George Sibley Writer

03/26/2018

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE YOUNG PEOPLE OF AMERICA:

I rejoice in the fact that there has been such a large response among young Americans nationwide to the last ‘school shooting’ – a strange term it is hard to imagine in connection with a public education system. But the fact that ‘school shooting’ has become a cultural commonplace about which the alleged adult population does nothing but the equivalent of crossing ourselves and getting back to business makes it appropriate that at this point, you the students in the schools, are finally saying, enough is enough; we’re at the tipping point and done with waiting for the adults to do something about it.

I am of that adult generation, and am properly ashamed of how little we have made of our time allegedly in charge of the world. It is my life as a parent – hardest thing I have ever done – and now a grandparent that sent me to the ‘March for Our Lives’ Saturday, carrying a sign that said: “Old Guy here for the Young Americans Who Are the Future of Our Democracy. It is not just about guns.’

I was there, in other words, not primarily to ‘protest gun violence,’ but to cheer on what seemed to be a surging commitment by you to become active challenging citizens rather than just the passive unquestioning consumers the American power structure wants you to be. But that surge should not be just about guns and school safety.

Trying to do something about gun violence is a worthy objective. But I hope that you do not become ‘single-cause citizens’ with all your hopes tied to that issue, because it is going to a long-term exercise in patience and frustration. Our cartoon Congress has already said it is done working until after the election, so the only way to act on that issue at this point will be to find and help and vote for candidates who promise to take a strong stand on the issue if elected – and some of them might actually get elected, and some of those might even remember their promises.

But after that, when Congress finally reconvenes, you will begin to learn how and why not much real change ever comes out of our national government when there is a strong status quo faction on the other side with lots of money and passion – all the strategies of delay, diversion, dilution and dissembling that can and will be brought into the fray. There is the further fact that guns (‘Sam Colt’s equalizer’) and what one historian has called America’s predilection for ‘regeneration through violence’ are deeply imprinted in the American character, at a level below reason. To get anything at all in the next year or two on this issue will be an exhausting effort, and any ensuing legislation will be heavy and cumbersome with compromise and dilution.

What I would remind you is that there are numerous other issues, also not receiving much action from your parent generation, that might pose even greater threats to your future than random madmen with AK-47s – issues that need the full engagement of active citizens, and it is engagement that can begin at home where you live as well as at the national level. We need to move toward new behaviors that will stop adding the gases to our atmosphere that overheat and dry out our world; to move more coherently toward renewable energy resources; to begin producing locally more of the food we now expect to be brought to us from California or New Zealand; to think about how we will find joy in life as active intelligent citizens when we (and the planet) can no longer afford an economy based on indulging passive and unthinking consumers. We need young people in school learning life skills by building affordable houses for teachers like students are doing in Crested Butte, Colorado, where I live.

I am not trying to discourage action against gun violence. But I do hope the recent surge toward a ‘young woke citizenry’ will thrive and grow powerful, through taking on some of our larger, more approachable, and ultimately more important challenges too.

- George Sibley, Gunnison

10/26/2017

I FIND MYSELF HAVING MIXED FEELINGS about the current movement to remove Confederate flags and statues.... It seems to me untimely – meeting rage with rage – and it is probably going to prove increasingly counterproductive if we still share a national goal of making ourselves ‘one nation indivisible.’ The forced removal of monuments will change no minds, win no hearts; victors reminding the vanquished they lost never does.

But in its ‘all or nothing’ formulation, the movement to remove also fails to make an important distinction: it is only partly an issue of a ‘state right’ to a racist heritage. There is another, maybe more important sense in which it is a veterans’ issue.

I have no particular problem with taking the Confederate flag off the capital building of a state; I am not bothered when statues of Confederate politicians and generals are taken down.

But it hurts my heart when I hear that a statue memorializing ‘the Confederate soldier’ has been pulled down.

I say this as one who, as a young boy-man, loved America but didn’t want to die for it, or for anything; I didn’t want to die at all yet. Beyond that base impulse, I went through the spiritual confusion associated with reconciling my love for America which expected me to defend it with violence if necessary, with the Christian faith I had grown up in, and with the humanistic glimpses that come to everyone lucky enough to encounter good parents and teachers.

I assume that many of the young men who marched off to fight the Yankees, as well as many of the young men who marched off to fight the South, experienced a similar spiritual confusion. They probably had, as I had in the 1960s, an imperfect understanding of that which we were being either asked or drafted to fight for and against (I had never even heard of ‘Vietnam’ in my public school education).

Many of them probably went to their respective armies with as much ambiguity as I did when I became part of the U.S. Army in 1964. As a youth, I had had ‘Red Dawn’ fantasies – kind of based in Lexington and Green Mountain myths – of fighting the communists when they invaded and swept across the nation; I would be part of a local contingent of fighters who would lay our lives on the line and never surrender, who would retreat to the woods and mountains and fight on – forever, or for as long as it took to expel the invaders. But to fight this fight halfway around the world? In defense of a corrupt government that even our own media criticized? Who were the heroic people’s militias in Vietnam, and who were the imperial invaders?

You don’t have to prowl far on the internet to find testimonials from veterans of today’s forever war that contradict the President saying ‘he knew what he signed up for’ – statements like, ‘I was 21 years old and will admit, very much in over my head.’ And anyone driven AWOL, like I was, desperatey confused by the massive mess of contradictions inherent in our wars on the other side of the globe, has to have empathy for Bowe Bergdahl. Most soldiers have never known with a general’s certainty what we signed up for, and on the battlefield many have experienced things that really messed up their minds as well as their bodies.

Going back to the Civil War and, as the President would say, its ‘losers’ – how many of them were Southern boys pressed into service from the region’s many small farms where they were still needed at home and had worked like slaves – not the officers who rode horses and had grown up on slave-maintained plantations, but the poor ones on foot who would be sent in waves into the maw of repeating rifles and the new Gatling gun in futile efforts to outnumber the bullets sent their way? How many of them joined up because the subsistence farm had failed so badly that even the army represented a better future? And certainly, there were also many for whom it seemed like a great adventure, who joined willingly and marched and fought enthusiastically. Armies work hard to make us all march and fight like a seamless unit, but our individual enthusiasm for the work, or lack of it, or questioning of it, remains in each soul. All of that forlorn ambiguity seems to reside in the statue of an unknown Confederate foot soldier.

There also needs to be consideration for soldiers’ families and friends at home, who had higher hopes for their soldier son or friend than a violent death on a battlefield. In this light, a statue of Jefferson Davis or of a mounted general is indeed a political statement that deserves to be treated politically. But the statue of the unnamed Confederate foot soldier might be better read as a mark of a community’s grief at the loss of its sons. The rebellious South lost its ‘state right’ to enslave other humans and needs to learn to live with that.

But it seems small and counter-productive at best, cruel at worst, for the victors to try to also demean memorials to the sad waste of young men who, whatever their personal understanding of or commitment to the cause, nonetheless obediently and more or less unquestioningly went off to the hell that old men throw them into, just as we expect them to do today, obediently and unquestioningly, for conflicts equally misbegotten in history’s longer run.

01/15/2017

WORD PICTURES (Yeah - I don't know how to post real pictures, or virtual ones either): We've been getting a lot of winter here the past week-plus - creeping up on three feet in Gunnison (high desert), and over six feet up in the high country - great for us water people, but for us shoveling people, just...big.

But it reminded me of my first big winter in this valley - in 1966, when I lucked into a job on the Crested Butte Ski Patrol, but wasn't feeling particularly lucky about that when we were trying to get the ski area open in a four-foot onslaught of warm wet snow (with a couple hours of rain in the middle of it, just like last week) that was like skiing in wet cement. Even the real skiers were having trouble with it; I alternated between horror and disbelief.

I wrote about it, of course - in my first book, Part of a Winter. Here's the story of that pretty bad day excerpted from the book, for those of you with nothing better to do (otherwise why would you be looking at this page)....


A memory more like a dream. I have no trouble placing the memory: it was my first day of real work as a ski patrolman in Crested Butte, Colorado. A day more like a nightmare, that one was. The year was 1966, the month was early December, the day was a Monday, and it was one of the worst days of my life – nobody had told me a ski patrolman had to be able to ski with a shovel. Or a backpack full of armed explosive charges.

It was pure coincidence that had driven or drifted me to Crested Butte that winter. I had spent part of the winter previous – the winter after my discharge from the Army – ­mopping floors and hauling garbage in a restaurant up on Loveland Pass in exchange for room, board, and Loveland Ski Area skiing privileges. The summer following, I'd worked construction in Denver, but I'd decided I wanted to go back to the mountains for the winter.

But where to go, what to do? I'd wondered that summer in Denver, parboiling in my own sweat on the roof of another exclusive tract home, looking away toward the far floating mirage of the Continental Divide. I wasn't enthusiastic about the idea of another winter of mops and slops. I took a first-aid course, in order to be qualified for ski-patrol work – my first actual investment in the future since I'd left the Army, or the Army had left me.

According to the popular mythology of our times, you have no future if you have a bad military record; and several months of job-hunting in Pittsburgh had convinced me that, so far as employment in mainstream industrial America was concerned, that was pretty much the situation – not so much because of my Army record (I don’t recall anyone ever asking) as because I mostly lacked marketable mainstream industrial American skills.

Lowering my sights, I found that there was no particular shortage of futureless jobs – driving taxis, pounding nails on non-union jobs, pearl-diving, and the like. But there were scales and levels in that world too, and ski patrolling sounded like a better way to be futureless in the mountains than restaurant mops and slops.

My problem was finding a ski area that needed a patrolman with less than a year of semi-serious skiing experience. I of course wanted to go to Aspen for the winter, that mountain mecca of hedonism. I went up there and put my application for ski patrolman on the bottom of a stack of ski-patrol applications stored in a wastebasket; then, being realistic about my chances, I found a "backup" bussing job in a restaurant. The only affordable places to live were four-to-a-room bunkhouses. The more I looked at a winter in Aspen, the less it looked like what I'd had in mind. I wanted to go to the mountains, and going to Aspen had begun to look like just going to another city.

Nevertheless, I was more or less resigned to the idea until one morning back in Denver, getting ready to pack up for the move. Over coffee at the Super Chef Cafe, I saw a tiny item in the Rocky Mountain News: “Crested Butte Open for Winter.” A ski area in Crested Butte had just been “reorganized” financially after bankruptcy proceedings the day before, and it it was going to be open for the winter.

Open for the winter. I liked the sound of that. Aspen, Sun Valley, Squaw Valley, Vail, Stowe were all advertising open for the winter too in tasteful ads in magazines like The New Yorker, and had been so advertising all summer and fall. Crested Butte was only deciding to open at all a few weeks before winter.
But that wasn’t all that I read in that little story. Crested Butte Ski Area had been or maybe still was sort of bankrupt; and being there myself in a psychic way, I figured that was a good credential for truly being open for the winter.

I found the place on the map, and was there the next morning. Employed as a ski patrolman by lunchtime. Nobody even asked if I could actually ski.

I subsequently found out that I was hired for the Crested Butte Professional Ski Patrol so quickly and easily that year was because the Forest Service regs said you had to have seven ski-mounted bodies on duty every morning in order to turn on the lifts, and everyone at the ski area had been paid late and irregularly the previous spring, and a ski area just coming out of bankruptcy proceedings when most areas are already half-booked into March wasn’t anyone’s idea of a good place to work.

Today, if you want to work on the Crested Butte Ski Patrol you have to be a certified Emergency Medical Technician to even get invited to Patrol School, from which you have to graduate with honors to even get a chance to be considered, should there be an opening. But that year, all you had to do was show up. I didn't even own a pair of skis, just some leather boots – forty-pound tennis shoes – I’d bought on sale the winter before; I’d rented skis at Loveland.

Part of my trouble was not really knowing just how inept a skier I really was. The previous winter at Loveland Ski Area had been mild, and I had learned to negotiate familiar terrain on hardpacked snow reasonably well, although I wasn't as fast and quick as I needed to be on steep and mogully slopes. I had "skied powder" -about ten times, and never more than a foot, lying on a good base of hard snow on familiar slopes in clear weather.

So I was totally unprepared for what happened.

It didn't snow in time for a Thanksgiving opening that year, and it didn't snow the rest of November after Thanksgiving. A few days into December, faced with a succession of bland sunny skies, people were already starting to worry about Christmas, the fat season. Then, one Friday afternoon it clouded up, and started to snow in the evening.

It snowed all day Saturday, all night, and well into Sunday. Sunday afternoon it quit snowing and looked like it might break up, but that was just the eye of the storm; it started in again Sunday night, and was still snowing hard Monday morning; it snowed without letup all day – except for a period of rain late in the morning.

By Monday morning, there were three feet of heavy wet snow (remember that rain) on top of a few crusty and highly crystallized inches of old snow; avalanches were running everywhere. Six miles up the road in Gothic, where I would be spending the sixth winter hence, two monstrous avalanches wiped out a cabin and lifted a twenty-foot steel bridge out of its abutments, setting it fifty feet downstream unharmed. I didn't know it could snow like that. And it hadn't really occurred to me that ski patrolmen had to go out in s**t like that. A body could get killed!

But there we were. Work to be done. Saturday and Sunday I had been assigned to a packing crew. That was before they'd perfected the big flat-footed wide-track packing machines that most areas have now, and the only way to pack the snow down to a skiable base on the steeper slopes was to go to the top of the slope with a crew of fifteen or twenty people, and sidestep down the hill with skis on in a long diagonal line. The most boring and thighbusting work imaginable, and if it is snowing an inch an hour at thirty-five degrees, so that everything that hits a warm body melts instantly and soaks in to dilute the slippery sweat of strenuous exertion – try walking sideways down a mountain with skis on in three feet of slush – it is also the most miserable work imaginable.

But at least it was a job I could do, and I wasn't being exposed for the kind of a skier I was, or wasn't. I looked through the wet curtain of falling snow, down those slopes with their three feet of bottomless snow covering God knew what boulders, fallen trees, growing trees, willow tangles, ghost towns, fallen civilizations – I was glad they told me to walk down sideways. The idea of trying to ski in that scared me to death.

But by Monday we'd packed the first two feet of snow on all the slopes-not that you'd notice, with another foot or two on top of it-and it was time to get the area ready to open, in case a skier or two heard that the place wasn't bankrupt after all....

There were two major jobs that had to be done that day – and ­the fact that they took most of the day is an indication of how fast things don’t move when it's snowing like that. We had to do avalanche control work, and we had to put up all the trail signs and fence off all the dangerous areas.

For some reason, Bachman, the patrol leader, picked me along with a couple of other patrolmen to go with him on avalanche patrol. Perhaps he wanted to see how well I could ski. So we stayed back and watched – me with a sense of relief – the rest of the patrol pick up trail signs mounted on ten-foot 2x4s, or armloads of eight-foot bamboo poles, and slide off into the snow curtain, over the gentle cliffs they called ski trails there. Then Bachman called us back into the warm patrol shack, to make up the charges.

Charges? Yes: two or three pounds of seismographic powder (for the shock wave, rather than the power of dynamite) strung together with primer cord, plugged with a nitro cap crimped onto a forty-five-second fuse. Bachman put these charges in a couple of small backpacks and handed me one.

He wanted me to ski off into that slush with six pounds of blasting powder, all capped and fused and ready to blow up, on my back? The simple thought of that lowered my marginal abilities right down into the absolute zero of quivering total spasticity.

Fortunately some of the avalanche slopes were not too far from the top of the lift. I did a lot of fast traverse-and-kick-turn skiing, and met up with the others only a few minutes behind.
They were peering over a raggedy gash in the otherwise smooth contours at the top of a steep slope angling off one of the main runs: so sensitive were conditions that a big avalanche had broken off when Bachman had skied up and stopped; his motion had transmitted enough vibrations through the soft snow to trigger the slide. We looked, and gulped.

We skiied on a little further, to a small steep slope right on the edge of one of the trails – part of the trail, actually, but steep enough to slide under the right conditions. I say it was a "small slope" – only big enough to bury a person in five or six feet of snow if he happened to get caught in it. I have always privately called that little piece of trail "Sibley's Exposure."

Because it was in the skiable part of the area, Bachman didn't want to use powder and blow a big black hole in the nice white snow, so he used it as an exercise in teaching us how to "ski off" an avalanche. To ski off an avalanche, you simply ski across the slope high up in its convex tension area, as quickly as possible, using your weight to cause it to break away under you and slide off below. "And whatever you do," boomed Bachman, "don't fall down!"

He skiied across first, to show us what he meant: nothing happened. "Okay," he said, "it's probably okay but let's all ski it just to get the idea." I was next. I pushed off onto the slope. "Faster!" he yelled. I fell down. My head downhill. My six pounds of powder didn't go off. But there I was, upside down, head below my feet, in the middle of an avalanche slope. The only way I could get up was to do a sort of a somersault to get my feet below my head again. By the time I was standing up, I was almost to the bottom of the steep part; the slope was virtually "body-packed."

"I guess we'll call that one controlled," said Bachman, skiing off.

After avalanche patrol, I spent the rest of the day helping with trail signs. Wrestling up barricades with bamboo poles and tangles of rope. The day was a soggy nightmare; words hardly suffice for describing it. I was ill-equipped: I was using a pair of rented skis that were camber-sprung and half-destroyed, and equipped with cable bindings, which, no matter how much I tightened them, popped open in that heavy snow at the most embarrassing points of the awkward turns I was trying to crank with a sort of a timid high-stepping stem turn. Going into those turns, I probably looked like a bashful dog trying to zero in on a skittery hydrant.

In my own defense, I have to note that I wasn't the only one having trouble that day. I saw some falls, in fact, that were downright cheering to me: misery loves company. But even in good company, misery is still misery.

The ski area was officially opened at noon: there were some hardy skiers from town and the college in Gunnison just champing at the bit. That meant we would have to sweep the mountain at four-thirty –although in my case, the idea of me being responsible for getting skiers off the mountain was laughable: anyone who actually wanted to ski on a day like that should have been helping me off the mountain. But the sweep run did have one enticement: after a day of thrashing around with twelve-foot 2x4s and jackstraw-loads of bamboo poles, we would get to ski one run with our ski poles, like God meant skiers to ski.

But even as we were all getting our skis on at the top of the mountain at the dark end of the afternoon – snow still falling in thick soft windless curtains – the patrol phone rang. Bachman went back in to answer it ... and came out shaking his head. The packing machine – a semi-useless snowcat designed for linemen in the arctic traversing six-inches of wind-crusted snow – had slipped off into a ditch down in the flats where the trails converged.

"Everybody grab a shovel."

And that brings me to that moment in the gray-on-gray dusk, that memory more like a dream, in which I find myself squatting for the umpteenth time that day in the usual tangle of skis poles cables gloves shovel and slush, finally tired almost beyond anger, looking into what might be called the Ultimate Alternative.

Over the past decade I've known two people who have gone over that edge and into that most silent of nights. Just lay down in the snow and went to sleep, both of them. The nap that opens up like a doorway between this and the same thing on the other side, only once you go through, the doorway disappears and there's no way back to this side.

Or so I might theorize. Those who have been dragged back from that edge in the nick of time, pulled away by friends into a warm place, slapped and rubbed and cajoled back to life, indicate that it probably wouldn't be a bad way to go. So long as you fight it, you are cold and miserable, soggy with simultaneous sweat and chills. But if you just decide to let go, or to continue letting go, if you decide you just don't care any longer if you are ever warm again – then suddenly you begin to feel warm, as your body, committed to live life to the last bitter calorie, sends out the vital heat in a last piss-in-the-ocean effort against the pervasive omnipotent cold. Hypothermia, and the last memory before going to sleep is of finally, finally, being warm.

But I guess I was still too angry at that point, if only with myself, to get that cold. So I reassembled myself once more, picked myself up from the umpteenth ridiculous fall and put myself and my skis back together, found my shovel, and made my way on to where the others as soggy and wornout and pi**ed as I was were working – shadows against the gathering night, lumpy and out-of-focus with dampness and tiredness, but still capable (as, I discovered, was I) of the casual curse and the laugh that must have struck the storm, with its love of intense silence, as blasphemous.

04/29/2016

THE ANTHROPOCENE!
A heavy word, first implying something kind of human - then something that sounds geological.... Our time is so short and we are so small, right, and geology is so long and large - right?
Yet we are changing the planet in ways that may be irreversible; as Stewart Brand argues: 'We are as gods, and have to get good at it....' For some reflections on this, check out my blog at
'Down on the Ground with the Anthropocene I' at
http://www.gard-sibley.org/george_files/Some_Writings/Antropocene1.html

I recently led, or pushed (think of “pushing a chain”) a seminar at Western State Colorado University, titled “The Colorado River in the Anthropocene.” The ‘Anthropocene,” as many of you have probably read or observed yourselves, is a geological epoch acknowledging that humans have, over the course…

02/05/2016

WORD PICTURE: There's nothing worse than having an interesting dentist. There you are, laid back in a cross between a bed and a waterboard, with your mouth open to a lot of invasive equipment, some of it slurping and sucking away in a semi-permanent way, with part of your mouth off in lala land somewhere, anyway no longer there with you, and the dentiist ... says something interesting. This doesn't always happen; a lot of dentists sort of run a monologue about the weather or something innocous, or - are silent, which can be better or worse, depending on the sound of the silence.
But the other day, here in Gunnison, my dentist, Josh Osborne - who streams a constant background of pre-2000 music - said how much he envied those of us who were 'there in the 70s'. He was assuming I was - there, that is, in his image or vision of the 70s. What I would have said, had he not had a large percentage of his equipment in my mouth, was - I'm not sure where I was in the 70s. Mostly, I remember it as a decade of trying to learn the dark art of parenting. I remember having heard the music that was playing when he said that, but I became a parent in 1971, and quadrupled the fun with a second new person in 1974, and that pretty well took care of the 70s for me - not to mention the 80s and well into - well, does it ever really stop? But I basically remember the 70s as a time of trying hard to develop a disciplined career as a writer, while working a lot of odd jobs in strange places - a small college, burning forests around the West, a sawmill, a library, and a lot of construction work - and trying to figure out how to be both a breadwinner and exemplar for the next generation. It was not, in other words, quite what I'm imagining my dentist - already a more organized professional than I will ever be - had in mind for 'being there in the 70s.' But since I couldn't say it then, I will say it now. And will close by saying that (even though I've only been in his chair/bed/waterboard twice - but once for a root canal) I think Josh is a great dentist, not least because he has enough of a romantic soul to think the 70s must have been wonderful. They were indeed full of wonder, a lot of which I am still wondering about. Anyway, I trust him with a mouth full of teeth (mostly full, a few gaps) I should have been taking better care of in the 70s.

11/27/2015

'Water Wranglers' is a big book telling a big story - the story of the development of the Colorado River from the perspective of Colorado's West Slope and the Colorado River District. The Denver University Water Law Review said of it:
'Water Wranglers, despite its length and extremely in-depth discussion of a complicated historical subject, is an easy and enjoyable read for anyone interested in the history of water development in the Colorado River Basin and the state of Colorado. Well-researched and containing useful maps and photographs, Water Wranglers provides valuable, objective information for individuals, neophytes or experts, interested in Colorado’s transmountain diversions.'
From the personal perspective of one who is primarily an essayist (essayer?), it was proof that I can run the marathon as well as the hundred-yard dash.

11/26/2015

The short video below is a 'picture-poem' assembled by Chris Segal of the Crested Butte Mountain Resort, from a couple hours of rambling Q&A and a lot of seemingly (to me) random video shooting. My first response on seeing it was - 'Wow. I wish I'd said that....' CBMR is doing a series of these this year - a nice step away from conventional ski-resort publicity. (The first one was of an avalanche dog - there will eventually be several on CBMR's site - skicb.com. The link for this one is https://vimeo.com/145653594.)

Part two of the "passion within" web series. A writer and educator, George Sibley, has lived in the Gunnison Valley for 50 years. He has seen Crested Butte…