The American Health Care Merry-Go-Round Kiada

 

Like so much else in the United States health care and medicine, a service industry similar to another once upon a time service bureaucracy in the US, America's universities, has been, and particularly so since the late 1970s, corporatised and McDonaldised. 

I am actually old enough to remember when it was different. My General Practitioner (GP) when I had the unfortunate experience of moving to a state that, it turned out, had only recently emerged from the ideological stone age only to shortly return to it again by the 1990s, Indiana, was independent. He was his own man He was own employer and living the American dream. And he had his office in a house near the county run hospital in that litte Hooser town that I had moved to from Big Tex.

I had, of course, been to doctors before but only rarely. When I was young, for instance, I rode my bike into a brick stairway and almost tore off my nose, something which required the doctor to come to our house and stitch it up. Think of that, doctor house visits! How backward!

In 1967 everything changed in terms of my health life and my life in general. One day while running track I could not breath. Eventually, after some false starts—including the idiotic your mother did it to you or it is psychosomatic diagnoses—I was informed that I had asthma. 

Between 1967, when my asthma issues first appeared and introduced me to the joys of the need fir constant medical attention and visits to medical specialists, I was taken, after seeing my GP, to see an allergy and asthma specialist at the Methodist Hospital in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, the Dallas neighourhood in which I and my family lived. My asthma doctor initially put me on cortisone which had the usual side effects which forced me off of it and on nebulisers.  

When I moved to Indiana my GP replaced the largely ineffective nebuliser treatments with Kenalog, which at first was great despite requiring periodic hospitalisations, and which eventually proved ineffective or of limited help in the long run as well. Because of the declining effectiveness of Kenalog my parents took me to see a Internal Medicinist at a health care clinic south of Fort Wayne. He put me on several pills, including Theopylline, Albuterol, and Prednisone, which I remained on, with limited effectiveness but a lot of nervousness, until the 1990s. 

Around 1993 or so I was put on Advair and Singular by an asthma doctor in Albany, New York. This regimen served me well, so well that I was able to do all my doctoring with my GP. Sometime in the 2000s the physician group I went to became part of St. Peter’s Health Partners—St. Peter’s is a large and increasingly sprawling hospital and health care centre in Albany--and eventually  Trinity Health, a Catholic non-profit health care corporation. They also decided to move up the medical status ladder to Internal Medicine physicians. 

Both of these moves—corporatisation and specialisation--point up something that has increasingly happening in American health care and in American medicine since the so-called Reagan Revolution. This processes was aided and abetted by the religious revival of neo-liberalism and its key utopian notion and symbol that the market was and is god. Deus ex machina! As a consequence the practise of medicine in the US has changed and changed, in my opinion, for the worse in many instances. 

Since around 2020 when I started having stomach and bowel issues the doctors—and I mean doctors plural--I increasingly saw and continue to see in the Capital region of New York, are not independents. Instead they, whether GP or specialist like the heart specialist, the pulmonologists, the allergist and gastro-intestinal specialist I now see--work for corporations like the non-profit Catholic Trinity Health, the apparently non-profit Community Care Physicians (CCP), and, Albany Medical College and Medical Centre, the physician and medical testing arms of the non-profit Albany Medical College and Albany Medical Centre  Like the modern and postmodern Western world in general all of these apparently non-profit corporations are private bureaucracies, modern bureaucracies, which, as Max Weber noted, are the dominant organisation in that putatively best of all possible worlds, the West. By the way, the last independent doctor I went to retired and passed his cases on to Certified Allergy Consultants, which has five locations in the Capital region and which I can find no historical information about. Welcome to the postmodern Western world, a world without history.

What these corporations do in the United States is mimic each other. Albany Med, for instance, has an MRI. So does Saint Peter’s Health Care Physicians, which is part of Trinity Health, and so does CCP. Each of these corporations, of course, and for financial reasons, want you to use their MRI, use their testing labs, use their physicians, and use their own portals, so they can keep, or at least try, to keep the monies from insurance—the private for-profit bureaucracies that really run health care and medicine in the US-Medicare, and the information they gather through health care visits and their patient portals— information, of course, is central to the postmodern core nation economy--in house, in the corporation. By the way, another portal, a physicians only portal, has been developed in Albany to allow said physicians and techs from the various corporations to see what their patient has been treated for by other corporations but this is not mandatory and chance is a factor in whether the various corporations put that important information up on the shared portal. Bureaucracy breeding more bureaucracies because of inherent irrationalities and inefficiencies in the already existing bureaucracies. 

Despite all the bureaucratisation that has come with corporatisation, however, efficiency and effectiveness, which bureaucracies and their new digital aids are supposed to be good at, aren’t always either efficient or effective.  I, for example, recently got a new phone number and set up a new email account and managed to get all these changed in my medical portals—there are four== portal accounts or so I thought. When I was asked to review the health information in my ENT portal I found they still had the old and now outdated information in health information despite having the new information in my accounts page. Redundancies are costly and perhaps unnecessary. Waiting times to see specialists can be and sometimes are long. It took me several months to get into see a skin specialist and Gastro, for instance. And just last week Albany Med's Gastro liver specialists wrote me a prescription for a medicine my G-I "generalist" had already given me, something I took the time to note in my  permanent portal record on Albany Med’s brand spanking “new” and “improved” portal—another bureaucratic tendency the celebration of the ever new and improved--and which had proven ineffective save at making me dizzy and loopy.

And many wonder why “consumers” are so cynical and skeptical these best of all possible worlds utopian days. Next customer, err, patient please. Ding.

Hosanna Hey-Sanna: God I Love the Neo-Liberal University and College

 

Everybody knows that old proverb about money making the world go around by now I assume even if they have not seen Cabaret. And unlike a lot of the more sentimental and melodramatic proverbs out there in our disneyfornicated world it is actually kind of true particularly in a world where the idea of the free market is now a sacrosanct article of metaphysical faith which, if someone has the temerity to question, is categorised as a commie, nazi, adolescent heretical alien loon.

This theological platitude—the free market is the best of all possible economic worlds, the capitalist version of the Bolshevik notion that they and they alone knew the direction of history because they numbered among nature’s chosen-- can even be found in bureaucracies where you would not have expected to find it forty or fifty years ago. You can find the money makes the world go around attitude, for example, in corporatised doctor’s offices with their increasing number of nurse practitioners and physicians assistants who are in some ways a kind of medical bureaucracy version of the higher education adjunct in the US. What Hippocratic Oath? You can find it in corporatised American dental offices. You can find in in the corporatised law offices of the United States. And you can even find it in the ostensibly non-profit world of corporatised and bureaucratised world of American higher education. What devotion to learning for learning’s sake?

There are a number of reasons for the corporatisation of what used to be public service oriented educational bureaucracies whether of the public or private sort. Most importantly, perhaps, there is the cultural religious like notion that the free market is nature’s or god’s economy, that the free market conception of modern capitalism is the only viable and true (note the theocratic nature of this faith) economic theory non-theory. There is the increasing prominence of political groups, mostly on the conservative and right wing populist parts of the ideological spectrum and particularly in the historically racist Dixie and the historically nativist West. There is the decrease in relative terms of national and state support for higher education in the US. There is the culture war between American universities and the wider world over books, the curriculum, classes or courses themselves, and administration, for instance. There is the need, a need others like Thorstein Veblen and Upton Sinclair recognised at the turn of the last century, to appoint hardly radical or even progressive business interests to their boards, and the power of these boards—they are the actual powers that have the authority to run universities and colleges—and faculties really have little means at their disposal to block or even ameliorate them. And there is the increasing notion among those with dreams of well paying academic jobs dancing before their eyes, that the American university and college is a way to advance one’s bureaucratic and financial career.

Quite a number of intellectuals regardless of political persuasion have not been particularly fond of the neo-liberalisation of American higher education large, medium, or small. But gee, what’s not to love about the neo-conservative university and college? I mean who doesn’t love the 200% plus increase in administrative bureaucrats in American universities and colleges between 1979 and 2008? Who doesn’t love the 60% increase in administrative bureaucrats in American universities and colleges between 1993 and 2009? Who doesn’t love the corporatisation and professionalisation of particularly male college football and basketball programmes on America’s university campuses and the use of student fees to build sporting facilities for the privileged few who “play” these childhood games at these universities?  Sis Boom Bah! Who doesn’t love the increasing retailistion of America’s universities and colleges with their customer oriented mentality and their customer service bureaucratic operations with their keep the customer satisfied attitudes, their grade inflation, their dumbing down of the curriculum, their speech codes, and their consequent and often selective curtailment of free speech? Who doesn’t love the increase in part-time yearly contract faculty, the lumpen academitariat, the cheap labour counterpart in American academia of cheap labour in the exploited peripheral world? Who doesn’t love the kowtowing of the university and college to big business, big business “practicality”, and big business spin doctoring? And who doesn’t love the increase in student fees to not only compensate for lost public support at public universities and colleges but to raise monies for the institution as well.

So, dear readers, let us raise our voices in praise for what is happening at Columbia University. Let’s praise what is happening at Indiana University. Let’s praise what is happening at the University of Southern California where that retailversity, showing its commitment to image over free speech, shut down its Facebook page at the end of the week to those who did not already like the USC page and, in some cases, to only the chosen, for obvious reasons and with obvious happy faced consequences. Let’s praise what is happening at the University of Michigan. Let’s praise what is happening at Yale and NYU. Let’s praise what is happening to public universities in theocratic and authoritarian parts of the United States (you know where they are who they are). What’s not to love, after all, about the public relations conscious and let’s raise monies from the economic elite for the postmodern American megaretailversity? Isn’t it the best of all possible academic worlds after all? And doesn’t building the best of all possible world mean that Orwellian language must be used to curtail free speech on university and college campuses if we are to remain the nation that we imagine in our myths and epic tales--myths and tales undergirded by power realities—we  are? Hosanna, hey-sanna, sanna sanna, hosanna he-sanna hosannah!

The SNAP or Food Stamp Kiada

 

I am retired and living on a fixed income of around $20,000 dollars a year. Even with a $400 dollar car payment—I bought a car before I was forced into retirement by vampire capitalist SUNY—I was doing OK. Then I got sick.

My sickness started when I took a generic version of Advair. After taking it I immediately struggled for breath and subsequently I developed stomach tightness and consequent deep breathing difficulties and bowel problems. I went to the doctor and have now been sent to a heart doctor, a pulmonologist, two allergists, an ear nose and throat specialist, and a Gastro-Intestinal specialist, including recently a GI liver specialist since I have liver and kidney cysts,  My doctor now wants to send me back to an allergist and to a urologist while the liver GI specialist is sending me back to the GI generalist. 

Needless to say, this merry-go-round that seemingly never stops is costing me monies even though I have Medicare and New York state retiree health insurance. As I told me GP after I brought this up when she wanted to send me to more specialists the copays of $25 dollars, $50 dollars—trips to an urgent clinic—and $100 dollars—three trips to the accident and emergency—not to mention three CT scans and two MRI’s, add up. And this is why, along with car issues, my savings are almost gone.

Because of the decline in my savings I decided, after looking at the qualifications—which I met--to apply for SNAP or food stamps through New York state, the state in which I live. I went to the online website and filled out the forms and provided pictures of my Medicare, NY state retirement income,  Ny state driver’s licence, and a host of other necessary documentation they demanded. About a month or so later I got a letter from food stamps saying they needed information about my pension. I assumed they meant my TIAA CREF “pension” of $70 dollars since they didn’t specify what they meant and I had already provided them with a picture of my NY state retirement income. So I sent it to them. In fact, I sent them the original since I no longer own a printer and wanted to get the documentation in as quickly as possible. Why they could not have asked me to send a picture of this online as I did the earlier ones is beyond me.

Several months later my application was denied. They said that I did not send them the requisite information. Did the post office lose the letter with document I returned four days after I received it? Did the SNAP office lose it? Was this intentional so that roadblocks where put in the way of applicants again and again hoping that the applicant would simply, at some point, give up? I immediately appealed the ruling by writing, calling, and emailing. 

Recently I received a call from the Albany County Government, the public bureaucracy that handles food stamp applications in Albany County, and which I assumed was related to my food stamp application given the timing. Though my phone is working and I had it near me I apparently missed the call. Is it one of those bots that lets the number ring once or twice and no more? I missed it again while at the doctor’s office. I tried to call and tell them when I would be home but got no response after I left a message. So here I am stuck in the hard place that one is always stuck in in a Kafkaesque and Voinovichian bureaucratic world.

Boo Hoo Hoo: Musings on Trauma and Free Speech

Ah, traumas and free speech. The one never seems to come up anymore without the other in modern Boo Hoo Hoo America anymore. Apparently many don’t grasp that free speech is different from action, I can say, for example, and traumatise many in the process by doing so, that god gave this land—Judea and Samaria, the land from not so shining sea to not so shining river—to me and mine. However, if I start to go out and engage in violence to make it so (shout out to Jean-Luc) extralegally—war doesn’t fall into that category oddly since most humans seem to have coded it as legalised murder if selectively—well there are laws as they say.

As to feelings the putative feelings of the traumatised they are, as the song says, nothing more than feelings. And many of those who have them faiil to have to provide evidence of physical violence to back up your traumas, something everyone has for a variety of reasons. Some of us apparently are able to kind of deal with those traumas—traumas we all feel and can hence sympathise and empathise with if some of us only selectively due to parochial political and ideological correctness--whether they be jealousies or some other form of human stupidity--something it is impossible to stop as history shows--thanks to Freud and his children and other coping mechanisms such as Buddhism or the serenity prayer or whatever. We have to if we want to continue slogging our way through the crap and pain that often is life. Life is not and never can be flower child bliss even with the assistance of psychedelics.

In reality, of course, in a world of rationality rather than emotions, calling for death to anyone whether it is theocratic Zionist Jews calling for the cleansing of Palestinians from Judea and Samaria, Palestinians calling for the cleansing Israelis from Palestine, or the formulaic "I am going to kill you” one hears all the time on American winkly TV shows, is speech and, in the case of the TV cop shows, is also usually a McGuffin or a red herring (hmm, interesting) form of speech. It is not an act of physical bodily harm or the killing of someone and thus is not a crime save in the boo hoo hoo fantasies of some of those many humans doped up on certain versions or variations of political and ideological correctness. That so many, including students at supposedly elite retaiversities like Columbia and Michigan and overrated retailversities like USC, have not comprehended this obvious distinction. is not surprising. Moreover, many claiming to be traumatised and thus in need of free speech are lying for their lord and using it as leverage in order to gain power and control in a culture war that has been going on in the United States even before there was a United States. These polemicists, regardless of the reasons for why they are pushing for the criminalisation of some speech, seem not to have grasped the historical fact that it wasn’t even possible to criminalise speech in places like Saudi Arabia, apartheid era South Africa, the old USSR, Israel, or the USofA (shades of prohibition) in the long run even in periods of inquisition and executions, and it will not be possible to do so, in the long run, in America's retaiversites even with their very limited commitments to freedom of speech and academic freedom either. And we should not forget that even if it were somehow possible to criminalise selective forms of speech such criminalisation would necessitate that the state or private corporations build a lot more gaols/jails than the US has now in order to warehouse these linguistic heretics since they would be filled to the gills with language convicts given that humans are first rate at one thing, uttering emotional and fantastical nonsense.

Before I end this post I should take note of the commitment, or better lack of commitment, of those supposedly traumatised by free speech to free speech, you know that little thing that is guaranteed in the US Constitution. Hypocrisy on a general scale about this is not surprising. Just look around at those right wingers who proclaim free speech out of the gilded side of their gobs and violate it out of the others when it is not their politically and ideologically correct speech at every turn.

The TIAA-Cref Kiada: Part Three, the Bureaucratic Cyclops

 

Bureaucracies, unlike suicide at least according to the M*A*S*H* myth, are definitely painful. I know because I have had several painful experiences mostly with private bureaucracies including three painful experiences with TIAA-CREF, a private financial service bureaucracy based in America’s Dixie. 

The first painful experience occurred sometime in the early 21st century, precisely when I don’t recall and, to be honest, I don’t care to recall as it is not really important to me. Anyway back to the tale: I had taken a job with the Research Foundation, SUNY, the State University of New York, a research arm of an educational system that is larger and substantially more mediocre than the demographically larger state of California. The Research Foundation decided to close my TIAA-CREF account rather arbitrarily, something bureaucracies, like monarchs, do constantly, of course. It took me three days of a painful series of emails and telephone calls, and associated headaches in order for me to have the monies accrued—a couple of hundred dollars at most, if memory serves-- from the Research Foundation SUNY account folded into another TIAA-CREF account I had taken out, this one with another SUNY bureaucracy, the State University of New York with which the Research Foundation, SUNY twain did not, and intentionally so, meet. 

After I retired from SUNY in 2021—a forced retirement since SUNY was not going to give me two classes and the health care that came along with those two classes--I decided to close my TIAA-CREF SUNY account a year later in 2022. I called the labyrinthian bot based TIAA-CREF number and was eventually transferred to the relevant bureaucratic department and bureaucrat. I was told I could close my account that day via the phone if I wanted to. I, however, decided to do it via a form which I assumed TIAA-CREf would ultimately need anyway. Moreover, I did not feel well, something that has become quite common in my retirement. I was sent the form and closed the account taking mental note that in the period between the phone call and the time it took the form to reach me and for it to reach them my account went down in value. But then that is what happens with modern capitalist stock markets. They go up up up thanks largely to casino capitalist speculation, and they go down down down thanks again largely to casino capitalist speculation, which is what happened to my no more than $3000 dollar account in the short interim.

2021 was also the year 1 I took a part-time job at the Albany College of Pharmacy Library. In retrospect I wish I hadn’t done this since ACP was one of the worst paternalistic and adolescent bureaucracies I have encountered in 69 years of life. I also—stupidity at work here again--took out another TIAA-CREF account when I took the job at ACP thinking that I would work at the college for more than three months I did before I quit because I could not stand the paternalistic nature of those administrative bureaucrats who ran the place.

In March 2024 I decided to close the ACP account, an account kept open in case I wanted to put more monies in it for me or my son. So I did what I did before but only after trying to do it via my online accoun—I also needed to update my email and phone number--an account which I had not used more than once or twice since I set it up and which would not accept my user ID and password, despite the fact that I had not only written down both and had saved my user id and password in my computer saved passwords page. Needless to say this is just one more of the many banes of life in the brave new digital pain in the arse age in which we are all now forced to live. So, I called the TIAA-CREF number, waded through the press x's for the y’s. When I got to an actual human I asked to be transferred to the account closing bureaucracy. My request was denied. When I asked for a form to be sent to me at the address they had on file so I could close my account that request was also denied too. I was, miracle of miracles, provided with an address that I could write to in order to request the account close form. And that is what I did. I even sent this request on one of the original pages of my quarterly earnings report to them requesting the form so I could close my account thinking that might help.

Long story short it has been awhile and I have still not received a response from this Orwellian meets Three Stooges bureaucracy even after sending a second letter. As a consequence I am now proceeding to the next step. I am going to contact the New York Attorney Generals’s office and contact a lawyer though paying my lawyer really to contact them probably isn’t worth the $72 bucks in my account as of the end of March or the hassle. Hiring a lawyer to deal with the absurd TIAA-CREF bureaucracy would no doubt set me back much more than what is in my account. But hey, $72 smackers is $72 smackers and I am retired on a limited monthly income from Medicare and the pension fund of the state of New York. Hmm, I really probably should rethink that last shouldn’t I?

The Books of My Life: A History of New Zealand (Sinclair)

 

Though many historians, caught up as they are in their parochial historical boxes, parochial historical boxes that often provide the scaffolding for various civil, civic, public national faiths, it is essential, if we are to understand the history and culture of the United States, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, to compare and contrast those national and far too often mythic histories, with the history and culture of other similar English and British settler societies. Given this it is necessary and essential for historians of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to read the history of each of these other English and British settler societies lest they play into and validate the myths of exceptionalism that are at the heart of the civil religions of each of those new nation-states. Some scholars, of course, Louis Hartz, Thomas Bender, James Belich and others, have attempted to do just that over the years. Nevertheless, despite these comparative histories of these comparative historians, the comparative history of English and British settler societies remains very much in its infancy and very much a marginal practise within the social sciences even today, to, I would argue, their detriment.

Keith Sinclair, one of the second generation of professional Kiwi historians, while punctuating his history of New Zealand with comparisons between New Zealand with the United States, Canada, Australia, and, of course, Great Britain, has written a book on New Zealand history that, since it first appeared in 1959, has acquired the status of a classic among histories of New Zealand. In A History of New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin, revised edition, 2000) Sinclair takes readers on a journey from the settlement of New Zealand by those who we now know as the Maori to the late 1990s.Along the way he touches on the high points of Kiwi political, economic, and demographic history, as any good history should do, and on New Zealand cultural and identity history, the last an exploration that was somewhat novel in 1959.

There is much in A History of New Zealand that should be grist for the comparative English and British settler society mill. Comparative English and British settler society historians will find much of interest in the history of European interactions with the Maori, in the attempt by the British to learn from their treatment of indigenes in what became the United States, Canada, and Australia and apply these lessons to Aotearoa. They can learn much from the impact of utopian ideas that originated in Europe and in how they played themselves out in New Zealand. They historians can learn much from the role capitalist land speculation played in the colonisation of New Zealand. They can learn much from the impact of World War I on New Zealand identity. They can learn much from the impact of depressions on New Zealand. They can learn much from the difficulties associated with an export based economy which NZ was and is almost from the very beginning of European colonisation. They can learn much from the delayed adoption of the Westminster Statute in Aotearoa compared to Canada. They can learn much from the movement of New Zealand out of the orbit of Imperial Britain and into that of Imperial America, particularly in the wake of World War II. They can learn much from the increasing ethnic diversification of New Zealand. They can learn much from the development of the welfare state in 19th and 20th century New Zealand, a welfare state, some argue, that was a leader in progressive and neoliberal reforms thanks particulafrly to the Labour party. And they can learn much from the integration of core nation New Zealand into the modern global economy dominated by the United States in the wake of WWII. 

Highly recommended for anyone interested in the basics of New Zealand history.

The Day We Freaked in Reno and Lake Tahoe

When Lea and I planed our excursion up the Pacific Coast of North America we also made plans to go to Yosemite National Park. We learned from our guide books that one not only should one but must reserve a tent campsite in the park given how many tourists come to the park even in April, which is when we planned to be there.

So, we made a four day reservation for a tent camping site in Yosemite and headed north. These four days determined our entire excursion in California and the Pacific Northwest. 

On our way away from the Pacific coast we decided to stop at Lava Beds National Monument which we could only reach by going through Oregon, We were only one of two campers in the campsite the two evenings we spent there. After awakening on the next morning we hiked one of the lava tubes that the national monument is famous for. In these tubes one hikes in total darkness.Despite this we only hit our heads twice, as I recall, as we felt our way along the walls of the lava tube from one cave to another. Thankfully we wore the hard hats which the rangers had provided to us in preparation for the hike.

After leaving Lava Beds we backtracked through Oregon and headed for Reno, Nevada. There we, much in need of a respite from tenting, stayed for four days in Circus Circus enjoying the hot tub, the television, and the cheap food that Reno, like Vegas, was then famous for. On one of our days in Reno we drove up to—and I mean drove up to--Lake Tahoe driving completely around the lake. It was, to say the least breathtaking. We had hoped to do some skiing but the temperature at the time we were there in April was in the 90s so skiing was inadvisable if not impossible.

Back in Reno we prepared to head to Yosemite. The we learned to our horror that the roads in from the Nevada side were closed during the winter months and April was considered a winter month. We panicked as we had to be in Yosemite the next day by, if memory serves, 6 pm or our campsite was first come first serve for others. Frantically we headed across the snowy Donner Pass to Sacramento then to Yosemite. We got there with a half hour to spare. We claimed our camp site noticing those waiting and hoping that those who made reservations, like us, would not show so they could claim an open tent site.

We, of course, did the usual things those who go to Yosemite do. We went to the lodge. We went to Hetch Hetchy whose beauty had been sadly destroyed to provide water for water hungry human animals in San Francisco. We took in the marvel that was El Capitan. We hiked along the river feeling its enveloping mist as we did. And we hiked up the 823 metres or 2700 feet of Yosemite Falls. 

As we hiked the Falls out of Yosemite Valley we had never seen so many people on the trail during our various journeys across the Canadian and US Wests. It was as if we were, and paradoxically so, at the mall since, as one ranger told us while we were at Glacier National Park in Montana, people will walk for miles in a mall—one of the temples of capitalist consumerism—but not in the great outdoors. In Yosemite, at least, they were hiking for the moment outdoors. By the time we reached the table where the falls fell and then fell again, however, most of those hiking the Yosemite Falls Trail had disappeared  hiking down the trail instead of hiking all the way up it. We were overjoyed to be away from the maddening halfway covenant crowd.

Truth be told, it was a difficult hike for Lea and me. This was in the days before I was treated for my asthma with Advair and Singulair and both of us, despite having hiked for months, had to stop a few times and catch our breath, resting for a half hour or so before beginning the hike up the mountain again. We were not the only ones having problems. We noticed a man in military fatigues who was in slow motion heavy breathing mode. There were other hikers, however, who made us feel deeply inadequate. Several young children, for example, seemed to have no problem hiking, nay running, up while a marathon runner in training passed us twice as we hiked up, once as he was on the way up the mountain and once as he was on the way down.

We finally reached the top and immediately went to where the falls fell off the mountain. We laid down on the pier at the top that stretched out to where the falls fell and watched the water fall. It was an amazing experience, an experience almost of free flight.

After we left Yosemite we went to nearby Kings Canyon National Park and Sequoia National Park.  The weather remained absolutely gorgeous.There was hardly anyone at either campsite. At the Kings Canyon campground one of the RV campers made biscuits/cookies for everyone in the campground bringing them to each tent or RV. We were so happy and they tasted so good. We met an Australian couple who were taking their one year vacation to travel across the US and Canada. We saw a couple travelling in an RV having trouble negotiating the roads in and out of the campground. We saw an RV break down and have to be towed out by a wrecker. The things one sees when camping!

 

The Day I Whirlpooled in Niagara Falls Ontario

 

I don’t remember precisely when it was anymore. It was, I am sure, sometime in the early mid-1990s. I was doing postgraduate work at university and borrowed a friend’s car—she called it the Beast—and drove down to Niagara Falls, Ontario to camp with my son Alan, who was still in his teens, and his mum, Rachel. 

Rachel, who had lived in India for a time, made us a very tasty meal of Indian—which region I don’t recall—for dinner that first night. I love Indian cuisine. The next day we did the usual things everyone does in Niagara Falls. We drove through the city taking in the touristy sites. We went to the Falls. We took a ride on the Maid of the Mist and got misty. We had a meal in a beautiful landscaped local park. We went to the Niagara River Whirlpool. 

At the Whirlpool we hiked down the trail and onto the rocky beach of this geological wonder and marvel where the water spins like a whirlpool. For some reason I decided that I wanted to feel what it was like to be whirlpooled by the river though it was probably illegal and certainly moronic. So I got into the river, grabbed on to the rocks and soil of its bottom and let my body move with that of the water. It was an amazing experience. Alain and Rachel eventually came in to the water as well though I don’t remember if they followed my idiotic example or not.

I paid for my stupidity later, however. For about a week my asthma acted up and my breathing was laboured. Was it the chemical bath? I did eventually recover living to tell the tale of the day I whirlpooled in the Niagara River near Niagara Falls, Ontario.

The Day I Was Surrounded by the Russian Navy

 

In 1997 I visited post-USSR Moscow for the first time. I was visiting relatives something that helped me cut through and around a lot of the red tape of getting a visa and getting official residency in the Russian capital.

I flew to Moscow via Aeroflot. I left JFK Aeroport in the morning and arrived in Moscow around 8 in the morning the next day. One of my relatives met me at Sheremetyevo Aeroport northeast of Moscow. I had packed lightly, carrying only two bags with me which I could put in the overhead and as a result got through customs and past the militsiya pretty quickly an with no problem. Tanya, my relative, and I left the aeroport, hoped a bus to a metro stop, and eventually made our way to her home near the Universitet metro station and near Leninsky Prospekt. I felt so good I didn’t need go to bed so me and my relative headed to a nearby park near the German Embassy.

I did finally go to bed, but at the normal time, and woke up feeling great the next morning. During my several months in Moscow I did the usual things. My bowels got messed up. I visited the museums. I went to the Kremlin. I went to Kolomenskoye, one of my favourite places in the city, lounging in the old orchard and watching the Moscow River flow. I went to Gorky Park via the embankment across from Luzhniki and did not have to pay as a result of going in the back way. I did the Mikhail Bulgakov tour visiting the Patriarch Ponds, Bulgakov’s model for Master’s house near the Arbat, the Sparrow or Lenin Hills, and the flat where Bulgakov lived which was covered with Master and Margarita graffiti from the bottom storey to the top. I visited the marvellous Mayakovsky Museum. I walked past the Lubyanka several times. I walked the French like boulevards of Moscow often making my way to Chistye Prudy to have a sit down, always making sure I went there by the street with Dunkin’ Donuts on it in just case I needed to use the wash room or water closet. I went to food and goods markets. I went to the USSR exhibition grounds. I saw the impotent’s dream. I went to Novodevichy and wondered about the cemetery finding Yesenstein’s, Oistrakh’s, and Bulgakov’s graves. I visited my relatives dacha east of Moscow near where the Soviet military stopped the German advance and picked fruit to put up for the fall. I went to hordes of churches which seemed to be on every block in the city. I visited the Choral Synagogue and went in after winding my way though those begging for alms out in front. And I went to bookstores, lots of bookstores.

There were some great English language bookstores in Moscow when I lived there. There was the famous one on Kuznetsky Most. There was Shakespeare and Company somewhere in, if memory serves, the south part of the capital. There was another one near Shakespeare and Company, if memory serves. There was one near the Arbat and the Master’s House. And there was one near the circle line in the south of the city. 

One Saturday in July I decided to go to the bookstore near the circle line. It was a beautiful day in Moscow, sunny and somewhere in the 70s, a lot like many other summer days in the capital. Generally the usually busy circle line was not that busy on Saturdays. What I did not realise until I got off the subway at a metro station I recall as having frescoes or icons of Soviet glory days. As I was walking through the station I was fascinated by the fact that you could clearly see the indebtedness of Soviet era heroic art to Orthodox Christian heroic art of earlier day.

After I exited the stations it very quickly became clear that it was Navy Day. Soon I was “surrounded by Russian sailors clearly having a good time on leave in Moscow. At first I was a bit scared. Booze, the military, out having fun, hey what could go wrong with that? Very quickly, however, my fears were allayed. The sailors were, and in retrospect not surprisingly so, in a very good mood. One of them asked me what I was up to and I told them I was heading to a nearby bookstore. They split from me almost immediately feeling, I suppose, that they could find a much better time elsewhere than with boring old me who could barely speak Russian in the first place.

The Day I Broke My Ribs in the Black Hills of South Dakota

 

After Lea and I left British Columbia we travelled to Rapid City, South Dakota. Lea had taken a short term gig with the Indian Health Service in Rapid which is why we went there to live for three months.

I had met Lea Danielsen in Salt Lake City. She, an Athens, Georgia girl whose father taught economics at the University of Georgia and who had converted to Southern redneckism which he now evangelised to high heaven, was doing a stint--I think it was a three month stint--with a health care corporation that placed doctors in positions around the US in Salt Lake. I was living an hour or so south of Salt Lake in Provo studying, researching, and teaching a class on social stratification at Brigham Young University.

I liked living in Provo—at 319 east and 100 north in Provo to be precise. I lived in a small studio apartment in the back of the two storey house. It was a short walk up to BYU, the Y, to the Sociology Department where I spent a lot of time. I also worked part-time and later full-time at Walt West Books on Columbia near the Desert Industries in Provo with the wonderful Walt West. It was one of the best used bookstores I have ever been in, and visited bookstores in Orem and Salt Lake.

For someone like me who was interested in American Christianity, American Protestantism, and Mormonism, the Y was a very stimulating intellectual environment. It was also a pleasant place to teach. One doesn’t go to BYU to party. One goes there to study. Several of the students I met and taught at the Y were as good as any of the best students at the University of Cambridge or the University of Toronto. One of the students I met—Cari Peterson (or was it Petersen?)—for example, knew Dutch, German, and Russian and she was only an undergraduate. She later went on to postgraduate work in German history at Indiana University in Bloomington. It was also a great place to learn about and research Mormonism, which was one of my favourite things to do at the time.

But back to meeting Lea, I met her when my friend Alan Avens, knowing my interest in American religions, “persuaded" me to go up to a Baha’i group meeting in Salt Lake. Lea was a Baha’i, a member of a fundamentalist, literalist, misogynist, and homophobic new religion that originated in Iran in the nineteenth century. I think Alan had met Lea earlier and thought that she and I would hit it off. And we did despite the fact that I was an atheist, something that would inevitably cause some friction between us as we travelled across the US and Canadian Wests.

Meeting Lea did for me what I suspect I did for her; we wanted to camp and hike but we didn’t want to do it alone. Soon she was visiting me in Provo and we were camping and hiking together. We, for example, spent a long weekend doing both at Arches National Park in Moab, Utah.

When Lea’s gig with the health corporation ended in Salt Lake and I decided to leave BYU, the more fundamentalist aspects of the university—the Y is this fascinating mix of fundamentalist religion and liberalism, religion and secular—didn’t sit well with me, we met up in Phoenix where Lea was doing a short stint in an Indian Health Service facility south of Phoenix. I had just written two editorials decrying the lack of free speech at the Y and thought it wise to get out of town. There we planned out what we were going to do next. We decided to drive from Utah to Grand Teton and Yellowstone and on to wider camping and hiking opportunities further north.

When we left Yellowstone we drove, after a several hour delay delay thanks to a 1 September parade in Gardiner, Montana, to Glacier National Park via US 89, a highway that winds its way through some of the most beautiful scenery in the US including the Grand Canyon, the Glen Canyon, Zion’s National Park, Provo Canyon, Cache Valley, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Grand Teton National Park, the Lewis and Clark National Forest, and finally Glacier. 

The delay in Gardiner proved to be a problem. Before we got there it turned dark, rainy, and foggy and I was stressed driving along a road that curved from left to right and back again and back again. I was doing all the driving because Lea couldn’t drive a shift and my Camaro was a stick. When we reached Glacier Lea and I had to set up our tent in the dark and in the rain with the limited help of a torch or flashlight. Both of us thanks to the stresses we were under—stresses so intense that my back and neck were throbbing with pain as I drove to Glacier—threatened, thanks to the anger we felt toward each other and the recriminations we tossed back and forth, to break off our camping and hiking sojourn at the top of our voices. By morning, however, we had calmed down and our journeys were back on. Familiarity does indeed breed contempt but it also breeds companionship and friendship, even if, in the long run, sometimes only limitedly so.

After Glacier we crossed into Canada after we were detained by a border agent at the crossing because I had mace that my mother gave me because she feared me driving across the US in my car and mace was persona non grata in Canada. We eventually went, as those of you who have been reading these memoirs know already, to Waterton Lakes National Park, Edmonton, Jasper National Park, Yoho National Park, Banff National Park, Kootenay National Park, and Cranbrook, British Columbia. Eventually we crossed back into the US and headed to Rapid City.

The health care corporation that Lea worked for and which gotten her the short term gig in the Indian Health Service Hospital in Rapid set us up initially at the historic Alex Johnson hotel in downtown Rapid City. From this base we hiked in the South Dakota Badlands, the only place we ever ran out of water during one of our many hikes, visited the famous Wall Drugs in Wall, went to Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial, went to look at the bison in Custer National Park, went to Deadwood, hiked one of the trails that circled around the Devil’s Tower National Monument in nearby Wyoming, where we saw four bald eagles and one human, got to experience the joys of hog heaven days in Sturgis, South Dakota and hiked the Black Hills. Additionally, I experienced the joys of getting into La Trobe University in greater Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and the University of Toronto, my dream school, for post-graduate studies

There are two hikes in particular that I remember Lea and I doing in the Black Hills. It was a beautiful November day in Rapid. It may have been somewhat overcast but the temperature was 10 degrees (mid-50s F). We thus decided on the spur of the moment, to head into the Black Hills to hike. Our first hike took us across and around boulders as we descended into a gorge. At the bottom of the decline I led the way across what looked like snow. It was actually ice. Upon stepping on it I almost immediately fell, got up, fell again, got up again, and fell again. When I got up for the third time I was in pain. Doctor Lea diagnosed my injury, broken ribs which there. Always ready, Lea wrapped a fabric bandage around my ribs and we, as we had to, hiked on. 

It was not the first time I had been injured while camping and hiking. Somewhere—was it in Canada or perhaps in the Redwoods parks north of the beautiful Arcata California?—my eye was scratched by a tree branch while Lea and I were out hiking. It was incredibly uncomfortable experience thanks to the fact that my eye—I think it was my right eye—would not stop watering or blinking. Thankfully, Doctor Lea made me an eye patch and put it on me. Within a few days I was back to “normal”, as “normal”, that is, as an always outsider like myself can get.

After finishing the hike Lea and I decided to hike up the highest peak in the Black Hills, Harney Peak (now Black Elk Peak) and its over 2200 metres or over 7000 feet. The hike was amazing. It was snowing those incredible large snowflakes. The sky bathed the green, brown, and black pines and the brown mountain in purple. There was only one other person on the trail—he was coming down as we were going up.The snow kept rising and rising. It was magical. We returned to Rapid happy if rather worn and me in pain.

The corporation that Lea worked for decided to transfer us into a new hotel later during our stay in Rapid City. In our new hotel we were given an apartment with three upstairs bedrooms, a downstairs kitchen, and a living room complete with television on which I watched the uncensored version of one of the best television shows I have ever seen, Tales of the City, on PBS. 

Eventually, Lea’s contract with the Rapid City Indian Health Service ended and we hit the road again. This time we were off to Winslow, Arizona. Lea flew and I drove down via Utah, where I spent a night in the Roberts Hotel, the same hotel I had stayed in when I arrived in Provo to look for a flat. On the way down to Winslow I listened to my Dallas Cowboys beat the Buffalo Bills in the Super Bowl on the radio. 

Before I forget I should tell you, dear readers, that Lea and I did stand on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. We didn’t, however, see any flat-bed Ford or beautiful young lass slowing down to take a look at us. We were really happy, though, that Flagstaff was just an hour away.

The Night I Was Almost Scared to Death by Wild Pigs on Santa Catalina Island

Lea and I had been living in Winslow, Arizona for several months. The reason was simple. Lea was an MD, a medical doctor, and she would take periodic short terms gigs with the Indian Health Service in between our various camping and hiking sojourns. A few months of rest and increased income was a nice punctuation in between our long and primitive sojourns in various forays into the “wilderness”.

When Lea’s contract was up with the Indian Health Service hospital in Winslow, the base from which we took excursions into Flagstaff, Sedona, and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, we decided to head for California. Our plan was to drive up the west coast from San Diego to Vancouver, British Columbia. We drove down to the misnamed Montezuma Castle National Monument, headed across Arizona on 260 and 85A to the old mining town of Jericho and Prescott. Finally, we got on Interstate 10 and headed through the gates into golden California.

We had hoped to make it to Joshua tree National Park before nightfall but it grew dark and we were tired. We stopped for petrol in Desert Center where the attendant told us that we could pitch our tent for the night. The next day we drove to Joshua Tree and set up camp. After staying for a couple of days we left. It was more of a rock climbing park then we expected and we were not rock climbers or even interested in rock climbing. We drove through San Bernardino picking up some food, including several large bags of pistachios,  at a Walmart along the way. Next we drove down to Palm Springs. Eventually we ended up at Lake Perris State Recreational Area near Riverside where we pitched our tent for the night.

The next day we headed into Los Angeles. Our plan was to go to Santa Catalina for four days of tenting and hiking before we headed south to San Diego. We drove to Long Beach without a hitch—traffic was light by California standards and along the way we saw the ruins brought by the earthquake of 1989--and caught the ferry over to Santa Catalina. After arriving in Avalon, Catalina’s major city, we walked up the valley past the old Chicago Cubs spring practise baseball field and past the school and pitched our our tent in a nearby campground. We were one of only two campers there. The other was a graduate Social Anthropology student from one of the colleges of the University of London. When we checked in we were immediately warned about the wild pigs that came out at night and how “mean” they were.

We had no idea how scary Santa Catalina’s wild pigs were until we went to bed that first evening on the island. Around midnight we heard them scavenging around our tent. We were so afraid of them—they sounded fierce—that we didn’t get out of the tent until morning. Thankfully, I was still in my forties and my plumbing was consequently in good shape. Of course, there was also the empty bottle method that could be used in a pinch.

The first hike we did on Santa Catalina was up a 2000 plus mountain to the west of the campsite. We were told that on a clear day you could see Long Beach and Los Angeles from the top. We were not able to see either when we got to the top of the mountain but we could not have care in the least. The views of that part of the island were spectacular. 

Also at the top of the mountain was a road along which the electric golf cart vehicles for which Catalina is famous for sometimes ran. Autos were largely verboten on the island at the time. We turned east toward Avalon and within a few hours was back in Santa Catalina’s largest “city”. On the way down we passed the famous Santa Catalina casino. Ahead of us while still descending we saw the Catalina desalinisation plant. As soon as we got to Avalon’s city centre we stopped into a great and inexpensive Mexican restaurant where we ate on several occasions during our stay on the island and got some of their excellent burritos.

We hated to leave Catalina with its wonderful weather and incredible scenery but we had to. Lea made plans to attend a medical conference at the Hotel Del on Coronado Island in San Diego. So we got the ferry back to Long Beach, got into the Camaro, and drove south to San Diego.

 
 

The Day I Almost Got Attacked by an Elk

 

In the early hours of the evening Lea and I turned off the Trans-Canada Highway, crossed the Bow River, and entered Banff, which had only become a self-governing town in the early 1990s. We drove through the city centre noticing as we drove that it was “larger” and busier than many of the places we had recently been in our sojourns though the Canadian Rockies. 

After driving through the city centre we went to the campground—it must have been Tunnel Mountain Campground 1 near the Bow River Hoodoos--and picked out a spot to pitch our tent. It turned out to be easier than we thought it might be to find a nice camping spot acceptable to us both—we generally spent a lot of time picking out a camping spot we both liked generally for scenic reasons—because of all the touristy human traffic we saw in Banff town. Most of the tourists—many of whom were Japanese tourists ensconced in what looked like relatively sumptuous busses--in Banff were not, we quickly deduced, living in a tent in September like us.

After we set up camp we headed back to the city centre to the grocery we saw on the way in in order to get some food to eat for our planned four day stay in Banff National Park. The grocery store surprised us in several ways. It was bigger and had a lot more food, including fresh food, to offer than what we had recently been used to and it was “reasonable” in cost compared to what we had recently been used to.

Back at the campsite we started a fire, ate, and went to bed. The next morning we did what we always did; we planned out a daily hike. We had a wonderful book on the best hikes in the Canadian Rockies which had been helping us do this since we entered the Canadian Rockies at Jasper National Park and whose advice we almost always followed. It never let us down in all our journeys. The hike we chose took us through meadows, pine trees, and eventually to the famous Banff Springs Chateau, one of the chateaus built across Canada by the Canadian Pacific Railroad (but now and then owned by an American company, a fitting microcosm for Canada’s client state economic reality) to stimulate tourism—this one near the hot springs of Banff-- and a picture of which always seems to adorn almost every promo for Banff I have ever seen in my life. Like everyone else who comes to Banff, I suppose, we wanted to see the chateau too.

So we started our hike to the chateau. There was no humans on the trial when we began. There were critters, however. Lots of them. Everywhere. As we rounded a curve in the trail we came upon a rather large female elk and her baby calf grazing right next to the trail. We stopped dead in our tracks and contemplated what we should do next. We knew that we did not want to walk right up to the elk. That might prove hazardous to human health we surmised. We wondered whether we should turn back given the counsel we had received many times and what we knew about large animal and small human interactions. After several minutes of discussion we decided that we would take a large arc to our left around the elk so as not to disturb them. 

I went first. I took a wide half circle around the elk mother and her calf and stopped on the trail to wait for Lea. Then Lea started. I noticed almost immediately that the mother elk looked almost quizzically directly at me. Then she started to come at me at a brisk gallop. I had no idea what to do. For some reason I yelled “stop". The elk stopped, gave me another look, and came at me again. Figuring I had nothing to lose I yelled “stop" again. The elk mother stopped and returned to her calf. I had survived injury or death to live another camping and hiking day.

Lea, who had stopped walking her half moon arc when the elk came at me, resumed her half circle walk and met me on the trail. We laughed about what happened and about the absurdity of it all. As we walked on we came across a Banff resident who had grocery sacks in her arms after having hiked to the grocery. She was making her way back home. We told her about the elks on the trail. She immediately turned back.

Happy to have escaped possible injury Lea and I hiked on to the chateau. There we dined in a store behind the chateau surreptitiously on a sumptuous feast of free dried salmon for prospective customers something I still feel a bit guilty about today. Dried salmon—and it was really, really good dried salmon--never tasted better.

Shout out to Monty Python...

The Day Captain Kirk Almost Killed Me

After spending four days in Banff National Park and the Banff public campground Lea and I decided to cross over the mountains once again to British Columbia to Kootenay National Park in eastern British Columbia. So we headed north to Castle Mountain and hung a left on Highway 93 which ran along the Vermillion River between high mountain peaks and pine forests.

The weather was gorgeous and sunny. Along the way we saw a black bear, the first bear we had seen on our journey from Utah through Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Alberta, and British Columbia. We saw breathtaking mountains, breathtaking turquoise rivers, and breathtaking turquoise lakes, all of which were an illusion, nothing more than sunlight bouncing off the rocks below the depths. 

We couldn’t listen to the radio because not even the CBC signal could make its way around or over the mountain fortress surrounding us as we drove. We wouldn’t have listened to it anyway because everything around us was so spectacular. We must have had the radio on the CBC, however, because suddenly as we emerged from our impregnable mountain fortress the radio burst on. 

The first thing we heard—it was almost as if the voice of god had suddenly appeared out of the burning bush--was Captain Kirk, Canadian born William Shatner. Both Lea and I, though we were not Star Trek groupies or devotees—trekkers or trekkies—of course, knew who William Shatner was. I may have known at one time that he had had a musical career but if I did I had forgotten it long ago. It was Shatner’s musical career that was the subject of the CBC programme. He was singing the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” on our suddenly working radio. It was punctuated by witty, parodic, and snarky commentary about the recording and Shatner’s musical career by a CBC host who was obviously having way too much fun. So soon were we. The song and the commentary had us in stitches immediately. We laughed so hard, in fact, that in retrospect I don’t know how I kept the Camaro on the road. 

Shatner singing the Beatles was only the beginning of the hilarity. Next up on the programme was Leonard Nimoy singing a song based on JRR Tolkien’s fantasy books, “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins”. Lea and I’s laughter may not have been as deep, as hearty, or as dangerous as that for Shatner and “Lucy". The shock and surprise of the now old was gone. What wasn’t gone, however, was the memory of this crazy experience, an experience I will never forget, an experience that could have injured and killed us both. C’est la vie.
 
 

The Day We Ran Into a Pack of Bighorn Sheep in Kootenay National Park

 

Lea and I drove—well I drove my Camaro since Lea could not drive a stick shift and the Camaro had a stick shift—from Banff National Park in Alberta to nearby Kootenay National Park in British Columbia. I think we must have had visions of hot springs dancing in our heads since we learned that the village of Radium Hot Springs got its name from the hot springs in its midst that regularly reached temperatures of 39 degrees (around 100 degrees Fahrenheit). Radium was at the entrance to the park. We, of course, dreamed of that kind of heat since we had been dealing with just above freezing temperatures for months in the beautiful Canadian Rockies.

Driving into Radium Hot Springs in September was a trip both literally and figuratively. Immediately we noticed bighorn sheep wandering along the roads of the town like pedestrians on a Friday evening going shopping spree in town centres or around town squares. According to local folklore the bighorn sheep showed up in town about the same time every year during hunting seasons because hunting was illegal in Radium and the bighorn sheep seemed to know that.

After getting a campsite and pitching our tent in the mid-morning hours Lea and I headed immediately to the hot springs where we sat for an hour or so watching the 39 degree temperature of the springs meet the 4 degree air of Radium producing that wonderful mist so redolent of hot springs meeting the colder air of the Rockies in the process. 

While sitting in the springs Lea and I planned out our next hike. We left the warmth of the springs and hiked into the mountains above the springs. We soon learned that we were the only humans hiking in the mountains this late in the season. As we hiked we saw a bighorn sheep. She or he skittishly looked at us and appeared to be deciding whether he should come at us at full gallop or not.  Thankfully, he or she didn’t.

We hiked on and soon we found ourselves amongst a flock of bighorn sheep to our left. The encounter with the earlier bighorn sheep had been a bit disconcerting. We talked about being in a situation all alone deep in the mountains of British Columbia and what would happen if we were attacked by that sheep with no one, no one, around to help us. Initially the encounter with the pack was even scarier than that of the single bighorn sheep. What would we do, we contemplated again, if we were attacked and injured with no one around to help us? We needn’t have worried. The bighorn pack ignored us. Strength in numbers? Who gives a crap about a couple members of that horrid human species?

We emerged from our hike several hours later and went back to the hot springs for more warm comfort and cleansing. Later—I don’t remember how long it was, a day or two perhaps—Lea and I took down our tent, loaded the car, and headed back toward Cranbrook to see an old fort and the train museum.

The Night Our Tent Collapsed and How We Fled to British Columbia

 

It was the last night of our intended stay in Lake Louise. We planned, after four days of camping in Lake Louise to head south to Banff town making it our base of operations for more hiking amidst some of the most beautiful mountain country in the world.

The September weather had been wonderful during our stay in Lake Louise just as it had been in Jasper. The days were sunny and in the 2 to 7 degree range. The nights were, of course, colder generally staying in the upper negatives just below freezing. And then it happened.

I woke up sometime in the middle of the night with a sense that something was closing in around me. Eventually I pulled my arms and hands out of my warm sleeping bag to feel around so I could see, well feel, whether this sense of claustrophobia was a phantom or not. It wasn’t. I woke up Lea and told her of my sense of dread but she quickly retreated back to dreamland. We would not realise what was actually causing my claustrophobia until we woke up the next morning. 

In the morning we unzipped our tent and emerged from it to find that under the weight of wet snow that had fallen during the night the part of the tent I was sleeping under had collapsed. By that time the snow which had fallen after we retired to bed was mostly gone, melted in the renewed sunlight of a new day, and what was left was a wet and slushy mess and so was the tent. After much gnashing of teeth we decided to drive west to Vancouver.

 I don’t know how far we got as we headed to Vancouver but on the way west we saw an old hotel or motel on Highway 1 and stopped. We needed to clean up not only our muddy tent from the snow from the night before but thought it would be nice to do something that we hadn’t done for awhile: take a shower in order to clean ourselves up and sleep on nice comfortable beds in warm rooms for a change.

Whether it was the showers, the warmth, or a returned sense of adventure Lea and I decided to return to the Rockies the next day. After getting cleaned up we drove into nearby Golden, British Columbia. Golden was a lovely and "real" small town. The town had initially been built as a settlement at the confluence of the Columbia and Kicking Horse rivers in the Rocky Mountain Trench by the Canadian Pacific Railway which was building a line through the region in the late 19th century. Later it became a lumber camp and a lumber town as did so many smaller settlements in British Columbia during the era. At night the town really did look golden set as it was against a backdrop of magnificent mountains and magnificent colourful skies on all sides. 

At that time we were there Golden wasn’t as touristy and as expensive as it is today. We went to one of those inexpensive department stores that one could often find dotted in the city centres of small towns in the West where we prepared ourselves for our return to Rocky Mountain climes. I bought a pair of polypropylene long underwear, which, according to the camping guide sources we relied on, was some of the warmest and dryest long john’s one could buy in preparation for coldish camping and hiking in the mountains. 

After eating we returned to the hotel. The next day we decided to do some camping and hiking at Yoho National Park in British Columbia before heading back to Lake Louise and on to Banff. I am glad we did. When we got to Yoho we got a campsite, pitched our tent, and did some hiking. 

In the evening we learned that there was a tea house near our public campsite, the Twin Falls Tea House. We went there as night fell and found, to our delight, not only good tea and good food but great conversation. Hikers were there from all over including the United States and from various parts of Europe, most prominently from Germany. Over hot cocoa and tea we exchanged camping stories and gathered expert information on where and what to hike next.

The next day, of course, we hiked. We even hiked up to the twin falls that the tea house was named after. Then we returned to Alberta and headed south for Banff National Park.

The Day a Bison Nearly Set on Our Tent in Elk Island

 

Lea and I had been camping in Waterton Lakes National Park and Glacier National Park on the border between Alberta and Montana, Canada and the United States, for eight days. They turned out to be two of our favourite camping and hiking spots on our journeys through Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Alberta, British Columbia, South Dakota, Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia (again). 

We decided, however, that it was finally time to head north. So we hopped in the Camaro and left Waterton. On the way north we passed through Cardston, the earliest LDS settlement in and capital of Mormon Alberta and hence Canada, High River, later one of the Alberta homes of the superb CBC show Heatland, Calgary, and Red Deer finally arriving in Edmonton in the early evening. We went straight to the West Edmonton Mall to see the waterslides, something my then friend Lea had a fancy for and wanted to see. Needless to say, they were impressive. When we learned that we could get free tickets to the waterslides if we stayed in the hotel attached to the West Edmonton Mall we decided to check into the hotel, a nice luxury after weeks and weeks of tenting in “primitive” conditions. We stayed at the hotel four days and not only did we get free tickets to the waterslides but also to the submarine, the second largest submarine fleet in Canada folklore has it, to the skating rink, and also a host of other attractions in the small city that was the mall, a mall which had its own police station and chapel. 

One of the first things we did when we checked into our room was to get into the hot tub for a bath, something that we had not really had to that degree anyway, for weeks. Sink baths and one minute showers (which all the “civilised Canadian national parks we visited had) are just not the same. We spent four days in the mall sliding on the water slides, riding in the submarine, and reading free copies of the Globe and Mail amongst other entertainments. I bought a sweatshirt (which I still have), got a haircut—my hair was too long for camping and tenting in “primitive” conditions, and we ate at some very good restaurants. We had a great time. I even got to visit one of my mentor’s in Mormon Studies at the University of Alberta and several nice nearby bookstores.

But Murphy’s Law was, as it almost always in, in operation though we didn’t know it at the time. The weather was wonderful during the four days we spent in the mall. It was sunny and only partly cloudy. When we went east to camp and tent in Elk Island National Park, however, the weather turned rainy and we “enjoyed” four days of rain in that park tramping around in our Sierra Designs rainwear. 

One of the most entertaining aspects of the park, as it always is in national parks, was the geology, the flora, and particularly the fauna. We saw, for example, a large moose enjoying a frolic in one of the ponds of the park. And we saw a lot of bison. One of these bison, a big bull bison, “liked” to be around us so much he walked and walked around our lonely tent in the campground, the only tent in the campground. At one point it appeared as though he was going to sit down on it crushing it, we were sure, in the process. We were, to say the least, a bit disconcerted by the absurdity of it all.

Fortunately the bison decided not to sit on our tent. It survived to live another day. So did we. We left Elk Island for Jasper National Park arriving there several hours later.

The Day I Nearly Died Laughing in Lake Louise

I no longer remember what day it was—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday?—but we—me and my then friend Lea Danielsen—decided to leave Jasper for Banff.  So we performed our usual campground ritual. We took the tent down, packed up the car, ate, and headed south down the Icefields Parkway.

The drive south was, as it had been when we drove west from Edmonton into Jasper National Park, spectacular. The sky was blue. The weather was sunny. The temperature was 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 (or upper thirties and forties if you do archaic and illogical Fahrenheit), As we drove south we saw the monumental mountains of the Canadian Rockies with their spectacular green, brown, and black pine forests, mountains and forests made even more spectacular by the blue background of the sky which they were foregrounded against. We saw turquoise rivers, turquoise lakes, glaciers, and finally, as we neared Lake Louise, the famous Canadian larches of Monty Python fame. 

By early evening we had made it to the Columbia Icefields and its camp ground. So we reversed our camping and campground ritual. We unloaded the car, put up the tent, and ate. Before going to bed we visited the famous glacier that helps give the icefields its name. The glacier even then was melting in the face of climate change. Wooden markers with dates noted showed where the glacier had been years before and where it had retreated to in the early 1990s when we were there. 

We then returned to the campground from the icefields but we quickly learned that the glacier was not done with us for the evening. It was a cold evening, colder than we had been used to during our September sojourn in the beautiful Canadian Rockies of Jasper National Park, since, or so local folklore has it, the cold winds blew off of the nearby glaciers and directly into the campground and into our tent. 

The next day we drove to Lake Louise, where we stayed, if memory serves for four days. We set up our camp in the Lake Louise public campground. We woke up the next day and did our other camping ritual. We hiked. We hiked up a mountain trail that took off from the northwest edge of Lake Louise. About halfway up we stopped at the Lake Agnes tea house for some scones, soup, and tea. Replenished we once again headed up the mountain to see the famous and world renowned larches of the Canadian Rockies. When we reached the top meadow there were others there who had done the hike up before us and who now served as replacement trees for the many birds that landed on their shoulders and their arms looking, one presumes, for food.

After staying on top of the mountain for a while we, unlike the German hikers we met who went on to other mountain tops, hiked down the mountain. We descended to Lake Louise with its hordes of Japanese tourists hiking around the lake on mostly level ground and finally ended our hike at the parking lot of the also famous Lake Louise chateau where we had parked so we could do our hike. 

From there we drove over to the Lake Louise Village Centre. It was there that it happened, the event that almost made me die laughing. An older couple started their car and the horn immediately started blaring and wouldn’t stop. The male driver apparently flustered seemed to think that the horn problem could be solved by driving around the village of Lake Louise. From the parking lot you could hear the horn blaring north, south, east, and west and could follow its journey around the tiny village and eventually back to the parking lot where me, Lea, and a host of others listening and likewise following the car’s odyssey were almost dying of tear stained laughter. 

After the show we got in the car, went back to the campground, ate, and went to bed. The next day we took down the tent, packed the car, ate, and headed south to Banff for further adventures, none of them as joyous and hilarious as the car with the ever beeping horn making its way around Lake Louise, however. 

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Hitchcock, The Birds, and the Happy Resolution

One of the fascinating things today about the brave new digital social media world is that a lot of those brought up and socialised into a world that thinks that it and its high tech, including its high tech films, are the best of all possible worlds and the best of all possible film worlds, are increasingly watching classic films these days. Though they have been socialised to dislike anything that seems studio bound, while at the same time, and paradoxically so, loving cgi, the new matte paining, while they have been brought up to hate black and white films not realising that black and white is sometimes an aesthetic choice and that some black and white films with their manipulations of light and shadow are works of art, while they have been brought up to prefer realism in their films, something that is ultimately not possible in books, films, or television given the reality that all of them are built on unrealistic manipulations of time and space, and while they have been brought up to dislike anything made in the past because it is technologically “primitive", they are increasingly watching the classic films of directors like Alfred Hitchcock on social media platforms like Patreon and YouTube because they have discovered that they can make monies by doing so. People will, you see, pay reactors to react to books, films, and television shows so they can watch how they react to them. Presumably, these voyeurs hope to see the reactor react positively to something they like, a fact that many reactors realise which is why they make sure to tailor their reactions so they can continue to make monies from their social media reactions. Commodity “aestheticism".

Alfred Hitchcock, of course, is one of the greatest directors of film of all time. He is one of the few masters of the cinematic craft and film art, as many of those watching his films on social media platforms for profit are learning. Hitchcock is not only the legendary master of suspense but he knows how to compose in black and white and colour, he knows how use music, he knows how to compose shots, he knows how to use delaying techniques for maximum tension, he knows, as did Shakespeare, mix tonal variations—comedy meets black comedy, meets drama, meets suspense, meets highbrow wit, meets even tragedy—all in order to manipulate those watching his films and to provide pleasure for those watching his films. One can, by the way, see just how good Hitchcock was at doing all of this even today thanks to the contemporary social media reactors we have been talking about, social media reactors who often describe how they were on the edge of their seats while watching a Hitchcock film. 

Not surprisingly, the Hitchcock film that seems to be the most viewed by YouTube reactors these days is his 1960 film Psycho. This is not surprising given that horror films—which Hitchcock did not make despite some reactors thinking he did--along with science fiction films and action adventure films, the new Westerns of modern Hollywood (see Die Hard), are among the most popular genres in contemporary comic book oriented Hollywoodland. Some reactors are, however, watching other Hitchcock classics as well including Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and The Birds (1963). A few viewers are even watching Notorious (1946), a kind of companion piece to North by Northwest and one of my favourite Hitchcock films, and Strangers on a Train (1951), both in glorious black and white. Very few, unfortunately, are watching Hitchcock’s British films, films such as the brilliant The 39 Steps (1935) and the brilliant The Lady Vanishes (1938), films that are as good as any films Hitchcock ever made,  

While the social media reactions to all of these Hitchcock films are interesting the social media reactions to The Birds are particularly interesting because they tell us something about the socialisation of social media reactors. The Birds is not your typical Hollywood film. Hollywood films are typically of the fairy tale variety with happy endings. They typically, in other words, have happy resolutions. The Birds, however, does not have a happy fairy tale resolution. Melanie (Tippi Hedren) and Mitch (the Australian Rod Taylor) may have found love by end of The Birds, by the end of the bird attacks that helped bring them together, but Hitchcock does not tell us the reason for the bird attacks on Bodega Bay north of San Francisco in the first place. Was it Melanie herself? Was it the caged love birds Melanie brought with her from San Francisco to the Brenner’s house in Bodega Bay for Mitch’s sisters birthday? Was it god looking down at the chaos caused by the attack of the birds on Bodega Bay, California and beyond and laughing at the absurdity of it all? Was it the end of the world predicted by Christians ever since the advent of that faith? Hitchcock doesn’t give us an answer or the answer. Nor does Hitchcock tell us how what we have just seen on the screen ended. Do Melanie, Mitch, Mitch’s mother, and Mitch’s sister escape the bird attacks after they drive off in their sports car at the end of the film? We don’t know. We can only speculate, surmise, hypothesise and most humans don’t like to do any of those three things.

In my experience those brought up on a steady diet of unrealistic fairy tales with happy endings and generally happy resolutions have difficulty, to use a contemporary phrase, wrapping their heads around works of art that don’t have happy endings where boy gets girl and life goes wonderfully on. I still recall, for instance, that when one of my relatives from Russia who was brought up in the Soviet Union of the 1970s on.a steady diet of happy resolutions came to visit me and we watched an episode of X-Files that didn’t have a happy resolution that she was flummoxed by the lack of a happy ending. She couldn’t understand why everything wasn’t tied up in happy social realist or disneyish bright ribbons and bows. Similarly, many reactors, most of them Americans I suspect, have the same reaction to The Birds. Why, the wonder, does the film not tie everything up in bright ribbons and bows?. Boo. Hiss. They can’t handle the truth that life often doesn’t have happy endings. And this is why, I suspect, those viewers who love Rear Window, who love Vertigo, who love North by Northwest, and who love Psycho, don’t equally love The Birds. 

I, on the other hand (and yes I do realise that value is in the socialised eyes of the beholder), think that The Birds is one of Hitchcock’s greatest works for exactly the same reason most reactors don’t like it: it doesn’t have a happy Hollywood ending. And that is why, I suppose, that I also prefer the art cinema, particularly the “foreign” art cinema, to Hollywood. The art cinema is, I would argue, more “real” than that of Hollywood. That, however, is not why most people watch movies. They may sing a mantra like chorus of we want realism in our films but they really go to see movies because they want to escape from the “real world”.  They go to see movies because they want the fairy tale. They go to see movies because they want the happy endings. They go to see movies because they want everything tied up in bright and happy ribbons and bows. They want, in other words, the bread and the circus. And who can blame them. Life, after all, is not a fairy tale. It does not often end happily. It is not often tied up in bright and happy ribbons and bows. Life is generally, as the Buddha said long ago, typified by suffering and the films Hollywood produces provide, as does religion, many with the serenity they need to get through it. They need their pie in the sky.

 

Dreaming My Life Away...

 

Every night for the last two or three years it has been the same thing: I go to bed. I dream. I wake up from my dreams before they are resolved. I have to urinate. Then, if I am lucky and can use yoga techniques to relax my mind and my body—a body racked by the pains of old age and old age infirmities-- I go back to sleep and dream again only to have the same thing happen again. The dream ends before it concludes and I am once again off to the water closet for the second or third time that night.

Usually I don’t remember my various mini dream movies. Most of them over the course of my life have typically been mundane and banal—a typical post-Star Wars Hollywood film--and most of them have been mundane and banal for the last two or three years too despite their lack of resolution. This morning I did remember my nighttime reverie and I wrote it down as it was one of the more vivid of my dreams and I wanted to make sure I did not forget it it so I could write it down and think about it some more.

In this dream I was in lovely house with at least two storeys. There were a lot of people in the house taking and moving about. I seemed to have been plopped down in the middle of a crowded party. Eventually I made my way upstairs to a room with very few people in it who were watching classic movies. A reflection of my general dislike about being around too many people particularly at mundane and banal parties and a reflection of my longstanding cinephilism?  Soon an announcement appeared on the television we happy few were watching that Michael Powell’s classic Peeping Tom—a film that deserves as much recognition as Alfred Hitchcock’s much better known Psycho—would be on next. I immediately headed downstairs and sought out two young French lasses. Did I assume they were cinephiles like myself because they were French and France—where I lived briefly and a country I have always been fond of—was well known for its cinephilism and film criticism in the 1950s and 1960s? I told them that the rarely seen and rarely shown Peeping Tom was going to be shown in a few minutes on the small screen upstairs. Initially, they berated me. Did they think I was trying to pick them up? Did they think I was ill? Did they not believe me? I left them immediately and climbed back up the stairs to watch the film. The two French lasses eventually followed which pleased me. Am I not as averse as I thought to watching small groups of others if they are also intelligent cinephiles? Then the dream ended.

As I thought about this dream I began to wonder if my endlessly repeating dream experience—dream ends before resolution—is a reflection of my age—I am not 69—and a reflection of my somewhat conscious concern about the end of my life.? I have long thought that I had resolved any issues concerning my mortality. Perhaps I haven’t managed to do this fully, however. One thing I do know is that I am weary and bored by the banal mundanity that is contemporary life in anti-intellectual America, a land where many right wing populists, many of them right wing know nothing theocrats, fascists, and xenophobes, seem to think that the stone age life was the best of all possible worlds in which humans had ever lived. As for me, I can’t imagine a much worse “utopia”, a utopia not that different from those when Christianity and Christian inquisitions ruled Europe, when Hitler and his inquisitors ruled Germany, and when Stalin and his inquisitors ruled the USSR, and I certainly don’t want to live in it now or at any time in the future or the past should the Doctor of Doctor Who really exist and can take me there. I would definitely want him to take me to almost anywhere else.