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| -rw-r--r-- | essays/tnf.txt | 41 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | leopold-essay.txt | 19 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | new.txt | 3 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2016-12-21_happy-birthday-sun.txt | 17 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | tnf.txt | 33 |
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diff --git a/essays/tnf.txt b/essays/tnf.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2653844 --- /dev/null +++ b/essays/tnf.txt @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +[<span class="small italic">I wrote this essay the night I found out that Doug Tompkins, founder of The North Face passed away. I never actually met the man, but I did work for his company for a while and it remains one of the more memorable jobs I've had.</span>] + +In 1995 I dropped out of college for the first time[^1]. I had made it through three semesters, which I thought was pretty good. Especially considering how much college had been getting in the way of my life, which at the time consisted mainly of hiking, climbing, surfing and generally living outdoors. + +It wasn't an expensive lifestyle by any means. I shared a single bedroom trailer a few blocks from the beach (location, location, location) for which my roommate and I paid, I believe, $220 each. Everything I needed, save the mountains and desert, was within walking distance. + +My biggest expense was gear. Rock climbing gear especially tended to be both expensive and, due to the often brutal conditions it existed in, short-lived. It was all good and well to live on bean burritos, but smart climbers did not try to overextend the life of ropes and cams. + +Looking around for ways to fund this lifestyle I did what countless others before and after me had done -- I got a job at the nearest outdoor retailer that would have me. + +In my case that turned out to be The North Face[^2]. My girlfriend in high school had worked at the Gap so I knew the retail clothing drill more or less and I definitely knew outdoor gear. I ate, slept and breathed it. Aside from obscure punk bands, there was little I knew more about than outdoor gear. I turned in an application and after one short interview, got the job. + +I was quite proud of myself. I had set out to do something and I did it. I won't try to unpack the privilege going on here, I was 19. I thought I had skills. I got some inkling of how little skills and how much unearned privilege I enjoyed later when my manager Kristine confessed to me over after work drinks that I was horrible at interviewing and she almost didn't hire me because I never looked her in the eye. But she thought I was cute, so I got the job. Skills my ass. + +I also go the job in part because it was nearly summer, which meant that half the regular employees would soon be departing for seasonal work around the west -- guiding white water trips, leading climbing expeditions and otherwise doing the sorts of things that people (and The North Face itself) expected North Face employees to do. + +This was back a bit, when The North Face (hereafter TNF) still appealed primarily to those spending their lives outdoors. I was selling gear mainly to fellow hikers, climbers and campers. Most of them didn't need the expensive gear they were buying, but then again nobody ever does until they do and then your life depends on it. Or so we all told ourselves. I originally wanted the job because I wanted one of the TNF four season tents. I dumped probably 25 percent of what I made back into gear and you know the one thing I never bought? A tent. Naturally. + +Still, back then a job at TNF was a highly coveted thing for someone with my aspirations, which were basically to work as little as possible and spend as much time outside as possible. + +While the perks were good and the pay enabled me to get by and do what I wanted to do, the job itself was little different that what my ex-girlfriend had been doing at the Gap. It was retail clothing sales. It was boring and the pay was pretty shit. + +There were a few things I enjoyed about it though. I enjoyed helping out the occasional thru-hiker calling from somewhere along the PCT in need of new gear or a warranty repair. The TNF back then had the best warranty in the business. If an item could be repaired it was repaired. If it couldn't be repaired, it was replaced. Very few questions asked. In fact employees like me could make the judgment call ourselves. For PCT thru-hikers I usually just sent out a new bit of gear, usually without even seeing their old one. They were out there doing it, I considered it my job to make sure they did it. + +Another part of the job I enjoyed was the gear testing. It didn't happen very often, but a few times, maybe four or five times in my nine months working there, the San Francisco headquarters would send out some prototype piece of gear they were thinking of making into a product. They'd send out a few tents to all the stores or a dozen jackets and the employees would take them out on their next trip. On one hand it was free gear, on the other it was possibly defective gear. It added a bit of spice to your trip. + +I have no idea how other stores did it, but at our store the gear shipments would generally come in on Thursdays. If there was gear for us to test we would all look over the schedule, see who had the weekend off, sometimes call unsuspecting fellow employees and try to switch shifts, and then make a group trip to the desert. + +After work on Friday we'd meet up at the Goat Hill Tavern, a terrible, brightly lit bar with sawdust and peanut shells scattered all over the floor, chosen chiefly because it was across the street from the store. One unlucky soul would be the designated driver and the rest would proceed to drink themselves silly. When the bar closed we would all pile in Roy's wood paneled Dodge minivan and high tail it out to Joshua Tree National Park. + +We'd get into the campground around three or four in the morning (yeah, we were those people), in varying states of exhaustion, bleary-eyed drunkness and sometimes already hungover. We would then proceed to do any tent testing. If anyone could get a prototype tent set up in the dark, it passed muster. We'd give it rave reviews. If we gave up and just threw our sleeping bags in the dirt the tent got a bad review while we got a few hours of sleep under the Milky Way before the blazing desert sun found us early the next morning. Then it was a full day of hungover climbing and a long drive back to the beach. It was a hard life. + +The other thing I remember about working at TNF was the incredible amount of downtime. In fact, if my memory is correct there were only about 100 customers the entire time I worked there[^3]. There were stretches on mid-week afternoons when no one would come in for four hours or more. + +There was a small climbing wall which we regularly reconfigured in a futile effort to challenge ourselves, but by and large we sat around reading books and magazines. I got a great many other things out of working at TNF, including things I would never have expected, like connections to some branch of the Mexican mob in Santa Ana and an introduction to really good Thai food, Thai food so good I wouldn't taste better until I made it to Thailand. + +Great jobs are like that and despite that fact that TNF was essentially retail sales, there was something more there, something about the company itself that went beyond what my girlfriend did at the Gap. Until one day all that stopped. My good friend and manager was sent packing and replaced by a professional salesman fresh off a stint at Mervins. I quite the first day I worked with him and have never regretted it. Everything is grand, until it isn't. + +[^1]: I would drop out four more times from three different schools before finally graduating from the University of Georgia, 12 years and 3000 miles from where I started. +[^2]: I had originally hoped to get a job at a privately owned shop named Adventure 16, but they were not hiring at the time I was looking. +[^3]: This is no doubt a slight exaggeration. However the store I worked at did eventually close for lack of business and in fact entire shopping center did the same a bit later. Last time I was in the area it was largely abandoned and in the process of being converted into loft apartments. diff --git a/leopold-essay.txt b/leopold-essay.txt index b17d619..a9487e4 100644 --- a/leopold-essay.txt +++ b/leopold-essay.txt @@ -1,14 +1,23 @@ -The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world. +One of Thoreau's most quoted phrases claims that "in wildness lies the preservation of the world". -One of Thoreau's most quoted phrases claims that "in wildness lies the preservation of the world". What fewer people know is the lives before it, which amount to little more than Thoreau embracing the westerward drive of empire so common in his day. "The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild", he writes, not too far off of Horace Greeley's more famous lines. +If that's true we're screwed. +Fellow conservationist Aldo Leopold seems to have written much of what he did to let us know not so much what we could save as what it was already too late to save, the wildness we had already lost. The last grizzly killed in Arizona. The jaguars disappearing from the banks of the Colorado as it snakes it's way through the Grand Canyon; the ways countless birds in Leopold's say still clung to existence in the islands of native prairie that speckled his home country of Sand County. +All that was gone long before I was born. Or mostly gone. When I was young there were still small pockets of wildness to be found. Buy enough 7.5 topo sheets and you were bound to find some relatively blank spots. The Superstition mountains. The chocolate mountains. The Chihuahuas. The Dragoons. For a kid who grew up in the decidedly not wilds of southern California, the southern edge of Arizona, the borderlands in more ways than one, retained pockets of wildness here and there. + +My father and I made frequent forays into such places. He always looking for snails. Me looking for something I could not put my finger on at the time. Some intangible thing that felt missing from the world. Adventure perhaps, connection perhaps. Whatever it was, all I knew back then was that it did not, for a few moments here and there, hiking the agave chocked hillsides of nameless mountains, tracing the delicate wisps of shade in the Palo Verde lined washes, sitting at the base of sheer buttes, back leaning against the warm sandstone, watching the shadows lengthen and the thunderheads roll in the from the south, it did not feel like anything was missing from the world. + +It wasn't just wildness though. Or not wildness in the sense that we westerner's tend to think of it -- roadless natural areas that are inaccessible. Accessibility is after all, very relative. Could you have driving a 4x4 up the wash to the base of the butte where I sat? Possibly and that alone is enough to destroy the kind of wildness that Leopold wrote about. A kind of wildness that ceases to exist not so much through the loss of land -- though that certainly doesn't help -- but through the growth of technology. + +Leopold writesWhen I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process of ordinarly referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adeults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living. + +"When I first lived in Arizona the White Mountain was a horseman's world. Except along a few main routes, it was too rough for wagons. There were no cars. It was too big for foot travel; even sheepherders roade. Thus by elimination, the coutnry-sized plateau know as 'on top' was the exclusing domain of the mountaed man: mounted cowman, mounted sheepman, mounted forest officer, mounted trapper, and those unclassified mounted men of unknown origin and uncertain destination always found on frontiers. It is difficult of this generation to understand this aristocracy of space based upon transport." + +These days we eschew aristocracy of space or otherwise. We want everyone to have equal access.: -Aldo Leopold wrote to tell us what we were losing. The last grizzly killed in arizona, the jaguars disappearing from the banks of the grand canyon, the ways countelss birds clung to existance in the islands of native prarire in his farm speckled home country of Sand county. -All that was gone long before I was born. Or mostly gone anyway. There were perhaps pockets you could find. buy enough 7.5 topo maps and you were bound to find some relatively blank spots. The superstition mountains. The choclolate mountains. The chiricauas, the Dragons. The sounter edge of arizona retained pockets of wildness here an there. -my father and I made forays into such places. He always looking for snails. Me looking for something I could not put my finger on at the time. Some wildness that for a few moments here and there did not feel like it was missing. We called half a dozen or more car rental places, but each time the minute the words four wheel drive and Dragoon Mountains came together in the same breath the lin went dead suspriciously soon after. Finaly we stumbled upon roadrunner car rentals, which had an old Dodge truck we could use. Roadrunner proved to be little more than a single wide trailer in front of car wrecking lot, which did not inspire confidence, but did in fact have a dirt brown dodge truck that looked like it was probably held to gether with tin cans, bailing wire and a healthy amount of duct tape. There seemed to be a mutual don't ask don't tell policy at work in which if we didn't ask the owner about the condition of the truck he wouldn't ask what sort of roads we plannned to take it down. diff --git a/new.txt b/new.txt deleted file mode 100644 index a286b87..0000000 --- a/new.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,3 +0,0 @@ -I have stood atop the bell curve and seen both sides. Or it feels like that sometimes. It feels like some kind of high water mark has passed, the tide reached as far up into the spectacular heights of civilization as it's going to and that now, suddenly, we're all noticing that it's running out behind us. I don't for a minute think that the election itself is any kind of marker, rather it's the thing that made us all look down at our feet for a moment to notice that, hey, that water is running away, back to sea and I'm sinking a bit, the sand sucking at our feet. - -I won't pretend to know what the actual high water mark was, it could have been in the last few years, it could have been around the time I was born, it doesn't really matter, what matters is that moment when we collectively noticed and had that "oh shit" moment. That realization that maybe this weird, highly flawed, deeply suspect world we've created was not on the rise and had not been for, well, at least long enough to suck our feet under the metaphorical sand. diff --git a/published/2016-12-21_happy-birthday-sun.txt b/published/2016-12-21_happy-birthday-sun.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0970596 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2016-12-21_happy-birthday-sun.txt @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +My son and I share a birthday, separated by 40 years. The next day, today, the sun has its own birthday of sorts. Death and rebirth in one. The sun is talented like that. + +As anyone with a birthday around now can tell you, the plethora of religious holidays nearby largely overshadow your own. Which is fine by me. As far as I can tell, Elliott doesn't have a strong opinion about it all yet, though he currently very much dislikes being the center of attention, which makes birthdays perhaps a bit unsettling. I can relate. + +Whatever the case our birthdays, combined with the Solstice the next day make for a nice little string of family celebrations. We hang decorations, enjoy a feast of sorts and celebrate the rekindling of light and hope at the depth of winter darkness. Or something like that. + +<img src="images/2016/2016-12-21_180324_alban-arthuan.jpg" id="image-217" class="picwide" /> + +It worked out nicely this year that the morning of the Solstice ice rimmed the world and temperatures dipped will below freezing. Winter is here. + +<img src="images/2016/2016-12-21_073905_alban-arthuan.jpg" id="image-216" class="picwide" /> + +Of course if you look closely at the photo above you'll notice we're not exactly traditionalists about our solstice celebration. Soy sauce and chili garlic paste are not your typical Celtic accompaniments. Yule pigs being in short supply in our yard just now, we went for Momofuko's Bo Ssam pork with some sticky rice and accompaniments. Next year I'll make some Wassail, this year I had to make do with some beer lao dark. Sorry any Celtic forebearers, I like my Alban Arthuan with a little Southeast Asian flavor. + +I've always found it a little curious that so many people, myself included, who don’t otherwise practice the Christian faith, choose to celebrate Christmas. Winter solstice makes far more sense as a holiday to latch onto if you want an excuse to celebrate this time of year. You don't need to be religious at all to recognize that the earth does indeed wobble a bit, which means that here in the northern hemisphere the longest night of the year happens to fall on, for simplicity's sake, December 21. Seems like as good a reason as any to celebrate. Naturally there's more to it if you want there to be, but that's up to you. + +A happy solstice to all. diff --git a/tnf.txt b/tnf.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 90707fa..0000000 --- a/tnf.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,33 +0,0 @@ -In 1995 I dropped out of college for the first time[^1]. I had made it through three semesters, which was pretty good I thought, especially considering how much college had been in the way of my life, which at the time consisted mainly of hiking, climbing, surfing and generally living outdoors. It wasn't an expensive lifestyle by any means. I shared a single bedroom trailer a few blocks from the beach (location, location, location) for which we paid, I believe, $220 each. Everything I needed save the mountains and desert was within walking distance. - -My biggest expense was gear. Rock climbing gear especially tended to be both expensive and, due to the often brutal conditions it existed in, short lived. It was all good and well to live on bean burritos, but smart climbers did not try to overextend the life of ropes and cams. - -Looking around for ways to fund this lifestyle I did what countless others before and after me had done -- I got a job at the nearest outdoor retailer that would have me. - -In my case that turned out to be The North Face[^2]. My girlfriend through high school had worked at the Gap so I new the retail clothing drill more or less and I definitely knew outdoor gear. I ate, slept and breathed it. Aside from obscure punk and hardcore, there was little I knew more about that retail gear. I turned in an application and after one short interview, got the job. - -I was quite proud of myself. I had set out to do something and just did it. I won't try to unpack the privilege going on here, I was 19, I thought I had skills. I got some inclining of how little skills and how much unearned privilege I enjoyed later when my manager Kristine confessed to me over after work drinks that I was horrible at interviewing and she almost didn't hire me because I never looked her in the eye. But she thought I was cute, so I got the job. - -I also go the job in part because it was nearly summer and half the regular employees would be departing soon for seasonal work around the west, guiding white water trips, leading climb expeditions and otherwise doing the sorts of things that people (and The North Face itself) expected North Face employees to do. - -This was back a bit, when The North Face (hereafter TNF) still appealed primarily to those spending their lives outdoors. I was selling gear mainly to fellow hikers, climbers and campers. Most of them didn't need the expensive gear they were buying, but then again nobody did until they did and then you life depended on it. Or so we all told ourselves. I just the other day sold a jacket I bought there 20 years ago that I had literally never put on outside. - -Still, back then a job at TNF was a highly coveted thing for someone with my aspirations. I got the job because I wanted one of the four season tents. I dumped probably 25 percent of what I made back into gear and you know the one thing I never bought? A tent. Naturally. - -While the perks were good and the pay enabled me to get by and do what I wanted to do, the job itself was little different that what my ex-girlfriend had been doing at the Gap. It was retail clothing sales. There were a few things I enjoyed about it. I enjoyed helping out the occasional thru-hiker calling from somewhere along the PCT in need of new gear or a warranty repair. The TNF back then had the best warranty in the business. If an item could be repaired it was repaired. If it couldn't be repaired, it was replaced. Very few questions asked. In fact employees like me could make the call, though the ideal things to do was send it in to the warranty department. But for PCT thru-hikers, I just sent out a new bit of gear, sometimes without even seeing their old one. This was before the internet; people were more trusting. - -Another part of the job I enjoyed was the gear testing. It didn't happen very often, but a few times, maybe four or five times in my nine months working there the San Francisco headquarters would send out some prototype piece of gear they were thinking of making into a product. They'd send out a few tents to all the stores or a dozen jackets and the employees would take them out on their next trip. On one hand it was free gear, on the other it was possibly defective gear. It added a bit of spice to your trip. - -I have no idea how other stores did it, but at our store the gear shipments would generally come in on Thursdays. If there was gear for us to test we would all look over the schedule, see who had the weekend off, sometimes call unsuspecting fellow employees and try to switch shifts and then make a group trip to the desert. - -After work on Friday we'd meet up at the Goat Hill Tavern, a terrible, brightly lit bar with sawdust and peanut shells scattered all over the floor, chosen chiefly because it was across the street from the store. One unlucky soul would be the designated driver and the rest would proceed to drink themselves silly. When the bar closed we would all pile in Roy's wood paneled Dodge minivan and high tail it out to Joshua Tree National Park. We'd get into the campground around three or four in the morning (yeah, we were those people), in varying states of exhaustion, bleary-eyed drunkness and sometimes already hungover. We would then proceed to do any tent testing. If anyone could get a prototype tent set up in the dark, it passed muster. We'd give it rave reviews. Most of the time though we just threw sleeping bag in the dirt and crawled in for a few hours of sleep under the Milky Way before the blazing desert sun found us early the next morning. Then it was a full day of hungover climbing and a long drive back to the beach. - -The other thing I remember about working at TNF was the incredible amount of downtime. In fact, if my memory is correct there were only about 100 customers the entire time I worked there[^3]. There were stretches on mid-week afternoons when no one would come in for four hours or more. - -There was a small climbing wall which we regularly reconfigured in a futile effort to challenge ourselves, but by and large we read books and magazines. There - -I got a great many other things out of working at TNF, including things I would never have expected, like connections to some branch of the Mexican mob in Santa Ana and an introduction to really good Thai food, Thai food so good I wouldn't taste better until I finally made it to Thailand. But - -[^1]: I would drop out four more times from three different schools before finally graduating from the University of Georgia, 12 years and 3000 miles from where I started. -[^2]: I had originally hoped to get a job at a privately owned shop named Adventure 16, but they were not hiring at the time I was looking. -[^3]: This is no doubt a slight exaggeration. However the store I worked at did eventually close for lack of business and in fact entire shopping center did the same a bit later. Last time I was in the area it was largely abandoned and in the process of being converted into loft apartments. |