway provides! It’s a narrow two-lane road that twists its way along, with the lip of the dramatic Black Canyon of the Gunnison River just a few yards away much of the time.

Well worth a bit of damp and shiver.

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Ridin’ the Storm Out, by REO Speedwagon

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