Roadtrip Vignettes, Part 2: Sun Valley, ID

I was at Sun Valley talking to the woman, 60ish or so, working the lift ticket counter. I was asking about the mountain’s winter offerings. “I hear you have a ton of snowmaking,” I said.

“Oh yes,” she said, clearly delighted, almost bragging. “We have more acres of snowmaking than anywhere else in the country.”

“So when do you get your big natural storms?” I asked.

Her smile flickered a little and she hesitated.

“It’s changing?” I offered.

“Exactly,” she said.

“It’s just like that in Colorado, too,” I told her.

Earlier that morning I’d been talking to a mechanic at a local bike shop. He too had mentioned Sun Valley’s extensive snowmaking. When I asked him a similar question about their storms, his response was rather more bleak. He said, “Every year we see the desert move a little further north.”

July 17th, 2013

Day 0

The call came at about 5:45am and I was deeply asleep. Debby awoke and understood before I did, and I swam up out of the depths and became immediately calm and I hope I let her know that I loved her as I went to answer the phone. It was one of those moments of cascading realization, where your understanding comes avalanching down, a great thing falling, and then a moment later it settles into a new stability. When Debby awoke I felt from her an immediate sadness as I came a moment later to understand that only one call would be coming to me at this time of morning, this morning. Sometimes you are made privy to many things all at once, and as I walked to the phone in the cool morning I could feel in that moment of her understanding and mine just behind it the many years of our time together and the way communication starts to happen not just wordlessly but sympathetically, a resonance between you that comes from feeling for so many years each other’s vibrations. Of course I didn’t consciously think any of this but I remember the feeling as I walked into the other room and picked up the phone and heard my sister sob.

July 16th, 2013

The news from New Mexico was good. My father was stable, they told me. He appeared to be peaceful. No need to rush back, my mom said. Why not take another day in Colorado?

That sounded relaxing, grounding, expansive. Yes, I said. I’ll come back Thursday the 18th instead.

I made plans to spend the 17th with my friend Chris Blarsky. Our conversations were always profoundly interesting and deeply invigorating. I figured Chris’s perspective on things would send me back to New Mexico with some interesting new ideas about making the most of my remaining time there, however long that ended up being.

The intensity of the experience I was dealing with in New Mexico had contributed to me not sleeping more than about four hours per night all summer (not without pharmaceutical aid, anyway), but I’d found the time back in Colorado really rejuvenating. I’d slept deeply and long every night. The night of the 16th was no different.

July 15th, 2013

…was a Monday, and I recall it with something of a sadness, for on that day I engaged in a deep self-betrayal, and the repercussions were substantial and long-lived.

You’ll forgive the vagueness. Some things can only be spoken of in the abstract.

In my life I have often practiced self-excoriation in the face of even my average mistakes; when I look back on something as destructive as what I did that day, my self-judgment has generally been brutal, has brooked no quarter.

But sadness, but grief: those are different. Those are not things you whip yourself with.

You see, Jerry has taught me a few things. Jerry likes to say, in the face of mistakes, “What did I have to learn?” Jerry says, “I’ll do better next time.”

I suppose it speaks well of my growth over the last almost-year that I don’t find myself reaching for that bloodthirsty penitent lash when I look back on that day. I acted out of fear; the repercussions were substantial: I had something to learn, and I did learn. I have faced opportunities to make similar mistakes since then, and while I can’t say I have entirely vanquished that cruel and compelling fear, I am here today to say that I did better the next times it came around.

Having witnessed the damage in my life from self-betrayals–the one I speak of here, and others too, some still coiled in my psyche, ready to draw blood–I have developed and continue to develop a different and more complete integrity. It’s a process, integrity, not a destination, and there are always temptations, and even a cursory glance at my life shows how much growth still remains. But things are so much better in my life now. Surely that is evidence that I am more true to myself than I was that day two years ago. Because I know this: if you act consistently out of integrity with yourself, the universe will test you and test you and test you until you learn.

July 14th, 2014

“As omens go, that’s not the greatest.”

I said those words the summer before, as I watched a black widow arise from behind a shelf in the backyard night to terminate a moth that had found its way into her web.

“But I’m not a moth,” I said. And that was true enough.

Another summer night, July 14th, 2014: driving down to Albuquerque to spend the anniversary of my father’s death with my family, approaching Santo Domingo, NM (interestingly exactly the place I normally stop for gas), I got hit by a thunderstorm so fierce I could barely see. The wipers, metronoming prestissimo, did nothing, and I crawled those last couple of miles, up the off-ramp, and then under the roof covering the pumps at Pueblo Gas, and from there as the rain came down in sheets and lightning lit up the night I called my wife.

July 13th, 2013

Besides the brief weekend back to Colorado for Nolus’s memorial, I had been in New Mexico for four weeks as mid-July approached, and I thought it might be nice to spend a few days back in Colorado. I had spoken with various members of the hospice team and was told that it was a good time to go. “He’s dying, but he’s not actively dying,” one of them told me. Our in-home assistant echoed that opinion. So I felt it was a good time to get back to Boulder.

All summer long I had been waiting for the right moment to have with my dad the one conversation that I felt still needed saying. I hadn’t had it during my first days in NM, when things seemed stable, and when I got back from the memorial, something happened. I remember the day. It was like a storm hit behind his eyes, wind and clouds and rain and lightning inside him, his eyes grey with it, grey with some interior tempest. Afterwards, there were occasional moments of lucidity, but he never really came back, and that was when he truly began the process of dying.

I came over every day. I kept hoping there would be a time for that conversation, another lucid moment when we were together, but there never was, and so on July 13th, the day before I was to go to Boulder for those few days, knowing that I couldn’t take anything for granted, I came to say to him what needed to be said.

I told him that it was okay for him to go.

I told him that it was okay for him to go because he’d left us all in a good place. I spoke of each of us in turn, my mom and my sisters and myself, and described how he had provided for each of us, how each of us was going to be okay. I spoke very specifically: Mama will be okay for these reasons. Hana will be okay for these reasons. Abigail will be okay for these reasons. I will be okay for these reasons.

He heard me. It’s strange because he wasn’t conscious in any ordinary sense of the word, but he heard me. He opened his eyes a little bit, just a little, like they were deeply heavy, like he was pulling himself out of the fog of a heavy sedation (true enough, with the morphine) to communicate just enough, before sinking back down into what I envisioned as a featureless but not uncomfortable grey-white mist, where time no longer passed in the way we understand it, a weightless place of no light but no dark either.

I told him that I was going away for a few days, and that I’d be back on Wednesday, the 17th. I told him I’d see him then.

And of course I told him that I loved him.

And then I kissed him on the forehead.

That was the last time I ever saw him alive.

You Don’t Get the Wimbledon You Want, You Get the Wimbledon You Deserve (or So They Tell Us)

I think we begin at the end.

Roger Federer loses the Wimbledon final to Novak Djokovic in 4 sets, 7-6, 6-7, 6-4, 6-3.

In a piece that aired before Federer’s semi-final match against Andy Murray, ESPN commentator Jason Goodall says that, if anything, Federer is playing better than he was in 2003, when he first won Wimbledon. Goodall even has some pretty sophisticated data to back it up.

At the end of that segment, when they cut back to the commentators in the studio, one of them briefly mentions that Federer’s success this year is despite the change in the court surface, which has slowed the game and caused the ball to bounce higher. All the studio commentators agree that the higher bounce plays into the hands of his rivals.

Still in reverse chronology: The first I ever heard of this slowing of the courts in tennis’s major tournaments was a piece by Brian Phillips on Grantland from June 19th, 2013. In it, though Phillips notes that Federer won all of his major tournaments after this process of slowing the courts was well underway, he asks, “Is [Federer’s] cool, thoughtful game actually helped by slightly slower play? Or is he such a phenomenal talent that he won 17 majors while the organizers of his own sport were essentially working to help his biggest rival?”

Now let’s fast-forward, to I think it was just before the match began, when Chris Fowler, John McEnroe and Patrick McEnroe mentioned how strongly the crowd was in favor of Federer, and how hard that must be for Djokovic.

And I thought about that the whole match long. Because I felt the same way. I wanted Federer to win so badly I realized I was expending energy trying to influence the outcome.

(Which is maybe slightly silly, because Boulder, CO, is 4,700 miles away from London, England, and because I was watching hours after the match had actually ended. Energetic effects may travel over great distances and even forward and backward in time, but…it’s still probably not the most effective use of one’s energy, don’t you think?)

So let’s go back to the end. Djokovic won 7-6, 6-7, 6-4, 6-3. I wanted Federer to win so badly that I woke up in the middle of the night and felt a wistful sadness sweep through me like a breeze. Match reports today use phrases like “ruthless efficiency.” Brian Phillips describes Djokovic as cyborg-ian. Which all leads me back to this: while I was watching, I thought a lot about what it is about Djokovic and what it is about Federer that had Federer by far the fan (and my) favorite. By all indications, Federer is a nice, sort of aloof fellow who plays tennis spectacularly well. By all indications, Djokovic is a friendly guy who plays tennis spectacularly well. If anything, Djokovic appears to be more immediately likable–as a person, anyway–than Federer.

Which suggests that one of two things explains Federer’s greater popularity. One possibility is that he’s won more Grand Slams than anyone else ever (among the men, anyway), that he’s pretty consistently called the best tennis player ever, and so he’s the sentimental choice. People want to see him win one more major because he’s getting old (he’s a few weeks from 34 now, whereas Djokovic recently turned 28) and every year that passes it becomes less likely. Please, Roger, we’re saying, win one more and stave off my fears of my own mortality for a little longer.

And I’m sure that plays a part of it, but I think the greater part is the second thing, which is that Federer’s tennis is by far the more beautiful. Federer plays tennis like a musician, the angles and spins of his shots dashing off with Mozartian exuberance. He plays like a dancer, with the racquet as his partner. His shots are so beautiful, I’d marry them.

Djokovic, on the other hand, plays like a machine built not just to play tennis but to put to rest any further arguments about which is superior, flesh or metal. It’s beautiful the way modern war weapons are beautiful. His shots are like laser-guided.

Throughout the match, I kept thinking back to the announcers pointing out that Federer is by far the more popular player, that the crowd, at the event and elsewhere, was very much rooting for him. And I kept thinking back, too, to Brian Phillips’ piece about how Wimbledon has slowed down so much over the years, diluting Federer’s strengths and playing up Djokovic’s. And I kept wondering if maybe the tennis powers-that-be did the wrong thing. Now, Djokovic beat Federer pretty soundly over the last two sets, and so perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered if Wimbledon were still played on the surface of old. Perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered if they played Wimbledon on a surface of polished mirror. Perhaps Djokovic, six years younger in a sport that sees its age-related decline hit earlier and more sharply than most, would have prevailed no matter what.

But if that’s not the case–if the boundaries that define the game have been tweaked such that the fans’ favorite loses, and in a slightly different world–a slightly different world that we could easily create–it would have been the other way around, and the victor would have been the player who played more beautifully, then hasn’t something greater been lost?

USWNT FTW!

How seriously can I take myself as a hardcore soccer fan if I don’t write something about the Women’s World Cup final and the U.S. team’s famous victory?

While four goals in the first 16 minutes is obviously a deep outlier of an occurrence, it wasn’t as accidental or as just-lucky as it might have seemed. Watch the first two goals. Pay particular attention to Carli Lloyd’s initial positioning and her movement on the plays:

Did you catch that? Did you see how on both goals Carli Lloyd moved from a substantial distance away to a pocket of empty space that was exactly where the ball ended up? Those weren’t accidents, those were plays. The U.S. coaching clearly noticed a particular weakness in Japan’s set-piece defending and set up those plays to take advantage, and boy did they. The ball found Carli Lloyd in each instance because it was supposed to.

Now just five minutes in, and Japan were down 2-0 and deeply shellshocked. In serious competition, with so much on the line, it’s not easy to regroup emotionally and energetically after something like that, and during the time it takes to return to balance (or as balanced as possible, once you’re way behind like that), it’s not unusual for things to go from bad to worse.

Bad to worse: Normally, Azusa Iwashimizu would manage to clear Tobin Heath’s deep cross, but instead she was late to react and just popped the ball up into the air so that Lauren Holiday could smash home that volley. (And what terrific composure Holiday showed there. It’s the easiest thing in the world to blast that shot 19,000 rows into the stands.) Normally, Ayumi Kaihori isn’t quite so careless in her positioning, but now Japan were down 3-0 and her brain was doubtless a jumble of electrical static, and–well, you saw what happened next. (You should watch it again. It’s awesome.)

And just how on fire was Carli Lloyd? When she missed a free header wide a few minutes after the chip, for what would have been her fourth goal, she looked almost surprised. “You mean I can miss?” the look on her face seemed to say. She was well-deserving of the Golden Ball.

A great win for the USWNT and a lot of fun to watch. Good job, USWNT, you are all the belles of the ball.

The Trip: Simple Gratitude

“Gratitude is well worth expressing,” I said a couple of days ago. It bears repeating. The practice of gratitude allows us to center ourselves in the positive feelings that remain in our body after a given experience. It allows us to be aware of how we’ve changed.

I’m grateful for many things about the trip and during the trip but for now I want to simply say that I’m grateful for the trip itself, for the simple privilege of having gotten to experience it.