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Monthly Archives: August 2016

Minneapolis Road Trip

Posted on August 31, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

Corn and Soybeans

I am back from a road trip to Minneapolis on family business. I will tell the family story later, this is about the road. People say I am a bit weird. I like road trips and enjoy not listening to anything but the sound of Diesel engines as I pass the trucks. I watch, listen, and as much as possible these days, think.

This time I was in a hurry to get there, so it was I-76, I-80, and I-35 to Minneapolis. I have done I-80 for you, and I-35 is more of the same-corn and soybeans. Some of the time it is soybeans and corn. The highway through Dezz Monezz is a bit dodgy, lots of turns and traffic.

The return trip a week later was more fun. I have known various people from Mankato over the years, but had never been there. I have always liked the name. The Native Americans were screwed in southern Minnesota more than many other places, being hauled off to Fort Snelling and imprisoned. We need to keep the memory of what happened to those people, here in the land of the free.

The drive from Minneapolis (I like writing that word, much better than MPLS.) to Mankato follows the Minnesota River for much of the way. The country is hilly and wooded, with farms on every available flat spot. Beautiful. Those of us from the West are a bit snobby about the Midwest, but there is beauty most everywhere you look. Except for the monotonous corn and soybeans. That country must be spectacular in the fall.

Close to Minneapolis, the Minnesota River is navigable. I like seeing ports in the middle of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine,_Nebraskathe country. West of Mankato, one finds corn and soybeans. My next goal was the Nebraska Sand Hill country and the Niobrara River. I followed the River from Niobrara to Valentine. It is farm country, but that River is always right over there.

Niobrara River

The River is a national treasure. Designated a Wild and Scenic River, it winds through hilly country and is bordered by woodlands. There aren’t many people in that area, another benefit. One can get a sense of what it must have been like before the European Invasion. I am sure it was better then than it is now.

Valentine has 2700 people, but is the commercial center for a wide area. It goes on my list of nice small towns. There are several River outfitters based around there for people doing canoe trips on the Niobrara. I still want to do that in the next few years before I am too decrepit for that sort of thing.

The Sand Hills

The Sand Hills. So beautiful I almost ran off the road while taking it all in. It is truly hilly there. The northern Sand Hills get quite a bit of moisture and there is water. Like western South Dakota there is a sense of space. You are in the West, not the corn and soybean Midwest. Do I seem a bit biased?

Cow country. U.S. Highway 83 from Valentine to North Platte is 115 miles of ranch country. Thedford is 58 miles south of Valentine with no towns. There is a school about halfway. There are ranches all along the way, every mile or half mile or so, and lakes. There is a national wildlife refuge there. Sandhill Cranes and a lot of other wildlife. No antelope. There should be, but there are probably too many fences.
As you drive south it dries out. In late August it is green around Valentine, but fairly brown closer to North Platte. We are talking about a huge area of northwest Nebraska, and as good cattle country as anywhere. We should be eating grass fed beef from there rather than corn fed feedlot beef from along the Platte. There would be less corn across the Midwest.

The wind blows out there. I saw five or six huge wind farms making power in Nebraska. There was one in southwest Minnesota. I saw none in South Dakota or Colorado. The sun doesn’t always shine out there, but the wind almost always blows, even at night. All that wind from Wyoming has to go somewhere. I saw a number of trucks hauling those long wind vanes, so the wind power business is growing. Wind makes more sense than solar in more northern parts of the country. Home rooftop solar is good, you can’t have too many wind turbines in town. More wind power, less coal trains rattling through Alliance.

Back in Colorado, along the South Platte, there is lots of history. Gold rush wagon trains, Indian wars, farming and cattle. One of the small towns is Iliff, named for an early rancher who got rich raising beef for the miners. He was another of those Methodists who had a big role in early Colorado. Evans, Chivington. Iliff founded the Methodist seminary at Denver University.

I have to get out to Julesburg and poke around the history there then go up to Scotts Bluff on the North Platte, with a stop at Fort Laramie on the way home. Another road trip.

Posted in Current Activities, Minneapolis, My Story, Niobrara River, Road Trips, Sand Hills

Jude Stoner

Posted on August 13, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

For a high school with less than 300 students in the late 1950’s, Fruita High School had some unique personalities.

A year or two ahead of me was Jude Stoner (not his real name, but close ). He was one of those people with exactly the right name. He wasn’t tall, but was well built, dark, and exuded self confidence. He didn’t participate in school activities, but wasn’t what we would have called a hood. He also was not a stoner.

I don’t know how it happened, but Jude ended up as a hairdresser in Aspen. The Aspen ladies must have swooned over him, a rough-cut, good looking guy doing their hair. In those days there wasn’t much going on in Aspen in the summer, so Jude did other things.

Ruedi Dam and Reservoir

At the time, the Ruedi Dam was being built 15 miles up the Frying Pan River from Basalt. That is not far at all in Isolated Aspen terms. Jude got a construction job on the dam. Good money, keep in shape, have a break from the hair salon. The ideal gig for Jude, as he was an experienced construction hand.

The two most beautiful mountain valleys. In my opinion, are the Frying Pan Valley from Basalt to Hagerman Pass over the Continental Divide. The other valley is the Crystal River Valley from Carbondale to Marble. Jude had a fine place to do a summer’s worth of construction.

Construction workers are a rough cut bunch, not known for tact or social niceties. Construction sites, especially in Western Colorado in the 1960’s, were strongholds of homophobia. Gay men anywhere in the rural West almost always migrated to the cities. Denver, for example, has had a significant gay community for a long time, drawing men from all the neighboring states.

Downtown Aspen 1960’s

Well, here was an Aspen hairdresser doing construction work. The word got out Jude was a hairdresser. Now Jude was kind of a formidable guy, so my guess there was a lot of talk about him behind his back. He had to have been aware of the talk.

One day it happened, one of the real men? on the crew called Jude a “Queer Hairdresser”.

Jude broke his jaw with one punch. No more talk.

Posted in Aspen, Fruita, Ruedi Dam, Stories

Arkose, Sand, and Loess

Posted on August 12, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

Geologists like to give common things fancy names. Aeolian Deposition means wind-blown stuff from the mountains on the land. Here in Eastern Colorado the South Platte and the Arkansas Rivers are in the process of hauling everything to the Mississippi Delta. This is kind of a slow process, but a lot of stuff is already there. Lots more is on the way.

The material coming off the mountains is in three general categories: gravel, sand and dirt. The stuff gets deposited, may get buried long enough to form rock (Castle Rock), but most of it sits around for a while, maybe millions of years, before it is washed into the streams and heads east.

Castle Rock

Along the base of the mountains are two kinds of deposits. As the Rockies were rising, they eroded almost as fast. Out mountains are mostly the roots of what was once there. During wet periods, like when glaciers were melting, the chunks coming down were pretty angular. The geologists call the deposits arkosic. The Castle Rock Conglomerate is a good example. At other times the erosion was so rapid that a mixture of angular rock and rounded river gravel were deposited together. Rocky Flats between Golden and Boulder is an example.

There are huge gravel deposits at the mouths of the many canyons emptying onto the flatter land where all the people live today. Boulder didn’t get its name by accident. I briefly worked for the telephone company in Boulder. I was on a crew burying telephone cable in new subdivisions. I ran a backhoe and a cable plow, a small bulldozer with a ripping tooth in back digging down about thirty inches and paying telephone cable out the back of the tooth (or plow). In some places, we had to bring in a big D8 Caterpillar dozer with the power to rip through all the hard packed gravel so my little John Deere 450 dozer could do its job. It’s sort of a Mini Cooper versus a Hummer.

All those lakes you see near all the streams exiting the mountains are old gravel pits converted into water storage reservoirs. You can find gravel in the South Platte River bottom in Nebraska that came out of the Rockies. As the gravel is carried along, it erodes from angular pieces to progressively more rounded rocks, eventually becoming sand, clay, or just plain dirt.

The flat country at the base of the Rockies is a patchwork of older rocks exposed by erosion, gravels and arkose near the mountains, then lots of sand, then dirt farther out. A geologic map shows the patchwork. Nature is relentless in its processes, but they are not uniform.

Denver’s Sand Creek

Eastern Colorado has several Sand Creeks, carrying the sand that blew out onto the flats to the South Platte or the Arkansas. You can identify the sand deposits in Eastern Colorado because they are cow country, not suitable for farming. My favorite Sand Creek runs from northern Aurora through some of the old Stapleton Airport property and on west to the Platte. The Bluff Lake Nature Center can give you a good look at the sand and the loess. Bluff lake itself is down along Sand Creek where you can play in the sand. The trail leading down to the creek and lake drops down the bluff from the parking lot. The bluff is loess.

Bluff at Bluff Lake Nature Center. Loess

Under most of the eastern plains is the Pierre Shale or the Ogalla Formation. The shale can be farmed, and the Ogalla holds all that rapidly diminishing irrigation water. The surface is mostly stuff the wind blew in. The dirt the wind carries is called loess, a German word. The soil is fine, and in some places can be hundreds of feet thick. That dust on your car after it sits out in Denver? It will either be Mississippi mud or loess. Well, even the loess will be mud someday, it is just being delayed for a while.

Posted in Colorado, Environment, Geology, Loess, Stories

Cops and Repression

Posted on August 12, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

Cops are a constant presence in our lives. When I was a young kid, the town marshal in Fruita drove a red Ford pickup with no lights or siren. It wasn’t long before there were real police with a cruiser. I have a lot of interactions with police officers because I am a lousy driver.

Cops

The first really negative interaction was during all the demonstrations following the invasion of Cambodia in 1968. We peace creeps stood across the barrier from helmeted Fort Collins police officers who could hardly restrain themselves from bashing heads. They were putting up with a lot of verbal abuse. The cop across from me was hyperventilating. Fortunately, nothing happened.

Cops today are shooting people and getting shot. Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore showed the nation how the police are an instrument of repression in some cities. Fortunately this is not always the case. After 9-11, Denver Water placed armed guards at the gates to the water treatment plants. Most of the guards were retired or off duty Denver Police Officers moonlighting. They usually worked one shift per week, and I got to know many of them at the plant where I worked.

It was a shock to me to discover that most of them were really nice guys. That did not fit my stereotype of cops. A couple of them, however, were not nice guys. They were right wing bullies filled with fear and anger. The hate they projected was almost physically tangible. They did not make eye contact and their speech was formal with an undercurrent of menace.

I am sure every police department of any size in the land has a contingent of those fellows. They are the enforcers, using violence to deal with undesirables. They are relatively safe form reprisal because of the need for police to provide mutual support to one another. There is a code of silence and even lying to cover for a fellow officer. This is more common in some departments than others.

These men serve as instruments of repression, usually to minorities. Their self-appointed job is to keep undesirables in line, using any method they think they can get away with, including murder.in the USA, their targets are usually black, with Latinos and other minorities as alternate targets.

Ferguson Riot

At one time, most of the racial repression came from groups like the Ku Klux Klan, with their cross burnings, beatings, and lynchings. Today, those groups have waned, and another means of repression has replaced them-rogue cops and rogue police departments. Cops and police departments have always been part of the system of racial repression, but now they are the default lynchers. There are no cross burnings on South Table Mountain in Golden these days.

This system has run into trouble because almost anyone with a smartphone can record police violence and get the recordings to the media. The code of silence is broken. In times of unrest like today, the violent incidents are on the television screen every evening, just like the atrocities in Vietnam were in the 1960s. Change in technology has made those conducting the new lynchings vulnerable. The old system of other cops and prosecutors allowing the lynchers to get away with their brutality is not gone, as Baltimore has recently shown, but it’s days are numbered.

It may be that one factor creating the Trump phenomenon is the breakdown of repression. The white working class, already hit by the loss of industrial jobs, is facing competition from people who were once sentenced to remain at the bottom. White working class men once had those minorities to look down on. Now the minorities are on the City Council and the police department.

Posted in Agression, Cops, Fear, History, Polarization, Politics, Race, Stories

At the Crossroads in 2016

Posted on August 2, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

This is a guest post by my wife, Carol Leavenworth.

At the Crossroads in 2016

By Carol Leavenworth, LPC

Most of the time I try to ignore politics. But this year the presidential campaign has become so bizarre that I’ve been watching with a kind of morbid fascination. How did we get here? How could a man like Donald Trump possibly have become a serious candidate for President of our country?

As a Jungian therapist, I have to ask myself how I and other politically liberal people may have unconsciously contributed to Trump’s success. Observing the contrast that emerged from last month’s political conventions between the Democrats’ positive vision for the future and Republicans’ negative and pessimistic view, I think I have begun to understand why these two wildly disparate standpoints appeal to such vast numbers of Americans.

Garden of Eden

As a psychotherapist I know that the loss of the fundamental safety and comfort that we enjoyed while we were held in our mothers’ wombs is a universal human experience. At birth we are thrust into a world of uncertainty and fear where our needs will never again be met instantaneously and our very survival is not necessarily assured. And life continues to become ever more precarious from there. The story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden reflects this experience.

Life outside The Garden is filled with danger and risk. Growth is impossible unless we embrace this reality. We must leave our mother’s side and venture out into the world – to school, to work, to new homes that we create for ourselves. That most of us do this pretty well doesn’t mean we are always comfortable with our lives or that we necessary feel all that safe.

But we want to be. A primary motive driving us throughout adulthood is to find the lost wholeness, safety and comfort that some small part of each of us vaguely remembers from the far distant past.

In tough scary times like these, this drive is even stronger. To allay our fears and satisfy deep needs to feel safe and whole we are inevitably drawn to leaders who encourage us to lay down our burdens and give over our struggle to a strong parent figure who will make it better for us. This is a profoundly human impulse, and today Donald Trump is the man who is appealing to that impulse.

Well good, you might say. Why not let him do it? The difficulty here is that it won’t work. We can’t resolve life’s important challenges by giving in to shadowy fears and returning to old dependencies. Going back will not help. In fact whenever we act on these regressive impulses, we risk ending up worse off than before. Think back on your own life. Most if not all of us can find instances in our own personal histories when we’ve chosen what we thought was the safe road only to find ourselves with more problems than ever.

But if we can’t go back, what will work?

It was First Lady Michelle Obama speaking at the Democratic Convention who reminded me of the viable and healing way through dark times. Her remarks swept away the negative and pessimistic mindset that I had fallen into as I watched the nightly news reports throughout the winter and spring. Hearing her, I recalled to myself the truths that I try to impart to others in my work as a psychotherapist. It is the choices we make from our best selves that are the ones that enable us to move forward in resolving life problems, big and small. Even more importantly these are the choices that build the inner capacities and strengths that will ultimately bring each of us to a new experience of the abiding wholeness and safety that can arise only from within. We heal ourselves and the world in the process of creating, developing and expressing our best selves.

Crossroads

The enormous divide that we see between the two major candidates for President tells us that we have arrived at a great crossroads. Eight years ago we made a courageous decision to elect the first African American man to the Presidency. He pulled us back from the brink of worldwide economic ruin and brought us here to the time when we are asked to make the even more courageous decision to elect a smart, politically savvy, seasoned and progressive woman to be our President.

Hillary Clinton points us to a future where we face the challenges that confront us head on rather than building walls and hiding behind them. She invites us all to work together to secure our futures. She affirms that none of the tasks before us can be solved by one person or one group. She does not promise to take care of us. She promises to lead us. And she asks us to dig deep once again and act from our best selves.

When we do, we help the world and we help ourselves. Acting on our best selves out in the world feeds our souls and contributes to the long and difficult task of rebuilding the inner wholeness that is the true goal of our searching hearts.

Posted in Fear, Jungian Therapy, Politics, Stories, Terrorism, Trump