Of Sugar, Time, and the Serendipity of Wisdom

April 12th, 2012

It’s the first session of the day and it’s still cool on this Autumn morning.  I shiver in my leathers, not entirely because of the venting in the Dainese suit.  The track still has patches of dampness from the fog which rolls in every night off the Dan River, but is drying quickly.  We’re helping it along with our laps.  The last track day of the year.  It’s going to be a good day.

The South Course at Virginia International Raceway has a hell of a long front straight.  More than half a mile.  Coming out of Oak Tree, the hard right-hander leading onto it – where legend has it that years ago the car racers used to deliberately rev their motors trying to shake acorns loose onto the tarmac – I’m in third gear on the GSX-R1000.  Deliberately over-gearing it, trying to keep down wheelspin.  Once onto the straight, speed builds in a rapid crescendo.  Even short-shifting – trying to keep the front wheel on the ground – I’m soon on the far side of 160mph.  God’s country.

Some of life’s experiences defy description.  Braking hard from those speeds, in what your mind tells you is an impossibly short distance, is one of those.  Those HH pads and the six-pot calipers provide what seems to be perfectly fine braking – really powerful braking – everywhere else.  Just not here.  Past the braking marker, two fingers on the lever, squeezing like the trigger of a rifle, the pads of those fingers feeling for the load on the front tire.  The rear end all light and softly shimmying, like the subtly-turning tail of one of those smallmouth holding station in the river over beyond the trees.  There are damp patches here, too, and one can’t help but wonder if we haven’t overloaded that front tire as we roll through them.  But, no, we’re ok.

You never think you’re going to make it.  The end of the straight comes at you like the earth towards a crashing plane.  It rises up like an unremitting wall, but with a rush like a cutting scimitar.  Only at the very end, just when you’ve nearly given up all hope, does it seem like yes, I think maybe I can  make that turn.  It always seems a surprise.

By late morning the chill is gone.  Now I’m sweating as each session gets underway.  I’m glad when noon arrives and the track goes quiet.  It gives me time to rehydrate some of the fluid I’ve lost.

My call home to Ginny is unremarkable.  “The Suzuki is running well,” I tell her.  “Be careful,” she reminds me as we hang up.  How many times over the years have I heard that refrain, sitting in the pits, calling from some racetrack far from home?

On the first session after lunch I go out expecting to continue the morning’s routine.  After a couple of laps to get some heat back into the tires I begin working the bike again.  I push aside the languor which envelops me.

On the third lap, past that long front straight, I begin working my way through The Spiral, a staircase set of esses which lead onto the low-speed right-hander called The Fishhook.  This is the most technical part of the track, the one with the most rapid left-right transitions.

All day long I have been ever mindful of the prodigious power of this motorcycle.  Of its otherworldly power-to-weight ratio.  It has already scared the hell out of me once – on this very track, a couple months earlier, when its brutal acceleration prompted an unintended wheelie at 140mph.  I long ago concluded that owning a bike like this is something akin to keeping a pet rattlesnake.

So, in a way, I’m not surprised.

Entering The Fishhook, I’m hanging off the right side of the machine, my knee reaching down towards the pavement.  Softly motioning the throttle, gently spooling the engine as I begin to lift the bike for the left-hander that looms just ahead, I’m apparently not gentle enough.

You can feel it when a rear tire breaks, when it first spins up.  There’s a tiny little release, a momentary fissure in the space-time fabric, that feeling of elastic firmness that wraps into our bones, when riding a motorcycle at speed.

The very best motorcycle riders in the world sometimes do that on purpose, deliberately breaking loose the tire and using the now-spinning and loosely-coupled rear end to square off the turn.  Leaving behind a long, black smear as the only evidence of their mastery.

I’m not that good.

The sudden softness surprises me.  As the rear of the bike rotates towards the left, my subconscious response is both immediate – and absolutely wrong.  I chop the throttle.  Even as the first neural signals flash through my brain of what is happening and how to respond to it, it’s too late.  The sudden removal of power has caused the rear tire to hook back up.  And the sudden reappearance of traction has caused the now-contorted-nearly-sideways motorcycle to turn into a catapult.  It launches me violently into the tarmac.

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Four weeks later the pain begins.  A sharp, intense, radiating, pain that begins in my neck, spreads across my shoulders, and descends down my arm.  It’s impossible to ignore.  But healthy all my life, I try and shrug it off.  It’s just a pinched nerved, I reason.  Must have tweaked something in that crash.

In a bit of twisted irony, it comes on nearly to the day that I am laid off, the company I work for becoming the latest casualty of the dot-com implosion.  I have no way of knowing that fifteen long, barren months lie in front of me before I’ll see another paycheck.

After ten days the strange pain not only hasn’t not gone away, it hasn’t diminished a bit.  It sits there, an angry intruder, acute in its intensity, chronic in its effect, touching everything in my life.  It’s on a ten minute ride on my other motorcycle, to get its annual safety inspection, when I have to ride nearly one-handed because of the pain, that I reluctantly decide I must do something.  The thought of not being able to ride is a darkness I cannot even consider.

A month later, after three doctor visits and an MRI, I have my answer.  Cervical spinal stenosis.  So much for something simple, something temporary.

And so begins my 10-year sojourn, living with pain as an ever present companion.  A sullen, unwelcome friend.  The new backdrop to everything else in my life.

A few years ago a hunting friend killed himself.  Brad was young and healthy and had everything to live for.  But he had been divorced and then he lost his job and his finances crumpled into disarray.  When he finally put the .45 to his head and pulled the trigger, I understood how it could happen.  Sometimes the pain just becomes too much.  You just want to be done with it.

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Almost exactly a year ago, a woman from one of the financial boards I frequent posted a topic “Is Sugar Toxic?”  It’s salient point was included in this link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?_r=2&src=me&ref=homepage

Like I usually do with longish articles, I printed it off.  Settling back in my chair, I began reading.  And in that fifteen minutes, something happened.  An epiphany arose.  When I talked to Ginny a few hours later I gave her the news.

“I’m off sugar.”

To her credit, she didn’t laugh.

She probably should have.  Anyone who knows me knows I have a legendary sweet tooth.  I have since I was a child.  Pies, cakes, donuts, candy.  I consumed them with a regularity that today, in retrospect, I find astonishing.

For years, orange juice was our staple anytime-you’re-thirsty drink.  Go for a run or a bicycle ride or work out in the yard?  Come inside afterwards and rehydrate with a quart of fresh, ice-cold orange juice.  We thought we were being healthy.

For years, a Starbucks’ grande mocha was my evening reward for having finished a long day at work.  In the summer I would switch to a Strawberries and Crème Frappuccino.

Chocolate milkshakes were a special delight.  Not a week would go by that I didn’t have several.  As far as I was concerned, they were the only good reason for McDonald’s to even exist.  My decades-long ritual meal of ‘hamburger, small fries, and chocolate milkshake’ was always a joy.  And there was a particular, greater-than-it-ought-to-have-been disappointment that attached to the occasional reply from the cashier “sorry, our milkshake machine is broken.”

A proper serving of ice cream – that would be a pint or thereabouts – every night, for years, stretching into decades, had been my long habit.

We could afford to rationalize these choices because of great good fortune.  Ginny was a marathon runner and was forever out burning a prodigious number of calories.  I was the recipient of a genetic makeup that caused my body to seemingly be unconnected to caloric intake.  Tall and skinny as a teenager.  I remained tall and skinny as an adult.

Mostly.  I gained a few pounds in my early thirties when I quit smoking.  And I gained a few more as I entered my fifties, the gradual slowing of metabolism that the wear of time always brings to bear.  My waist line had gone from 32 to 34 and then to 36.  But at 6’ 2” and 180lbs I still considered myself to be in pretty decent shape.

Still, that morning after-shower routine in front of the mirror was one of increasing angst.  I had seen plenty of examples of men growing older to know that even my beneficient DNA endowment would not forever be proof against a bulging belly.  I saw the evidence every day.  That thirty-six I wore was increasingly becoming a snug thirty-six.

Against all odds, I remained firm to my new resolution.  In doing so, I learned a few things.

Sugar is added to nearly everything.  It’s actually quite hard to eliminate entirely from one’s diet.  Even where it’s not been added during processing, food products still often contain sugar.  The mixed nuts that I began consuming as a substitute for sweets, for instance, contain a gram or two.  Vegetables often have a fair amount.  And fruits, almost universally accepted as good for you, are loaded with fructose.

What I found is that, with a modicum of effort, I could keep my intake to less than ten grams per day.  Since that stood in such sharp contrast to the 100-200 grams I estimate I was consuming before, I figured that was good enough.

I made only a few exceptions.  Over the course of the year, I had but three proper deserts:  a piece of wedding cake at my son’s wedding, a piece of homemade cheese cake at a friend’s home, and a tiny piece of cake at my father’s 86th birthday a couple weeks ago.

It is astonishing how utterly exquisite a sugar-laden sweet is when you’ve gone months without.

Ginny, having been health-conscious for years, was more than happy to support my sudden turnaround.  Her efforts to buy and prepare no-sugar or low-sugar meals were instrumental.  About the only thing we disagreed on were fruits.  She continued to eat them in abundance.  I very much limited them.  So much so that one of my favorite memories was the simple afternoon when I steered the Harley to the side of a remote back road and sat down in the grass beside it to enjoy my lunch.  When I was done with that I extracted from my saddlebag a single, ripe peach.  Cold, pungent with sweetness, with juice that spread through my fingers as I ate it, it was the perfect capstone to a perfect few hours.

For the first few weeks, it was like my body didn’t know what to make of my new diet.  For the first time in my life, my blood wasn’t being subjected to vast amounts of sugar.

After about a month, I began to lose weight.  Slowly.  A pound or two per week.  Months later, after dipping into the 150’s, it stabilized.  “I’m back to my old high school, weight,” I happily joked to Ginny.

More importantly, that chronic pain in my neck and shoulders – my horned companion for a decade – slowly began to subside.  Today I still have moments of occasional discomfort, but for the most part it is gone.  Don’t ask me why.

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Like many people, the internet for me is a portal into a variety of communities.  Whatever it is you’re interested in, you’re bound to find a group of like-minded folks who share that interest, and with whom you can speak and debate and argue.  It’s fun.  And it’s enlightening.

What we don’t normally expect is for it to be profound.

And yet, for me, in the case of this one post a year ago, it most emphatically was.

Thank you, Wendy.

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A Letter to Mom

February 18th, 2012

My mom died last week, on Tuesday, February 7th.  Today was the service.  This is a little letter I wrote to her.

“Intercostal expansion is compromised,” the doctor quietly murmured, the gauze of his mask compressing the words.  He smiled kindly down at the frightened little girl, though she could hardly tell it from behind the veil of white.

Turning slightly, he straightened, his brow furrowed.  He nodded back towards the ward.  The nurse and the intern understood.  He began jotting notes on the clipboard he held.  She moved quickly through the doorway, into the hum.  There were six unused respirators, all down at the end.   She chose one and began preparing it, going through the step-by-step protocol they had showed her a week ago.  She tried not to think of the little girl.

When she was done the head nurse came over.  Glancing at the long, oblong device, the older woman quickly checked her work.  She nodded approvingly.  “This is perfect.  Go have a cigarette, honey.”

To get to the small room that served as their makeshift lounge, she had to walk the length of the ward.  In the days since she had been here she had gotten used to the constant hum of the machines.  But she hadn’t gotten used to the rest of it.  Walking past row after row of the iron lungs, she forced herself to smile brightly at each of the children in turn.  She was glad when she got to the end and pushed through the door to where they couldn’t see her anymore.  Pulling her mask off, she washed her hands at the sink, having to will herself to continue for the prescribed amount of time.  When she was done, she used the back of her hand to smear the tears away.

One of the other volunteer, out-of-town nurses, was in the lounge when she walked in.  Noticing the red eyes, she produced a wan smile as she held out the pack of cigarettes.

“How are you holding, Joyce?”

“Okay,” she smiled back, taking the offered smoke and lighting it.

“Well, take it easy.  You have to pace yourself.”

Joyce nodded.  “I know.  I will”

The early afternoon passed quickly.  Handling the row upon row of polio patients, all of whom were kids, was tedious, manual work.  It made time fly.

They were surprised, then, when the head nurse called down the ward for a quick stand-up.  Joyce and the other two nurses quickly walked down to the end where the head nurse stood.  When they had all gathered, they moved together through the double doors, where the patients could not hear them.

The older woman turned to the three younger nurses.  Her face was grave.

“They’re calling for thunderstorms this afternoon.”  She paused, letting that sink in.

“Remember what we told you during your orientation.  If we lose power, we’re going to lose some of these kids.  There’s nothing you can do about that.  If it happens, we revert to basic triage.  You support those who have some remaining pulmonary capacity.  The ones who have the best chance of making it.  You have to let the others go.”

She paused.  “Any questions?”

The three younger nurses said nothing.

“Okay,” she said, leading them back into ward.  “Try and smile.”

Within an hour, the first crack of thunder was heard.  First in the distance.  Then closer.  They could feel it roll over the hospital, a tangible thing.

Joyce was working on a little boy when the lights first flickered.  “Please, God,” she whispered.

The little boy looked up at her, his head the only thing sticking out of the iron cylinder, his eyes serious.  “Why are you afraid?”

Joyce was taken aback.  The question hung there for a moment, while all the threads of this week, this summer, came together.

She smiled down at the boy.  A thin smile, but true.

“I’m not,” she said.  “I’m not afraid.”

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I’m not really sure of all the details, Mom, of that little story you used to tell us.  But that’s something how I’ve always imagined it.

The courage of a young boy.  And the courage of a young nurse.

And that’s how my earliest memories of you were.  I remember a young Mom who was confident and smart and assured.  A little bit sassy.

I remember your Cokes.  Whatever you were doing, working around the house, there was always that glass two-thirds filled with ice and Coca-Cola.

I remember the bicycle you worked so hard to buy for me, when it could hardly be afforded.  A mirror of your own longing, when you were a little girl, unfulfilled.  I remember the morning you took me to the window of the bedroom there at our house in Hillwood, and pointed to the bike resting there under the tree.  And I still feel bad, all these many years later, for my confused comment back to you, “but it’s rusty.”  I still, obviously, had yet to learn that there is nuance in the word ‘new.’

But it all turned out fine.  I remember that sunny, spring morning not long after when you took me out back and taught me to ride, running alongside before mounting, swinging my leg over it like a pony express rider.  It was a marvelous gift.  I bet you didn’t imagine then that I would forever be wedded to things with two wheels.  That they would be my sustenance across a lifetime.

I’m sorry about the man down the street who I peed on.  I know you told the people who came and told you that “Jeff would never do such a thing.”  It must have been a shock when you found out it was true.  I know it must have been embarrassing.  All I can say is that he deserved it.

I remember how you loved baseball.  How the Senators were always on the radio.  It was from you I learned to love that game.  To forever associate long summer days with the grandest of sports.  Spring training started this week.  Like you, I can’t wait for April, for opening day.  Lou and I will be going to a Nats game later this year, once it warms up.  We’ll be taking you with us.

I remember all the suppers you cooked.  All the times you baked biscuits.  I didn’t appreciate that at the time.  It was only later, as I grew older, that I began to have a dawning realization of how, simply, hard it must have been to cook those big meals for a family of six, every night, after working all day.  I’m still not quite sure how you managed it.

I remember the cakes you used to bake, and how you’d let me lick the beaters and the bowl.  That was always a special treat.  So much so that, one day when you weren’t there I pulled a box of cake mix down from the cabinet.  I had stood there and watched you do it many times, of course, adding the eggs and the oil and turning to it with the mixer.  So I knew what to do.  I mixed up that bowl of cake batter and then carried it outside, hid behind a bush where I could take my time, and proceeded to spoon it in my mouth like it was pudding.  I was sick in no time, of course.  It was my first lesson that you can, indeed, have too much of a good thing.

I remember the year I got that knot on my knee.  The tumor that, after a few months, they went and operated and took out.  I’m sure that must have been frightening for you.  Especially as a nurse, knowing what you did.  It was only years later, after I had children of my own, that I came to understand the awful anxiety that a parent feels when one of their children is sick.  It’s hard to put on that happy face for the sake of the child, to give them the comfort that all will be well.  But you managed it.  So well, in fact, that afterwards, when I described to Kent all the presents I had gotten while in the hospital – it was like Christmas in July – that the two of us spent hours trying to figure out how to grow tumors.  The best I could come up with was that jumping off the fence must have caused it.  So that’s what we did, spending an entire afternoon jumping off the fence in the back yard.

I remember the time I had done something wrong – I don’t recollect what – and you shushed me on outside.  I remember walking around, thinking about what I had done, and trying to figure a way to make it better.  I remember the surprised look on your face when I knocked on the door a little while later, with the bouquet of flowers I had walked around the yard collecting.  I had no idea of the impression on you that small act would have.  But you never forgot it.  Not a year went by ever after that you didn’t mention it.  It taught me that the impact of the kindnesses that we show others is not related to how big they are or how much they cost.

One of my jobs was cleaning up the dog poop that Heather left in the back yard.  Taking the shovel and digging a fresh hole along the fence line and then walking around the yard, picking up the piles of poop and walking back to drop them in the hole.  I remember the cool fall day when I had been putting off that – what I considered rather unglamorous – job.  You came out and grabbed the shovel and, with me in tow, began walking from pile to pile, energetically enjoining me in how to do it.  Heather had eaten something strange and her poop piles were speckled with these little dots of red and green and yellow.  “See how pretty they are?” you enthused.  I think I was all of six or seven at the time.  It was my first inkling that not even Mom’s are omniscient.

As we got older, Saturday mornings – Saturday being the day you didn’t have to go to work – became work days at home.  Kind of like those suppers that you made every night, it wasn’t until I was older that I began to have any kind of appreciation for the magnitude of keeping a household, with four young kids, while both parents worked full time.  At the time, I must confess, I didn’t much care for those Saturday mornings.  I’m sorry I never got very good at cleaning the bathroom, despite plenty of opportunities to practice.  I think, though, that Mops might have gained from my loss.

I remember the night, when I was perhaps thirteen, when you enlisted me to help go find Snu.  I remember your driving from house to house – all the places we could think she might be – where at each I would sally forth and inquire if she might be there.  I remember your turning to me after the third or fourth stop and pleading “Jeff, please don’t you ever do this to me.”

Hopefully, I didn’t.  I don’t think they called you the time I set the school bus on fire, and had the bus driver shrieking in panic, with my 8th grade science project.  So that doesn’t count.  And I won’t mention the other things.

Snu was okay that night, of course.  Snu was always okay.  As were we all.  If I could change anything at all, it would only be that.  That it’s all okay.  That we’re all okay.  That there’s no need for you to worry.

Mostly, more than anything else, I remember certainty.  The certainty that you were always there.  I remember when I was six or seven and woke up deathly sick.  By mid-morning I was burning up with fever.   You bundled me up in a blanket and picked me up and carried me out to the car, where we headed to the doctor.  I got one shot while the doctor was examining me.  And another out in the waiting room, as we were leaving, after I fainted.  In my whole life I cannot remember a day when I felt so sick.  And yet, through it all, the thing I remember most was the sense that you had it all under control.  That I was safe.  That it would all be okay.

And so that’s the promise I now leave you with.  That we’re all okay.  And that there’s not a thing for you to worry about.

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A ‘Bike’ with Four Wheels

January 15th, 2012

There’s a road I know – a gnarly, dangerous, technical, twisted route that rises up from Virginia’s Piedmont to cross over the Blue Ridge Mountains.  My father grew up on a farm a handful of miles from there and some of my earliest memories were riding that mountain road with him and my grandparents the several times a year when we would go down to visit.  That was back when families did that sort of thing – going out for a Sunday drive, just for fun.  We’d end up getting an ice cream cone somewhere.  Or else we’d hit the cold storage plant where even today, all these years later, I can still in my mind’s eye smell the sharp, intensely pungent scent of those apples.   Or – my favorite – we’d stop by the fish hatchery, where I’d hurriedly walk along the series of concrete pools where the trout grew.  Starting as couple-inch fingerlings, each pool in turn held increasingly larger fish.  I’d stop at the pools at the end, the one’s that held foot-long trout, and gaze down into them with unabashed blood lust.

Years later, as a grown man, I’d periodically come back to that road that fell from the heavens.  To ride it too fast on a motorcycle.  Or, fly rod in hand, to numb my legs in the trout stream that tumbled along beside it.  Or sometimes, just because.

In 1969, hurricane Camille – one of only three Cat 5 storms to hit the U.S. mainland during the 20th century – hit the gulf coast with sustained winds of 190 mph (and wind shears well over 200 mph).  After savaging the coast, it quickly diminished as it moved inland.  By the time the remnants of the storm had turned eastward and crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, it was hardly more than a tropical depression.  And yet… there was a perfect storm of meteorological conditions in the witch’s brew that came together there.  A roll-the-dice confluence of factors that took a thousand years to finally come up snake eyes.  The long and the short was that that long, narrow defile cut through the mountains, turned epic.  Nelson County received over 30 inches of rain that night.  A year’s worth, in six hours.  And that trout stream I had long loved turned killer.

Over a hundred people died from the rains, the flash flooding and mud slides killing many people while they slept.  A few hours later, Woodstock, that iconic rock and roll epic up in the Catskills that was a lodestone to my generation, turned all wet and muddy.  The remnants of the remnants.

There is a little crossroads village right there on that road.  It actually marks, for me, when I’m on a motorcycle, where the road starts to get serious.  It pretty much washed away during Camille.

About two miles outside that crossroad, my cousin Kent has a small farm that he inherited from his dad, my uncle.  It’s a place called Level Green and it may be the closest thing to paradise I know of.  The house, which my uncle spent half a lifetime – traveling four hours each way every weekend from his home in suburban Maryland – renovating from an old tobacco barn, has about the prettiest view I have ever seen.  The Blue Ridge Mountains rise in the near distance, with a subtle grandeur that just compels you to keep looking at them.  There’s a large pond my uncle put in.  It makes for lovely fly fishing only a few hundred yards from the front door of the house.

For many years my uncle, and then Kent, hosted my father’s-side summer family reunions down there.  Those were, for all that long span, one of the best days of the year for me.

Ten years ago, on one of those afternoon family get-togethers, while the kids were down at the pond swimming and most everyone else was congregated around the house talking and catching up, Kent wheeled from the barn a couple of ATV’s.  His cousin, who lived not far away, rode his over.  Kent broke out three cold Coronas, which we took long draughts from and then placed in the pouches hanging from the luggage racks.  I could see no other good purpose for the sacks than to carry cold bottles of beer.

Of course, I’d been riding motorcycles for a couple of decades and was very familiar with those.  But I’d never been on an ATV before.  Kent showed me the basic controls and the three of us did a quick ten-minute lap around the farm.  It was fun.  Very different from a motorcycle.  But very cool.  I did admit to a mild feeling of discomfiture when turning the ATV at anything above a walking pace.  Since it couldn’t lean – and thus gather its traction that way – the ATV felt loose and on the verge of falling over.

Back at the house, we ditched the empty Corona bottles and refilled the pouches with fresh ones.  Kent looked at me.  ”Ready to go over the mountain?” he asked.  I had no idea what he was talking about, but what the hell.  Tossing back another swallow of Corona, I grinned back at him.

“Sure, why not.”

My task wasn’t particularly hard.  All I had to do was follow behind Kent and his cousin and try and emulate exactly what they did.

The only problem was, there was this incredible sense of cognitive dissonance.  The things I was watching them do, a matter of feet in front of me, were clearly impossible.  To say the terrain was severe would be a vast understatement.  It was crazy.  In my mind, it was utterly unnavigatable except perhaps very slowly, on foot.  And yet, there they were, fording creeks and climbing boulders and going down this nearly vertical, rutted excuse for a trail.  With me following right behind them, shocked time after time that this machine I was riding was doing what it was doing.  I kept expecting to die.  And I kept on being surprised that it didn’t happen.

It was no wonder, then, that I breathed a sigh of relief after the 30-minute loop brought us back down to relatively horizontal ground.  When we got back to the house I downed another beer very quickly.

A bit of shock and feelings of mortality aside, I never forgot that experience.  I vowed that afternoon I would one day have one of those miraculous machines.

And now I do….

Honda Foreman ATV

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It’s a 2012 Honda Foreman 4×4 with Electric Shift and Power Steering.  500cc four-stroke single.  Liquid cooled.

ATV with Plow

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Here it is after I dropped the plow.  That’s a 2500-pound electric winch on the front.  To help with wood cutting, of course.  Since – far be it that fun would be my rationale for getting this machine – I decided I needed something to help get the wood I cut out of the woods and back to my log splitter.  Of course.  It seems that the Blaze King just keeps on giving.  And giving.

Honda Foreman ATV2

And who knows?  That snow plow might just do some business after all on that quarter-mile-long driveway of mine.  We’ll see.

I got it in Camo because I might even hunt with it!

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You get some sense here for how long my driveway is…

ATV in the Driveway

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Within five minutes I already had my first “oh sh*t” moment.  Blasting around the yard a little too fast, over a little bump and there’s a three-foot-long, 18-inch in diameter roll of chicken wire Ginny had left lying in the grass by the garden.  No time time to turn.  No time to brake.  Oh well.  Give it gas!  Karoomph.  Bzzzt.  So much for that roll of chicken wire!  I do begin to see why they recommend helmets with these things.

And, yes, they apparently do call them ‘bikes.’  Dunno why.  But they do.  So there you go – it can go in the bike shed with my other fun stuff.  (although it’s starting to get crowded in there.  I think I may need to kick some of the bicycles out)

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Of Blaze Kings and Princesses and Lovely Hot Fire

November 19th, 2011

“They sent the wrong model,” I said.

Even as I said it a tortuous disappointment washed over me.  Who knew that you could get so excited by the arrival of a new woodstove?  And thence to be struck with such despondent dismay when it all went awry?

“What do you want us to do?” Darwin asked, one hand still holding the heavy cardboard facing he had pulled away from the dark stove atop the pallet.

My mind raced.  The forlorn shape of my old The Earth Stove stood there in the darkness on the deck, already pulled out of the house.  It was done and I knew it.  I wasn’t going to ask them to lift it yet again and put it back.

It was going to be cold tonight.  And I’d be leaving in a day to go hunting.

I flashed back to the specs.  Would a couple of inches really make that much difference?

“Go ahead and bring it in,” I said, despondency morphing into resolution.  “We’ll make it work.”

.

Like a lot of things, this all started with only the whiff of a thought.  And not a new one at that.  Ginny and I had bounced around the idea of getting a new woodstove for years.  As usual, I just didn’t want to spend the money.

But then there was that Saturday a few weeks ago, right on the cusp of what I now know serious wood burners call ‘the shoulder season.’  A few clicks on Google and I sat there looking at an Osburn 1800.  Sixteen, seventeen hundred bucks.  Not cheap.  But not outrageous either.  And the more I looked at that stove with its nice glass front the more I said hmm.

I could see us sitting there on a cold January day with a pretty little fire going behind that glass.

Alrighty then.

A little more research and a little more googling tweaked it a bit.  I decided upon the Osburn 2300.  Then it was just a matter of reading some reviews and finding out where to buy one.  That search led me to hearth.com.

I spent a rainy Sunday afternoon mesmerized.  After years of burning wood every winter in our old, 70’s-era ‘The Earth Stove,’ I thought I knew everything – the very little bit – anyone needed to know about burning wood in a woodstove.

Au contraire.

Turns out there are layers of subtlety woven into what surely is one of the oldest practices of man.  It’s the confluence of art and wisdom and science.

And it turns out I didn’t know jack shit.

I figured the biggest difference in new stoves today – other than having draft controls that work – was that pretty glass door.

Turns out there’s a little more to it than that.

A couple weeks and a bunch of fun hours later – I truly did find all this wood burning lore fascinating – I knew a few more things about it.  And I no longer was interested in that Osburn.   I have no doubt it’s a nice stove.  But I learned a long time ago that when a bunch of really smart people in an arcane art profess a similar opinion, one is wise to listen to them.

And so down the rabbit hole I went.

After that it was just a matter of figuring out the details.  The King wouldn’t work because my chimney flue is only 6.”  But no worries.  There’s the Princess – just a little smaller, and designed for that 6” flue of mine.  And still wielding all the magic that Blaze King is famous for.

Now certain of what I wanted, and suddenly committed to biting the financial bullet to get it done, the next speed bump was… there are apparently no authorized Blaze King dealers in Virginia.  I had a couple of nice conversations with dealers across the river over in Maryland, and tried calling one in West Virginia, but finally shook my head and said ‘this is crazy.’

I called Blaze King, out in Walla Walla.  The nice lady there hooked me up with the East Coast distributor.  “No problem,” the friendly fellow there told me.  “How’s Fairfax?”

“That’s perfect,” I said, being as it’s on my way home from work.

And that’s exactly what I did.  Tony sent the order the next day.

I ordered the ‘Parlor’ model simply because it was a couple inches shorter than the ‘Ultra’ which first caught my eye.  Blaze King recommends 36 inches of vertical rise before you turn your stovepipe towards the wall.   I couldn’t make that.  Not even close.

And so my consternation ten days later when Darwin and Eric tore away the shipping cardboard of my new stove, an Ultra, there in the dark with their truck backed up to my deck, wondering what to do.

Bring it in.  We’ll make it work.

And so it is that the old The Earth Stove is gone.  It might have been dirty and it might have burned a mountain of wood in the process, but it brought many an hour of warmth and comfort, standing between us and hurt on how many cold and snowy days.  May it rest in peace.

And now ‘The Princess.’  Four hours into her maiden, virgin burn.  She’s already amazing.  Hell, she might roll this burn all damn winter.

I love her already.

The Old Warhorse

The Princess

One More Time...

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A Tale from the Thai Thai

August 24th, 2011

The backdrop to this story:  Sonny Page was the pseudonym of a friend of mine on one of the online financial forums we both frequented.  Sonny and his wife were realtors in Atlanta (she still is).  Many of Sonny’s earlier posts on that forum were titled “Tales from the Thai Thai” and in them he would provide anecdotes from their business and tidbits of wisdom about how real estate was doing.  Sonny died two months ago.

.

“Be careful,” the man said.

A small smile crinkled my mouth as I intuited his meaning.  “Sure will,” I nodded.  “Thanks.”

He reached down again for the pint bottle that rested on the ground.  Something clear.  Gin or vodka or maybe just straight-up grain alcohol.  What had been in the brown paper bag when he passed me on the street a few minutes ago.

The man had no way of knowing that I had already made my decision and that his warning wasn’t necessary.  But I appreciated the thought.

A month ago I decided to do this.  So it was that I put in for a week of vacation during the fourth week of August and began, from my office there on L Street in Washington, D.C., to make ready to be gone.

On Saturday morning I wheeled the Harley out of the shed, aired up its tires, lashed my pack to the rear seat, and pointed it west.  It was a trip I had planned to do for years.  Alas, one thing or another always seemed to get in the way.

Sometimes we wait too long.

When I was a kid I read a book by Virgil Carrington Jones about the Hatfield’s and the McCoy’s.  I was entranced.  The deadly feud that had befallen the extended kin of those two families – friends and neighbors all – seemed an astonishment to me.  I vowed then to one day come and visit the killing ground along the Tug Fork dividing Kentucky and West Virginia.  And finally, here at long last I was.

Ask people about Matewan and they’ll think of the movie.  Based upon the true story of the 1920 massacre when Baldwin-Felts detectives hired as armed thugs by the coal operators came to town to evict striking miners from their homes.  When they were confronted by Sid Hatfield, the town’s police chief and a distant relative of the Hatfields of feud fame, along with Mayor Testerman and a handful of angry miners, shooting broke out in the center of the little town.  When it was over ten men lay dead.

I had seen the movie, of course.

What people mostly don’t know about Matewan is that thirty-eight years prior to the 1920 massacre it was also the scene – just across Tug Fork and perhaps twenty paces up the bank on the Kentucky side – where three McCoy boys were tied to pawpaw bushes and executed following their fatal stabbing of Ellison Hatfield a couple days earlier.  Thus did the feud begin in earnest.

I had originally thought to spend a couple of nights in Matewan.  But as soon as I pulled into town after a long two days of riding I was disabused of that notion.  Cruising slowly down the street, I shook my head.

Parking the bike, I pulled my Leica from my pack and began a slow reconnoiter.

Nearly deserted, the couple of square blocks of the old town center held the air of despair.  Broken shop windows, going-out-of-business signs, and a general state of disrepair hung like a pall over the little community.  Seems the renovated train depot hadn’t been so renovated after all.

While I stood in front of the Post Office reading the plaque about the 1920 massacre, a man whom I judged to be about thirty walked past me holding a paper bag in his hand.  We nodded a quiet greeting to each other.

If the historian in me was disappointed and the humanitarian was dismayed, at least the photographer was intrigued.   Decay and dissolution are part of our world and can sometimes make for trenchant subjects.  And so it was that aspect had me circling the depot with an eye towards light and shadow.  And that’s where I came again upon the young man – this time ensconced in the back doorway of one of the non-descript businesses – with his fresh bottle on the ground and his warning for me.

No worries, my friend.

Back at the bike – relief sudden that no harm had come to it in the few minutes it was out of my sight – I mounted back up, considering my options.  It would be dark in another couple of hours and I hadn’t the haziest idea of where I was going to spend the night.  Adjusting the .38 S&W in my jeans pocket, I turned the Harley back up to the stop sign, paused, then turned north towards Williamson and Pikeville, themselves, too, part of the killing ground.

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Thirty-four years ago I was sent from the distant reaches of my home in Northern Virginia to a place not far from here.  I was a newly minted 24-year-old telephone installer for C&P Telephone Company, one of the old Bell Operating companies.  West Virginia had endured epic flooding that spring and the C&P divisions there needed all the help they could get.  Ostensibly, I volunteered.

The real reason is because I had the temerity to have a brief relationship with a woman in management.  Apparently, she had spurned the advances of one or more of the senior executives and that didn’t sit well.  That she would then take up with some kid – and a bargained for, union represented one, at that – was just too much for them to handle.  She got shipped out in one direction.  Me in the other.

Such were the mores of the time.  It didn’t much matter that she was single, I was single, and all the old guys that she rejected were married.  It was one of my first lessons in the wielding of power and influence.  And that such is often devoid of rationality or fairness or integrity.

The two summer months I spent in Beckley and Huntington were fascinating in lots of ways – perhaps stories for another day.  What I didn’t know at the time was that a fellow telephone installer from a different garage back home was also sent there.  They sent Craig to Williamson.

Craig and I later met once we returned home, became friends, and, of course, compared stories of our duty in West Virginia.  We both had seen hardship.  Abject poverty.  People stricken by economic circumstances that today seem hardly fathomable.

Craig had seen something else.  Near the town of Man, he had seen a retarded man chained up, like you might a dog.

Craig was a truthful guy, not known for exaggeration.  I never took his story to be apocryphal.  And so, back to the present, and after a good night’s rest in Pikeville, I rode back east into West Virginia and began my exploration.  I spent the morning visiting those areas that had long held my fascination.  Logan and Main Island and Blackberry Fork.  The places where hard-bitten men had once turned upon their neighbors with murderous intent.

And then I turned towards Man.

I found it a surprise.  Far from the tiny, stricken hamlet I had long envisioned it to be, I found it instead to be, if not overly prosperous, nevertheless a place of energy and hope.  Cruising slowly along the street, I passed a pawn shop with a row of compound bows displayed out on the sidewalk, something you don’t see every day.  Turning the Harley around, I came back and parked.

Inside, I first wandered to the back to look at the guns and the bows and the fishing tackle – turns out the store was a sports shop as well.  But what I found most intriguing was near the front, adjacent to the long rows of pawned goods.  A high-definition, flat screen television was set up a few feet from the register and displayed on it was a pretty young woman talking about the prospects of Bank of America.  On the bottom part of the screen was a stock ticker.

As I stood there for a moment putting my ear plugs in, I had to smile.

If that sounds condescending, I don’t mean it to be.  If there is a greater reason for my week-long road trip, it is to reset perspectives from the white-collar D.C. world I normally live in.  I have always found West Virginians to be among the friendliest and happiest people I have ever met.  As I traversed the state heading towards Tug Fork, I chose to ride the tiny roads that spiral across the mountains and pass you along from one tiny community to the next.  The consistent themes you see are shadowed hollows, streams, railroad tracks, coal mines, and tiny little towns built not as squares or rectangles or circles – but strung lengthwise along the road and the river, following the contours of the landscape just like everything else.  That, and stark beauty.  The mountains rise above you in sheer, breathtaking cascades, like cathedrals.

Entrepreneurship is everywhere.  Little shops, often operating out of people’s homes, offer everything from haircuts to taxidermy to tax services to any number of different kinds of repairs.  It’s not a world of business plans and ROI and continuing to grow a business bigger and bigger every year.  It’s a world of trying to eke out just enough dollars over cost to simply survive.

The irony is not lost on me that, notwithstanding the long efforts of these good people, many of them will make less in a year than some of us will gain or lose in a single day in the markets.

Choices matter, of course.  It does, indeed, make a difference what decisions we make.  But it also helps to be lucky.  To be born in the right place, at the right time, and to the right parents.  The fruits of capitalism fall in a vastly disproportionate heap to those who are.

But these good, proud people don’t often dwell on the challenges they face.  Places like Matewan and Williamson and Man and all the countless other burgs and hamlets across the land where things are tough… sure could use a break.  But at the end of the day what matters most is the soul and the spirit they bring to the task.  When I sat down in my hotel room that night in Pikeville and loaded the images from my Leica into my laptop, I noticed one shot in particular.  Down at the very edge of town, at the corner of Hatfield and Mate streets, the concrete portico held, in addition to the street post sign, a rustic wooden barrel, an elegant wooden bench, and a landscaped concrete square from which a tree grew.  All that, and a sprinkling of red flowers.  Small though that street corner might have been, it was nevertheless well-manicured and beautiful, the equal of anything you’d find in the finest of gated communities, without a hint of despair written in it.

How can you not love people who would do such a thing?

And so that’s the message I take.   To be a little bit more like them, to count my blessings.

And then, with that thought in mind and the day waning, I turn south.  I have something to do.

.

It takes me two days.  Rolling lengthwise across West Virginia, back into Virginia, then into Tennessee, down into North Carolina, and finally, at long last, dropping out of the mountains of northern Georgia.

To Atlanta and the Thai Thai.

Sonny’s old stomping ground.  The place that inspired so many of his great posts.  And so that’s where I sit, right now, as I type this.

What can I tell you?  Just like Sonny always said it was… it’s a lovely place.  The people are nice.  The food is outstanding.  The only thing that would make it better is if Sonny himself were here to share it with me.  With us.  We could laugh.  I could joke and tell him that in a couple of years when we’ve got Steven Strassburg back and Bryce Harper is up my Nats will have his Braves’ number.  He’d probably smile and say “yeah, maybe, but there’ll still be Philly in front of both of us.”  He could tell us once again about Silver Wheaton, whether he thinks Randy Smallwood is up to the task.  We could ask him if he thinks he’ll ever again be all-in on it.

Alas.  Alas.

There’s one last thing.  If he were here I’d smile at him and tell him thanks for that four-percent-of-portfolio flyer I took on Silver Wheaton back in January, just for fun, based solely upon his recommendation, without doing so much as an hour’s worth of due diligence.  I didn’t keep the position long – just a few months.  But it netted a nice little thirty percent gain.  And it says something about Sonny that that’s the only time I’ve ever done such a thing.  I probably never will again.

I’m not nearly the silver wonk that Sonny was, but I do have a handful of silver coins – again, which I surely wouldn’t have were it not for him.  Just before I left home I went to the drawer and extracted two mint 2010 one-ounce Silver Eagles.  It was the first time I ever really looked at them.  Sonny was right, in that last post of his.  They truly are beautiful.  I slid them in an envelope and put it in the pocket of my pack.

They’ve come a long way.  And, yet, not nearly far enough.

This morning, before coming to the restaurant, I stopped by Sonny’s wife’s office and left the coins, for their two kids.  It was the only thing I could think to do.

And now, having finished an excellent meal and my thousand-mile detour, I’ll head back outside and climb on the Harley and turn it north, towards home.

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The Magic Fly Rod

August 11th, 2011

Darkness was falling and I had to hurry. Nowhere was that more evident than the time it took me to find the eye of the number 16 Parachute Adams. Fifty-eight-year-old-eyes don’t let you forget some things.

But finally it was done. Pulling the tippet snug I could feel the stretch of the monofilament, the barb of the hook biting slightly into the flesh of my thumb.

I had already made a pact with the fishing gods. Just fifteen minutes. This one last pool. Then I’d walk out in the dark. It wasn’t lost on me that there was a tinge of foolhardiness written in that deal. I was risking the rod, after all.

But the limpid last hour of a late spring day has an otherworldly quality to it. I couldn’t help myself.

Kneeling abreast of the boulder at the tail of the pool, I fought the urge to hurry. “Just watch for a minute,” I reminded myself. “You can spare that much.” The head of the pool, forty feet away, was already shrouding into darkness, the light and the water merging into one. My squinting eyes walked slowly back along the rock ledge, the downed log, and the broken riffle, back to where the knee of my waders rested in the water.

“Okay,” I thought to myself. “One cast. That’s all you get. Right there.”

Twenty-five feet.

Looking behind me at the channel in the trees where the line would have to go, I stripped off several handfuls of line. Then with a flip of the rod tip I pulled the line into the air, the leader and the Adams following. I knew I couldn’t see the backcast so I didn’t bother looking. But I could feel the rod load with the same spun, silky smoothness – like a woman’s wet kiss – that it had all afternoon and that told me everything I needed to know.

And then the firm stroke rolled forward and the rod had that rightness about it and the line unfurled in a tight curl. At the last minute I released the last couple feet of line from my left hand and watched, satisfied, as the tan line fell quietly to the water. I couldn’t see the leader, certainly not the fly, but I knew where it should be. I had to force myself not to look there.

By all odds, it should have been a bust. No indicator. No way to see. Done.

But the afternoon had already convinced me that the rod brought something special to the game. And so, having slowly stripped two yards of line back as I gauged the drift of the Adams, I wasn’t surprised when some fathomless, preternatural sense, spun out of that graphite blank and down the line to the leader where the fly lay, caused me to lift the rod tip.

And instantly there it was. The weight and the sudden, shocking aliveness of the rod in my hand.

I didn’t land him. I had the pleasure of his acquaintance for the space of only a few heartbeats. Then I heard, and could vaguely see, the skittering jump and the sudden slack line and the aching disappointment.

But it was okay. As I reeled in the line and felt for the soggy fly so I could snip it off, I already knew I had something special. Carefully feeling for the ferrule, I gently prised the two sections apart. As I headed down the trail, slowly making my way back to the truck, I kept marveling at the rod. I didn’t feel embarrassed by the thought that came to mind.

The one that told me I had just been given a bit of bottled magic.

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Early October, four decades and change earlier, I’d have been hurrying the half-mile home from where the school bus dropped us off. Quickly changing, I’d grab my rifle and three or four rounds of Long Rifle from the yellow box of Super X that I carefully husbanded. Then I’d be out the door, anxious to get in the woods. It was squirrel season.

That year Outdoor Life published a story about the Anschutz Model 54 .22 rifle, imported by Savage at the time. I must have read that story a hundred times. I yearned for that rifle more than I can possibly describe. To me it represented, surely, the absolute pinnacle of what a squirrel rifle could be. Had the devil come knocking on the door with one in hand, I would have sold my soul.

Alas, my soul was spared. That Mossberg of mine ended up having to suffice.

And so it was. As I grew into a young man – and then yet into a middle-aged one – Rugers and Remingtons and Winchesters and Smith & Wessons and Colts defined the boundaries of the weapons I acquired.

They were fine, workmanlike weapons. They served me well. I have absolutely no complaints, no regrets. Indeed, I cannot think of that Ruger No. 1 I carried in the November woods for all those years without a smiling fondness. In the shadows of my memory, the place it mostly lives these days, it is like an extension of my arm and my eye and my heart.

But something happened. As I went wending through the years of the sixth decade of my life, I slowly came to understand a bit of wisdom: that the greatest commodity to which we might be graced is not fame or fortune, or power or riches.

It is, simply, time.

It seems a shame to not realize such a truth as a young man, when you have a nearly full bank of the stuff. But no, most of us come to that realization only towards the latter end, after well more than half our allotment has been spent.

It was shortly after acquiring that bit of wisdom, that I remembered. The dream from long ago.

And so I went ahead and bought that Anschutz.

And the first time I squeezed the trigger on a round, one in which the sear broke with an otherworldly rightness, I knew that kid in me from forty-some years earlier had been right.

Sorry it took so long.

And so it was that time was much on my mind when I called Tom Morgan. Tom’s Time. Gerri’s time. My time. Everyone’s time.

I knew, more than anything else, the vastness of what had been lost. What had been put aside by the choices I made as a young man. I knew, as well as anyone, that there was no more time to lose.

I had heard. Now I had to know.

Three-weight. Seven-feet, nine-inches.

When it came, after waiting forever, I sat staring at the long cardboard tube for over a day. That’s another thing that time-wisdom thing gives you… a proper appreciation for slowing some things down. Like lifting that glass with two fingers of good whiskey to your nose and reveling in the spirits there, before taking the first sip.

And when I finally did lift the package, heavier than it should have been, slowly pulling the tape off the end to extract its contents, I was prepared to be amazed. But even that did not prepare me.

I have never owned anything like this. It is exquisite, substantial, sublime in every possible way.

But, of course, that is what it is.

How about what it does?

The answer to that would have to wait a few more days. And then I had my answer.

It is magic.

first look

medallion

never to be sold

awaiting its destiny

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The Friend I Never Knew

July 19th, 2011

One of the curious side effects of our modern, connected world is that we often “meet” people online and then build a relationship with them – perhaps for a very long time – all without ever meeting them in person.  I have a number of such friends, acquaintances I have met on various photography, motorcycling, fishing, shooting, and finance online communities.  It’s actually a rich and wonderful way to hook up with people, literally around the world.

What doesn’t change is when something happens to someone you care about in those online worlds.  In that respect it’s little different than when it happens to “real life” people.  I remember the utter shock a number of years ago when a young woman whom I had befriended online was killed in an accident.  You log in one evening, just like you always do, only to be confronted with devastating, shocking news you never expect.  You might think that having an online relationship, versus a real-world one, would largely temper the feeling of loss.  But, amazingly, it doesn’t.  I wrote “Katie,” a story published in Sport Rider, about that first experience.

Now, again.  Sonnypage was a friend of mine on one of the financial boards I frequent.

I don’t know what to say.

I first joined this financial community in 1999 or thereabouts. Back then I was working for a dot-com start-up and had visions of quick riches and an early retirement. So I spent most my time on the, ahem, Retire Early board.

Sometimes things don’t work out how you think.

Fifteen months of unemployment later, a lifetime’s savings spent and a portfolio crushed, well, you see the world in a little different way.

I suppose it was probably around 2004, after being back to work for nearly a year – struggling back towards the light – that I wandered back, wondering what had become of that online financial community that had once teased me with its promise. The Retire Early board didn’t much interest me anymore. Somehow I found Mish’s old board.

And it was sometime during those first few weeks that I came across the first post I had ever seen from Sonnypage. Talking about Atlanta and real estate and the Thai Thai.

I didn’t always agree with his sentiments. I was already convinced that real estate was headed for disaster.  But what a writer! You could almost feel the love and enthusiasm for his profession coming off the screen.

And then a few weeks later he posted something very special and very personal… a long soliloquy of his time as a lieutenant in Vietnam. It was some of the finest, most heartfelt writing I had ever seen.

And from that moment on I always looked for the Sonnypage byline. He was the one poster – the only poster – whom I automatically read, regardless of subject line or number of recs. We have always been blessed on the board with an unusual number of savvy, smart people. The financial acumen here is infinitely higher than almost anywhere else I go. But Sonny was the best writer, bar none. How could you not love reading his posts?

2004 was significant for me in one other respect. For that was the year I abandoned my long-standing stocks-for-the-long-run way of thinking. An ardent equities bull for two decades, I began to see things that gave me pause. By the time the year ended I had moved 50% of my tattered-but-slowly-recovering portfolio into cash; and the other 50% into… gold.

That, of course, put me square in line with Sonny’s own evolving thinking over the next couple of years. As his real estate business slowed, and then tripped, and then expired, Sonny came to own the precious metals story. His storied move into silver – and Silver Wheaton – became legendary.  That’s when he and I had the first of our several offline dialogues – and where I first discovered that ‘Sonnypage’ was really a nom de plume. I had to laugh when Sonny first told me of its origin. But it was one of his favorite books – maybe his favorite of all time – and so I went ahead and ordered myself a copy.

One of the things Sonny and I shared was a love for reading. The brown truck from Amazon shows up at my house a couple times a week – to the mild consternation of my wife Ginny – and so there’s always a long queue in front of me.

Tonight, when I get home, I think I’ll pull out that old, yet-unread favorite of Sonny’s, and make that next up.

In the meantime, life is funny. You never really know what you’re going to get served up. Or what road you might end up on.

Many of us love finance and economics for their inherent fascinations. But there is a serious side to it all. A part of it that, should we get it wrong, holds the promise of much woe.

And that is… the number. How much do we need?

Retire too early, save not enough, and we see the prospect of exhausting that which we’ve counted on to see us through.

Retire too late, keep building it ever higher… and we may never get to enjoy it.

It hurts me that Sonnypage was much on the latter side of that difficult question.

Alas.

Though we might debate the merits of this strategy, or that approach, on a public forum such as this, in the end these are questions that come to us in the dark of the night… and must be answered by ourselves, alone.

We live today in a world of unparalleled financial peril. When I consider my portfolio and its 75% weighting in gold, I console myself that Sonnypage was a kindred spirit, both of us riding the very outer edge of today’s fiscal mores. I couldn’t have asked for a finer companion.

Godspeed my friend.

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Josh and Jenni

July 11th, 2011

Weddings are among the most special occasions that we ever get the chance to experience.  This past weekend my oldest son Josh married the most delightful young lady. What a lovely weekend…

We’d like to thank everyone for taking time out of your busy lives to help us celebrate this very special weekend.

You know, out of all the things that touch us in this world, few have the centrality, the importance of marriage.  Most of the things we do, most of the things we strive for, most of the things we attempt – indeed, most of the things we ever achieve, are, if we’re being honest with ourselves, as transient as a bird’s flight across that lake outside.

Marriage, on the other hand, far from being fleeting, has weathered the ages with a special discernment.  Unlike nearly everything else in our lives, it has resisted the vicissitudes of social fashion.  It has worn the cloak of time, remarkably unchanged, across the arc of centuries.  And so it is with us even today, as important as it was millennia ago.

I’m hard pressed to think of anything else so durable.  It is the only thing I know that has transcended time, culture, and geography.

And so when something so special, something that lives at the very heart of our humanity, comes to two young people whom we love so deeply, it is a blessing to be treasured.

We thank you for sharing it with us.

As for Josh and Jenni… I have only one tiny piece of advice for you.

Your life together will bring many joys.  And, yes, a few challenges.  Just remember that those things you hold together will always be far more important than anything you might hold apart.

May God bless you.

Josh and Jenni at the Lake

Chuppah

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The End of an Era

June 3rd, 2011

Well, it’s been exactly six months since I’ve heard from Kent Kunitsugu.  After eight years of being in nearly every issue – fifty-three stories – I think it’s fair to say I no longer write for Sport Rider magazine.

It was a cool gig while it lasted.

I’m proud of what I accomplished.  From the very beginning I sought to illuminate those motorcycling issues that I thought were important.  To describe the lessons, the joys, the often subtle nuances, that slowly presented themselves to me over three decades and hundreds of thousands of miles.  To share the bag of talismans I had been given.

More than anything, I tried to convey the magic – what it was like to actually be in the seat… running fast through nice country on a good bike on a fine road.  To wield well that incredible vehicle that so many of us love so passionately.

I’m grateful to Kent.  First for personally saving Sport Rider twice – initially in the late nineties when the original staff at the magazine was fired following an in-house imbroglio; and then a decade later after Andrew had his horrific crash up on the Angeles Crest.  In both cases Kent was called upon to put together nearly the entire magazine by himself, over many issues and for long spans of time – a herculean task that too few people today appreciate.

And then, when I came along in the summer of 2002, for being open-minded about things.  Previously, the Benchracing column had been reserved for guest authors – one-hit wonders who would drop a story and then be gone.  Despite that well-entrenched let’s-hear-from-lots-of-different-people-with-lots-of-different-perspectives formula, Kent didn’t hesitate in shaking things up – allowing me to begin dropping my byline there in the back of the magazine issue after issue.  With only a handful of exceptions, for those eight years the Benchracing column became the ‘Jeff Hughes’ space.

Not only that, Kent gave me room.  Most regular columns in most magazines are on the order of 800-900 words and run little more than a page.  Benchracing was no exception.  When, after my first two submissions, I asked for more, Kent didn’t hesitate.  He allowed me to wax loquacious with 1500 and 2000 and even a couple of 2500 word pieces.  To those who know the magazine business, and how precious editorial content  is, that was a rare gift.

I hope I returned the trust that Kent gave me.  I think I did.  I always – save one I-somehow-forgot-the-date-and-was-a-day-late-miscue – made my deadlines.  I always figured  Kent had enough headaches putting together each issue without worrying whether his contributors were going to get their stuff in on time.  I always tried to act like the professional we’re all supposed to be.

More than anything, I tried to craft good words.  To create stories that were polished and error-free and ready to publish.  To provide, in the words of the old newspaper dictum, ‘clean copy.’

And so why did it end?

I really don’t have an answer.  Kent hasn’t offered an explanation and I’m not inclined to ask for one.  But given the very challenged state of magazines and newspapers today, I could surmise that Sport Rider is facing declining ad revenues even as they were finally able to add a third full-time staffer – Bradley Adams joined the magazine late last year.  Since the amount of editorial content a periodical can publish is directly driven by those ad revenues, Kent may simply not have any space left over after he and Andrew and Brad have done their thing.

Just a guess.

Or maybe, as a friend of mine pondered in an email a few weeks ago… “Did Kent fire you? I  think he finally figured out you are a beer drinkin’, gun totin’, woman chasin,’ unPC, Harley rider!”

That might be it, after all.

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The Break, When it Comes, Will Come Swiftly

April 9th, 2011

2pm.  The sun is still high in the sky, only recently having begun its slow drift towards the horizon.  The heat and the humidity hang there like a blanket, seeming to hold the gray smoke that now drifts with a slow interminableness along the open fields.  The cannonading just finished, seeming to go on forever, has been the most amazing thing.  So many guns.  So much thunder.  So much fire and smoke.  Men on both sides marveled at it, knowing surely it was a prelude to something momentous.

Just east of Seminary Ridge, down in Spangler’s Woods, there is an awful, unspoken anticipation among the men lying in the shade of the trees, their stomachs empty because they had no appetite for lunch.  Even for an army proud of spirit, one now long-used to victory and with an unflagging belief in their commander, this thing seems an impossibility.  Peering out across the vast expanse of open ground  – nearly a mile – they are gripped by thoughts of how this thing must unfold.  They cannot escape wondering  of their own mortality.  Those who have caught a glance of Longstreet’s countenance cannot have been heartened.

And then come the orders.  The men stand quickly to arms, forming up in their regimental lines.  Standing shoulder to shoulder with their brothers and neighbors and friends, their bowels churning.  And suddenly they want to just be on with it.  To get it over with.

And so begins the long, terrible march.  My great grandfather is among them.

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A hundred and forty-eight years later, we all know how it turned out, of course.  An unmitigated military disaster for the South, Pickett’s Charge gave proof that even the most exalted of generals sooner or later make a mistake.  They fall victim to their own hubris.  They are consumed once too often by their own confirmation bias.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious to even the very least of military captains that Longstreet’s plaintive beseechment to Lee that “no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle could take that position…” was utterly correct.

How was it then that Lee could have been so blind?  How could he fail to see a picture so utterly clear, one without even a hint of mystery or obfuscation?

Sometimes you just shake your head.

.

Indeed.  And so it is, yet again.  Markets turn on one thing more than any other… confidence.  The confidence which comes from a tomorrow that unfolds in a predictable arc, based at least loosely upon what happened today.  The days turn into weeks.  And the weeks into months.  And the months into years.  And after awhile there it is – the willful certainty of what the future holds.  We pretend we don’t know.  We tell others that we harbor no such belief, that we are as open to whatever the future might bring as is an eight-week-old puppy.  But in our heart of hearts, where the truth lives, the certainty holds its candle up high.  It is the monument upon which our hubris is built.

In something much less than a hundred and forty-eight years, people will look back upon us in wonder.  They’ll look at the landscape that lay before us, like we today do of that long-ago field in Pennsylvania, and shake their heads.

They’ll see the 1960’s and an American economic goliath attempt – unsuccessfully – to fund both a long, drawn out foreign war and a vast expansion of social programs at home.

They’ll see the 1970’s and the object lesson that came from that attempt.  They’ll see, notwithstanding the savaged economy that was part of that lesson, an increasing belief that economics had been mastered.  They’ll see the removal of the last vestiges of a gold standard.

They’ll see the 1980’s and the start of something strange called supply side economics.  They’ll see, written in the numbers, the first bump in the graph, the first bit of intellectual snobbery, the notion that debt doesn’t matter.

They’ll see the 1990’s and the beginning of two decades of economic malaise that would grip the world’s second most powerful economy.  They’ll see the rise of activism by central banks, an accelerating belief that economies can be engineered, that recessions no longer need be part of the picture.  They’ll see the curious transformation of a central banker from geek… to rock star.

At the dawn of the millennium, they’ll see it all pick up steam.    They’ll see the advances in communications and technology which suddenly ushered in a multi-generational labor arbitrage.  They’ll see free money and a flood of liquidity and the sudden strangeness of home values rising faster than wage rates.  They’ll see the odd, incestuous business model via which rating agencies make money.  They’ll see the unfettered explosion of unregulated derivatives, synthetic vehicles whose notional values dwarf the world’s real economies – yet which remain an opaque maze.  They’ll see leverage, everywhere, on a breathtaking scale.  They’ll see the loosening of regulations which allow banks to do pretty much anything they want.

More than anything else, they’ll see debt.  Debt everywhere.  They’ll see whole peoples, entire societies, who for two generations had lived beyond their means.  Who consumed more than they produced.

They’ll see the Euro and instantly see the flaws in its concept.  How it could not endure.

They’ll see the demographic tsunami that approached.

And then they’ll see the first cracks, the first fissures in the firmament:  Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain.  They’ll see the rating agencies, newly chastened, floating sovereign ratings towards junk.

They’ll see broke states and broke municipalities.

They’ll see the largest bond fund in the world dump Treasuries.

They’ll see commodities reach generational highs.

From the periphery, they’ll turn their gaze towards the center, to the major economies of the world – and find it even worse.  They’ll look around for a bastion of sanity in the developed world – a single society that did not choose recklessness, one economy that was managed with prudence and care – and not find one.  They’ll look for the outrage and the opprobrium that ought to attend that fact, and find it scant.

In the end, they’ll look at the numbers.  The simple math behind it all.  The inexorable truth that lay before seven billion people, ignored.

And from that, more than anything else, they’ll shake their head.

The history will be clear to them.  The break, when it came, was sudden and swift.  Like an earthen dam crumbling away in a flood, inevitability made manifest.

It will be so obvious to them.  What they’ll wonder is how it could possibly have not been so utterly obvious to all of us.

And there will be no answer.

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