Texas notes: Severed

     Soon to be Ex-Austin-Bureau-Chief Caren Jeskey shares her journey home to Chicago.

     Skeeter Sims. Mule Clark. Hoot Owl Hatcher. Turkey Beckham. Baby Beef Chandler. I stepped gingerly around faded Texas stars emblazoned into a sidewalk in Cooper, Texas. As I read the names memorialized in the middle of each concrete star, I thought “how beautiful. This town really loves their animals.” Then something inside of me (I hear her a lot these days, my inner intuitive voice) spoke up and said “Those are the names of people.” I was touched. Imagine your name preserved into a sidewalk of the town where you lived. What an honor.

     I did not know why these particular names were chosen. Were they veterans? I surmised that my question would be answered when I got to the starting point of the display. I made my way down, photographing each and every name since they were all too good to be true. Foxy Roan. Pig Choate. Bat Poteet.   

     But no. All I got was a marker for a Miller’s Pharmacy, and more names. I learned that Goebel Templeton was from the nearby town of Charleston. He seemed well loved and had extra signage. Hubster Doctor Lawyer Teacher Preacher From The Holy Land. He’s someone I might have liked to meet. We could have sat down and had a soda or a whiskey and cigar on a bench near a cobblestone street. I could have listened to his story and marveled that his life was so different than mine, even though we are both “American.”
     I’ve learned in my time here in the Country of Texas that people are more like snowflakes—in a good, individualistic way—than I ever knew before. I have a soft spot in my heart for almost everyone I’ve met, especially countless seniors I spent time with along the way in the hospitals where I worked. There was the man who wanted to set me up with an oil guy. That was before he got pissed at the doctor and went to his truck to get his shotgun. The crisis was averted with the help of local law enforcement, thank goodness. What I will remember about him, more than the threat of feudal violence he displayed, was the time he recited a poem he’d written for his wife when she was 12 years old. At the time of this reading she was in her late 80s without much mental capacity left. As he recited the poem she sat up in her bed & came to life. She murmured the words she could remember along with him, and we all cried. (I won’t get into the fact that I was disciplined for crying at work when a stone-faced bitchy nurse reported my “lack of professionalism.”)

    I reached out to the host on the ranch I am staying on to ask about the names. “They are people who have animal names that have lived in the community. Wolfe Lowery is my husband’s uncle.” Goebel may not be an animal name per se, but it’s the name of a company that makes animal figurines. I am starting to get it.
     As I researched more about Mr. G, I learned that a 500-pound meteorite fell to this part of the earth during the passage of Halley's Comet, bringing some publicity to the community of Charleston in May of 1910, 111 years ago. Mr. G would have been about 3 years old at that time. How did that affect his life? What did his folks think about this comet that fell from the sky?
     It’s not lost on me that I am in the land of flat-earthing non-masking Ted Cruz-loving folks. Did they think the Lord sent the comet for a reason? This land is my land, this land is your land. Staunch Pentecostals and atheists alike are invited! So here I am, exploring this land that belongs as much to me (well, the public lands and thoroughfares I traverse, and sometimes the places I rent) as it does to anyone else. My mind is being blown over and over again in the Big Star State that I am going to leave behind later today.

     So far on this jaunt in Cooper, I got spooked by a horse who was probably more scared than me. I met teens fishing for crappie who’ve never been out of East Texas, the same horse doesn’t like cucumbers and spat the one I offered him back out to me, opting for flowering clover instead, and I almost stepped on a severed drum head. I huddled and quaked under blankets and pillows the other night while 87 mph winds raced across the plains and lightening was continuous. I was terrified. Friends in Louisiana and California followed the radar and texted me with advice and comforting words during the tornado watch, until it passed.
     Tomorrow I will go find the tiny house community I was told about today, and perhaps visit another small town to learn of its charm. Yes, this is the South and I am always aware that certain people are far from being welcomed here, are far from safe, and that makes me sad. I’ll be back in Chicago soon enough where I can continue to do my part to affect social justice while enjoying my “one wild and precious life” in the words of Mary Oliver. Wishing you the same.

The risks we face: bears, cars, COVID-19

     A woman was eaten by a bear in Colorado Friday, shortly after my wife and I arrived for a long weekend. Not just mauled; consumed. A bad end. This tragic and gruesome event didn’t give us pause before hitting the trails, however. Such attacks are rare. Plus, it happened near Durango, the southwest corner of the state. Far from Boulder.
     Just another risk to consider, along with whether I need those ski-pole-like sticks that older hikers use to keep their balance — not yet — or if we should cut our hike short because of the weather — we did, a good choice, since it began hailing, hard, two hours after we left the mountainside. And of course the most dangerous peril of all: driving to the trailhead.
     Not to forget the newest, and therefore scariest, risk: COVID-19. Most hikers wore masks, even though we were outside and more than six feet apart, generally. Those who didn’t have masks would pull out the necks of their T-shirts and tuck their noses inside as we passed, almost as a form of greeting. I am fully vaccinated, so I wore my mask below my chin when nobody was around, slipping it into place as people approached. It seemed the polite thing to do, and I didn’t consider my personal freedom trod upon.
     Back home, Lori Lightfoot announced Chicago will lead the charge returning to festivals, concerts and summertime fun. Will people show up? Of course we will. Dinners and music and trips give life the illusion of significance.
     That’s why I raced to get my shots. We flew to Colorado, a few days before my wife’s “full immunity” kicked in, to help my mother through some minor surgery. Because of the timing, my wife initially decreed we would wear face shields on the plane. That was scary. Face shields strike me as something nurses wear in intensive care units. To wear one in an airport is a bridge too far, like putting on a welding mask to shake hands. But I was willing to humor her. Heck, I once took Metra downtown wearing a kilt, backwards. What is shame to me?
     But the day before the flight, when she practiced putting on the face shield, it was murky—we had bought them online—and she abandoned the idea. I uttered a silent prayer of thanks.

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Home again.

   
     "Yay!" I exclaimed.
     What's rarer than a cheer? Particularly nowadays. Sincere, not ironic. Private, spontaneous, enthusiastic, a cry aloud upon seeing something worth hurrahing about.
     The top of our new tulip tree, planted on the parkway last year. It was bare buds when we left for Colorado last Friday, and sported a full crop of its distinctive, tulip-shaped leaves to welcome us back Wednesday evening.    
     It survived the winter. Which is not something new trees always do. A pin oak, several cherries ... I've planted, or at least caused to be planted, a number of living trees that quickly transitioned to elaborate sticks, dead as 2x4s.
     The tulip tree made it to the spring. We all did. Yay indeed.
     Though it was done on seeing the tree, that exclamation also conveyed general joy of return—one of my favorite parts of traveling is coming home. True for me and, I hope, for most, if they live in a halfway decent place, and probably even if they don't. The end of a long day: the 10 a.m. Uber to the RTD Park 'n Ride, the 10:52 bus to Denver International Airport, 1:45 p.m. flight to Chicago.
     Plus I had extra lower expectations, as the six days we were gone coincided with remote exams week at NYU Law. I didn't even bother going upstairs to say we were home, and had tried to brace my wife.
     "The kitchen will be messier than you've ever seen it in your life," I informed her, in the cab on the way home. "Approach the situation with love."
     It was true that every dish he used was in the sink, and the dish-washer full of clean dishes we left behind was untouched. But it turns out using dishes is very 20th century—youth today consume directly out of the containers and, of course, Soylent complete nutrition beverage. It was 10 minutes' work to set it right.
     I did pause, saddened, at the newspapers, which had been taken in ... and dumped beside the door. Still in their plastic sheaths—"newspaper condoms" as I call them. No relaxing from the rigors of the law with the high quality journalism to be found in the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Gotham-fixated and regularly-led astray-by-flashy-yet-marginal-fads New York Times, which tries, and is generally also worth opening.
     I collected the pile, relocated it to the coffee table and dug in. Home at last.

Event occurs unexpectedly

     BOULDER, Colo—Journalists have a hand in defining what a story is, or did, occasionally leading to a phenomenon I call the "Near Collision." Two jets will either collide on an airport runway or nearly do so, and then the media will start paying attention to runway mishaps and reporting when airliners come close to hitting each other at airports, until they realize that it happens frequently and then stop.
     The underlying phenomenon is reporters being sensitized to situations so they start treating the commonplace as extraordinary.
     For instance, Monday I noticed the Denver Post ran the staggeringly mundane headline "Area is at heart of debate over growth." I tweeted it with the snarky note, "And the Denver Post snags the Generic Headline of the Week Award."  

     After plowing through the article, or trying to, I'd have gone with the equally-long,
"Is Governors' Park filled to the brim?"

     Then Tuesday, having coffee, I noticed another anodyne headline, "Cases per capita 2nd in U.S." Just as bad? Or does it seem worse arriving in the after-echo of the first, like two planes slipping past each other the day after a collision? I began to play a game I think of as, Write the Better Headline. The deficient headline takes 28 spaces (ignoring that a small "i" actually requires less room than a capital "C," and so on). We could substitute the far more urgent, "COVID surges in Colorado" in 24 spaces, tossing in a few spaces for the extra caps.
     I thought of making this a running game, "Beat the Denver Post Copyeditors." Until it struck me that the Denver Post is one of the newspapers gutted by Alden Global Capital. The professionals who know how to write a newspaper headline were probably let go long ago, and to make light of those left behind to flail and founder is like ridiculing a family living under a tarp after a tornado leveled their home. So apologies to those stout souls who remain lashed to their oars at the Post. I only share their embarrassment now as a cautionary tale to my friends at the Trib. Keep pushing to find that benevolent billionaire to sweep in, or someday, after a future Chicago police shooting, the Tribune will be running headlines screaming, "Mayor speaks about situation."

Soft(er) landings

 

     The only way to get good at anything is through practice.
     Which is hard enough when you are practicing something safe, like writing, or tennis, or carving wood.
     But what happens when practice can get you killed?
     Steps must be taken. And devices deployed.  

     I was was hiking down a mountain trail in Colorado when I spied a flash of something large and hot pink up the trail ahead. It looked like an inflatable mattress. Hard to ignore a thing like that. The owner noticed me noticing it.  

     I had to ask, because otherwise I'd never know.    

     "I'm trying to figure that out," I said, in my friendliest tone, gesturing toward the large pink object.
     "It's my very visible crash pad," he said, with laudable abashment. 

  A "crash pad" was an unfamiliar concept to me. Well, except as a temporary place where hip young people caught a few z's. But that couldn't be its meaning here. Still, well-named, as no further explanation was really necessary. The device describes itself. 

     As if to demonstrate anyway, he immediately proceeded to set the crash pad at the base of a rock wall and begin climbing, quickly but methodically working his fingers and toes into the crevices and crawling up the red rock wall. I asked him if I could take his picture and he said, over his shoulder, that I could. Better safe that sorry, 

  

Joe Pyzyk's bench

 

     Joe Pyzyk's friends choose his tribute well. A sturdy wooden bench, sitting all by itself in the shade of a lonely tree, well along the Mount Sanitas Valley Trail, just west of downtown Boulder, Colorado. Marked by a simple bronze plaque: "In memory of Joe Pyzyk." One tends not to notice such plaques. But I noticed this one. 
     I'm in town, hanging with a pair of octogenarians of my acquaintance, seeing one through a daunting medical procedure, with the stipulation that I'll vanish first thing in the morning, if possible, and get a walk in.    
     My wife asked a niece who had studied at Boulder's Naropa Institute what trail she recommends, and she picked Sanitas, which worked for us. Saturday we walked up the valley trail and Sunday went up the more difficult mountain trail, which is like climbing a staircase a mile long. Both trails are well-populated, which is supposed to be bad, nature rudely withdrawing her glories when it comes to humanity. But after a year of lockdown, I enjoyed saying good morning over and over, and watching the procession of lean, lanky hikers, without enough fat to make a butter pat between them, plus of course their dogs, of all breeds, from whippets to huskies.  We saw dozens of them.

     There were also a number of black-billed magpies capering around the slope side of the valley trail, and I had never seen the bird before, with its dramatic black and white feathers and long thin tail. Like myself, they seemed undaunted by the presence of people, and got quite close to us.
     On the way back, both days we paused on Joe Pyzyk's bench, to let my spine recalibrate itself—more back trouble—and watched the people and dogs go by. (It's located on the valley trail; on the second day, after an hour on the mountain trail, we hit the valley trail for a cool-down stroll). Most people had a canine companion, and most of those were off leash but well-trained.  I of course wondered about our benefactor, and later found enough on-line to glean that he was 27 years old, a University of Wisconsin grad who came to the University of Colorado at Boulder to work on his masters in fine arts. He loved his dog Leo and loved the Rockies, which make the bench's location double appropriate: before a stunning vista and a virtual pooch parade. Pyzyk was also loved enough that somebody or some group endowed this perfectly-situated bench. I noticed his parents' names online, and for a moment thought of digging further. But his youth reveals tragedy aplenty without sniffing around for details, and in this case delving would be ingratitude, certainly poor recompense for installing this fine bench in such a dramatic spot. I suppose purists might complain, as purists like to do, that having a bench here at all interrupts the natural vista.  But so does the trail, as well as a wooden fence by the bench keeps people, who can be careless, from falling into a small brook. So this is already a blazed area of the countryside, a place which a good solid bench enhances rather than detracts from.

     During the pandemic I didn't worry too much about what I would do once I had my shots and could go somewhere, and now I know: I would come here and do this. A good choice.

Black-billed magpie

Travelin' man.

 

     I've travelled by gondola and burro and aerial tram, taken streetcars around New Orleans and cable cars around San Francisco, crowded into tap-taps in Port-au-Prince and clung to tuk-tuks in Bangkok, sailed across the Atlantic and around the tip of South America, taken bullet trains across Japan and France, flown in biplanes and helicopters and the Goodyear blimp. I get around, or used to, before COVID grounded me and, to expand my perspective beyond its usual focus, the whole world too.
     So my emotion, returning to air travel Friday, for a quick hi-folks-remember-me? visit to Boulder is perhaps surprising. Or at least worth noting. It was not joy or relief or even enthusiasm, but the deepest calm I ever experienced going from Point A to Point B. I didn't sweat the plane tickets—hard to do, since my wife bought 'em. Didn't sweat the packing or the cab. Sat facing away from the gate as they called the rows and, to be honest, when I did turn around at "4" imagined the gate empty and the plane gone. And smiled.

    Everyone on board wore their masks when they weren't sipping their bottles of water or nibbling their Stroopwafels and mini-pretzels. I ordered coffee black and didn't worry too much about lowering my mask to drink it. The air smelled medicinal.  
    No worries. Maybe surviving the pandemic, so far, is part of that. Just as I used to say that after you give up drinking everything else is easy, after you hunker down for a year to avoid a plague ravaging the world, well, whether you get a window or an aisle seat just isn't that big a deal anymore. I can't say whether this is permanent or the result of a ... calculating .... 14 month pause in flitting hither and yon, a period when the longest trip was a drive up to Madison to find out who opens the Cologuard jars. 

     True, when the United Airbus took off, I did ruminate, as I always do, that the first 10 seconds the plane is in the air are the most dangerous in the flight, when you find out if you'll get where you're going or end up spread across a field, like American Flight 191, with workers picking you out of the muck with tweezers.
     But if the past that thought came as a kind of hard squint, this time it was a distant ruffle, soft and vague, like a bell tolling twice in a church steeple far away.