Jump

There he was, measuring the distance from the top of the big rock to the water below.  Twenty feet?  Twenty-five?  Whatever it was, it was far.  More concerning to him than the drop, though, was the depth of the water.  Ten feet maybe?  Twelve?  He stood there looking down, knowing there was no real way to gauge from above.  How much water do you need?  He wasn’t sure. 

You should just go.  You just saw Angel do it.  His anxiety level, which had been a low persistent buzzing in his body since stepping out of the forested canyon and onto the rocky promontory, jumped a notch in response to this thought.   He was filled with a nervous uncertainty, but he noticed that it lacked a sharp edge of fear, which surprised him. 

Little Mikey explores the swimming hole in 2007.

He’d seen this cliff many times before, but never from the top.  After all, this was his favorite swimming hole in all of Oak Creek, large enough and deep enough to swim in, with a wide, shallow area for the kids to play in.  And then there were the rocks on the far side, the deep side, that seemed like they were designed for jumping into the water.  There were three of them, in perfectly ascending order.  He thought of them as the Three Bears rocks, because one was too little, one was too big, and one was just right.  He’d jumped from the little one and the just right one many times in years past, but never big bear rock.  He’d never even considered jumping from that rock, even on the few occasions he’d seen others do it.  But he was there now, and he thought he might just do it.  He even felt, in some strange way that he knew was unconnected to any sense of masculine pride, an urging, like he was supposed to jump. 

His being there at all was really an accident.  The others set out from camp to go swimming a half-hour before, and so to save time, he took a side path through the forest, guessing it might turn out to be a short cut.  And it was just that, except the near-constant upward tilt of the trail brought him not to the water’s edge, but to the rocky outcropping overlooking the swimming hole.  Right to the top of big bear rock. 

Helpful Hints from the Annual Camper

Although I don’t like to admit it, I am an annual camper.  That means I am one of those people who take their families camping no more often than once each calendar year.  Being an annual camper isn’t the best kind of camper to be.  For one thing, you still have to acquire and maintain all the gear of a regular camper, and find a place to store it, only to drag it out for a few days of use every July. 

Worse, though, is how much the useful knowledge and expertise you gain from one year’s camping trip naturally decomposes over the course of the following eleven months, three weeks, and a couple of days.  For me, the arrival of each trip is met by a disturbing lack of recall.  When I was preparing for our trip this year, for example, I found a short-handled pry bar at the bottom of the box.  I held it up, wondering why last year’s me thought it was such a good idea to have a Wonder Bar (as they are sometimes called; there's a picture of one up top) dedicated just for camping.  It’s a strange feeling, to look at a box full of stuff and know that you’ve seen it all before, but not have a clue why some of it is in there.  Fortunately for this year’s me, I erred on the side of caution and threw it back in.  Turns out that a Wonder Bar is a very useful thing to have around a campsite, for prying wood apart, or pulling nails, and it makes an excellent tool for managing a campfire, which I then remembered was the real reason I had included it.   

Then there’s the disquieting sense of having to rediscover and relearn things you already knew.  Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to stare at a piece of rope and know, I mean absolutely know, that last year you knew how to tie a decent knot, but now, no matter what you try, it always ends up looking like you’ve just tied your shoelaces?    

Starting now, this annual camper is going to begin rectifying this problem by writing down some of the things I tend to forget from year to year.  This way, instead of watching the nylon canopy we put over our picnic table disintegrate in one big burst of flame and then think, “Oh, that’s right.  I’m not supposed to leave the propane on while I go off looking for a lighter,” all I have to do is read over this list next year and be reminded to TURN THE @#$%! PROPANE OFF!!!

Those who camp as infrequently as we do might find some of the following hints useful.  Everyone else, I assume, is reading for laughs.

Sedona, Oak Creek and Cave Springs

Just about every July, my brother-in-law takes his family up north to go camping.  They always go to the same place, the Cave Springs campground in Oak Creek Canyon.  Over the last six years or so (with the notable exception of last year), we have tagged along, at least for a few days each time.  Camping at Cave Springs brings a welcome break from cicada season here in Phoenix, and relief from all the symptoms of summer madness their ceaseless droning represents.    

Oak Creek Canyon is just north of Sedona, that internationally-recognized focal point of new-age flakiness set in the midst of some of the most amazing terrain on earth.  You’ve probably seen pictures of some of the more famous buttes and rock formations and the striking colors they display.  One of the things I like most about camping in Oak Creek is that we pass through red rock country on our way.  There’s nothing quite like the experience of arriving in Sedona’s environs after driving a hundred miles through the flat, washed out, non-descript landscapes of the desert.  It’s always a magical moment, coming around that final bend in the land of tan to see the first richly glowing rust-colored hills emerge in one fluid, constantly expanding vista.  It’s like that classic moment in The Wizard of Oz when the movie goes from black and white to Technicolor, or in the old version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, when they first step into the big room in Wonka’s candy wonderland.  It’s also something like an incredible strip-tease performance, only it’s Mother Nature peeling off her beige blouse, and taking off the horned-rim glasses, and unfastening her hair…  

Another few minutes of driving and the surroundings have completely transformed into something strangely wonderful.  It is a realm constructed entirely from enormous red blocks of weather-sculpted sandstone.  The world outside the car has abandoned its standard, bland palette in favor of one that focuses with an artist’s intensity on just three colors:  that signature color of the land itself, which we call red, but which is really an indescribable mix of pinks and reds and oranges and creams, and whose predominant hue seems to change with every elusive morphing of the light; the deep, dark, absorbing green of juniper and pine which cover the hills, stud the slopes of the buttes’ bases, and sprinkle across their tops like chocolate jimmies on a cupcake; and the color of a sky so sweet, so juicy, and so thickly blue that for some reason you can only think of watermelon, and how much you’d like to sink your teeth into it, and let those cool sky-juices run right down the sides of your mouth and drip from the point of your chin, puddling sky-blue at your feet.  Their combined vitality produces an exquisitely interlocking balance, a harmonization to some secret platonic template of beauty. 

It’s no wonder the vortex-worshippers and crystal gazers go ga-ga for it.  I know I feel different when I get there, although I’m not there to align my chakras or get my aura read.  But there is a mental shift that takes place upon arriving in red rock country, and for me it's the moment of release from all the work and stress that comes from getting the hell out of town.  Sedona is my visual confirmation that the escape is real, and now.  In turn, my body instinctively begins to relax, and my high-revving mind downshifts to a slower gear, automatically lowering the frantic spinning of my brain to a smoother, calmer rpm.

Dark Tower: ka and ka-tet

I’m in the middle of something I never thought I’d be doing:  reading Stephen King.  His Dark Tower series, to be specific.  If you had told me a year ago that at this time I’d be knee-deep in Stephen King novels (literally; I stacked them up the other day and they came to my knee cap, and that’s not even including the one that just came out, The Wind Through the Keyhole), I’d have said that you’re fruitier than a box of Harry and David Royal Riviera pears, nuttier than the pecan pancakes at Cracker Barrel.  But here I am, some 2,000 pages in, and there’s no turning back now.  In the world of the Dark Tower, there’s a word for such a thing: ka.

The basic story follows the quest of one man, Roland Deschain, who is seeking this mysterious and foreboding Dark Tower.  In the beginning, and for a long time after, we don’t know what the Dark Tower is (a place? a thing? Donald Trump’s office?), nor do we know why Roland is so anxious to find it.  What is clear is that he will stop at nothing, and will allow nothing to get in the way of achieving his goal.  It’s a lot like Moby Dick, except Melville doesn’t make you wait until page 200 to give you the first clue about why Ahab is maniacally pursuing this certain white whale.    

At any rate, in Roland’s world they have this thing called ka.  It’s like fate, or destiny, or The Force, or the will of the universe, or God, or Stephen King’s bank account, or something, and it plays a part in everything that happens to Roland.  Just like in our world, some people believe in it, and many people don’t.  Roland accepts the existence of ka, and even though it imposes great tragedy and suffering on him, he relies on it to know that it can lead him to this Dark Tower, where he must…do something.  I still don’t know; I’m only just starting the fifth book in the series right now, The Wolves of the Calla (and by starting, I mean I’m on page 175 of 900 or so).  There are two more volumes after this, and so far each book has been longer than the one before.  It’s like one of those hallways in your dreams that just keeps stretching longer and longer, and the more you run, the farther away the end of the hallway gets; which, now that I think about it, is a very fitting, King-like metaphor (I keep thinking of that scene in The Shining).

Missing Andy

It’s an interesting feature of human nature that, too often, it takes a person’s death to get us to fully comprehend the importance of that person to us.  You would think that after going through the process a few times, we wouldn’t keep falling for the same old prank, but we do.  It’s like we’re Charlie Brown.  We see Lucy holding that football, and we want to believe that she will let us kick it, even though we know, based on past experience, that it’s wrong to believe it.  So we go through our whole routine, and, well, you know what happens.  And then, as we’re lying on our backs with little Woodstocks circling our heads, we are confronted once again by the thing we somehow keep forgetting.  It’s not Lucy that suckers us into doing this every time; we sucker ourselves.  And the worst part is, even though we know it now, we also know that we will forget it again, probably right before the next time we come around a corner to see Lucy, holding an innocent-looking football and grinning sadistically…

In other words, it would be nice if we could fully esteem someone while they’re still around, when both we and they could reap the rewards of our heightened sense of appreciation.  But unless someone gives us clear and unmistakable advance notice of their imminent passing, there’s no real sense of urgency driving us to a full scale assessment.  It’s simply not the kind of thing that needs to get done today, like getting to the grocery store for milk, or washing the kids’ school clothes.  Our minds cling to the illusion of permanence, and we keep our daily stores based on the erroneous belief that things don’t change much from day to day.  I don’t know if there’s a whole lot we can do about that.  It’s seems to be the way we’re made.  Death just has a funny way of refuting that particular belief.  It also has a funny way of focusing our attention. 

These somber, perhaps even macabre, reflections come in response to the news of Andy Griffith’s death last week.  Strange that the passing of a TV sitcom actor would be the catalyst for such introspective spelunking, but there it is. 

Like millions of others, when I think of Andy Griffith, I think of The Andy Griffith Show.  And when I think of The Andy Griffith Show, I think of two things: the classic sitcom itself, and Griffith’s character at the center of it all, Sheriff Andy Taylor.

For my generation, The Andy Griffith Show is part of that great triumvirate of classic television sitcoms, along with I Love Lucy and The Dick Van Dyke Show.  Growing up in Phoenix, then-independent Channel 5 was the station that carried those shows, always clustered together like a prized, three-piece collection of rare Tiffany glass.  As I remember it, the classic order was The Dick Van Dyke Show at noon, followed by The Andy Griffith Show at 12:30, and I Love Lucy at 1:00.  There was a fourth (mostly Hogan’s Heroes, although other shows would sometimes supplant it for short stretches) that bridged the gap until Donohue started at 2:00. 

Throughout the seventies and eighties, no matter where you lived in this great land of ours, you probably had a Channel 5, and that station probably played the same trifecta of sitcom greats at least once every weekday on what appeared to be direct orders from God. 

Guest Post: Kent Yoder

Today marks another first for thunderstrokes:  the first guest post.  It comes courtesy of Kent Yoder, a friend and fellow blogger.

Kent and I came to know each other through our mutual friends, Rick and Karri.  Over the years, we would connect at the occasional get-together, and, of course, Rick and Karri’s seminal white elephant party at Christmastime.  I always appreciated Kent’s quick comebacks, sarcastic asides, and obscure references (three of my favorite pastimes); and as a result, we formed a kind of friendship by association, a friendship once removed, you might say.  For a short while, we actually worked together at the post office, and it was during that time that I developed an appreciation for Kent’s honesty and dedication, and learned that his sharp, dry wit wasn’t just something he saved for parties.

Last year, Kent was unexpectedly diagnosed with prostate cancer (really, is there any other way to be diagnosed?).  Over the last twelve months the disease, and its treatment, have taken a serious toll on him physically.  Seeing him, especially as infrequently as I do, is to be surprised all over again by the constant and relentless siege he is enduring.  He seems to exist within an increasingly narrow range of the physical spectrum, between manageable discomfort on the good side, and unalleviated pain on the bad.  Despite this, his positive attitude, sense of humor, and a certain, not wholly definable form of good-natured nonchalance - or is it humility? I can’t quite put my finger on it - continue to throw out sparks from under the inconceivable weight of fatigue and suffering.

Floating Lessons

I watched Maria struggle with learning to float on her back in our local public pool.  It was her second week of swim lessons.  The instructor had his hand underneath her, holding her up, and he was encouraging her to relax, and spread her arms and legs out. He was there, he told her soothingly, and nothing bad could happen.  Maria’s arms were flailing and slapping the water, and her rigid legs were sticking out of the water like two arrows shot from the same bow. 

This was actually progress.  She had spent almost all of the first week clinging to the side of the pool and wailing.  And last year’s lessons, when she was two, were a study in a small-scale disaster.  We were in the pool together for those classes, and she had absolutely no interest in anything but the bucket of pool toys the instructor brought with her.  Every day we tried, and failed, to practice blowing bubbles, dunking, and doing “big arms.”  Leg-kicking was the only area where she would make any effort at all, in short spurts, and only because we shamelessly dangled toys like carrots as a reward.  Her stubborn tendencies were on full display, as were mine, and many days our lesson ended early.  Sometimes very early. 

This year we decided to put her into the first level of real swim lessons straight away.  No toys, no holding onto Daddy, no getting out early.  Thus, the initial clinging and wailing.  

It might sound harsh, but we desert dwellers take the ability to swim seriously.  We have to.  In Phoenix, every other house has a pool, and for a long time we led the nation in child drownings and near-drownings every year.  When you live here, swimming isn’t a luxury; it’s a survival skill.  So, watching her struggle with putting her face in the water, or floating, while difficult, was a hell of a lot better than the alternative.

Of footballs and rock falls

Two seemingly unrelated stories appeared in the newspaper recently.  The first was a front page article reporting that Pop Warner football had announced some new rules designed to protect kids from the possibility of concussions.  The youth football league set restrictions on how much time could be spent on tackling and blocking drills in practice, and also eliminated “full-speed, head-on drills in which players are more than three yards apart.”  They are the first to formally place restrictions on contact in practices, a decision which was made out of the growing concern over concussions and their long-term effects.  A local parent quoted in the article praised the move, saying, “Anything they can do to help our kids be safer is great.”  

Also in the same section of the paper on that same day was a story about some closures within Yosemite National Park due to “falling rocks.”  Parts of several popular lodging areas are being permanently shut down due to the danger.  In a report, the Park Service said, “Rock falls are common in Yosemite Valley, California, posing substantial hazard and risk to the approximately four million annual visitors to Yosemite National Park.”  According to the newspaper, “officials went on to say that dangers exist in nearly every national park but they are particularly acute in Yosemite, given its unstable geology, which causes rock falls weekly.”  Yosemite geologist Greg Stock went on to say, “There are no absolutely safe areas in Yosemite Valley.”

If I had seen either of those articles on its own, I probably wouldn’t have thought much about it.  “Good, protect those kids from brain injuries,” probably would have been the extent of it, or, “Good, protect those oblivious campers,” and that would have been that.  But there was something about the way those two stories appeared one right after the other, and the way they both spoke to the issue of safety that made me stop and reflect.  And the more I thought about it, the more something began to emerge from the juxtaposition of these two stories that bothered me. 

Now personally, I welcome Pop Warner’s concern for limiting kids’ concussions, and I have no problem with the Park Service wanting to prevent campers from being flattened by boulders.  But the thing that struck me about these two problems was that neither one was new.  The dangers have been present all along.  For example, yes, we’ve learned a lot scientifically about brain trauma and its long-term effects lately, but we’ve also known for a very long time that getting smacked in the head repeatedly isn’t exactly healthy, haven’t we?   And those rocks have been falling in the same places in Yosemite Valley for eons, and only now have we decided to do something about it.  At some point, you have to ask yourself why didn’t previous generations have rules about how much head-hitting is allowed in football practice, and why did they build those cabins in the first place?

For Unlawful Concert Knowledge - Van Halen 2012

As Marty McFly, or any fan of Back to the Future can tell you, returning to the past can be a dangerous thing.  But the desire to raise the dead is a very human tendency, and it strikes all of us from time to time.  Just like Frankenstein’s monster, though, to act on this impulse is almost never a good idea. 

I was reminded of this, in all places, at a Van Halen concert last weekend.

Elizabeth and I, along with my sister Kim, her husband (and our concert blood-brother) Paul, and his friend Jamie, went to see the big VH.  June 16^th, 2012.

The year is kind of the crucial part here.

I went because it was Van Halen, the Van Halen I remember from our childhood. Almost.  This tour didn’t include burly bassist (and original member) Michael Anthony, whose sweet, cherry-on-top, high-register vocal harmonies were sorely missed, but still.  David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen, together again, after so many years of feuding and on-again, off-again ugliness.  This was the opportunity to recapture something I thought had likely been lost forever. 

Remember all those years spent wishing for this exact thing?

However, a lot of water has passed under the bridge; and after nearly thirty years, it’s not the water but the structural integrity of the bridge that tends to worry me. 

I don’t want this to sound bigger or more dramatic than it is.  I’ve never been a male groupie (moupie?) of the band or anything.  I didn’t live and die with every album and video drop.  I’m just one of what must have been hundreds of thousands of kids in the 70’s and 80’s who loved most of the Van Halen songs we heard on the radio, maybe enough to buy a album or two.  Okay, so I doodled my fair share of VH’s on school notebook covers and study guides, but certainly not more.  Their reputation as a live band was legendary, but I didn’t get to see them in concert during their glory days because I was only twelve in 1980, and concerts were still a few years ahead of me, an undiscovered new world a whole ocean away.    

I do remember the big ruckus when Van Halen went ‘electronic’ with 1984, and Eddie Van Halen, the band’s guitar virtuoso, jumped over to keyboards, apparently in a vain attempt to shame Billy Joel like he shamed so many guitarists in their chosen field.  But the band’s deviation from their heavy, guitar-centric sound didn’t bother me the way it did many hardcore fans; to me 1984 was clearly intended to be a collection of infectious, pop-song ear candy, and nothing more.  Besides, I had already decided that the band had peaked several albums ago, and pretty much everything after Van Halen II was just more mounting evidence of a slow, but not unenjoyable, decline.

Leaps of Faith: The Dorina Groves Interview

This interview marks the opening of a new front on thunderstrokes.  I’m expanding the scope of the blog to include interviews with people who have interesting, or even amazing, stories to tell about themselves.

I am particularly fascinated by stories involving a ‘leap of faith.’  I’ve taken the proverbial leap once or twice myself (in fact, the blog itself is one).  I am endlessly fascinated by others’ experiences, and learning more about where the impulse to make vastly logic-defying moves comes from, how it all comes into being, and then, of course, assessing the consequences.  I guess part of me is always seeking to understand things better, and leaps of faith can seem like mysterious, or incomprehensible, creatures.   

Dorina Groves’ story falls into the amazing category, at least for me.  This is a woman who walked away from the life she had built for herself, which included owning and operating a coffee shop here in Phoenix called “The Coffee Grove.”  A few weeks ago, she set out on the road in her ‘hoopty,’ an old camper she obtained in a trade for her car, to spread a message of hope to the people she knows are out there right now feeling lost and lacking faith in life and themselves.   That’s all you really need to know for the following interview to make sense, although part one of this two-part set provides a good deal of useful background information.   

I feel extremely fortunate that Dorina Groves made the time to talk to me, even as she was trying to tie up all the loose ends of the life she was leaving behind, and making last-minute preparations for the great adventure to come.  We talked for two hours after she closed the store on her last Thursday at The Coffee Grove.  In the moment, the conversation we had was inspiring, and I was inspired over and over again as I transcribed her words and then put together the interview you are about to read. 

At the end of part one, I posed a question that was probably foremost in many readers’ minds, along the lines of:  “What could possibly possess someone to get rid of almost everything they own at the age of 40, buy a dilapidated ’78 Dodge camper, and travel across the country to spread the word that, ‘If you have a pulse, you have a purpose?’” Here to answer that question, in her own words, is Ms. Groves.