Volunteers

Nope, not the altruistic citizen type.  Rather, I refer to garden volunteers, where plants spring unbidden from the soil.

[photo by Gary]

Case in point: this potato plant, which sprouted in my garden from discarded compost (see front center, along the edge).  A chunk of raw potato must have had an "eye" (that's the place where sprouts emerge from a potato after you've had it awhile) woke up, and started putting down roots.

When I noticed this plant I recognized it as a potato and left it grow in situ.  When the above-ground foliage dies back, then it's time--as the locals say--to "raise" your potatoes.  then I'll find out whether it's red or white, and of course the size of the individual potatoes attached thereunder.

I've been accused of being kinda with OCD or anal about keeping my garden spiffy.  This more panoramic photo could be Exhibit A, but bear with me:

You can see the volunteer potato plant at the left-center front.  But immediately behind it is a row of volunteer sunflower plants, which emerge every spring from last year's sunflowers.  I transplant them into a row from their various sprouting locations throughout the garden.  And the cool thing is that we never know what we'll get, since we plant several varieties of sunflowers from seed every year.

If I were truly afflicted with OCD, these volunteers would not stand a chance.  Instead, I welcome them.

  

False Summits

Every Ultrarunner has his favorite story of false summits along the trail. 

Mine is neither dramatic, nor especially interesting.  But it was memorable, for me.  It was in the late winter of 1998 and my buddy Bill and I were training for the Massanutten 100 Miler in VA that May.

The training run in question was The Wild Oak Trail 50 miler (out 25 miles to the start/finish, then reverse the course).  It was sort of a Fat Ass type of run: low key, no shirts, nominal fee to cover expenses, etc.  The course, on the WV-VA border, slowly wended its up way to the 4000' level, where we had been warned to expect some serious "post holing," where the snow is too deep to run and you wound up lifting one leg after the other vertically just to get it out of the snow and on to your next step.  This section was more frustrating than tiring.

At last the course turned downhill and retreated below the snow line.  Bill and I were still optimistic and running well.  But somewhere around mile 20 of the first loop, after a descent to a pretty low level, there came an undistinguished uphill.  It wasn't real long, as I recall--perhaps a mile or so--but what drove me crazy about it was that you could see the top.  That is, until you got there...and then saw that the trail continued uphill to the "real" summit.

Only that summit was also false, and the trail continued uphill some more.

Doing this about 4 times completely shattered my resolve and my desire to continue.  We pulled in to the start/finish area; while not having a huge abundance of time, we could have turned back out for the second loop.  But the false summit trail had done me in, even though we would have run it in the downhill direction.  Then the notion of post holing in the dark at 4000' sealed the deal: we called it quits at 25.

Today, whenever I think of that run, all I can think about are those false summits.  Maybe now I am better at gauging slopes, etc., and have never again been snaked like I was on that day. 

Don't Take Your Trees For Granted...and Ultrarunning

From a cool article in Boing Boing--which as I always say, should be on your daily reading list if it is not already: "Income inequality can be seen from space."

How? It's surprisingly simple. Turns out, demand for trees in neighborhoods behaves a lot like a luxury item, as opposed to a basic necessity.

Tim De Chant at The Per Square Mile blog wrote about research on this a couple of weeks ago. Then, he went out and found examples, using images from Google Earth.

Research published a few years ago shows a tight relationship between per capita income and forest cover.

...They found that for every 1 percent increase in per capita income, demand for forest cover increased by 1.76 percent. But when income dropped by the same amount, demand decreased by 1.26 percent. That’s a pretty tight correlation. The researchers reason that wealthier cities can afford more trees, both on private and public property. The well-to-do can afford larger lots, which in turn can support more trees. On the public side, cities with larger tax bases can afford to plant and maintain more trees.

The trouble, as De Chant points out, is that the disparity here is about more than aesthetics. It's about air quality, cooling effects in the summer, and documented impacts on stress, crime, and quality of life. It's also interesting because it seems to go against the stereotype of wealthy suburbs where all vegetation has been eliminated in favor of houses.

So the next time you cuss out a tree root for making a horizontal Ultrarunner out of you, please give a thought to the folks for whom trees are a luxury, not something simply taken for granted.

 

His Brother's Keeper

This Paul Newberry Associated Press article was in my local paper on 1 June.  It concerns a couple NBA stars from the 1950s, names I didn't know...but now wish I had. 

I am posting the entire article.  Please take a couple minutes to read it and ponder what it means to be your brother's keeper.

One of the greats is gone.

And, no, we're not referring to anything Hall of Famer Jack Twyman did on a basketball court.

Twyman ignored the ugly racial times that were the 1950s and '60s to dole out perhaps the greatest assist in NBA history.

He stood up when many wouldn't, becoming the legal guardian and the best of friends to Maurice Stokes when his stricken African-American teammate needed him most.

It's a life everyone should know about.

It's a story worth telling again and again.

"Maybe this is a little learning opportunity for everyone who plays professional sports," said John Doleva, president and CEO of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. "Jack didn't look for accolades. It was just the right thing to do. That's what made him a very, very special man."

Twyman, who died Wednesday night at age 78 from an aggressive form of blood cancer, was a largely forgotten relic from that quaint era before professional hoops became a truly national sport. Never mind he was a six-time All-Star, who along with Wilt Chamberlain became the first player to average more than 30 points in an NBA season.

None of those glitzy numbers was more important than the lasting bond he carved out with Stokes, who passed away more than four decades ago but remained a part of Twyman until his last breath.

The NBA could do its part to keep their legacy alive by establishing the Twyman-Stokes award, honoring the best teammate in the league.

The recipient wouldn't have to go as far as Twyman did — stepping in as Stokes' legal guardian after he was stricken with a debilitating brain injury and essentially watching over him for the last 12 years of his life. But that would be the template. Someone who fit the description on and off the court, who would be willing to put aside his own wants and needs if something so tragic happened to another in the same uniform.

"I knew the story," Boston Celtics coach Doc Rivers said Thursday during a break in the Eastern Conference final, "but, honestly, I don't know it as well as I probably should."

Well, here's a refresher.

Stokes was one of the NBA's budding stars in the '50s, a power forward who could do a bit of everything. Rebound. Shoot. Dribble. Block shots. Run the court. In a documentary that aired on NBA TV, legendary coach Red Auerbach remembered Stokes as "Magic without flair."

Stokes scored 32 points in his first NBA game for the Rochester Royals. He went on to average 16.8 points, 16.3 rebounds and 4.9 assists in his rookie season, was chosen Rookie of the Year and earned the first of three straight trips to the All-Star game.

"Probably next to Michael Jordan, he was the greatest ballplayer to hit the NBA," Ed Kalafat, who played during that era, said in the same documentary. "This guy, for as big as he was, he could do everything Michael could."

Twyman, who was 11 months younger than Stokes, entered the league with Rochester during the same 1955-56 season and had the look of a budding star, though he wasn't as dominant as his teammate. The Royals moved to Cincinnati in 1957 and made the playoffs for the first time in three seasons, with Stokes ranking third in the league in both rebounds and assists.

But Stokes — and Twyman — would be forever changed by what happened in the last game of the regular season at Minneapolis.

Stokes fell over the back of another player and slammed his head on the court. He was knocked cold but, in the crude medical treatment of the times, some smelling salts brought him back to consciousness and he finished the game. He also played in the opening playoff game, a loss at Detroit. On the flight back to Cincinnati, Stokes suddenly became ill.
"He sweated profusely," Twyman would remember years later. "It was if someone grabbed him by the head and dunked him in a swimming pool."

An ambulance was waiting when the plane landed, and Stokes was rushed to a nearby hospital. But nothing could be done. He fell into a coma and was totally paralyzed when he came out of it. He was suffering from post-traumatic encephalopathy, which ravaged the part of his brain that controlled motor skills. He would never walk again, much less play basketball.

That's where Twyman stepped in.

He was one of the few Royals who lived in Cincinnati during the offseason. His teammate was confined to a hospital bed — scared, all alone, with bills to pay and no way to do it.

"How would you like to be one of the premier athletes in the world on a Saturday?" Twyman once said. "Then, on Sunday, you go into a coma and wake up, totally paralyzed, except for the use of (your) eyes and brain. I mean, can you imagine anything worse?"

Twyman took over as Stokes' legal guardian, organized what became an annual exhibition game to raise money, and made sure his buddy was cared for the rest of his all-too-short life. That Twyman was white and Stokes was black made no difference, even during an era when race relations had become the nation's defining struggle.

"To do what he did in the late '50s when, frankly, racial relationships were what they were, it wasn't a normal thing to do — a white man to basically adopt and become the legal guardian for Maurice," said Doleva, who oversees the hall where both men are rightfully enshrined. "It's an extraordinary story, but it speaks to his heart. Jack left his heart on the basketball court every time he played, but he had a much bigger heart when it came to his teammates."

Physically, Stokes never came close to being the man he once was. Mentally, he was stronger than ever, never feeling sorry for himself, never griping "Why me?" His heart finally gave out in 1970. He was just 36, having never realized anything close to his potential as a player, but having lived a full life as a man.

Later, when explaining why he did what he did, Twyman said simply, "That's what friends are for." Besides, he always felt he and his family got far more out of his relationship with Stokes than they ever gave back.

"He taught us a lot. We learned a lot from him," Twyman said in the documentary. "We're honored to have had the opportunity to be associated with him."

Right back at you, Jack Twyman.

The human race was honored to have been associated with you.

 

I Love North Carolina, But....

Head, meet sand (from Scientific American, via the Earth Bound Misfit):

...the meter or so of sea level rise predicted for the NC Coastal Resources Commission by a state-appointed board of scientists is extremely inconvenient for counties along the coast. So the NC-20 types have decided that we can escape sea level rise – in North Carolina, anyhow – by making it against the law. Or making MEASURING it against the law, anyhow.

Here’s a link to the circulated Replacement House Bill 819. The key language is in section 2, paragraph e, talking about rates of sea level rise: “These rates shall only be determined using historical data, and these data shall be limited to the time period following the year 1900. Rates of seas-level rise may be extrapolated linearly. …”

It goes on, but there’s the core: North Carolina legislators have decided that the way to make exponential increases in sea level rise – caused by those inconvenient feedback loops we keep hearing about from scientists – go away is to make it against the law to extrapolate exponential; we can only extrapolate along a line predicted by previous sea level rises.

We vacation there on the Outer Banks every year, and have done so for decades.  Whew, I am sure glad that the sea level is only going to rise 8" as stipulated by the legislators, rather than the 39"+ predicted by, you know, actual climate scientists.  Because you see how that would be inconvenient for tourists and the hospitality industry there.

 

Cats in Art: The Dead Cat (Gericault)

From my continuing weekly Sunday series of cats in art. I'm using some ideas from the coffee table book, The Cat in Art, by Stefano Zuffi.

Click image for larger, ESC to return. Image credit Wikipaintings, here.  The Dead Cat, Theodore Gericault, 1821, oil on canvas, held by Musee du Louvre, Paris, France.

We previously saw Gericault's Portrait of Louise Vernet as a Child in this space back in Dec 2011, where a young girl--Louise Vernet--was holding one enormous cat.  With respect to this dead cat painting, Zuffi comments:

Rarely has the death of an animal been depicted in a more dignified way.  ON a bare bench, the cat's pale body is analyzed in all its stark reality, in the stiffness of death--its face contorted in a tragic grimace, its paws limp.  It is true that whoever has seen his or her cat die cannot be happy with a replacement, so important is the individuality and character of the one that has passed away.

So sad, so realistic.  Gericault gets it right.

 

Guess Who Said It?...and Ultrarunning

1. "Corporations are people, my friend." 
2. "...we don't need more national parks in this country; we need to actually sell off some of our national parks." 
3. "It's long past time for this Administration to stop delaying American energy production off all our shores." 
4. "Overregulation from EPA is at the heart of our stalled economy." 
5. "I'll get us that oil from Canada that we deserve." 
6. "Let EPA go the way of the dinosaurs that became fossil fuels." 
7. "No one will miss a hill or two." 
8. "We have to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency."

Answers:

1. Mitt Romney
2. Rep. Cliff Stearns, FL
3. John Boehner, Speaker of the House
4. Rep. Mike Simpson, ID
5. Mitt Romney
6. Rep. Louis Gohmert, TX
7. Sen. Rand Paul (on mountaintop removal coal mining)
8. Newt Gingrich

All these quotes were in a recent fundraising request from the Sierra Club, of which I have been a member for years.  To me, it's a no brainer that any serious user of the backcountry--such as we Ultrarunners--just has to align philosophically with the principles of conservation and preservation espoused by environment organizations such as the Sierra Club.

Yet in certain places in my social circles, even mentioning the Sierra Club--much less admitting I'm a member--is tantamount to saying that I molest children and kick stray dogs.

Somehow it's become chic to want to sell out our descendants' legacy of things natural, wild, and free, as though we can't afford to protect such things.

We can't afford NOT to.

Where They Lived

I'll conclude my Memorial Day series of posts with the May 2012 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, containing a sad article entitled "Where They Lived."

Author T. A. Frail and photographer Ashley Gilbertson teamed up to document homes where grieving parents have preserved intact the bedrooms of their dead servicemember children.

There's a balance between remembrance and getting over it.  I hope never to have to walk in those shoes and I will never criticize any family's choices on such a personal matter.

My heart goes out to all those thousands of families whose lives have been shattered forever.  May peace be yours.

By the way, the photo above is of the bedroom of Army Pfc. Richard P. Langenbrunner, 19, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Langenbrunner committed suicide on April 17, 2007, in Rustimayah, Iraq.  This bedroom, with its PC and telescope, looks like the kind of bedroom I would have loved as a teenager.  I can't even imagine the kind of wartime stress and hurt that would have caused a 19 year old kid to kill himself.