A December Story

                                              A December Story

     A bad piece of country lay ahead. We should have got across and delivered the packs we carried hours earlier. But the going on this brute of a barren mountain had been slow and hard. Now the night was coming down, darker and colder by the minute. Going on was more than we were up for. We thought we had not been doing too bad, the four of us with our packs and our dog, until the dark and cold stopped us in our tracks. And,to make things worse, we felt half lost, unsure of how to go on. So, we began to look for a place, protected, out of the punishing wind, where we could make camp-- such as it might be--and hunker down for the night.

MY GIFTED EARS

 

                                                 MY GIFTED EARS

    I have a gift. It has been given me to be able to wiggle my ears. I can wiggle them in concert or one at a time, and to nearly any beat!  I have tried to be modest about this ability.

   But, sometimes, when I am alone, it gives me considerable pleasure to use my ears to beat out that great old hymn of empire, Rule Britannia. Sometimes I find myself “playing” variations on it.

   But there are other significant uses for wiggling ears.  Occasionally, I would get them moving up down and crosswise while advancing a particularly pithy idea in a classroom lecture. The students who were paying attention to what I was saying did not notice my ears. The others, desperate to grasp at any possible relief from their boredom, would usually give way to giggles.

   Or, an overwrought student, baring his soul over some crisis or other, could be restored to her felicity by noticing, through her tears, that my ears were going like sixty.

   They really can go!

   Which reminds me, about playing a tune: I am able to play the kazoo. My trombone kazoo on the ledge above this Mac is a treasure. I should tell you that I am self-taught on this wonderful instrument and learned its rudiments as a little boy by singing through a lilac leaf. Some there are who imitate the kazoo by holding a piece of cellophane over a comb and playing away. Those who play the swinette, do so by holding that comb tight over a pig’s ass and singing hard.

   I want you to know, too, that I am most likely the only one you know who has played the adagio, third movement of Mozart’s G-minor quintet in public on the kazoo. As I recall, that particular public was too stunned to respond.

   I played in earnest and reverentially, having been taught as a freshman in college that this Mozart quintet was the greatest of all music.

   Today, I see no reason to think otherwise and hope that my rendition on the kazoo would have given Mozart a moment of glee in the midst of his heart- break.

    But, I must confess that, try as I will, I cannot move my scalp.

Beginners, uncertain of their musical prowess, or those who may want to improve their embouchure, may want to consult the definitive, The Complete HOW TO KAZOO,  by Barbara Stewart.

Kicked Out

 

Dear Readers of this blog:

    At the end of summer, Betty and I wanted to drive the Brainard Lake loop above Ward and so presented our life-time pass at the station below Red Rock. The usual jolly, out-sourcing, privatized lady in her faux uniform noted our pass and handed us a childishly written green half-page to the effect that these jolly outsourced old folks, now in charge of our public lands, would no longer admit us to these public lands on our federal passes.

   They begged that they could no longer “afford” so to admit us card-holders, even for a fifteen-minute drive-around. And the US Forest Service, now a jolly city ”business”, signed off on this infamous new policy.

    From the time, now several years back, when the Forest Service abdicated service and turned these public lands over to these privateers, I felt anything but jolly about it and always presented myself at the gate as angry and sour.

    But the ladies remained jolly to the end and professed to know nothing about the “public” nor its lands. Nor did they appear to care. They wanted only to be “paid off”.

   And now, this season, we are handed this “green slip” of pathetic pleading on behalf of the poor corporate outsourced jolly workers.

    Allow me to vent my spleen and share with.

                                                    ~~~~~

Boulder

October 25, 2012

Steve Werner,

    American Land an d Leisure Company

Paul E. Cruz,

     United States Forest Service

Sirs:

    I have before me the green, half page of poor construction about Golden Age access to the Brainard Lake area. This insult was handed me of late at the Red Rock Lake control station.

    I knew, when the Forest Service decided it was no longer a “service” but a provider of a product to its “customers”, that we were facing the end of our traditional uses of the forest. The corporate beast engulfs everything, even our public lands.

    It may have been in 1939 that I first saw Red Rock Lake, not to fish, but to search for a salamander with too many toes for my teacher’s research at C U. It was a tough to get in there in those days-- gorgeous, remote, with that mysterious stone lodge on the east side.

  And I recall vividly, in 1952, taking a six and one-quarter pound rainbow from Red Rock on a dry, size 16, Red Variant. The fish caused a sensation in the Denver Press.

    My wife and I have gone back time and time again over the decades; until, that is, as anglers, we were turned into  “customers”-- and effectively run out by rapacious privateers.

    It is difficult to find words for their effrontery-- or for the disintegration of the Forest Service from its historic role in the American Ideal of public lands.

    My revenge shall be to blog this letter and never to go up there again. No more that annual drive around the Brainard Loop and back out. Where once, with an almost child-like confidence in the splendor of our Rangers, and with that youthful excess of energy and stamina for fishing, we now feel reluctant to leave the safety of our car.

     I wish American Land and Leisure Co. a rapid economic down-turn back to darkest Utah or wherever it hides out. The work it does is not wholesome.  And of the Forest Service: I hope that it may somehow get out of  “business” and back into SERVICE of those sacred lands of ours.

    I’m yours, a lost customer

Gordon. M. Wickstrom

Bouldercreekangler.blogspot.com

More on the Greenback

 

                          

This morning’s Daily Camera (Nov.5, 2012) ,with its customary insouciance,  carries a column by Ed Engle on the fortunes of the greenback cutthroat trout. Ed takes the party-line of the University of Colorado geneticists who have sought the birth certificate of the trout that for three decades has been thought to be the long lost authentic greenback. What they have discovered under their microscopes, they believe means that the greenback that we only thought we knew is, in fact, a forgery.

   I have been writing on this subject for two decades myself and now feel called upon to weigh in again on behalf of the greenbacks we know and have fostered. You may like to read on….

My Zinnias Are Using Me

 

                   

 out front every summer I plant a big, long, four-row bed of mixed zinnias. Like Katicha’s right elbow, they are much admired by connoisseurs.

   The thing is, for this essay, is that these zinnias have been grown from their own seed for at least eighteen years. I take the seed from the dead heads of the flowers, as I did this morning, to keep them in a cool, dry place until next May-- if the Lord lets us live….

   This morning I thought more carefully about what I was doing out there on the deck on this glorious October morning, pulling the dry petals with seed attached  from the dry blossom. I must then break the seeds free from the chaff of the petal.

    Lets see… if there is any one thing we may all agree upon, it is that the intention of each of those seeds is to fall to earth next spring in a rebirth. A new life. Right? Such is basic botany.

    It occurred to me also that I, ME, this morning, was as essential to my seeds new life next year as was the soil in which they were lodged for the sun and water to nurture them.

In my fingers was the life or death of these seed. I selected them, naturally or no.

    Then a funny thing happened, otherwise I should shut up and go do something useful.

    You see, I have one variety of zinnia that wants to dominate the rest. I like it a lot and call it my pom-pom for its pronounced and fine ball shape. It’s pink, a rose pink, that I like, even if my father did advise that pink was the “unnecessary color”. I’d protest to him, if I could, that this abalone pink is a strong and useful tint of an all but necessary color.

    So, there I was this morning faced with a box full of dead zinnia flower heads, I flew to my work only soon to realize that those pom-pom pink heads were coming to my hand way more frequently than the others. That variety was demanding precedence and getting it. Not only because they were plentiful, but because they gave up more mature, darker gray, spade shaped seeds than did the random others. The pom-poms harvested much more efficiently. They were making certain that, through me, by using me, they could dominate the garden next year and so fulfill their reason for being: plain old reproduction. They were making me a part of their life process. Without me, they were done for.

    But then there were heads of other blossoms: reds, of several hues, lesser pinks, purples, a few yellows and even fewer cherished whites. I really wanted their seed in order to relieve the heavy pinkishness of the bed. As I began to process the seed of these  “other” blossoms, I suddenly realized that they too were using me in the process of their destiny as a variety.

They were forcing me to be extremely careful of their seeds, almost to the individual seed. In this way they would live to bloom another season. They have their way of getting round their yellow and white weakness.

    Years and years ago, I was in thrall, and in many ways still am, to George Bernard Shaw, to be known hereafter as “GBS”. I was much moved by his evolutionary thinking and his effort to side-step Darwin in order for human consciousness  to enter, as a force for development, the competitive field of the species. 

    GBS championed Lamarckian theory and was highly criticized for it. I tried to keep the faith and, today, believe, in my foolish, fond way, that I and my zinnias are making a sort of point for Lamarck-- evolution in miniature, and saving a lot of money into the bargain. 

   Have you noticed how few zinnia seeds there are in a two-dollar pack? I’ve harvested a small fortune worth and will share some of them, even the pink pom-poms.

On the Thirteenth Day of September

    Serious Pleasure

    It's said that Denver is now the capital of American fly fishing. Helping to prove it, two of us over-seas members of the venerable and premier London Flyfishers’ Club, are hosting the first formal Flyfishers’ Club dinner ever held on this side of the Atlantic.  This historic event is taking place this week at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. 

    G.William Fowler of Odessa, Texas, and I are in charge. My lawyer friend Bill Fowler has written a definitive account of this gentleman’s social club in London and himself frequents the club’s rooms in Brook Street.  Some will recall that I once wrote and produced at the Library a play imagining a furious debate between the two most famous members of the club, Frederick M. Halford who gave us the dry fly as we know it and G.E.M. Skues. He shook the trout fishing world by introducing the wet fly and nymph to the hallowed chalk streams south of London in the 1890s.

    Continuing the club’s tradition at such formal dinners (this one afar from London at the splendid Brown Palace) Boulder’s Anders Halverson, amid some little ceremony, will address the company. Halverson is today’s most provocative and fascinating  writer on trout and their geographies. His book, “An Entirely Synthetic Fish: How Rainbow Trout Beguiled America and Overran the World” changes minds everywhere it is read and predicts deep change in managing and angling for trout. It is as critical an issue as the virulent Halford/Skues stand-off at the club in London over a century ago. Harry Briscoe, President of “Hexagraph  Fly Rods” of Houston, will respond to Halverson’s remarks. 

   Both Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales, the club’s patron, have sent us their warm greetings.

   Fowler has said that there is nothing quite as satisfying as researching the great Halford in the elegant club rooms in Brook Street, in the finest of all fly fishing libraries, surrounded with artifacts of four centuries of angling. As for me, you can imagine the pleasure of sitting at dinner “over there” and looking up to see my own books on the shelves of that library.  

    Next morning some of the diners will be going out after Front Range trout, helping to prove that Denver is indeed the exact center of American fly fishing, whether with Halford’s high floating dry flies or Skues’  deep-sunk nymphs-- still a matter of controversy even in Colorado.  And all of it redounding to The Flyfishers’ Club of London and its contribution to American fly fishing.

                                                ~~~~

      

                                                            

The Honor of Sticks

 

                                             

    In front of me here, propped up against the bookcase above my bench, is a “production”

fly fishing rod that an uncle long ago won on a lunch counter punch-board. He gave it to me, right off the bat, this three-piece, nine-foot set of sticks. I was maybe thirteen and hugely happy to have not one but two fly rods. Just imagine, a kid like me with two fly rods.

    Sticks! Is there any stick like a fly rod! And  is there any richer rough-and-tumble Anglo Saxon single syllable word?