Graciously

 We saw Peter Frampton the other night in Salt Lake City, and he was great. We go way back together.   I felt like I was hanging from a tree in Central Park watching his free concert in ‘75 or dancing in my dorm room playing my lacrosse stick, before he came Alive.   This was the ‘Never say Never’ tour and it was bittersweet, but I like my friend Terry’s tour title of ‘Frampton is Still Alive’.  Frampton covered Georgia on my Mind early with no words and finished with While my Guitar Gently Weeps that was a great sentiment but it was ultimately not Prince, who now owns that song. In between he played his schtick songs as the structure for some great jams.  Even the mouthpiece stuff was unabashedly good.   ‘Lines on my Face’ was my favorite, whether it is about grief, age or cocaine, I still love the practical line, ‘I still got a house I got’ta heat’.   His big hit ‘Show me the Way’ surprisingly felt like Peters rendition of a wanderers Ripple by The Dead.  When he sang the line from ‘Shine On’ -  ‘Find it hard to see you in the darkness, I looked around, you were besides me’, I turned to my wife Tracey, smiling next to me.

Salt Lake was great with easy travel and parking and a dinner at a nice old speakeasy cat-house on Franklin Street in the Tenderloin.   It is a good size city now with critical mass and there is finally some there, there. The Eccles theatre is a modern version of Carnegie Hall that I didn’t even know was there. There are high rises going up even taller than The Church, and large apartment buildings employing structural architectural gymnastics just for post-modern style.  We arrived in Salt Lake in the 70’s when the Central Business District was vacated by an exodus of business to the suburbs and the malls.  We fled to the hills and small town Park City.  There were less than a million people in Utah at the time and Frampton was an unknown outside of NYC.  Since then SLC has enjoyed a resurgence spurred by the 2002 Winter Olympics when ‘The World Was Welcomed Here’ and they stayed.  Throw in a successful conservative State Economy, the marketing moniker of ‘The Silicone Slopes’, the diverse beauty of the state with the heavily promoted ‘Mighty Five National Parks’ and 80% of the state being federal land, as well as the acceptance of the quirky but friendly Mormons and you have one of the most successful cities in the country.  They announced recently that we will get an NHL hockey team, and possibly a MLB baseball team and the 2034 Winer Olympics.  The sky is the limit for ‘This is the Place' and with its rebuilt International Airport, and growing cultural diversity, Salt Lake City, as well as Park City and Peter Frampton, grew up with us.

The all-star band was on stage right that night, admiringly facing Frampton on stage left. They were good but it was his show.  There was a video screen behind the band showing Monte Python type clips like ‘Frampton Comes Alive’ on a rocket blasting off into space. The band was rocking, and Peter’s fingers were dancing dexterously with upbeat tempos and solos.  He still has it. He was very gregarious and personable. Sounding Happy. Lively. Fun and funny. Frampton is the rock sound and attitude that I grew up with and brought here, and thereby compare it to all other rock.  Peter is sick and dying and came onstage with a cane while I had brought my Sciatic cane for walking in the big city.  I held it high during the encore and he acknowledged.   There are no coincidences.  Peter and I, Salt Lake and Park City had come a long way and successfully grown older graciously, together.  Frampton left extorting the crowd to consider that we are all struggling with something in this life, and to try not to be judgmental of others, not knowing their trials and tribulations.  Like the Grateful Dead ask in 'Uncle John’s Band', Peter asked us, "Are you kind." 

Special

 It struck me as funny, the day of the eclipse, watching Totality race across the country on TV and looking up at the sliver of Partiality in my own backyard, and I thought how special we must be.  Days before I saw the perfect crescent moon rising before dawn, racing unknowingly to its new-moon rendezvous with the sun in a few days, unaware of its effect on the scurrying humanity below.  All of us looking for a higher universal perspective, human bonding experiences, or something else to do.  This random, light bending confluence seemed inevitable by now, and I was amazed that science could predict its conjugation to within a second, years ahead of time. Two, seemingly independent, celestial objects on their gravitational orbital dance with destiny.  It was special.

Is it a coincidence that the sun is 400 times as big as the moon, but 400 times further away, giving us the perfect eclipse geometry?  I think not. There are no coincidences in nature’s design of the universe. It all has a mathematically balanced plan. There are, in fact, several moons, around dozens of planets, around millions of stars, in billions of galaxies, and that is just in the universe that we know of today. There are, realistically, millions of eclipses going on in the universe at any given moment. In the trillions of places to live out there, the probability that there is Not life on one of them is almost zero. If there is an eclipse happening out there, and there is no one to see it, is it really that special?

We are separated from each other, in this vast universe, by the current Einsteinian limitation that nothing goes faster than the speed of light.  He said that if you stood on a train going the speed of light and shined your flashlight ahead, the light beam would only go the speed of light.   So, we are separated from the rest of the universe by great distances and the speed-limit of light, which is 186,000 miles a second, or 700 million miles an hour, or 6 trillion miles a year.  Wicked fast.

In Star Trek their Warp Speed number is cubed and multiplied by the speed of light to get their actual speed.  So, Warp speed 2 would be 8 times the speed of light or 6 billion miles an hour.  Peak Warp Speed 9.6 is 1900 times the speed of light and that is 12 quadrillion miles per year.   That is tremendously fast but that is science fiction.  We still do not believe that Warp Speed is possible without a theoretical Warp Drive, Worm Hole or Quantum Tunnel taking short cuts through the space-time continuum.    

 According to our current physics, if you stood on the closest star today and looked back at the earth, you would see the light from the Insurrection at the Capital 4 years ago.  If you were on one of our closest galaxies and looked back at the earth, you would see the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.  Light is really fast, but the universe is really big.  And getting bigger.

Even if there is life out there, it could not get here if it wanted to. They are protected from us by our own isolation and the speed-limit of light. Which is good since we would probably beat them up, because they were different from us, or start a war with them because they want our stuff.  Either there is a lot of life out there in the universe that just cannot get here from there, or we are really really really special.  The Garden of Eden. As special as The Dark Side of the Moon or a Total Eclipse of the Sun

Duct Tape Dream

According to my mentor Tom Clyde, there is a universal symbol of someone who identifies as an old time, old school  local.  Duct Tape.  It can be found on the nicest CMH powder suit and the lowliest old Park West Patrol coat, untimely plucked from the nearest dumpster.  It is usually worn with honor and pride, as a silver badge of courage, longevity and frugality.  It screams a practical philosophy of ‘waste not want not’.  It begs the universal question of ‘if it is not broken, why toss it’.  It echoes Ira Sac’s sentiment to ‘Be More, Appear Less’.  It supports the superstition to never change clothes during a powder cycle or even a good power year.  It honors the fashion leadership of 50-year local John Haney who skis every day, dressed in Duct Tape while eating carrots and sweet potatoes on the lift.  He wears it proudly because, ‘it costs money to lose money’.  And it does.

Duct Tape, not Duck Tape,* is usually utilitarian silver, the kind used by HVAC guys, electricians, plumbers and anybody who has something to fix.   It can by any color, like a blend of black to surreptitiously patch your big-ass,- blown out ski pants like mine worn proudly, or day-glow for safety and style on the slopes.  I have never been hit or run over in my orange jacket with the pink Duct Tape.  It makes it easier for your friends to spot you but it does make it hard to hide from the ski patrol in the woods when you are peeing or poaching.   It can be used on skis to stop delamination of the tips, or boots to stop leaks, or poles to make them effectively adjustable - with a thick bump-out rap, one hand width below the handle, or gloves - for that one finger that wears out first as well as goggles, glasses, gators, hats, face lips, scars, cars, motorcycles, bikes, boards and virtually anything you want to make look cooler. I have a dream.  We should not be judged by the content of our character, but rather by the condition of our clothing.  The only credential we locals, or any of our clothes need in this town for true acceptability is, ‘he rips’.  And we do.

As a personal addendum to this great idea, all locals should include the year they came to town after their name and signature so we all will know the proper amount of reverence and respect to bestow on them.  It is like a Water Right - Priority Date that indicates when you filed your Water Right, where you are in line to get your full amount of water before anyone after your date gets any.  ‘First in Line, First in Right,’ the water guys say, but they also say ‘Use it or Lose it’, which works here as well.   Your Locals Right is similarly tied to your residency here and for the ‘Best Beneficial Use’’ of all.  That is defined as 'The Basis, the Limit and the Measure’ of your Right so that also works for your value and seniority in town.  This is not tied to your place of origin, ownership, age, race, identity, money, education, appearance, attitude, altitude or aspect, just to your Locals Right Date.  This will establish a transparent hierarchy of accountability and authority for anyone who has any longevity around here and skin in the game. It is only right.

You might even want to write your Date on your coat with Duct Tape to see who gets first shots on a powder day, the best parking spaces, the first seat on the bus, the best tables at restaurants, the right of way on trails, and perhaps good Sundance tickets.  Maybe they can build a special lane on 224 and 248 or a special line on the chairlifts for those with the better priority dates.  Then John Haney, Tom Clyde and I would always be fashionably first.   As it should be.  

 

Mathew Lindon ’79, Snyderville

No Regrets

 Regrets, I’ve had a few, like not sleeping with more women when I could, but then again, too few to mention.  I did what I had to do, like not taking better care of my body, and saw it through without exemption.  I could have been a better father, friend, brother, son and husband, but I did it my way.  What is a man, what has he got, if he didn’t look back and didn’t think how he could do it better.   It is human nature, and the engineers, shoulda-woulda-coulda, curse to optimize, to be efficient and to make the best with what we have.  So looking back, what would I change about our little town?  If we did it my way.

I would, for example, not let the Coalition Building accidentally, suspiciously and conveniently burn to the ground in one dramatic night.  This building was an icon, our icon, the symbol of the resort and the town.  It was a ten story master of architecture and art, form and function, with huge timbers of great mass and girth.  It was a supremely functional anchor of the tram that took ore off the mountain and deposited it in two train tracks in its belly, by gravity alone.  Sure, the Town lift and ski bridge are nice, connecting the mountain with Main Street, but we lost our monument, our symbol, our Eiffle Tower.

Would we, in fact, drain all the water under our town out to Jordenelle, Salt Lake and towards Ogden in over 500 miles of drain mine tunnels.  Park City used to be lush, verdant, with surface streams flowing everywhere.  Now we must pump our ancient water from way down deep or from Smith-Morehouse, Rockport and the Weber River.  That is like pumping the Great Salt Lake into the west desert in the ‘80’s to evaporate, then complain today when the lake dries up.  Where is the foresight for sustainability.

Next, I would not build a road the size of an airport runway into town.  I you build it they will come.  If you don’t, will they stay away?  The road serves as a fire hose that shrinks to a lawn sprinkler in town.  It can’t handle the flow and pressure of our large attractive demand and the endless supply volume of people who want to get here.  There is a disparity between the desired level of service on the highway and the comfortable carrying capacity of our local roads, resorts, runs and restaurants.  If the road was smaller, would less people brave the traffic, or would they park at the junction and take the bus?   We can build a tunnel and a flyway, but where would they go.  They would just kick the can down the hill.  We continue to expand that fire hose road into town and complain that the outcome never changes. Repeating the same mistake and expecting different results, that’s insanity.

I would have started by preserving open space before we started building developments, when it was cheaper, and the choices were better.  I would bury the concrete water tank on Masonic hill.  At least paint it sage and juniper green.  Ridgetop development is unsightly and forbidden in most places, especially for public works structures.  I would respect the existing wetlands in Park Meadows, Snyderville, Snow Park (Frog Valley) and Silver Lake (Lake Flat).  These wetlands were the lush mountain ‘parks’ that this city was named for and were developed before proper Clean Water Act enforcement or George Bush’s declaration of ‘no net loss’ of wetlands. 

I would not let them cut down the nice Conifer trees in front of the defunct Holiday Village cinema so we could see the sign that says ‘visit our web site’.  I would not chase the Kimball Art Center off Main Street, because of architectural differences, to an Art District that we still don’t know what it looks like or how we can afford it.  I would not create two separate bus systems when all our planning should be regional and foster support and cooperation.  I would run free buses to Heber, Kamas and Salt Lake and encourage workers to use park-and-ride lots by paying them from the time they parked.  I would require that every second home over 5000 square feet have a caretaker’s quarters for someone to live and take care of the grounds while working other service jobs. This would solve our housing crisis in a town where 60% of the homes sit empty most of the time. I would not encourage people to flip houses so quickly, turning our homes into tax free commodities and driving up the prices. 

But all in all, we have done well with what we have. Mistakes were made that we cannot take back, but it is still a pretty, great place.  We did some great things with open space at Swanner and Octothorpes, Round Valley and Bonanza, 500 miles of trails and great recreation centers, affordable housing and free busses, Art and Balloon Festivals and Silly Market, historic preservation and the Special Ability Center.   Development worked better when it went slow and thoughtfully, allowing public input of different opinions and ideas, minimizing individual greed and fear.  Government worked better when we elected and hired the best and the brightest, and we listened to them.  We should continue to plan each chartered course, each careful step along the byway.  And more, much more than this, we do it our way.   Apologies to Frank.

Matthew Lindon ’79 - Snyderville

March Madness 2024

The tourists are gone, and we have survived another year of March Madness.  No, not NCAA hoops, Magic vs Bird or Catlin Clark.  I’m talking about that spring break time of year when friends and relatives choose to come out to visit.  It is the Goldilocks time of year when it is not too warm and sunny but not too cold and cloudy, when the snowpack is thick and the weather is nice, ‘just right’ for some spring skiing.  They don’t realize that the sun, birds and the Sand Hill Cranes have just come back and we are just emerging from our hovels from our winter hibernation. They don’t see the months of darkness we enjoy, the cold and unrelenting blizzards that build our snowpack and the crowds of Christmas and Sundance that help us pay our bills and keep the buses free. 

I discovered this place on my own frat boy spring break, when we came out west and slept on the uneven floor in the little red house on Park Avenue.  The skiing was fast and the weather was warm and we burnt our neophyte faces off in the high altitude sun and our tenderfoot tongues on the hot new Mexican food.  The beer flowed like wine.  We quickly moved out here and never looked back.  Since that time we are deluged with guests every year, mostly in the spring.  If we lived in Des Moines, I’m thinking we wouldn’t have this opportunity.  Friends came out early and stayed late and slept on our floor and in our guest beds when we built houses.  That lasted until we got significant others who kicked them to the curb and told them to get their own accommodation.  This is our life, not just your vacation. 

So they come with family and friends, and eventually wives and children, packing an ungodly amount of equipment and spending an unimaginable amount of money, spurring our economy and making our town successful.  They stock up on enough food and alcohol to last a year, thankfully depositing the leftovers at our house on their way out of town.  They store their equipment in our garages and basements, where I now have several pairs of phantom, skis with no apparent owners.  They temper the normally frantic ski tempo down with their needs and necessities, Zoom calls and work deadlines, as they do their own thing at their own pace. We enthusiastically meet them on the mountain when they are ready, willing and able and they adhere to our request to simply not make us wait or go shopping.  We graciously ski a few runs with them until they get hungry, hurt or tired and we go our separate ways, to meet again later for beers and dinner or just to tell tall tales and lies.  After all, if it wasn’t for tourists we would all be miners. 

I give them tons of credit; it is very tough to come from far away with all that stuff and get everyone up to go skiing.  It’s a challenging thing to do if you’re not used to it, prepared, experienced or in good shape.  Taking kids is even harder and these parents should be commended for their efforts to introduce their kin to the ski culture that has changed all our lives for the better.  They all promise to move out here, but eventually most go home, returning to what they really want to do.  It’s a nice place to visit but they wouldn’t want to live here.  These visits do serve as a continuity link to where we are from and other lives we have lived.  It is hectic, making room for others in our homes, our town and the slopes, but I wouldn’t change It for the world.  I realize that although they come to ski they also come to see me.  It is a great opportunity to catch up with old friends and new family and they remind us constantly what an incredible place this is, when we lose perspective.   I wonder what it would be like if we lived in Des Moines.

Matthew Lindon, ’79 - Snyderville

Thank You.

 I pulled into the glacial moonscape parking lot.  They gave up plowing weeks ago.  The three attendants weren’t paying much attention, so it was chaos.  People were walking and parking all over.  I did my best to park orderly but the guy parking next to me almost took my door off and left his car running to power his head-banging stereo.  Why is people’s taste in music inversely proportional to the volume of their stereo. ' Have another Red Bull', I said.  I put my boots on and then the attendant came by and asked me to pull my car up 13 inches.  I said it was too late and would be dangerous for me to drive in my ski boots.  He shrugged, in Portuguese. I’m an A-hole, I admitted in broken English. Obrigado.

Getting on the lift, the ticket taker blithely pointed her Japanese scanner at my chest as I pointed to my leg pocket.  She asked if I was ‘Joe Blow from Kokomo’ and I said ‘no I’m Joe Schmidt, the rag man’ so she asked to see my pass.  I begrudgingly dug it out of my pants and she scanned it.  This charade was repeated on every run, with lots of bowing. Arigatou.

 Then on another lap, people were piled up at the entrance to the self-regulating, magic diamond maze so I was forced to enter the ski patrol line.  The Swiss checker warned me against this, and I explained with a smile that I was on the ski patrol in another life, and I thought I was grandfathered in.  He humorlessly persisted and warned I might get yelled at. This discussion was now in the spirit of a friendly negotiation of our Season Pass contract.   After all, being the customer, I am always right, like Nordstrom's in the 1980s.   I said OK but hinted they might want to have a sign out front to say ‘don’t congregate at the Maze entrance’, which everyone does.  Especially people from South America, it’s a cultural thing (like Brazilians who like to wait for their friends while standing on the loading bar up front).  He indicated that no one would heed the Maze sign since they ignore the No Phone Zone signs and besides that, this enforcement was above his pay grade. So I said ‘OK then stop telling me what to do’.  ‘A-hole’, he smiled in German.  Danke Schone, I squinted back.

It was like the ski-school teacher who chased me into the woods one day and told me there were bathrooms at the lodge, even though they smelled like New York City in July. Misplaced or distended authority.  Ya got a problem wit dat.  What’s next, French-Canadian volunteers in yellow telling me to slow down?  I am an A-hole.  Merci Beaucoup.

On my way out I tried to ski to the gondola to go home but it was clogged up with a ski school circus tent and the magic carpet ride.  I took off my skis and walked the extra hundred yards around the ski school on their nice new heated patio, past the walled in Docs Bar and the fenced in Umbrella Bar.  I got on the Cabriolet and went home wondering who was thinking about circulation and marketing here.  I’ve seen more inviting après ski bars on Temple Square.  But then again, they didn't ask me.  I’m an A-hole. Ya betcha, fer sure.

The moral of the story is: don’t be an A-hole like me, no matter how long you’ve lived here or how well you remember how it used to be.  The local and immigrant working folks out there are doing the best they can.  Maybe they need more training and money or better management and corporate support.  They are here for us to enjoy our indulgent lifestyle and pampered pursuits.  Focus your attention rather on the extractive ski industry that is sucking the money and life out our little ski towns, to distribute to shareholders far away, paying low wages and throwing us a bone but leaving us holding the bag for traffic, housing, wages and overcrowding.  I hear they even bought A-Basin just for guys like me.  Because I’m the A-hole? Muchos Gracias.

Saving Money with Living Wages

 

We drove over to the Canyons on a magnificent Tuesday and although the traffic wasn’t too bad, the parking lot was an absolute glacier skating rink with hummocks and seracs because during the last storm they didn’t plow it. This was their Entry Statement?  Parking was a free-for-all for pedestrians and cars, in the mud with only three uninterested parking attendants available.  They needed ten, I thought, but I guess they were saving money. 

We got on the mountain, and it was glorious.  It was a bluebird day and the grooming was magnificent.  The only thing was that there was not enough of it.  Only one or two runs were groomed off every lift and they got skied off quickly from the focus.  I thought they might be saving the snow from overworking it but we were in the middle of another great storm cycle so I concluded that they must be saving money.  

There used to be a variety of groomed runs to choose from on each lift, as recently as last year, when they recovered nicely from the 2020 Covid year debacle of minimum wage and supply chain limitations that closed slopes, lifts and restaurants.  I was told that they can’t find enough snow groomers and I wondered how that could be when grooming is one of the coolest jobs on the mountain, besides throwing bombs, if you can make enough money to eat.  Then I realized that with near zero unemployment, it’s not an employee problem, it’s a wage issue.  No one wants live in the parking lot in their VW van or drive from Nephi to work at night for $20 an hour.  If they paid a living-wage there would be a line of drivers all the way to Heber to help them groom. 

A living wage might be classified as enough money where you wouldn’t need essential worker assisted housing to survive, which is defined at about $80,000 a year in Park City, or about $40 an hour.  Hiring roughly 500 groomers companywide at that rate would cost them less than 1% of their Season Pass income.  A small price to pay for excellence.  Their flagship mountains in Colorado have plenty of groomers, plows, parking lot attendants and lift operators.   What are we, the red headed stepchild, the poor little bastard?  

Deidra and our local mountain management team have done well with what they get but we are clearly not a corporate priority. Then I realized that the company and shareholders don’t care about the ‘product’ once they get our money in September.  It’s like size-flation where you get a smaller box of cereal each year for the same price.  It made me wonder what the product was that we agreed upon and contracted for in September.  Was it the outstanding 2022 ski season or the horrid 2020?  Snow helps but there is a big difference.  You never know, they never say.  Or is it OK for our mountain to be demoted again from Top 10 to Top 50 in the USA rankings.  That affects everyone.   

So, I went in to get a cup of coffee to think about this and I gave the cashier a twenty.  He said we don’t take cash, only credit cards or your Mountain Charge Account, whatever that is.  I looked at him and he looked at me.  I finally stuffed the twenty in his shirt pocket saying ‘trickle-down, stick it to the man’ and we both laughed.  On the way out of the parking lot that day I was swallowed up by a bone crushing, Moon size crater that has been there for 9 years.  Nice Exit statement, I thought, I guess they are saving money.