Autumn in Manhattan

Before proceeding, a couple notes. First of all, thanks again to everyone who has donated to my National Nordic Foundation Drive for 25 page. If I win the jacket, I promise coffee cards all the way around! I'm less than $100 from my new but final goal ... if you want that warm fuzzy feeling watching the Olympics, please go to my fundraising page. It's very simple to give. My longer spiel is here. You heard it here first: the women's 4x5k relay is going to be one of the iconic moments of the Sotchi games.

Second, I can't believe that my last post about our August 2012 backpacking trip in Idaho omitted the trip's soundtrack. It was The Tallest Man on the Earth's 2012 album "There's No Leaving Now." {TMOTE is really one short Swedish guy.} We never stopped playing it for 5 days. Does anyone understand the economics of full albums available on YouTube? Anyway, I challenge you not to get sucked in.

I love fall in Manhattan. We're halfway between Texas and Minnesota -- so the autumns here are neither too hot and un-fall-like nor too short. We enjoy an endless succession of bluebird days in the low 60s, interrupted every now and then by enough rain to keep my new lawn green. Well ok, we did have snow during the third week in October, but who's counting? Does anyone know why my camera turned the snowflakes into big round sand dollars?

Fall is all about annual traditions. For example, Jim and I turn off our office air-conditioners and pretend that we are hearty environmentalists. I convince myself for just a few weeks that THIS is the semester I can finally coast. And J comes during her fall break (in time for the snow). This year we proved (in Kansas City) that one need not go to Europe to increase one's Caravaggio count.

And you have to love Hieronymus Bosch. This has to be a Bosch, right? I mean, that is one strong drink. Anyone know what painting this is (sorry, all I can offer is some detail)? I can't find it here.

J and I went on our annual hike in the Flint Hills.

Fall in Manhattan also means tailgating. Here's some brisket sausage. It's a niche product, but I see that Nolan Ryan Beef has recently added brisket sausage to its product mix. 

Sam also smokes a duck every fall that brings tears to my eyes, complete with duck fat potatoes. Sweetie, I promise next time you can pick the meat.

Here are a few classic fall images from around town.

Of course, I don't want you to think that Manhattan is static. Things change. This fall, for example, I learned that we DO have good bread -- thanks, Stines, for the incredible black-crusted baguettes.

Tuttle Creek Lake and State Park are idyllic in the fall.

And to top it off, the lake offers the best rollerskiing in the world, no exaggeration. No, this is not because KS is flat -- in fact, Manhattan is extremely hilly. But thanks to an Army Corps of Engineers dam, this park offers miles of flat and nearly car-less roads -- and nightly orange skies. When rollerskiers enter heaven, here's what it looks like:

A Bit Late ...

J was in KS last weekend, which gives me a good reason to blog about ... my backpacking trip to Utah Idaho more than a year ago. (It's a long story.) Which reminds me: thank you very much Tom and Maria and Sean and Gillian and Sam and Dad for giving to the National Nordic Foundation's Drive for 25. I'm halfway to my quota, which means that the Little Lebowski Urban Achievers still need your help. Here is the link to give, and here is my longer description of why this is a worthy cause. It's an Olympic year people!

Here's an artsy shot on the way driving in -- the location is too great to mention.

Let's get started with a few establishing shots of the pure awesomeness of the place. (I love that awesomeness satisfies the spellcheck, but Missoula does not.) Here's our first night's campsite.

It may have seemed like a guys' trip from this shot

But thankfully Gillian came along.

BTW, any time is the right time to rock the vintage (real) 80s xc hat.

Some larger awesomeness.

Sam stayed hydrated.

The second night we found an amazing campsite right under a mountain that was basically our own private island complete with a fishing hole and some small waterfalls. It provided the best white noise for sleeping I've ever had (give or take one spot in Lassen National Park ...).

The spot called for an epic whiskey.

The forest fires nearby were the only downside to a cushy trip. Ash literaly rained down on us and blocked the sun.

We fished a bit, too. Sean wrestled with one mighty beast and won. (Look closely.)

The next day brought a new and drier terrain -- still with plenty of lakes and mountains though.

Here we are deliberating (near a beautiful lake) whether to cut the trip short one night and put in an epic hike back to the trailhead. Well, it wasn't so much a deliberation ... we always make this decision once we start talking about beer ... and Sean always leads the march.

The last shot on the trail. No sunglasses ... as in, it was getting late.



Then we made a beeline for town.

Ok maybe not a beeline. The road was indescribably bad, much worse than it looks here.

And here was the pure elkyawesomeness payoff.

Something we can all agree on (think Rocky IV ...)

In honor of the president's renewed calls for bipartisanship (he just will never give up!), today I write about something that all of us can get excited about: supporting our present and future Olympic athletes.

It often surprises Americans (and almost always surprises people from other wealthy nations) to learn that our Olympic athletes receive very little state support -- at most a small stipend and travel money if they make the "A" team for their sport. (Most athletes in the developmental pipeline receive zero.) And most Olympians still have to fund-raise. Jesse Diggins is the rising star of the U.S. cross-country ski team and a World Championships gold medalist -- and, frankly, given her appearance, if she played just about any other sport, she'd be a millionaire by now -- and yet here she is raising money to fill in the gaps in her travel budget by offering a slide show and dinner at a cafe in Stillwater, MN. Meanwhile, Kris Freeman, the anchor of the men's national team for more than a decade, was unceremoniously booted off the team last year because, in an era of budget cuts, he was deemed unlikely to medal. Even the Wall Street Journal has chimed in here, writing in an editorial a couple days ago entitled "The Skier who got the Cold Shoulder" that "The USSA leadership has made some great decisions of late. But they made a bad call earlier this year when they cut former national champion Kris Freeman from the U.S. cross-country team."(That's right Katie and Brian: Kris Freeman made the WSJ! And if you guys want to read an extended interview with Freeman, you can find it here on sustainableplay.com.)

So I'm hoping you'll give $10 -- or maybe even the suggested $25 -- to support the National Nordic Foundation's Drive for 25, which supports nordic skiers throughout the pipeline. Please consider giving through my page here:

https://www.grouprev.com/derekhoff

Now, let me address some potential objections you might have.

Objection 1): are you kidding me? You want me to help rich a bunch of rich white people on skis when children are dying in Syria?

Answer 1): Ok, fair enough to a point. Cross-county skiers are not generally hungry and homeless. But as I write on the fund-raising page, https://www.grouprev.com/derekhoff, I hope you will donate to Syrian refugees, too (and I provide a link). And yes, all of us would like to see a wider variety of people take up cross-country skiing. If you are serious about this issue, then I encourage you to give to the Loppet Foundation, which is working to diversify the sport.

Objection 2) sorry, but after I give to Syrian refugees and to the Loppet Foundation, I don't have anything left for the NNF.

Answer 2) Well, if you can truly state that your charitable giving is a zero-sum game -- that you have a fixed budget for how much you give, and that's that -- then fair enough. But if you don't give $25 here, would you really give that money to other causes, or would you in fact spend it on Epics or espressos or Whole Foods kids snacks or DVD copies of Tucker and Dale vs. Evil?

Objection 3): I know you: you must be getting something out of this, too.

Answer 3) Well, it is true that for setting up a fundraising page, I am entered in the raffle for a U.S. Ski Team down puffy jacket. And yeah, I'd like one of those. But my odds of winning it are very slim. Mostly I'm doing this because I love the sport and I love that our skiers are starting to surprise the world.

Objection 4): You shouldn't use your blog to fund-raise. It's annoying.

Answer 4): You got me there. 

So, patriotic Republicans and Democrats alike, I know the Cold War is supposedly over, but do you really want to lose the medal count to the Russians this year in Sochi? Thanks a lot. Please click here to get started.

Fight Epic Inflation!

Two tidbits from the wrecking crew's current exercise in scorched-earthism stand out above all. The first is the revelation that a few elder Republicans, namely Former Attorney General Edwin Meese III, devised the current brinkmanship strategy of shutting down the government in an effort to destroy Obamacare a long time ago, as in just after last fall's elections. You can read all about the "blueprint to defunding Obamacare" here. So much for the grassroots efforts of Tea Party regulars.

The second thing that stands out is rhetorical. Speaker Boehner’s comment that Republicans are locked in an “Epic Battle” (matched by a senator's comment that Republicans, unlike the French, do not surrender) said it all. Ever since the counter-attack against the Great Society in the 1960s (much more so than during the initial counter-attack against the New Deal), a siege mentality has been building and building on the Right until it has reached the point of paranoia. Every social program rests precariously on the slippery slope to socialism, every vote in Congress is a life and death moment for the movement, and the president is a foreign-born Muslim -- not simply a moderate who adheres to another historically dominant intellectual tradition in the U.S. (and, who, er, wanted fewer Americans to die from a lack of health insurance enough that he used a Republican-originated and market-oriented plan to get more of them coverage). This bunker mentality was and is a good strategy. The Right is so good at “working the ref” (bitching and moaning to the referee so much that you eventually get some friendly calls) that it gets a lot of what it wants; for example, after the Right demonized the “liberal media” for a generation with no end in sight (well past the point when this characterization even approached reality ... and this report is good too), CNN's webpage now feels the need to have a conservative columnist (and a well-known one at that in Newt Gingrich) but Fox News's webpage ... well, can you name the progressive columnist there?

But somewhere along the way, the clever theorists of the working the ref strategy starting believing their own BS. And as a historian, what I find additionally distasteful about this Epic Battle mindset, beyond its nastiness and the fact that it's currently being manifested in economic terrorism, is that it is so out of line with the views of the founders — you know, those wigged and powdered but supposedly populist folks whom the Tea Party normally fetishizes (and who rather inconveniently believed that a stronger state would grow the economy).

"Long live the little guy!"

The founders designed the Constitution to produce institutional conflicts, but they assumed that consensus could still be achieved through 1) a unity of public-interested elites; 2) rational and informed debate predicated on the assumption that these debates were in fact real, meaning that some lawmakers would change their mind during them (!); and 3) the willingness of average citizens to defer to elites. Obviously we've arrived at zero for three ... and while we're at it, don’t get me started on how the Tea Party actually subscribes to the views of the anti-Federalists, making its worship of the Constitution all the more ironic.

When he was locked in a budget or tax battle with Reagan, it never would have crossed Tip O’Neil’s mind to speak of an “Epic Battle.” It may be ok for The Dude in the Big Lebowski to draw a line in the sand, but this kind of thinking is less funny in the real world, where it's hurting the economy and real people's lives. And anyway, why would Tip O’Neil resort to such bloated rhetoric and ruin his night out drinking with Republicans at the end of the work day? (I’m sorry to romanticize the mid-century Congress, but I do think there’s something to the argument that disappearing fraternization across party lines there is a big part of why our politics have become so poisonously stuck.) There's a lot of talk out there that Speaker Boehner is a drunk (why has the blog "Drunk Boehner" fizzled?), so what's the problem? Even if Boehner doesn't know that the term “Epic” should be reserved for twenty-mile trail runs and fresh powder, shouldn't he therefore at least know that it's also reserved for fantastic beer? Someone book this sad man a weekend in Jackson Hole, please. 

Knowing that language matters, and determined to take back the word “Epic,” I traveled to Salt Lake this past weekend. Our now-lives-in-Milwaukee-formerly-at-KSU friend Aaron was in town for a conference and stayed with us. Powder was not an option, but we were in fact snowed out of our planned hike because the mountains got several inches of snow — this being the first week in October. So we retreated to lower elevations and enjoyed sweet and longish if not truly Epic hikes in Mill Creek and on Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake (I managed to forget the camera on Antelope). The fall weather was certainly Epic. We spent most of the first hike debating the relative merits of foliage in Vermont and Utah. I staked out the position that the reds out East are more spectacular (though I fully concede that, in the yellow category, nothing beats the blazing aspens of the West). By the end of the day, the snow had retreated from the trail to the tops ...

But meanwhile, just up the road ... anyone getting excited?

Aaron spent most of the Antelope hike dealing with the tree that he and Tara were on the cusp of removing from their new lot ... or was it the neighbor's tree? Hard to tell now.

The pinnacle of a fun-packed weekend was an excellent dinner at the new, well, Epic Annex with J and Aaron and John and Sarah and the boys. Plus, about half of our other friends showed up mid-meal on a fundraising pub crawl for the Madeline Choir School. Ah the bonhomie of the gentiles here … I managed to forget the camera once again, but I hope my fellow Salt Lake blogger won’t mind if I borrow some photos with full recognition. A perfect fall day spent hiking in the Wasatch followed by sumac-dusted fries, cauliflower dip, Korean chicken wings, and a lamb burger with pickled vegetables — capped off with a whiskey-barrel-aged Smoked and Oaked and a Brainless on Cherries? First tracks in early October, even if they weren't ours? These, my friends, correctly qualify as Epic.

Photo credits: Urban Spoon, Kelli Nakagama and RandomActsOfKelliness.com

Photo credits: Urban Spoon, Kelli Nakagama and RandomActsOfKelliness.com

Things are (mostly) peachy

Thanks to everyone who has complained about the long break in between entries Andy's comment on my last post, I thought it was time to report on life back in the states. After I last left you, I went deep into Dublin searching for Shane McGowan with our new friend (also named Andrew) based on inside tips from the woman at our hotel's front desk. I won't go into too much month-old detail here, so it will suffice to say that we did not in the end technically run into Shane McGowan; he was not, in fact, at the sometimes-cringe-worthy-sometimes-admittedly-fun-hackneyed-Irish-music-plus-Riverdance-dinner-theater-for-70-something-tour-groups show we ended up attending as part of J's conference -- or at the National Gallery in front of the famous Caravaggio painting, "The Taking of Christ," discovered in 1990 in a Jesuit dining room -- or in front of the last Bruegel of the trip. But I believe in my heart that we got extremely close (one bartender: "well, I haven't seen him here in a while; he's been busy"), and, regardless, Dublin is one hell of a fun city in which to go searching for Shane McGowan.

 

Several tour group members left before the end of the show

So what's it like being back? Well, to resort to cereal-box philosophy for a moment, we have a peach tree in Utah, and it's hard to get the perfect peach: soft but not mushy, perfectly colored, bursting with flavor -- and of course unblemished. The last bit is especially hard without pesticides. But spraying is not a good solution, either. Put another way, the birds ate a lot of our peaches this year ... but we still enjoyed a fantastic crop.

So first, Andy, the qualifications. I knew that I live in two conservative states, but I had forgotten just how much of a "burned over district" KS is. (Andy's also in the guild, so I steal the term for the Erie Canal area of western New York at the epicenter of the early-nineteenth-century Second Great Awakening -- the same area from which hail both J's family and the Church of Latter-Day Saints.) I mean, I got to telling people in Germany that America's religion is football. But, having been unable to get Monday Night FOOTBALL on the radio in KC, A MAJOR MARKET, the other night driving back from the airport due to the remarkable proliferation of religious stations -- and forget about hearing a non-Royals baseball game; maybe I am romanticizing my youth, and maybe this was due to the strength of mega-city east coast radio stations, but whatever happened to getting random baseball games on the radio at night from 1,000 miles away, as I used to be able to do in upstate New York [not too far from the burned over district] on my grandmother's 1970s transistor radio? -- and I miss Jack Buck and Hank Stram calling MNF on the radio -- I'm increasingly convinced that America's religion is, well, religion. (Take that sentence, John Updike!) Note to secular progressives: nothing will get done around here until someone finds a way to rejuvenate the Christian Left.

And, once again, despite my deep-seated belief that we all should engage ideas with which we disagree, etc. etc., I have been forced to retreat back into the warm fuzzy goodness of my personalized filter bubble due to the sheer nastiness and idiocy of House Republicans and the bizarre reality of college graduates who, while posing as breathing citizens, rely for their climate change expertise on the blog entries of fossil-fuel-industry-funded, non-scientist conservative activists who focus on one data point out of context (say, the increase in arctic ice this year from its RECORD LOW last year) rather than rely on the expertise of, um, say, scientists. Now that I am sitting in on German 2 this semester (and greatly enjoying it) I have a modest proposal that I hope my friends over at All Things Education and Cedar's Digest will debate: I propose that we cancel college language requirements and replace those 4 classes with A) a new course called Critical Thinking 101, all of the textbook proceeds for which will go to yours truly after he receives a huge advance and writes it; B) mandatory stats; C) a course called "How to Read in an Era of Bullshit"; and D) a capstone seminar called "Deconstructing Fox News." Progressives are living in a "cotton candy land," as my high-school baseball coach used to put it, if they think rational debate and argument mean anything to radically anti-empirical people.

Oh, and then there's the matter of the wonderful health care system that the Tea Party doesn't want to change forcing me to wait two months to see a spine specialist ... whereas I waited two weeks to see one in Germany.

But, as stated, things are mostly peachy, if not as peachy as J's peach crisp, which may be the best dessert ever.

And, speaking of great food, we met Brian and Katie and Matt and Denise and adorable baby #16 Ben for brunch at LUMI BISTRO, our friend Evan's new cafe in downtown SLC (350 S 200 E #100, under the Metro Condos). I promise -- this is a spin-free zone -- Lumi is excellent. The space is cool, and the food is delicious, local, simple but elegant, and reasonably priced. As importantly, the espresso is some of the best in town. Here's the tomato crepe and the nicoise; I failed to snap an image of my tremendous baked eggs with ham and fresh vegetables. John, I'm relying on you to go there and take some espresso porn.

Tomorrow is the first ever Konquer the Konza race in our beautiful Flint Hills prairie preserve. It will be painful to be on the sidelines -- for seven years I'd been hoping someone would put on a race here -- but the upside is that I get to sleep in and then head to the finish line with a local and hoppy Tallgrass in hand to adopt the role of Wise Elder Ex Runner, he who spouts off about how bad running is for you even as he patently wishes he weren't on the sidelines.

Mentioning the Flint Hills reminds me ... during the early-1960s debate in Congress on what became the Wilderness Act, a lot of clergy testified that we should save some lands as God made them ...