Zenwind

Marines’ Hymn

2011-11-10T14:11:00.003+07:00

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“From the Halls of Montezuma,
To the shores of Tripoli;
We fight our country's battles
In the air, on land, and sea;
First to fight for right and freedom
And to keep our honor clean:
We are proud to claim the title
Of United States Marine.
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“Our flag's unfurled to every breeze
From dawn to setting sun;
We have fought in every clime and place
Where we could take a gun;
In the snow of far-off Northern lands
And in sunny tropic scenes;
You will find us always on the job
The United States Marines.
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“Here's health to you and to our Corps
Which we are proud to serve;
In many a strife we've fought for life
And never lost our nerve;
If the Army and the Navy
Ever look on Heaven’s scenes;
They will find the streets are guarded
By The United States Marines.”
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The Monster Mash (in honor of Ron D., one of his favorite songs)

2011-10-31T19:20:00.001+07:00

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“I was working in the lab late one night
When my eyes beheld an eerie sight
For my monster from his slab began to rise
And suddenly to my surprise
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[chorus]

“He did the mash
He did the monster mash
The monster mash
It was a graveyard smash
He did the mash
It caught on in a flash
He did the mash
He did the monster mash
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“From my laboratory in the castle east
To the master bedroom where the vampires feast
The ghouls all came from their humble abodes
To get a jolt from my electrodes
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“They did the mash
They did the monster mash
The monster mash
It was a graveyard smash
They did the mash
It caught on in a flash
They did the mash
They did the monster mash
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“The zombies were having fun
The party had just begun
The guests included Wolf Man
Dracula and his son
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“The scene was rockin’, all were digging the sounds
Igor on chains, backed by his baying hounds
The coffin-bangers were about to arrive
With their vocal group, "The Crypt-Kicker Five"
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“They played the mash
They played the monster mash
The monster mash
It was a graveyard smash
They played the mash
It caught on in a flash
They played the mash
They played the monster mash
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“Out from his coffin, Drac's voice did ring
Seems he was troubled by just one thing
He opened the lid and shook his fist
And said, ‘Whatever happened to my Transylvania twist?’
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“It's now the mash
It's now the monster mash
The monster mash
And it's a graveyard smash
It's now the mash
It's caught on in a flash
It's now the mash
It's now the monster mash
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“Now everything's cool, Drac's a part of the band
And my monster mash is the hit of the land
For you, the living, this mash was meant too
When you get to my door, tell them Boris sent you
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“Then you can mash
Then you can monster mash
The monster mash
And do my graveyard smash
Then you can mash
You'll catch on in a flash
Then you can mash
Then you can monster mash.”
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(Written by Bobby “Boris” Pickett and Lenny Capizzi. As recorded by Bobby “Boris” Picket and The Crypt-Kickers, 1962)
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[This one is a Halloween classic, but I post it now for my late great friend, Ron D. I will dare to say that he would have appreciated the irony and evil humor, even if it has only been a few months since he gave up the ghost and left us poorer in a world without him. I will always associate this song with Ron, because when I acquired a copy of it on a 45rpm vinyl single in about 1964 or 5, we both loved the song but had trouble making out the lyrics. Ron was at my place and set straight to work on the problem: he asked for paper and pencil, and we sat down on the floor in front of my parents’ old phonograph and played the song over and over until we got the words right.]
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-Zenwind.
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Book Reviews: Three Dan Simmons novels: Summer of Night, A Winter Haunting, Children of the Night

2011-07-25T19:39:00.000+07:00

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These three novels are horror stories by Dan Simmons, and they are part of a very loosely related series. Summer of Night (1991) is the first one, which should be read first, and it introduces us to all of the characters when they are kids in 1960. The other two, Children of the Night (1992) and A Winter Haunting (2002), each take up the story of one of these kids as adults. Other Simmons novels also mention more of these kids as adults.
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Summer of Night occurs in small town America in 1960. Our characters are 11 or 12 years old, a group of friends in Elm Haven, Illinois. They have a club called The Bike Patrol and they enjoy all the innocence of summer, playing baseball and swimming, until some increasingly creepy things happen and they learn that there is profound evil in the world. There are hints of ancient curses implicating the brutal Renaissance Borgia family. As are all Simmons tales, it is a great read.
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The direct sequel is A Winter Haunting, although it was published a decade later (2002). One of the main Bike Patrol kids, Dale Stewart, is now a troubled adult 40 years later, and he is somehow compelled to return to Elm Haven even though he does not consciously remember the events of 1960. This novel was chilling. Before reading it one should read Summer of Night.
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In Children of the Night (1992) we find a former Bike Patrol kid, adult Mike O’Rourke, as a wounded Vietnam vet and now a Catholic priest, and he is called to look into some strange occurrences in post-communist Romania. He finds orphanages with staggering amounts of HIV infections (as in fact there was). Romania and Transylvania are loaded with legends of Dracula and vampirism. Can such evil be involved in our story? This novel can stand alone by itself without any prior reading of the Simmons corpus.
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Simmons continues to astound me. I read anything he writes.
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-Zenwind.

Nixon’s War on Drugs and its fatally unintended consequences

2011-07-17T22:44:00.002+07:00

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President Richard Nixon launched his War on Drugs in the early 1970s, and two of the fatalities in this war were not drugs at all but rather two young American human beings that I happened to know at the time as acquaintances within my social circle. I guess you could call them “collateral damage” in that war, mere numbers who happened to die while our noble all-knowing government was fighting those elusive demon drugs.
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Forget for a minute the viciously immoral and un-American action of an anointed power figure such as Nixon directing the coercive power of the law, of the police and the courts against the act of recreational self-medication chosen by free individuals – an act that was victimless as long as these individuals were not hurting anyone else. This is a tale of unintended consequences caused by the fatal conceit of elitist holier-than-thou “moralists” with political power.
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In 1968 very few of my friends or acquaintances in my rural community were using outlawed drugs. When we partied, we used alcohol. However, when I returned home in 1970 after a tour of duty in Vietnam, almost all of my close friends were now smoking marijuana – just as an estimated 85% of my combat unit in Vietnam had smoked pot frequently there. In my rural culture, pot was becoming almost everyone’s number one partying choice. There were good times. We slowed down the pace of life and no one got hurt. It was much the same across the rest of America.
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A few of those in our local youth culture stubbornly stuck to their hard-drinking ways. We called them the “Boozers.” One guy, E., was scary. He drank extremely hard while driving insanely fast. I once caught a ride home from him, and I vowed that I would never get into a car with him again. We all agreed that he would never live to be 21.
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Then something weird happened. E. started coming to pot-smoking parties – probably because virtually all the decent young ladies in our area were regularly there. He started to enjoy pot more than alcohol. We would be amazed to see him driving his powerful V8 car slowly along the backroads at an idle to arrive safely home. We started to talk about it and agreed that maybe E. would actually live to be 21 and more. It was a remarkable transformation. He had mellowed out and slowed down.
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Enter the federal government under Nixon. An easy target in this War on Drugs was the Mexican border, where much of the pot that Americans were smoking came across at that time. Nixon increased the number of drug cops and pot-sniffing dogs along that border, and immediately it shut off access to pot in small town areas such as mine.
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Well, it only shut off the flow of pot for a month or two, until pot that was much more powerful started coming in steadily from Columbia in much bigger quantities. There is a lesson in this, an iron law of economics. Where there is a solid demand, suppliers will find a way around obstacles to meet those consumers’ demands. Legal prohibitions will never stop it.
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The more important point I want to make is about the unintended consequences that may occur because of such arbitrary blocking of free-market economic supply. Consumers often have primary or preferred consumer goods as a first choice, for example, pot, and then secondary substitute goods are their second choice if the preferred good is unavailable. With access to the preferred good, pot, temporarily blocked by the whim of coercive government, people picked substitutes.
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The chemistry majors from nearby colleges would come by every community in VW minivans equipped with all they needed to manufacture acid, aka, LSD. They were acid labs on wheels. It was now cheap, available, and it partially filled the consumers’ demands. Nixon did not intend this, but he was instrumental in establishing the use of LSD as a regular party drug by blocking access to pot.
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Other frustrated pot smokers chose other substitute drugs. Our friend E. chose to go back to alcohol. Denied pot, he started to drink hard again and to rev up his big V8 Pontiac and speed off like a rocket down the highway. Then the news hit us: E., with another friend of ours as a passenger, drove that Pontiac off the road and wrapped it around a huge tree. Neither of them reached 21.
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This is part of the tragedy of humanity’s modern loss of freedom. Men who are puffed up with moral righteousness and possessing political power, like Nixon, get arrogant and think they have the wisdom and the right to direct the lives of sovereign individuals. They appoint themselves as social engineers and use law to coerce people toward some kind of imagined ideal of their own.
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However, they have neither the moral right to do this, the political right to do it, nor the wisdom to foresee the unintended consequences of using force to interfere with the peaceful spontaneous order of Free Minds and Free Markets.
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-Zenwind.
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Movie Review: Enemies of the People (2009)

2011-06-09T19:23:00.003+07:00

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Enemies of the People (2009) is a documentary about the Cambodian genocide by the communist Khmer Rouge. I recommend it highly. It is in English and Khmer with English and Thai subtitles.
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In the late 1970s the Khmer Rouge took their version of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology and tried to out-do Mao. They abolished city life, herded everyone into the jungles at gunpoint and forced them to be peasant farmers. “Enemies of the people” were thought to be everywhere, and they killed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of those they identified as middle class Cambodians, e.g., students, teachers, professionals, and even “middle peasants” who husbanded small plots of land. Money and markets were abolished, so death by starvation resulted, and it is hard to sort famine deaths from murders. Estimates vary, but around 2 million Cambodians died during the Khmer Rouge regime, perhaps 21% of the population.
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The filmmaker, Thet Samboth, one of today’s leading news journalists in Cambodia, lost his family during the killings. His father, a Khmer Rouge member, was purged during the madness, his brother was killed later, and his mother died soon after. But he said he doesn’t seek revenge. He just wanted to understand it all and to record this history as a lesson for future generations before it is forgotten. He took 10 years to make the film, slowly gaining the confidence of many former Khmer Rouge killers including one of the former top two leaders of the Khmer Rouge, Nuon Chea, former Brother Number Two (to the late Pol Pot’s Number One). Nuon Chea is now 82 and facing a criminal justice tribunal.
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Lower in the ranks of the Khmer Rouge were the actual killers out in the provinces, the people who had to slit the throats of countless “enemies of the people” on the orders of those higher up. (The orders were to “save bullets” and thus kill in a more personal face-to-face manner with knives or iron bars.) Khoun was one of them, and he points out where in his rural neighborhood the killing fields and burial grounds were, pointing in all directions around them. Neighbors passing by confirm it.
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Suon was a bit higher in rank and ordered Khoun and others to kill, as well as himself taking part in the killing of many. Today both of them are very remorseful that they blindly followed such orders. Suon, referring to traditional Theravada Buddhist beliefs, asks: How many rebirths in how many holes in hell must I endure to wash away my evil karma? He is in absolute despair.
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Sister “Em” is interviewed, an even higher ranking Khmer Rouge official at their local level. She had ordered Suon and Khoun to kill. She is reluctant to have her face filmed, so all we see is her back-lit outline. She is not as forthright as Suon and Khoun, seemingly not admitting her own guilt so much as it just being a case of
“following orders from above.” The higher we go in the Khmer Rouge hierarchy, the less we find the acceptance of responsibility. The higher we go, the more they remain True Believers in their holy struggle.
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I wished that there had been more analysis of the ideology motivating the leaders. The closest we get is when Brother Number Two Nuon Chea still insisted that it was, after all, right to value (an abstraction called) “the people” over
“individuals” – somehow justifying the killing of maybe 2 million of these individuals. Rationalizing to the bitter end, he said they were “enemies of the people.” 20% of the population?!?
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Who really were the Enemies of the People? Individual Cambodians who just wanted to pursue life, liberty and happiness with their families? Or self-anointed intellectual leaders such as Pol Pot and Nuon Chea? This is classic Collectivism, where the abstract good of the collective group, e.g., variously called the
“people,” “nation,” “community,” “society,” “tribe,” “race,” or “gang,” somehow justifies sacrificing the actual real-life individual members of those collective groups. As Ayn Rand and other libertarians have reminded us, a collective is nothing but an arbitrary grouping of individuals. It is the individual person that lives, feels, thinks and aspires, and who suffers and dies at the hands of the political True Believers (be those politicians self-labeled as “brothers,”
“comrades,” “conservatives,” “progressives,” etc.). In Cambodia’s case, multiply that individual’s pain, suffering and death by 2 million.
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Nuon Chea seems unrepentant. Yet when filmmaker Thet Samoth finally did tell him at the end of the film that his own family was killed by the Khmer Rouge, Nuon Chea did say that he felt very sorry. Perhaps this one concrete example of the personal tragedy of an individual, Samoth, who had befriended him and talked to him for many years made some kind of connection to reality in the mind of Brother Number Two. A bit too late, I think.
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-Zenwind.
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Book Review: With the Old Breed, by E.B. Sledge

2011-04-23T19:12:00.000+07:00

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With the Old Breed (1981/2007) is the finest combat memoir by an enlisted man that I have ever read, and this is merely a brief note on it after I finished reading it today. The “Old Breed,” of course, is the First Marine Division (1st MarDiv), first activated in WWII to fight at Guadalcanal, the first US ground offensive against the Empire of Japan. This book was one of the main primary sources used for the great HBO miniseries The Pacific (2010), which is quite true to the book.
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The 1st MarDiv went on to fight at Cape Gloucester on New Britain, Peleliu (the ferocious but “forgotten” battle), and finally on Okinawa at war’s end. E.B. Sledge joined the division in time to see action on both Peleliu and Okinawa; my father joined them in time to see action on Okinawa (see the photo on p.77 of a 75mm “pack” howitzer like one my father crewed); and I joined the Old Breed in 1969 in Da Nang to see action in Quang Nam Province, RVN.
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Sledge was a fine writer and a sensitive soul whose horrific personal experiences in the meat-grinder battles of Peleliu and Okinawa are given to us honestly, starkly and humanely. He does not glorify war. Rather, he gives the reader the actual realities: the terror, stink, brutality, inhumanity, soul-killing fatigue and madness of it. The American and Japanese casualty statistics he gives are sobering; but the experiences, sights, sounds, smells and emotions he personally relates are horrifying.
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-Zenwind.
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Book Review: The Earthsea sagas, by Ursula K. Le Guin

2011-04-23T17:59:00.002+07:00

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This is a wonderful cycle of five fantasy novels (plus a short story or two) which Le Guin wrote over a period of three decades. She is a very fine writer, and I seek out anything else that she wrote. At this time, my review will only be a short note on the Earthsea novels, because I feel that I really cannot do justice to them by reviewing them yet. I need to come back to them much later to re-read and re-absorb them. Hopefully, I will update this someday into a full review.
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Earthsea is a fantasy world of islands with rich cultures, and various types of religion, non-religion and magic are practiced there. There are dragons, too. Some of the beloved key characters – such as Ged and Tenar – are traced through the series of novels from their youth to older age. The novels should be read in their proper order to best understand the sweep of the tales. The novels and major stories, in order, are:
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* A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)
* The Tombs of Atuan (1971)
* The Farthest Shore (1972)
* Tehanu (1990)
* “Dragonfly” (1997) short story from collection, Tales From Earthsea (2001)
* The Other Wind (2001).
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-Zenwind.
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Book Review: Black Hills by Dan Simmons

2011-02-26T22:47:00.002+07:00

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Black Hills (2010) is yet another great Dan Simmons novel. He continually amazes me with his variety of genres, subject matter and his deep research. This is historical fiction with a fantastic twist, and I loved it. The action starts immediately in 1876 as an 11-year-old Sioux boy happens to be on the battlefield at Little Big Horn during Custer’s Last Stand just as Custer dies in front of him, and Custer’s ghost enters into him and haunts him for decades, providing insightful dialogue between the two personalities/cultures. The boy’s Sioux name is Paha Sapa (meaning “Black Hills”), and it is his story that we follow – with Custer’s ghost trailing along. Native American Indian worldviews, mythologies, visions, sentiments and complex histories are well-respected and well-represented throughout this story.
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Custer’s history is well researched. Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the massacre at Wounded Knee are part of the story, and their histories are presented well. We are swept along through general American history, all within Paha Sapa’s experiences, as the Indians’ day is over and the white man’s story is ascendant. The construction of the Brooklyn Bridge is detailed far to the east. The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair is an important setting in the plot, along with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. The ambitious 20th century project of carving Mt. Rushmore by the visionary Gutzon Borglum is also integral to Paha Sapa’s story.
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Simmons’ vision of Native American Indians is extremely sympathetic and respectful, but it is not mindless or politically correct (thank the Great Spirit!) because he is not afraid to be historically accurate rather than just being a wishful thinker about it. Many well-established historical points may not be so easily accepted by primitivist mythologizers: i.e., when Simmons writes of the “fun” of war for Plains Indians, and of the Sioux as “a ruthless, relentless invasion machine,” attacking other Indian tribes and pushing them off their traditional lands (p.429). (It is also noted that the whites are just as bad with their own relentless warfare, soon becoming worldwide.) It is admitted that the Plains Indians often stampeded buffalo herds over cliffs (buffalo drops), killing them by the hundreds, just to cut out a select liver (or tongue) from the top layer of carcasses and leaving the rest to rot. It was not just the Euro-Americans who wasted natural resources that seemed to be without limit. No race or culture is promoted over another here; instead we find a common, complex, understandable human history, weird as it may turn out to be.
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One thing extra I like about this novel – besides its usual Simmons genius – is the appreciation for wilderness and natural settings, which Simmons describes so well. That speaks to me personally in a powerful way. Paha Sapa sees the ever-encroaching growth of human settlement and development as a grim inevitability, but he still sees the spirit of natural beauty left. And in the end he can still say: “This is a good day to live.”
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-Zenwind.
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Nightmares of War & the Sense of Smell

2011-01-12T20:21:00.010+07:00

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(Do not read this too close to mealtime.)
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This incident took place in northwestern Pennsylvania USA in April, May or June sometime in the mid-1990s, in the first really consistently hot days of the year. This is the time of the year when the remains of animals that had been road-killed by cars during winter and left along the roads smell most rank. My many walks along highways and back-roads have always confirmed this.
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I was living at Wilderness Park high up on the Allegheny Plateau and hiking often out on the back trails in the Allegheny National Forest, which was just out my back door. One section of my favorite trail paralleled a back-road for a brief while at a distance of several hundred yards across a quite wild forested area, but if the wind was right you could occasionally hear motor vehicles on the road across that stretch of woods.
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On this one particularly hot day as I was hiking this trail, the wind was blowing from the direction of this back-road, and I caught a couple of different whiffs of road-kill from that direction. One of the smells was extra strong, and I was sure that it must be a very big animal such as a deer or even a bear.
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Immediately after this time I started to have very vivid, extremely violent and disturbing nightmares that involved stark images and memories of the Vietnam War. They went on for a week or two. I had not had nightmares like this for a long time, so I could not account for it.
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I have had other war-related nightmares that could be easily explained, before and after this episode. Back in 1986 after seeing the very authentic movie “Platoon” in the theater, I immediately had nightmares and disturbed sleep for a two week period.
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Also, a number of years later – long after this incident at Wilderness Park that I am presently describing had occurred – I again had disturbed sleep for a period, and I am sure that this latter episode was because at that time I was teaching US Military History for two semesters. As a brand-new course preparation for me, I was reading about and thinking of war all of the time, and I was especially thinking of it last of all before sleep-time. (I gladly handed over this course to a teacher both well-qualified and very eager to teach it, because it pleased him very much and contributed to his morale as a history teacher on our team, it strengthened our history department’s program, and it got the nightmares out of my head.) But these two episodes, the one before and the one after the Wilderness Park one, were not as disturbing as the one I now describe in the mid-1990s.
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I could not explain why I was having these vivid nightmares at this particular time, so I just assumed it was the hot humid weather triggering memories of tropical Vietnam. I turned up the a/c at night but still had the horrific nightmares.
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Then I belatedly got the community gossip. It was not road-kill that I had smelled after all. Two neighborhood boys on their bicycles had discovered a woman dead in her car on an obscure turn-off dead-end lane off from that back-road that paralleled my hiking trail. She had committed suicide in her car with the windows down earlier on one of those fine days of spring, and she was not discovered until a while after the fact, and this along with the extreme hot weather put her into a bad state of decomposition. The location of her body was exactly upwind of the place on my hiking trail where I had smelled on that day what I thought was a big animal road-kill, and the timeframe was an exact match – i.e., I had smelled the scent before her discovery. It had never occurred to my conscious mind that it was not the smell of a regular road-kill of a forest animal.
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Dead mammals have a particular smell, but dead humans have a unique one. The best descriptions will usually tell you that a human’s decomposition smell is a sickeningly “sweet” smell. The only time I smelled this smell intensely was in Vietnam. In the tropical heat, decomposition worked fast. Our own dead were zipped into body bags and brought out as quickly as possible, but sometimes not quick enough. Enemy dead were often neglected, especially in more remote areas, and you were reminded of them by the smell whenever you went back through that area. It was a smell that you wished at the time that you could somehow flush and cleanse out of your nostrils, sinuses and skull, but it stayed with you. By the 1990s I had completely forgotten about all of this through the years, especially the fact of the uniqueness of the smell of human decomposition.
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So now I became convinced that, 25 years after being in Vietnam, the ripe death-smell of this unfortunate woman near Wilderness Park triggered memories of the war somewhere inside my subconscious and completely without my conscious knowledge, thus producing unexplained nightmares. It made me a believer that memories can reside in the mind closely linked to the sense of smell.
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I began writing this document when I read (on 18 September 2008) the following article in Science Daily online. The linked article is named, “Emotion and Scent Create Lasting Memories – Even in a Sleeping Brain,” and describes experiments on the brain chemistry of mice at the Duke University Medical Center and is published in The Journal of Neuroscience. Implications for other mammals such as humans are clear.
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It all falls into place and makes perfect sense to me.
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-Zenwind.
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Movie Review: The US Marine Corps, Avatar (2009), Aliens (1986), and James Cameron

2010-11-10T17:56:00.007+07:00

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[This is posted on the Marine Corps Birthday 2010.]
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I was starting to wonder: what is it with James Cameron and his ongoing respect for the US Marine Corps? He is native Canadian with no military experience, but he has written rather good portrayals of Marines in at least two of his great films. Then I find out that Cameron’s younger brother, David, was in the Corps, and James has the highest respect for Leathernecks (aka, Gyrenes, Jarheads).
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Cameron was screenwriter/director for Aliens (1986), the second and perhaps best film in that series, and which had Colonial Marines of the future. Al Matthews, the actor that played the Colonial Marine sergeant in this film, was actually a Marine Vietnam War vet. So his dialogue to his Marines after they all come out of cryo-sleep came naturally, namely when he said:
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“All right, sweethearts, what are you waiting for? Breakfast in bed? … Another glorious day in the Corps! A day in the Marine Corps is like a day on the farm! Every meal’s a banquet! Every paycheck a fortune! Every formation a parade! I LOVE the Corps!”
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Maybe it is Cameron’s temperament that also makes him feel akin to the Marines – Cameron is an infamous hard-ass on set who demands that things are done with complete perfection. I was particularly impressed with his treatment of Marines in the science fiction film Avatar (2009) in which he was the writer/director.
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The protagonist of Avatar, Jake Sully, is a disabled veteran Recon Marine whose combat injuries confine him permanently to a wheelchair. He has a chance to join the Avatar Program on the planet Pandora only because an avatar driver’s body (a hybrid of a human mind inside a Pandoran-native humanoid Na’vi body) had been prepared from the DNA of his twin brother. His twin was a Program scientist who just died, and his avatar body had been prepared at great cost, so Jake’s genetic identity with his brother makes him uniquely able to use it. And in an avatar body Jake will be able to walk again. So he is a misplaced warrior thrown into a science program, and yet the wild and dangerous world of Pandora might demand such a warrior spirit.
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When in his human body in the wheelchair, Jake always wears a T-shirt with the USMC’s Eagle, Globe and Anchor emblem. He’s proud. In an early voice-over narrative monologue that defines who he is, he says: “There’s no such thing as an ex-Marine; you may be out, but you never lose the attitude.” Ooh rah!
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When Jake, in his avatar Na’vi body, is brought before the Na’vi tribal leaders, they ask him what he was before as a human, if he was not a scientist. He replies with pride, “I was a Marine,” and then, to further explain this concept to them, he continues, “a … uh … a warrior … of the Jarhead clan.” That was the moment I became a really big fan of James Cameron’s writing.
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The villain, Col. Quaritch, is Security Director of the Pandora mining operation, heading what is really a mercenary force of tough guys. He is also a veteran Recon Marine, and he is tougher than nails. His dialogue and delivery are priceless. (He is played perfectly by Stephen Lang, who played Stonewall Jackson in Gods and Generals, I thought Lang should have gotten an award for movie “villain of the year” for his performance in Avatar.)
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Here in the real world of movie critics there has been some misplaced controversy about Cameron’s treatment of the USMC in Avatar, with many people thinking that he is making the Corps look bad through the former-Marine villains such as Col. Quaritch and many of his mercenary thugs. This argument goes thus: the actual USMC strategic doctrine for over a century has been to win over the “hearts and minds” of the indigenous people. To truly win them over. This strategic vision came from the Marine experience of always being a small force landed in hostile places a long way from home, and it evolved into the Small Wars Manual, the bible of counter-insurgency operations. (The Small Wars Manual has consistently been ignored by the Pentagon until it is too late.)
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Critics of Cameron say that the official policy of villain Col. Quaritch – which is a hostile contempt for the indigenous Na’vi of Pandora – disrespects this USMC vision. But the critics completely miss the point. Hero Jake Sully fully redeems the story in two ways: First, he serves the just cause within this story’s context. Second, he actually is devoted to a Marine-like vision of understanding and working with the indigenous Na’vi. And as a Marine, Jake is solidly brave, wonderfully true, and always faithful.
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Semper Fi. Enough said right there.
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-Zenwind.
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Werewolves of London by Warren Zevon

2010-10-31T12:17:00.002+07:00

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“I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand,
Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain.
He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fook's,
Going to get a big dish of beef chow mein.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
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“If you hear him howling around your kitchen door,
Better not let him in.
Little old lady got mutilated late last night,
Werewolves of London again.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
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“He's the hairy-handed gent who ran amuck in Kent,
Lately he's been overheard in Mayfair.
Better stay away from him,
He'll rip your lungs out, Jim.
I'd like to meet his tailor.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
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Well, I saw Lon Chaney walking with the Queen,
Doing the werewolves of London.
I saw Lon Chaney, Jr. walking with the Queen,
Doing the werewolves of London.
I saw a werewolf drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic's,
His hair was perfect.
Werewolves of London again.
Draw blood.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London
Ahooww-Ooooh! …
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London
Ahooww-Ooooh! …
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London
Ahooww-Ooooh!”
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-(Music and Lyrics by Warren Zevon)-
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[This song was the radio song-of-the-week in May 1978 when I did a solo rock climb of Fritz Wiessner’s “Old Route” on the Upper Washbowl Ledge, Chapel Pond, Adirondacks, NY. It was a great high point in my early climbing development. High, wild, and throwing out all restraints. My theme song of that day. Ooh Rah! –Zenwind.]
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Book Review: Mountains of the Mind: a history of a fascination, by Robert Macfarlane (2003)

2010-10-14T19:41:00.011+07:00

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Robert Macfarlane can really write. As expressed in its subtitle, Mountains of the Mind is a sort of history of the human fascination with mountains – and more. It is part history, part geography lesson and part literary survey, and there are great bits of lore on almost every page. He chronicles the changing ideas about mountains that led to people actually climbing them. He also intersperses the text with some of his own personal experiences in the mountains, which are eloquently written.
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The first chapter is named “Possession,” and that says it all. Mountains do possess some of us. From his own youth, reading through his grandfather’s books, Macfarlane has been possessed, i.e., obsessed. The gory details of injury and death in the mountains are part of its romance. It is a familiar path: one reads the thrilling, and often tragic, stories of great mountaineers and expeditioners of the past and one gets caught up in the quest. Alpinists have often been very literate, and their writings are usually impossible to put down.
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There is the great 1924 mystery of Mallory and Irvine, who were last seen climbing ever upward on a high ridge of Mt. Everest before the clouds obscured them from below. There are books on the great polar expeditions. There is John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest (a personal milestone in my own young adventure reading), telling of the 1953 ascent by Hillary and Tenzing. There is Edward Whymper’s Scrambles Amongst the Alps, with graphic illustrations by Whymper. Then there is Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna.
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Herzog’s account of the French 1950 ascent of Annapurna, the first-ever ascent of any Himalayan peak over 8,000 meters, is a mountaineering classic that possessed me as it did Macfarlane. It was a tipping point into obsession for both of us. Herzog and Louis Lachenal set off on a cold, clear morning from the highest camp for Annapurna’s summit. As Macfarlane paraphrases, “Quite soon it became apparent that they would have to turn back or run the risk of severe frostbite. They carried on.” (p.7) Herzog lost all his fingers and toes to frostbite, but they reached the summit and lived to tell about it. (My own 1976 experience – see “The Frostbite Trip” – was a painful one of freezing my toes and thinking I would die, but still carrying on and up, a decision I have never regretted.)
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Chapter Two is “The Great Stone Book” and tells of Europeans first treating mountains as objects worthy of study, with the new science of geology slowly giving birth to concepts of “deep time.” The early geologist, Scotsman James Hutton, ended his Theory of the Earth (late 1790s) with this: “The result therefore of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, – and no prospect of an end.” This was a mind-stretching concept, and the Romantic poets and painters became possessed by mountains and wilderness.
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Chapter Three is “The Pursuit of Fear” and discusses attitudes toward risk, death, the 1865 Matterhorn disaster, etc. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a recklessly addictive personality, took up what he called “a new sort of Gambling” – addiction to heights. He would climb a rocky peak and then pick a blindly arbitrary descent route, knowing that down-climbing is much harder than ascent. In 1802 he found himself stuck on a ledge in England’s Peak District with a storm coming in. He obviously lived to tell of it, but he was lucky.
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The great English climber Alfred Mummery was an early advocate of solo climbing, and he died in 1895 in one of the first attempts to climb an 8,000 meter peak, Nanga Parbat, with a small climbing party. Nietzsche wrote of the “discipline of suffering – of great suffering” being what has “produced all the elevation of humanity hitherto,” and that “This hardness is requisite for every mountain-climber.”
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In 1865 the Matterhorn was first ascended by Edward Whymper in a party of seven, several of whom should not have been on the hill. All seven were tied into one hemp rope, the common practice at that time. Descending after victory, the most inexperienced man slipped and dragged down three others, and these four fell thousands of feet down the North Face. Killed were a young English lord, a preacher, a Cambridge student and a Swiss guide. Whymper and two others only lived because the rope broke. The reaction in England was hysteric, with outcries that mountaineering was lunacy and “a depraved taste.” Maybe so, but we climb.
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Chapter Four is “Glaciers and Ice: the streams of time.” Geology came to the idea of a great Ice Age in the past, of a once-frozen Earth as well as a possibility of a return in the future of “icy death.” 1816 was “the year without a summer,” a disastrous cold spell caused by volcanic ash in the atmosphere, and it caused poets such as Byron and Shelley to contemplate this with dread. Later, the wider spread of the idea of ice ages changed not only science but the popular way of looking at landscapes.
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(My hometown in northern Pennsylvania has a classic U-shaped valley cutting through the hills to the south, caused by huge glaciers of the last ice sheet advancing overhead. I pointed this out and explained it to my Thai wife – who had never until that April been out of the Tropics – and she laughed at me, convinced that I was telling an outrageous jest. I did not press the issue since it was not a concept that she would easily assimilate, and, after all, it really is a mind-blower.)
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Chapter Five is “Altitude: the summit and the view.” In 1786 Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps, was climbed by two Frenchmen, Paccard and Balmat. By the end of the Eighteenth century, Macfarlane writes, “Summit fever was catching.”
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In 1818 the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich painted Wanderer Above a Sea of Clouds. Macfarlane writes that this Friedrich painting “became, and has remained, the archetypical image of the mountain-climbing visionary, a figure ubiquitous in Romantic art.” He continues, saying that “…as a crystallization of a concept – that standing atop a mountain is to be admired, that it confers nobility on a person – Friedrich’s painting has carried enormous symbolic power down the years in terms of Western self-perception.” (p.157)
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For artists and poets of that day, such as Friedrich, Keats and Shelley, “[altitude] coincided perfectly with the Romantic glorification of the individual. … The mountain-top also provided an icon for the Romantic ideal of liberty: what could more obviously embody freedom and openness?” (pp.158-9). Height now “equaled escape, it equaled solitude, it equaled spiritual and artistic epiphany.” (p.160)
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Chapter Six is called “Walking Off the Map,” and it recounts the joys and rigors of exploring new mountain ranges. It makes me want to put on my boots and go.
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Chapter Seven is “A New Heaven and a New Earth.” Macfarlane mentions an experience that I have often had: of returning to the lowland civilization after being awhile in the mountains and finding it to be a disorienting episode, solitary and incommunicable. One feels like an exile returning home after long years abroad, “bearing experiences beyond speech.” (p.204)
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Chapter Eight is “Everest,” and tells of George Mallory’s fatal obsession with that mountain through his letters and other writings. (“Why?” “Because it’s there.”)
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Chapter Nine is a short final chapter, “The Snow Hare,” and it sums up many of the threads earlier in the book. Macfarlane tells of meeting a snow hare briefly on a winter mountaintop in Scotland in a completely blinding snowstorm. This solitary encounter, a crossing of paths, sums up for him the feeling of “wonder” found on mountains.
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“The solitude I had [earlier] experienced in the whiteout on the ridge had been replaced by a sense of distance invisibly before me. I no longer felt cocooned by the falling snow, I felt accommodated by it, extended by it – part of the hundreds of miles of landscape over which the snow was falling. … I thought of the snow falling across ridge on ridge of the invisible hills, and I thought too that there was nowhere at that moment I would rather be.” (p.278)
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I have never been on that specific mountain, but I know exactly what he means.
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-Zenwind.
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Book Review: The Terror, by Dan Simmons

2010-08-03T21:03:00.006+07:00

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The Terror (2007) is my favorite Dan Simmons novel and one of my favorite novels ever. (See earlier intro post about Simmons here.) This is historical fiction and horror. It is based on the historic lost Franklin Expedition, a British expedition of two ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, sent to look for the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic in 1845 under the command of Captain Sir John Franklin.
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Historically, the two ships and all hands were lost without a trace except for the graves of three crewmen and a note left behind. It is still one of the great arctic mysteries. Simmons researched the case, as well as arctic exploration in that age, and then added his own imaginary spin to it. As we read, we experience the deep cold of the six-month arctic night as the ships are frozen into the icepack. Added to this is Eskimo mythology and the associated terrors of the Far North.
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One reason that I like this book is because of its authentic descriptions of true cold. I have bivouacked out in the cold down to 40-below-zero but never in the amazing deeper cold experienced by these men. While I had lived outside at minus-40 for a week in 1970s gear, these guys had inadequate clothing and gear, and they were starving to death over a long, long time. It gives you the shivers, and this might be a good book to read on oppressively hot summer days. If you read it during a long northern winter, it will take you into a long dark tunnel of terror.
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I also like the main character, Captain Francis Crozier, historic captain of the HMS Terror and second-in-command of the expedition under Franklin. Crozier was an Irishman, and thus an outsider in the mainly English naval establishment. He was also a melancholic and a substance abuser – much like me in my younger military days.
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Simmons also gives Crozier memories of alienation from his earliest days, of standing alone outside a village on a winter’s night, looking at the village lights but feeling completely estranged from his community. I had this same winter experience – many, many times while growing up – e.g., standing alone in a frozen pasture, or a wood lot, or on a snowy hilltop above my own native village after dark, watching the snowstorm against the town’s lights, feeling apart from all humanity. The character of Crozier really touched me, and my own experience of expatriate re-birth outside of my native culture makes me appreciate him and the destiny Simmons gives him even more.
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The only previous literary background required to enrich the reading of this novel is just a minor familiarity with English philosopher Thomas Hobbes – and I can provide the context you need right here. The few references in the novel are more of an inside joke. Hobbes was an extreme pessimist and an advocate of completely authoritarian political rule. His most famous work was Leviathan (1651) in which he argued for an extremely strong government because human nature is perversely wild and dangerous.
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Caveat: I do not agree with Hobbes about human nature, and I am completely opposite him in politics. I advocate little or no government while Hobbes wants absolutism.
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One of Hobbes’ primary arguments is that the horrible religious warfare of his times was because of too much freedom of religion – too much choice – and that one absolute ruler or ruling group should dictate one religion for all to follow in order to stop the fighting between sects. (But I would say that, while a large amount of religious freedom did encourage the flowering of countless religious sects, it was precisely the mix of government power with religion that caused the insane wars within Christianity in Hobbes' day.)
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When Crozier is assigned, against his inclination, to conduct a Sunday religious service on his ship, he announces that he will read from “The Book of Leviathan, Part One, Chapter Twelve,” and he reads from the very cynical Hobbes on historical religious flights of fancy from the most ancient of days. That whole episode is – to me – a philosophical joke, one of my favorite passages in the book.
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In addition to the above, certainly the most famous quote of all from Hobbes’ Leviathan is that, without an absolute government to intimidate and control people, man’s life will be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Keep that quote in mind, as it identifies Crozier's attitude before his redemption.
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A final note on this book. I was reading it while waiting for supper at The Saxophone pub in Bangkok and listening to a good jazz band, and I came upon its description of a bonfire on the ice as a “Guy Fawkes Day above the Arctic Circle.” I checked my calendar, and indeed it was 5 November, Guy Fawkes Night, that very night. (“A penny for the old guy.”)
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I love this book.
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-Zenwind.
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Review: Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons

2010-08-03T20:17:00.002+07:00

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The first Dan Simmons works I read were the four big science fiction novels making up his Hyperion Cantos series. This had a lot of background involving the English Romantic poet John Keats. Keats – or a clone of Keats – even appears as a minor character. I had always been a great fan of Keats’ shorter poems, but I had never read his slightly longer attempts at epic poetry in his poems “Hyperion” and “Endymion.” The four novels of this Cantos series are Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion. Read them in order.
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The narrative style of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales also figures into to the beginning of this series, as various characters give their backgrounds during a long journey. One is also reminded of Boccaccio’s Decameron, where everyone tells their tales.
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Before I started those four books I did some major homework, finding a volume of Keats’ complete poems with biography, extensive commentaries on the poems, selected letters of his, etc. I read his drafts of the epics “Hyperion” and “Endymion” for the first time, and I immersed myself in the world of Keats, ending with his young death of TB in Rome near the Spanish Steps. With this background I enjoyed the Simmons’ novels more. When the Keats clone is in his room near the Spanish Steps, I already know what it looks like. Reading it, homework and all, was a major project which I really enjoyed.
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Book Review: Ilium / Olympos, by Dan Simmons

2010-08-01T22:57:00.003+07:00

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One of Dan Simmons’ best is the science fiction double novel, Ilium and Olympos, in which the Greek gods are reincarnated or duplicated as characters on the planet Mars of the future. Mons Olympus, the old volcanic cone on Mars is the highest mountain in the solar system, and a lot of action will happen there in a new Olympos. Action on the battlefield at ancient Troy is featured, with all the Homeric heroes there in this revised story. There are anomalies of time and space in the story, so that over 5,000 years in time and the entire reach of the solar system are involved. You simply will not believe how the stories of both Achilles and Odysseus end up.
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The background literary context of these two huge books is Homer, most especially The Iliad, but also to some extent The Odyssey, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Those are the most important sources and are most important to read as background, but Simmons also refers to Nabokov’s novel Ada or Ador: A Family Chronicle and to Proust’s multi-volume work In Search of Lost Time, aka Remembrance of Things Past. Since certain literary/mythic characters and their stories pop up in these novels, I first refreshed my readings of some of those classics, re-reading The Iliad, The Tempest and surveys of classical mythology. However, I passed on perusing Proust, and I never got a chance to acquire the Nabokov novel. I really enjoyed Ilium and Olympos and recommend them. Read the two in their proper order.
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Reviews: Dan Simmons' novels

2010-08-01T22:19:00.004+07:00

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Dan Simmons is one hell of a fiction writer and one of my favorites. (I thank Jeff Riggenbach for pointing out his works many years ago.) Simmons writes in many genres: science fiction, historical fiction, horror, fantasy, mysteries and thrillers – and he sometimes mixes several genres in one book. Some of his works stand alone while others are part of larger series, and most of the individual novels are huge. I have only yet read a fraction of his voluminous body of work, but I’ve never been disappointed.
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Simmons excels in “intertexuality,” where his stories and characters often refer back to other works of literature such as Homer, Shakespeare, Keats, etc. I had heard about this aspect of his work, so I have always made sure to first do my homework – i.e., to find out which authors/works are referenced in any one book, and then to try reading those works – before beginning a new Simmons novel. He is richly versed in literature. When he often delves into themes of Classical Antiquity, it is wise to have a reference work on Greek and Roman mythology close by, such as the ones by Bulfinch or Edith Hamilton.
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I will soon review here, separately, some of Simmons’ novels that I’ve read: The Terror, which is my personal favorite; The Hyperion Cantos, consisting of four novels; and Ilium and Olympos, a set of two.
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(About his first novel, The Song of Kali, I’ll only say this here: Don’t read this one unless you have a perversely excessive taste for true horror; Simmons may have gone way over the line with it. One of Simmons' latest novels is Drood, which is concerned with Dickens' last and unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It is told from the viewpoint of Wilkie Collins, a friend of and frequent collaborator with Dickens.)
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-Zenwind.
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Vampire Book Review: The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova

2010-08-01T22:08:00.001+07:00

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If you love history and are fascinated by Dracula stories – both the gothic tales and the real history of Vlad III The Impaler -- you should enjoy this novel.
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More precisely, if you appreciate the sound methodology and scholarship of true historians, if you love libraries and old books, if you can get hooked on well-told arcane histories of exotic places and times such as the late medieval Balkans as the Ottoman Turks are over-running Southeastern Europe, if gothic tales of vampirism tempt you, and if you like good fiction writing mixed with it all, then The Historian (2005) by Elizabeth Kostova should be well worth reading.
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I had heard good things about this book, but I was not prepared to like it so much. I had read In Search of Dracula and follow-up histories about the real Vlad Dracula, aka Vlad III Tepes (1431-1476 CE), when they were first published several decades ago, and of course I was a major fan of Bram Stoker’s novel, of Bela Lugosi’s movie classic and of a few other of the better-made vampire films.
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In this novel, the historical detail fascinated me, and the historian-as-detective plot delighted me. The action sweeps across many decades in the 20th century – as well as the 15th century and other times – and much of it takes place in the 1950s in an Eastern Europe that is still behind the communist Iron Curtain and in the grip of sinister masters.
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I could not put the book down until I had finished. You might want to keep an Atlas or world map handy while you read, as the scenes often include travels to places most of us usually do not visit or know much about.
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-Zenwind.
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Book Review: David Gibbins’ Novels

2010-07-24T15:33:00.003+07:00

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If you do NOT like history or archaeology, stop reading this review now. But if you do love these sciences – as well as good fiction writing – this is one author of fiction that you might appreciate, as the historical parts of his books are outstanding.
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A reviewer once wrote, “What do you get when you cross Indiana Jones with Dan Brown? Answer: David Gibbins.” That sums it up.
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David Gibbins is a leading marine archaeologist and an authority on shipwrecks and sunken cities. He did his studies in archaeology at Cambridge and has taught university courses on archaeology and ancient history in England. He now does fieldwork and writes one novel per year.
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Gibbins’ five novels feature a modern marine archaeologist, his colleagues and support teams (many with military experience), former professors, and world-class scholars. The historical knowledge revealed in their conversations is fascinating. These stories are primarily historical detective adventures and partly thrillers, following the clues from archaeological finds or discoveries in ancient libraries to unexpected links through time.
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The action involves a lot of travel to historic sites throughout the world, tons of ancient history lessons, and usually sinister institutions and villains somewhere in the background. Very dangerous black market grave robbers and arms dealers are often lurking. His historical research is very good, with the added imaginative fiction taking you further out.
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At the end of each novel is an “Author’s Notes” section where he debriefs the reader by sorting fact from fiction in the story you have just read. He tells you what in the story is considered to be fairly solid history and why, briefly mentioning the documentary sources (e.g., Plutarch, Josephus, Greenlanders’ Saga, Christopher Wren, Sima Qian, Plato, various modern authors, etc., with many of these sources already mentioned in conversations within the story). Where he has added fictional content to the stories, he tells you, and it is often about actual longstanding historical rumors, puzzles, implications or speculations which he uses with a “what if?” kind of imaginary development.
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Ideally, it might be good to read the novels in order of their publication, because the characters’ back-stories accumulate and build on one another. But you can still fully appreciate each individual novel if read out-of-order by starting with any one of them.
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The first novel in this series is Atlantis, where they stumble into historic clues of the possible location of this legendary lost sunken city. We are taken from clues in a dusty dig in the desert of Egypt on to Plato’s legend, then to a Minoan shipwreck in the Mediterranean, and on to the Black Sea and the wreck of a long-lost Soviet nuclear submarine, then to nearby Abkhazia (a former autonomous region in the Georgian Republic USSR, and now a gangster haven). A lot of ancient history is sifted through and reviewed.
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The next novel, Crusader Gold, finds our heroes searching for the lost menorah from the Temple in Jerusalem that Titus had brought to Rome after the Roman conquest of Judea in AD 70. After the fall of Rome it may have gone to Carthage or Byzantium. The story involves the Varangian mercenaries in Byzantium led by the historic Viking Harald Hardrada, who once even went to Jerusalem; then there is more about the crusades. Then it is the findings of maps and documents in an old English cathedral; and then startling evidence in the ice from Greenland’s medieval times as well as in the 20th century involving a Nazi agent. A lot more geography and history is covered in this one book, and you won’t believe where they end up.
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The Lost Tomb (aka, The Last Gospel in the UK) involves an excavation at Herculaneum, which was buried along with Pompeii by Vesuvius in AD 79. Then the underwater archaeologists think they may have found the shipwreck of St. Paul. A lot of ancient Roman history is covered and speculated on, including a lot about Claudius and Pliny the Elder. There is a dive through old sewers of Rome and one into an old submerged part of London. The history of the ancient Britons who resisted the Romans is involved. And much more.
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The Tiger Warrior starts with an archaeological dig on the Egyptian coast of the Red Sea and about the site’s actual link to the sea trade routes connecting ancient Rome and the East. It talks about the lost Roman legions of Crassus that were defeated by the Parthians in 53 BC at Carrhae and whose survivors were led into slavery at Margiana (Merv, Turkmenistan); about India and the British colonial experience there including the 1879 Rampa Rebellion in southeastern India; about the overland Silk Road, which takes us high up in the mountains of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan and the Pamir Knot, then to northeastern Afghanistan’s lapis lazuli mines. The tomb of China’s First Emperor casts its shadow over the action.
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The fifth novel, The Mask of Troy, I just finished reading yesterday. The cover photo shows the golden “Mask of Agamemnon” that Heinrich Schliemann revealed at Mycenae in 1876. (Caveat about Schliemann: a controversial figure, he was a clumsy digger and boastful, but he showed the world that there might be some historical truth within old myths such as Troy; Gibbins debriefs us on him, warts and all, at the end.) This novel takes us underwater to naval wrecks from the harbor off Troy dating from the 1200 BC Trojan War to the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign. Nazi death camp experiences yield important clues to the mystery. There is speculation on Homer’s lost epic poem that followed The Iliad, the one that describes the actual Fall of Troy and about how horrific that final battle was.
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Gibbins is getting better all the time, and I highly recommend his books. His five novels thus far, in inexpensive paperback, are:
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Atlantis (2005)
Crusader Gold (2006)
The Lost Tomb (in the UK, The Last Gospel) (2008)
The Tiger Warrior (2009)
The Mask of Troy (2010)
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Book Review: Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War (2010) by Karl Marlantes

2010-07-18T15:54:00.002+07:00

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This is a great Vietnam War tale – and although it is a work of fiction it is still authentic in spirit and in its every detail. Matterhorn is the name of a fictitious hill within the story in the Khe Sanh area of I Corps, South Vietnam. This is the best novel that I have ever read to come out of the Vietnam experience and one of the best war novels I’ve ever read. I highly recommend it.
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The author, Karl Marlantes, has been there. He was a highly decorated Marine platoon commander in Vietnam, earning the Navy Cross (the only higher award for Navy and Marine Corps personnel being the Medal of Honor), the Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts, ten Air Medals and two Navy Commendation Medals for valor. Keeping in mind the notorious stinginess of the Marine Corps in awarding medals of any kind, his achievements are noteworthy. Marlantes is also a Yale graduate and a Rhodes scholar. He spent over 30 years working on this, his debut novel.
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The novel gives you the experience of the Vietnam War, the insane horrors of combat, the constant filth, both the extremes of the tropical heat to the shivering cold nights when soaking wet and bone-weary. Race relation problems of the late 1960s are handled very well, and also the phenomena of “fragging” an incompetent officer or NCO. For Marines planning to stay in the Corps, there was a distinction between the more professional “career men” versus the “lifers.” A lifer was defined as “someone who can’t make it on the outside,” someone with enough rank to make your life miserable for no good reason, and these guys were sometimes targets of fraggings. The dialogues and the profanities are exactly right.
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The stupid politics of that war is everywhere a major theme, as lives are wasted taking hard-won territory only to abandon it soon after. On occasion an officer would think more about their own career advancements than the losses or hardships of their men. Those being killed and maimed are usually teenagers who haven’t even lived their lives yet. The book sometimes makes you very angry, but it is ultimately redeeming.
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The protagonist, 2nd Lt. Mellas, evolves from a spoiled college kid with military-political ambitions to a good combat officer and a compassionate commander of men. He learns from both the enlisted and commissioned Marines who have been in-country before him. The other characters are very well drawn and very authentic, especially Lt. Hawke, the kind of guy that men will follow anywhere. The humor in the midst of horror also comes through at times.
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There were many details in the story that really brought back vivid memories. For example, the concussion from the explosion of in-coming enemy mortar rounds sending a wave of pressure against your eyeballs as well as your eardrums. Also well-written are the times when you think that you will certainly die soon – e.g., Cortell and Jermain discuss Pascal’s Wager, although they have never heard of Pascal or his philosophical “wager” about what awaits us after death. We all knew about that bet in some way of our own and were forced to think about it. That is haunting.
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Before reading the novel, definitely read the “Glossary of Weapons, Technical Terms, Slang and Jargon” in back, and keep a bookmarker in place there so that you can refer back to it while reading. The Vietnam War had its own unique jargon, but so did the Navy and Marine Corps, and so a lot of it is esoteric to those services. But even I had to look over this Glossary many times for things such as radio call-sign protocol details, etc.
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Also, keep handy the three pages in front of the novel for the fictitious “Chain of Command and Principal Characters” chart (with their radio call-signs in italics), and also the two map pages: “Bravo Company’s Area of Operation” and “Matterhorn and Helicopter Hill.” The USMC units in this novel are fictitious, in that they are real Marine (reserve) units but they were never in Vietnam. Also, the map adds the fictitious Vietnam hills Matterhorn, Helicopter Hill, Eiger and Sky Cap, and this map goes farther west toward the Laotian border than it did in reality beyond Khe Sanh. Read the author’s disclaimer on the copyright page for the full details about his fiction versus the reality.
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I think this novel is going to be a war classic.
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A Man on the Moon, by Andrew Chaikin: Book Review

2010-06-25T20:43:00.003+07:00

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“Man must explore. And this is exploration at its greatest.” Those were the first words of astronaut Dave Scott on his first Apollo 15 moonwalk, and they sum up the spirit of this book. It is the story of, and a tribute to, the Apollo program right through to its last mission, and the book was the basis of the TV mini-series “From the Earth to the Moon.”
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I found this book to be a very exciting read (I read it twice) as it revealed that each Apollo mission was an incredibly unique journey in itself, with often gripping dangers, uncertainties and challenges. Many people are familiar with the triumph of Apollo 11 and the close-call of Apollo 13, but few of us paid much attention to later Apollo missions up through 17, the last one. Each new mission constantly upped the level of the technology and the expectations, building on the previous test flight experiences, and they marvelously expanded both science and the human adventure.
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Especially evident in this book is how the whole program exemplified the human virtue of Rationality. Even though it was an audaciously risky venture, it was done with a scrupulously rational risk-taking and with a carefully thought-out approach by a huge team – a combination of scientists, engineers, manufacturers and test pilots. Chaikin describes the approach as a “series of methodic, incremental steps that are the hallmark of test flying.” (p.54). E.g., they first had to test fly the Gemini program flights and the earliest Apollo flights in order to learn how to dock two space vehicles in space, etc.
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Test pilots have a reputation for being fighter-jocks and wild mavericks with balls of brass. True enough. But those chosen to be astronauts were also very highly educated and highly disciplined test pilots. For them and their fellows on the entire Apollo team, the drill was to plan, to make checklists, to practice, to test, then to re-think, re-plan, make new checklists, practice, test, etc. They did it by the numbers, and simulators were used constantly to practice, practice, practice. Thus, when unforeseen emergencies did occur, they were ready to think their way through the options. Odysseus with a physics degree.
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When, in the far future, humanity looks back on its history, the Apollo program will be seen as one of those truly great human adventures. And A Man on the Moon will be one of its greatest celebrations.
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Satori on Parris Island, 1968

2010-06-16T20:49:00.001+07:00

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(“Satori” – a Japanese Zen term for a flash of sudden insight, a small shot of instant enlightenment, a profound step on the path to awakening.)
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November/December 1968: Parris Island, South Carolina, U.S. Marine Corps Boot Camp. It was one hell of a bad place for a sensitive student of Zen striving for peace of mind and a glimpse of enlightenment.
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One item of military business right off the bat was specifying vital info for our dog-tags: i.e., name, serial number, branch of military service, blood type, and religious preference. But on this last item, religion, I just didn’t fit in – as I never have fit in with any defined group anywhere in my life.
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The most relevant quasi-religious label for me in those days and nights of extreme discipline would have been “Zen Buddhist.” After all, some state of mind near that had been my solace and discipline in the years before my enlistment – and that was especially true of my last summer and autumn between high school and the Corps, where I meditated in the forest.
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(“Zen” – Japanese term for a higher meditative state. It is derived from the same word and concept in: Pali, “jhana”; Sanskrit, “dhyana”; Chinese, “Ch’an”; Korean, “Son.”)
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Yet “Zen Buddhist” was only partially true for me. I never identified much with it as a “religion” or with the modern Zen schools in Japan – except for their historical warrior ethos, their visual aesthetics and some of their great poets. I was always too much of a Thoreau-like loner with no drummer to march to. I just don’t belong.
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My own intro to Zen was scandalous, via Jack Kerouac’s Beat Zen and Gary Snyder’s translations of the “Cold Mountain Poems” of the ancient Chinese mountain hermit poet and Ch’an/Zen-lunatic Han Shan. So, should I have inscribed on my dog-tags something like “Ch’an-Zen-Taoist Beatnik forest hermit hipster”? Too big for the dog-tag plates.
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Also, I was afraid of writing down “Zen Buddhist” because I feared that I would have the living shit beat out of me by my Drill Instructors for my heathenish and un-American ways. These guys were all-American warriors but not thoughtful scholars. So I caved in to fear and had to choose the only obligatory religious label left: “No Preference.” That has embarrassed me ever since because I was so cowardly. After all, I was going off to war, and possibly to my death, so I should have customized my own epitaph.
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Ok, now to the satori.
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On Sundays we had choices of religious services to attend in the morning: Protestant, Catholic or Jewish. If you refused these you stayed at the barracks and were worked extremely hard by the D.I. there. I chose Protestant just to get out and get the chance to sit and meditate in a chair while the preacher droned about something in the background.
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Going to and from church was a more relaxed kind of march, where we stayed in step but didn’t have to put our heels down hard as the usual. The D.I. just took us there and back, with no pressure, and it was very peaceful – my favorite time of the week. A kind of “walking zen.”
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It was a Sunday morning in early winter, with a hard driving rain, very dark skies, and thunder and lightening. We all wore our green GI rain ponchos, the huge ones with the big hoods to fit over helmet and gear. I fell into a meditative trance as we stepped along on the wet pavement.
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Then, I looked up and around at my fellow boots/recruits. All heads and faces were bowed against the driving rain and were invisible because of the huge hoods, and everyone was just looking at the feet of the guy in front of them. All ponchos were waving back and forth together in perfect easy rhythm as we marched along in step.
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Satori! Suddenly it seemed that we were all Zen monks hundreds of years ago at a Kyoto temple, in perfect harmonious movement.
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That little flash has continued to fill me with immense joy and a meditative high whenever I think back on it.
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-Zenwind.
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Lord of the Rings & Philosophy

2009-01-08T19:28:00.002+07:00

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Review of *The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy: One Book to Rule Them All.* 2003 edited by Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson. Open Court Publishing.
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This is Volume #5 in a very interesting series from Open Court called “Popular Culture and Philosophy.” Series Editor is William Irwin.
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The book is dedicated: “To the entwives, wherever they may roam.” If this resonates with you, you may well love this book.
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If you are familiar with and enjoy J.R.R. Tolkien’s works connected with *The Lord of the Rings* and if you either have some small experience in reading philosophy or want to plunge into a widely diverse selection of philosophical writings for the first time, this book is a delight. There are 17 contributing authors, all of whom are professional philosophers and/or theologians who love Tolkien’s works and know them intimately. Each essay is about 10 pages.
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Because of the variety of philosophical viewpoints here, you will not agree with every essay. Indeed, I do not agree with even Tolkien on many points. You will find existentialists, theologians, greens, Aristotelians, and representatives from many other viewpoints. But every essay is interesting and thoughtful. I have always considered it to be fruitful to read philosophers and philosophies that I am in disagreement with. I consider this in many cases to be an exercise in “mind-stretching,” although in some cases it does seem more like being stretched upon the torture rack. Good for the mind, at any rate. (“That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” Nietzsche.)
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I am very much a fan of Tolkien. Before reading this book for the first time, I had read Tolkien’s *The Hobbit* and *The Lord of the Rings* (TLOTR) a number of times. I watched the excellent Peter Jackson films of TLOTR more times than I can count, along with the extra “Appendices” special feature interviews and commentaries in the Special Extended DVD Editions. Also, I have had the benefit throughout the years of many conversations with family members who are longtime diehard Tolkien fans.
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This volume of *TLOTR and Philosophy* was very understandable with my basic background of Tolkien reading (along with my undergraduate major studies in philosophy). But the authors also mention some of Tolkien’s other writings, *The Silmarillion* in particular, as well as material from his letters and essays. So, after I read this volume of *TLOTR and Philosophy,* I went on to read *The Silmarillion,* which is a much different reading experience, as it is rather unfinished and more like an epic than the adult fairy tale that TLOTR is. But it did give me a richer background on Tolkien’s fictional history of the elves and early Middle Earth, and I enjoyed it tremendously. After reading this, I then re-read the volume of essays reviewed here. The second reading was substantially more interesting and enlightening.
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My review follows.
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Part I: The Ring.
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Chapter 1: The Rings of Tolkien and Plato: Lessons in Power, Choice, and Morality. By Eric Katz.
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(I will state from the start that I think it is inexcusable that there is no mention in this entire volume about Lord Acton’s maxim on power: “Power tends to corrupt; and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” In a story about the One Ring to Rule Them All with all of its seductive and corrosive power, I was very disappointed not to come across what I thought was an important and obvious point. Perhaps my life-long libertarian background made me assume that everyone knew this maxim. Perhaps also the editors did not want contention over politics to darken the mood of the book.)
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In this first essay, Eric Katz reminds us of Plato’s tale of Gyges’ Ring in *The Republic,* which makes its wearer invisible. Gyges finds the ring and uses its cloak of invisibility to seduce the queen and kill the king. Katz writes: “Plato’s question to us is whether or not one should be a moral person even if one has the power to be immoral with impunity. Does immense power destroy the need to be a moral person?” (p.6) He gives a brief outline of Plato’s story and the arguments surrounding it.
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Then Katz discusses how various characters in TLOTR deal with the seductive power of The One Ring, the Ring of Power. Tom Bombadil is not affected at all by the Ring, and he alone can still see Frodo when Frodo is wearing the Ring and is invisible to everyone else. Galadriel refuses to take the Ring. Gandalf will not take it. But these characters are not mortals. Among mortals, Gollum is destroyed by it and obsessed with it. Sam will not keep it. Boromir is seduced by it, thinking that he is strong enough to wield it for good purposes. Aragorn will not take it. (One might also note that, in the book version, Faramir will not take it either.) Also, Bilbo gives it up, although reluctantly. And poor Frodo…. The personal choices of all these characters are examined very well.
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Chapter 2: The Cracks of Doom: The Threat of Emerging Technologies and Tolkien’s Rings of Power. By Theodore Schick.
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The title gives you a good idea of the subject matter, and I will not say much more about it.
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Chapter 3: “My Precious”: Tolkien’s Fetishized Ring. By Alison Milbank.
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Milbank provides a very interesting discussion of TLOTR in light of Freud’s theories on fetishism, in light of feminist theories, and even in light of Marxist alienation theory. She has interesting thoughts on “rings” and “things” in Norse and Anglo-Saxon mythologies, with a great analysis of Northern language (which was Professor Tolkien’s domain). She explores the “wonder” of natural things and our connections to them.
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Part II: The Quest for Happiness. (I liked all of this Part very much.)
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Chapter 4: Tolkien’s Six Keys to Happiness. By Gregory Bassham.
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This is a great chapter. Bassham reminds us that Hobbiton, Rivendell, and Lothlorien (a.k.a. Lorien) are happy places, so he asks us to consider what their inhabitants might teach us about “the secrets of true happiness and fulfillment.” (p.49) He finds six important lessons.
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1. Delight in Simple Things. He notes that hobbits “have no real government.” (I remember reading or hearing somewhere that Tolkien considered himself to be a “Christian anarchist,” if I am not mistaken.) Elves love to sing and to gaze at the stars. Bassham brings in insights from psychological theories and studies. He talks of the simple pleasures recommended by Epicurus. We are also reminded of Thoreau – “the great American apostle of simplicity” – who told his readers to “simplify, simplify.” (p.51)
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2. Make Light of your Troubles. Bassham tells us that this is one of “The Quaker Dozen” rules to live by, and that hobbits have this virtue, as did Marcus Aurelius, the great Stoic philosopher.
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3. Get Personal. High praise is given to Aristotle’s *Nicomachean Ethics* in relation to his discussion of friendship and its role in the fulfilled life. Recent psychological studies are cited to reinforce the point. Bassham writes: “No doubt if some hobbit-Aristotle had written his or her *Nicomachean Ethics,* the goods of friendship and connectedness would have featured at least as prominently as they do in Aristotle’s version.” (p.55)
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4. Cultivate Good Character. In a letter, Tolkien wrote that one aim of writing TLOTR was “the encouragement of good morals.” (p.55; quoted from Tolkien’s *Letters*) (One might add here that this kind of cultivation of good character is also an important theme in Aristotle’s ethics.)
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5. Cherish and Create Beauty. The elves in Tolkien’s books are tall, graceful, wise, and beings of incredible beauty. (For equivalents in Ayn Rand’s works, I think of Ragnar and Kay.) In Tolkien, creativity is also essential to the happy life. (Again, I am reminded of similarities in Rand, who considered productivity to be among the greatest of virtues.)
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6. Rediscover Wonder. Tom Bombadil is in a continual state of rapturous wonder, and it is inexhaustible for him since he is ancient beyond all the memory of any others. Bassham says that the elves have “an almost endless appetite for poetry, song, gazing at the stars, and walking in sunlit forests.” (p.58) They see things with “ever-fresh wonder and delight.” (In this description of the elves, I get a sense of zen.) Bassham quotes Tolkien, from an important separate essay of his entitled “On Fairy-Stories,” where Tolkien talks of “recovery,” a regaining of a sense of freshness, of a “clear view,” “so that things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness and familiarity.” It is a “return and renewal of health.” (p.59) For Tolkien, fairy tales like TLOTR can be healing.
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Chapter 5: The Quests of Sam and Gollum for a Happy Life. By Jorge J.E. Gracia.
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I like this essay even though I only agree partially with the author on a few things. What I do like is his frequent references to Aristotle, e.g., the point that true happiness depends on one’s nature, on the kind of being one is. Gollum has “no resources, no friends.” He has no friends because “he has no love for himself,” and Aristotle is quoted to support this idea. Gracia says, “Gollum lacks this self-love.” (p.70)
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Chapter 6: Farewell to Lorien: The Bounded Joy of Existentialists and Elves. By Eric Bronson.
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I love this essay. (Note: The two philosophers of whom I have read most of their works – and have also read those works with the most care and intensity -- are Rand and Nietzsche; my picture of Nietzsche is close to that given by Bronson here.)
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Grace, beauty, serenity and wisdom are the striking attributes of elves. Elvin songs are joyful, and all the creations of their artistry are of incredible beauty. Galadriel is the Lady of Lorien (a.k.a. Lothlorien). She is more powerful, wiser, older and more experienced than all the other elves of Middle Earth.
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The elves are virtually immortal. They live on for thousands of years. They can die in battle or by a similar mortal injury, but there is some kind of reincarnation involved where they still keep all their memories. Elves can also die of a “world-weariness” that makes life unbearable.
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Galadriel has a hint of sadness, for she remembers the elf rebellion long, long ago in the paradise across the sea to the far West of Middle Earth. She remembers a great Golden Age when elves lived in the West among the god-like Valar, a time when there were no blemishes at all on their happiness and innocence. There was a Fall involved in this earlier elf history, and Galadriel remembers it. It was an act of hubris, disobedience and rebellion that took place when her elf-clan decided to leave the Western paradise and travel to Middle Earth in order to fight evil. (This story you will find in *The Silmarillion.*) Galadriel did not take the treasonous oath that her kinsmen took, but she came with them in exile to Middle Earth, thus she shares somewhat in their rebellion. The memory of this episode taints the joy of elves in Middle Earth with just a hint of sadness. They have an echo of yearning for the West. (p.75)
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Bronson describes how “Galadriel presides over Lorien with songs of joy…. But it is a happiness born of sorrow and dispossession, and that is why Tolkien can be placed in a wider tradition of European philosophers who still affirm life, while bearing witness to the passing shadows.” (p.76)
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Bronson continues: “Philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Jaspers, and Hannah Arendt agree that life carries with it a certain despair, but alongside the suffering stands a spontaneous affirmation of life as it is, though danger lurks behind every tree.” (p.77)
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Nietzsche has hope in dark times; he sees a powerful artist as being the one to give hope. This artist, in Nietzsche’s words, “should see nothing as it is, but fuller, simpler, stronger: to that end, their lives must contain a kind of youth and spring, a kind of habitual intoxication.” (p.77) (I would also ask you to compare this with Rand’s neo-Aristotelian conception of art depicting “life as it might be and ought to be.”)
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Nietzsche also says that world-weariness will set in if we do not learn how to forget certain things. Galadriel, as the elf in Middle Earth who carries the heaviest burden of memory, finds some measure of forgetfulness in that moment when she refuses to possess the One Ring. She remembers who she is, she will “remain Galadriel,” but since she passed this incredible test of will she is unburdened of a heavy weight.
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Part III: Good and Evil in Middle Earth.
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Chapter 7: Uber-hobbits: Tolkien, Nietzsche, and the Will to Power. By Douglas K. Blount.
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This was a painful chapter for me to read and to re-read because Blount and I have very different interpretations of Nietzsche. Blount is a theologian, so he cannot be expected to sympathize with Nietzsche to the extent that I do. Blount seems to be of that school that sees Nietzsche responsible for spawning Hitler, Sauron, and all other manner of evil. I think that Eric Bronson’s interpretation in Chapter 6 is a better one. Blount seems to me to be missing the point of the Will to Power, e.g., Nietzsche would also see scholars and artists (possibly including Tolkien) as exemplars of a Will to Power.
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One of my problems here is that my studies of Nietzsche were 30 years ago, so it is hard to put my finger on exactly where I think Blount is off-base here. Also, Nietzsche was not so much a systematic thinker as he was a poet. He expressed himself in aphorisms and short enthusiastic exclamations, and thus contradictions abound in his writings. (It just occurred to me that both Nietzsche and Tolkien were philologists, immersed in their linguistic specialties and in the wide traditions of wisdom in their respective fields of focus: Tolkien in that of Northern cultures and Nietzsche in those of the Classical world. Contradictions can be found in both.)
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Blount sees in Tolkien’s works a religious conflict, citing supporting evidence from his letters. Nietzsche can always be used to fill in as a great villain, and he often has been so used.
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Chapter 8: Tolkien and the Nature of Evil. By Scott A. Davison.
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Davison asks if Evil is an independent force. Is the world Manichean, where Good and Evil are two equally powerful opposing forces locked in eternal war? Some Tolkien scholars think so according to Davison, but he disagrees.
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He says that evil depends on goodness, taking the “Augustinian” view and citing Tolkien to show convincingly that Tolkien, a Roman Catholic, agreed. Augustine, Davison, and Tolkien see evil as a negation or a destruction of the good. In a letter, Tolkien wrote: “In my story I do not deal with Absolute Evil. I do not think there is such a thing, since that is Zero.” (p.102) (Ayn Rand also wrote of evil as being ultimately impotent and a negation, and she wrote of evil often showing itself as a “hatred of the good for being the good.” Strange bedfellows here, indeed.)
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One of the interesting things about the evil character Sauron in TLOTR is that he thinks everyone will want to possess the Ring and thus its power. He cannot conceive of the possibility that anyone would have the motive of instead renouncing great power and completely *destroying* the Ring. In this aspect, he shows a tremendous *absence,* a great lack of understanding, wisdom and vision.
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Chapter 9: Virtue and Vice in The Lord Of The Rings. By Aeon J. Skoble.
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(Apparently Skoble is a libertarian, but this is the first I have heard of him. His bio paragraph says that he is editor of *Reason Papers.*)
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This is my favorite essay and is in itself worth the price of the whole book. Skoble gives us a robust presentation and defense of Aristotelian “virtue ethics,” arguing for its superiority to either Kantian duty ethics or utilitarian ethics by using TLOTR characters as examples.
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I think that this would be a very good intro to Aristotelian ethics for one who was totally new to it. It is a great 10-page intro to important aspects of it. (Many Randians do not seem to realize how close Aristotle’s ethics are to Ayn Rand’s in many ways.)
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Skoble writes that Aristotle has a *developmental* focus on ethics: “what we need to do is *become* virtuous.” Certain “habits of thought and action tend to move our characters … towards states Aristotle calls virtues….” Of course, other habits of thought or action tend to move us towards vices. In his section titled “Developing Good Character,” Skoble writes: “For Aristotle, moral virtues are states of character one develops which, as they become more integral to one’s being, help one to lead a happier, more fulfilled life.” (p.111)
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How do we decide, in a particular situation, how we should act? Part of a virtue-ethics is the idea that a person who has “cultivated good character” will have developed a kind of “moral wisdom” – what Aristotle called “practical reason.” (p.111) Practical reason must make judgments in “reference to a predominant goal.” … “On the Aristotelian view, there is such an overall predominant value: life, or more specifically, a flourishing or good life.” (p.112) (Those familiar with Rand’s ethics will see a distinct resemblance here.)
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Aristotle stresses that one must learn to acquire a virtuous character by performing virtuous acts. (p.112) It must be developed and be made habitual. A helpful part of this process of self-development is finding and emulating the right role models. (p.113) (This reminds me of the Buddha’s advice to choose to hang around “Noble Companions” and to avoid the influence of ignoble ones.) Skoble then looks at several characters in TLOTR to illustrate both virtuous and vicious character traits in light of virtue ethics. Aragorn and Boromir are compared; Skoble points out that Boromir, although basically decent, has a flaw of intellectual stubbornness of the kind that Aristotle had criticized by quoting Hesiod: “He who grasps everything himself is best of all; he is noble also who listens to one who has spoken well; but he who neither grasps it himself nor takes to heart what he hears from another is a useless man” (Hesiod, *Works and Days,* quoted in Aristotle, *Nicomachean Ethics,* 1095b10). Skoble’s whole discussion of Boromir as a tragic figure is very interesting. (p.116)
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In the section “Virtue Ethics in Perspective,” Skoble makes some final comparisons between virtue ethics and both Kantian and utilitarian ethics. (pp.117-119)
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(If you have not read it yet, I highly recommend Aristotle’s *Nicomachean Ethics.* Buy a small paperback copy and carry it around for those times when you can browse it. Browsing is easy because most versions have a good Topical Table of Contents, allowing you to look up subjects according to what interests you might have at the moment. After some time of familiarization, read it straight through. It is absolutely a classic in ethical thinking.)
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Part IV: Time and Mortality.
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Chapter 10: Choosing to Die: The Gift of Mortality in Middle Earth. By Bill Davis.
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I found this to be a very interesting essay, even though I do not agree completely with Davis in the end. He may be much closer to Tolkien’s view than I am.
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Davis describes many of the most common ideas about death in TLOTR very well. Elves are immortal, for as long as the world endures. In the viewpoint of the elves, the death of a human means that human’s complete annihilation, and the elves actually call this “the gift” given to men. If an elf dies in battle, he is reincarnated into a similar body with memory intact. Elves never really die, and men consider this to be a “gift” given to the elves. Each envy the other.
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Davis Discusses “Death in Middle Earth” (pp.124-7) and then gives us a good treatment of “Death on Planet Earth.” In this last section, he discusses Socrates’ view of death as well as that of the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius in his *On the Nature of Things.* Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus are also mentioned. (pp.127-9)
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In the section “Immortality in Middle Earth,” Davis covers Tolkien’s references to elvin reincarnation, and he also suggests that elves find immortality to be *boring.* (pp.129-130) In connection with this last thought, the section “Immortality on Planet Earth” brings up ideas about immortality from Eastern and Western religions and philosophies. The eternal punishment-task outlined in Camus’ *Myth of Sisyphus* is mentioned, along with Wowbanger the Infinitely Prolonged in *Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.* Wowbanger is immortal and is so horribly bored by this condition that he institutes the personal project of insulting every singe person in the universe, one at a time, in alphabetical order. When he shows up, he ascertains that you are the right person on his list, then he rudely insults you, checks off your name on his vast list, and then sets off to find the next name. (pp.130-133)
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The most relevant case in the actual TLOTR story is Arwen’s love for Aragorn, who is a mortal man. Arwen is a rare case of being half-elvin, from one elf parent and one human parent, and she must ultimately choose either to be immortal as an elf and forever leave Middle Earth, going over the sea to the ancestral elvin realm in the West, or she can give up her immortality so she can live one mortal life in Middle Earth with Aragorn. This is high romance. In *The Silmarillion* there is the similar story of the love between Beren and Luthien.
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Chapter 11: Tolkien, Modernism, and the Importance of Tradition. By Joe Kraus.
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Kraus writes that “the heroes of TLOTR often rescue themselves because they remember something important that their enemies have forgotten.” … “They have studied history, lore, tactics, languages, and geography, and they know as much as they can about whatever it is that they are attempting. They have their trusty swords and their quick wits with them all of the time, but they have also done their homework. Thus, Tolkien seems to tell us, knowledge is a crucial part of what it takes to be a hero.” (p.137-8)
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Kraus argues that one part of Tolkien’s vision in writing TLOTR was “to imagine a world where scholarship and respect for tradition provide real and tangible power.” Tolkien, as a professor, studied and taught ancient Northern European languages and “was committed to the values of the humanities.” (p.138) To Tolkien, “being heroic ties into being scholarly.”
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Kraus writes that Tolkien saw immense despair in a modern world that has rejected tradition. This despair is shown in TLOTR by Denethor and Saruman, who both were great scholars but have now disregarded their learned wisdom, followed false new hopes or visions, and have succumbed to despair. (pp.141-3)
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(Is Kraus arguing for conservativism? Or is he arguing for perennialism? A perennialist is one who values certain particular traditions chiefly because he sees true perennial value in them rather than just valuing them because they are old and traditional. I prefer being a “perennialist,” because I see value being timeless as value, whether it be old or radically brand new.)
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Chapter 12: Tolkien’s Green Time: Environmental Themes in TLOTR. By Andrew Light.
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By “green time,” Light means a perspective on the natural world that involves a tremendously long view of time, an evolutionary time-scale or longer. The ents and Tom Bombadil represent this perspective in the story. Light talks about the niches that the various free peoples of Middle Earth love the most: elves love the forests, dwarves love the mountains and the underground places, and hobbits love The Shire.
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Elves are immortal, thus they have the long view. Even such an ancient one as Treebeard says that “The Elves cured us [the ents] of dumbness.” Davis suggests that this may mean the elves nurtured “a capacity of reason and eventually of speech” in the ents. (p.154) In a letter, Tolkien wrote: “The elves represent … the artistic, aesthetic, and purely scientific aspects of the Humane Nature raised to a higher level than is actually seen in Men.” (p.155)
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Part V: Ends and Endings.
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Chapter 13: Providence and the Dramatic Unity of TLOTR. By Thomas Hibbs.
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Hibbs argues, with good textual evidence, that in his stories “Tolkien manages to suggest the working of a higher, benevolent power, a providential orchestration of events.” (p.167) Hibbs launches into a discussion of the traditional philosophical problems with the idea of providence. Then he proceeds to argue that “Tolkien offers a dramatic demonstration of the reality of human freedom and action and of the way patience and compassion is used to overcome evil.” (p.168) The role of Gollum is considered as an instrument of providence. Also, the case of Boromir and his changes at his end are examined.
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Hibbs writes that “Gandalf explains that while we can’t always control life’s storms, we can control how we react to the inclement weather.” (p.172) (Said like an ancient Greek Stoic.)
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Kant’s (Enlightenment) view of nature being “disenchanted” is contrasted with Tolkien’s fictional view, where “the entirety of nature is not just enchanted but is permeated with reason and moral sense.” (pp.172-3) Hibbs then dismisses any reading of a Manichean vision in Tolkien, instead going with Augustine: evil has no real existence because it is merely an absence, a privation of the good. (p.174)
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Chapter 14: Talking Trees and Walking Mountains: Buddhist and Taoist Themes in TLOTR. By Jennifer L. McMahon and B. Steve Csaki.
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I had higher hopes for this essay, but it is still okay. The authors seek to “address the themes of sentience in non-human entities, man’s relationship with nature, the importance of the master and student relationship, and the balance between good and evil.” (p.179) (Yet none of these themes have had much relevance to me in my four decades of interest in and study of Eastern philosophies and religions, except for my “relationship with nature,” which is that I simply consider myself at home there.)
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The ents obviously cover the sentience part. As for sentience in non-human things in Eastern thought, the authors remind us: “This is particularly true of Japanese Buddhist sects which have incorporated some of the animistic elements of Shinto.” (p.181) (The Shinto belief that certain beautiful locales in nature – e.g., a rocky place, a streambed, a hilltop, a tree or a shoreline – may have their own spirit, or “kami,” has always had an aesthetic resonance with me in my enjoyment of nature, but I never interpret this as a possession of “sentience” on the part of the place or things.)
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As for master and student, and the mentoring process, they point out that sometimes the right master may seem to be unlikely. E.g., Zen master Dogen left Japan to find instruction in China, and he learned profound lessons from a Ch’an monastery’s cook whom he ran into on the docks. In TLOTR, Sam is sometimes the wise master that Frodo needs. Also, Gandalf, Elrond and Aragorn share their vast wisdom with the hobbits. (pp.185-188)
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As for a balance between good and evil, the Taoist yin/yang balance is discussed.
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Chapter 15: Sam and Frodo’s Excellent Adventure: Tolkien’s Journey Motif. By J. Lenore Wright.
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“Not all those who wander are lost.” (p.195) (A quote from Bilbo Baggins, my all-time favorite character in Tolkien. I always saw him as a fellow wanderer.)
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Wright talks about journey motifs: the journey out of the Cave into the light in Plato’s *Republic.* Augustine’s *Confessions,* depicting his spiritual journey from pagan Rome to Manichaeism to Academic Skepticism and finally to St. Ambrose. (pp.194-5)
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She reminds us that Descartes’ scientific journeys of discovery led him to turn inward, in his words, “to undertake studies within my self too and to use all the powers of my mind in choosing the paths I should follow.” Frodo and his fellow hobbits transform themselves throughout their journey, and they realize Nietzsche’s advice to “become who you are.” (pp.196-7)
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In their personal transformations, Gandalf, Aragorn and Sam all have some kind of name changes, which is an important journey motif, as in the great Chinese tale, *Journey to the West,* where “Monkey” eventually becomes known as a “Buddha Victorious in Strife.” (p.198)
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Sam and Frodo are Nietzschean “Yea-sayers,” who welcome life despite its burdens. But Smeagol and Saruman are “Nay-sayers,” becoming “inauthentic” in Heidegger’s terms. (p.199) Sam and Frodo are also pilgrims on a “Quest,” and they need guides such as Gandalf and Aragorn. Frodo, much like Dante moving with the guidance of Virgil through Hell, stumbles, faints and struggles against the spiritual weight of the Ring. (p.201)
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Chapter 16: Happy Endings and Religious Hope: TLOTR as an Epic Fairy Tale. By John J. Davenport. (Final essay in this collection, and one of my favorites.)
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This is a great essay, the kind that opens new avenues of thought. The title sums it up pretty well. It took me about three readings of this essay before I could really integrate it. Although I have a lot of major religious/philosophical differences with Tolkien (and Davenport), I think Davenport’s essay is a very important one when thinking about Tolkien’s works.
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Davenport starts by saying that some readers see TLOTR as an entertaining adventure, while others see it as a Christian allegory. He says: “I will argue instead that Tolkien conceived his masterpiece as an epic fairy tale with a kind of religious significance.” … “I will look at Tolkien’s theory of the fairy tale and his Arthurian romance model for the happy ending in TLOTR.” (p.204) I found what follows to be very interesting.
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Noting the long-standing critical debate about whether or not TLOTR is a fundamentally religious work, Davenport points out that Tolkien’s work is closer to Northern European mythology in many ways.
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In a footnote, Davenport writes: “…I would argue that Tolkien’s work is also deeply inspired by the Arthurian legends and the larger cycle of British national mythology. The very first story Tolkien wrote about his fictional world, ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, has clear links to the Fall of King Arthur.” (p.205)
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Davenport draws heavily upon Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories” (which was also cited earlier in this volume in Ch. 3 by Milbank and in Ch. 4 by Bassham) and claims it is an essential essay for understanding Tolkien. Rather than being stories for children, in Davenport’s words, genuine fairy-stories for Tolkien are a form of “serious literary art in which nature appears as a ‘Perilous Realm’, the world of ‘Faerie’.” (p.207-8)
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Tolkien always insisted in his letters on the importance of his theory of fairy stories to his work. Davenport mentions other good examples of this type of fairy story: the original *Perseus and the Gorgon* and *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.* (p.208)
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Tolkien coins a term, “eucatastrophe,” for the kind of happy ending in a fairy story that appears right in the middle of apparent catastrophe, a kind of joyous “turn” in the story. Davenport writes: “[Tolkien] conceives tragedy as the true form and highest function of drama, and eucatastrophe as the true form and highest function of fairy-tale.” (p.210)
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Talking about the New Testament stories of the Resurrection, Tolkien says, “The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories.” (p.211) Davenport says that the Gospels have a eucatastrophe – i.e., the Resurrection -- that holds out more direct hope than the more indirect ones of most fairy-stories.
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Davenport very convincingly argues that the medieval tale of *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight* is one that “…Tolkien studied closely and used in creating Frodo.” (p.211) Later Davenport writes that “…Gawain is Tolkien’s primary model for Frodo.” (p.212)
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The Green Knight is a variant of the “green man” nature spirit in ancient Celtic myth. (p.211) He is immensely powerful, and it looks certain that Gawain will die by his blade. But a eucatastrophe occurs, a “turn” in the story that saves Gawain from death, although Gawain receives a scar from the contest that he will carry for the rest of his life. (p.212)
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Davenport reminds us that Frodo, too, will receive a scar, the loss of a finger, during the eucatastrophe that occurs at a climactic moment in his story, saving him from near certain doom. (p.212) In Tolkien’s *The Silmarillion,* Beren’s quest for a Silmaril results in a similar scarring, the loss of a hand. (p.214) (I will also point out that Robert Bly’s book, *Iron John,* investigates fairy tales and emphasizes both the fictional and existential importance of wounds and scars in the journey to true manhood.)
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Davenport writes: “Tolkien’s primary goal in TLOTR was to create a fantasy for our time with the same eucatastrophic power that Gawain’s fantastic tale had for fifteenth-century Britons, and this is what gives his trilogy its encompassing religious mood.” (p.213)
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Davenport writes that, while the unfinished *The Silmarillion* was designed to be an epic, “…TLOTR is meant to *combine* the epic quest narrative with the eucatastrophic (or indirectly eschatological) significance of the true faerie tale.” (p.215) This combination had never been done before in British or Germanic mythology.
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Davenport then catalogs many of the eucatastrophes within TLOTR, ending with Aragorn’s act of “turning”: turning around to find the sapling of Nimloth, the White Tree of Numenor, that itself has a pedigree going all the way back to the earliest of days. (p.218)
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[End of my reviews of this volume’s essays.]
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After-notes by reviewer:
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I had been wondering for many decades and never really understood why it was that Tolkien could be so beloved by many I knew who are Christians. It seemed exceedingly odd and inappropriate to me, because in my experience Tolkien was a terrific hit mainly among neo-pagans I knew or knew of, many of whom are certain that Tolkien was one of the major influences in the 20th century revival of Paganism in the West. But I think many of the essays in this volume help explain the situation to me in some degree. TLOTR is a pre-Christian tale modeled on the very ancient pagan North, but some of Tolkien’s Roman Catholicism still does come through (including the Aristotelianism that Aquinas had synthesized into the Catholic tradition).
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One of my main disappointments with TLOTR has always been the episode where I felt that Frodo “dropped the ball” at a critical moment, thus he fell a notch or two in his heroic stature in my mind. The tiny hobbit, who heroically declared “I will take the Ring” on the Quest, later fell somewhat short of my expectations of a true hero. But Davenport’s discussion of Tolkien’s eucatastrophic vision of the fairy tale explains this all very well regarding the aesthetic purpose of the entire story. Tolkien – although being a 20th century writer -- is not really in the Romantic traditions of heroism that I so love and prefer, as were developed in the 19th and 20th centuries.
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Yet I love *The Hobbit,* *TLOTR* and *The Silmarillion.* I think I like them so much because of their sense of a history, as well as the poetry in them, and the nature-aesthetic that Tolkien makes so real. There are also heroes aplenty, in the roles of Sam, Strider, and many, many more. It really is an epic fairy tale.
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-Zenwind.

Ice Skating in the Swamp

2009-01-08T19:07:00.001+07:00

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I used to ice skate a lot in my younger days, when winters were so cold. But the greatest experiences I ever had skating were a series of solo explorations on skates into the big swamp just east of Sugar Grove’s borough limits during one of those frigid winters in the early 1960s. I was anywhere from 10 to 13 years old at that time, and I saw things in that winter swampland I’ve never seen before or since.
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I had tried to explore this swamp in earlier years in the summertime, and it was almost impenetrable because of both the dense thickets of brush and also the deep, sticky mud in the meandering streams and pools that would go over your knees and stop you in your tracks. My friends and I could only get into the outer margins of the swamp during the warmer parts of the year, never into its heart. But in the cold of winter the watercourses actually became my trails.
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I had just received a pair of boy’s figure skates for Christmas, as I had out-grown my old hockey skates. Christmas afternoon I went back to the little stream going through our north pasture, Brand’s Creek, and tried them out. The frozen stream surface was rough from wind ripples on the water freezing into ridges, and the little gradual waterfalls now became horrendously fast downgrades that made me rocket down along the stream’s eastward course. It was almost like skiing on ice. After falling hard many times and finally hitting a couple of barbed wire fences that separated pastures and crossed over the creek, I gave up for the day, skated back upstream against the wind and went home to lick my wounds.
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But before returning to the farmhouse I glanced at Brand’s Creek’s course as it went eastward far beyond my day’s short excursion and on into the great swamp. I knew that our creek met the bigger Stillwater Creek somewhere after going into that swamp.
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There was a challenge taunting me here. My father had always told of Doc Grant once skating down the frozen Stillwater Creek from downtown Sugar Grove to some point far downstream. I am not sure how far Doc skated, but skating downstream would take you eventually through Busti, NY and end when the Stillwater meets the Conewango at Frewsburg. I was not a good enough skater to go any of those long miles, but I thought that I would be able at least to skate Brand’s Creek to the swamp on my next try.
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On another day that week I skated Brand’s Creek from our pasture through Carl Allen’s north pasture and Francis Thompson’s north pasture all the way east to the swamp. I didn’t hit a single fence, because instead I just hit the deck and slid under them.
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One odd hazard I faced was double ice layers, caused by initial freezing of a higher water level followed by a drop in water level and then the hard solid freeze of a lower level. I would suddenly, without warning, break through an upper ice level – which was terrifying – and be stopped by the lower, solid level. Once I slid down between the two layers, which were not much more than a foot apart, and I stopped with ice above me and below me. I felt stuck, I could hear the water gurgling below me, and I was in panic, really scared. I could not elbow or claw my way back upstream to exit the hole I had fallen through. At last I discovered the virtues of the front teeth of figure skates, and I used them for grip to struggle out.
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Continuing downstream, skating down even the gradual incline of such a small stream was frighteningly fast, especially with the wind at my back pushing me on. I fell many times, but I eventually reached the point where the creek enters the swamp. I had to give up and return home because of the extreme wind-chill and because of my numb fingers and toes. The return against grade and wind seemed endless.
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After returning home and thawing out, I announced my plans for skating into the unknown of the swamp, and my mother was positively horrified with worry, especially because I always went alone. But my father reasoned: “Ice is usually solid if you have had three or four sub-zero [Fahrenheit] nights in a row.” That was good enough for me. We had had prolonged sub-zero weather for almost a week, with temperatures minus-10, minus-15 or lower most every night. So I was determined to try it. The things I put my dear mother through.
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New Years Day was minus-10 at 9:00 AM with a stiff wind when I again went down Brand’s Creek to the swamp. When I crossed into the swamp on skates I got tangled trying to get through a barbed wire fence and I kept tripping in the underbrush, tree roots and grasses when the front teeth on my figure skates snagged. I finally found a small stream in the swamp and started exploring.
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The ice was immediately smoother, more level and more forgiving, because the trees and brush had shielded it from the wind. It was like glass with only a dusting of snow. This was the first time I had ever skated on smooth ice, and I was ecstatic. The little hummocks of grass and sod that would form a sort of stepping stone of dryness in summer travel were now obstacles that would trip me. I had a little open U-shaped area in the fork of this small stream were I could skate fast, and any falls would not be too rough. I skated back and forth on this area, faster each time. I remember once falling at great speed and sliding face-first across a broad area into the frozen grassy stream bank, and I was laughing so hard I could hardly stand back up.
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Later, as I was skating as fast as I could along my little course, a rabbit suddenly jumped out of hiding from somewhere among the grass hummocks, and he ran away from me skittering and slipping on the ice. He was having a hard time getting any traction, but I was already moving fast in his direction so that I was actually gaining on him. Now I feel bad for chasing the poor little guy, who was probably scared silly. I don’t know what I would have done if I had caught up to him, but the situation resolved itself quickly. The previously open stream was now turning into less and less ice with more and more grass hummocks and trees. As the rabbit jumped unto these little islands of dry land he gained traction and momentum, while I was dodging them, trying to keep my skates on ice and trying not to trip. The rabbit got further ahead, I finally tripped on the grass and crashed into a tree root, and the rabbit disappeared into the woods. Good for him.
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I visited the swamp again the next weekend. Again, it was sub-zero cold with even more extreme wind-chill. I explored further beyond my last point and found traces of a little tributary creek coming in from slightly upstream. I wound my way through sketchy ice patches in a mostly grassy stream-course, often having to walk over uneven hummocky dry ground, which made my ankles ache. I was ready to give up and go back until I saw a clearing up ahead and made my way to it.
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Entering this clearing was one of the most unique memories I have of my youth. Ahead of me was a beaver dam. It was low and broad, maybe 30 yards across. The area of ice dammed up in the pond above it was about the size of half of a football field. On one part of the pond was a beaver lodge. The dam of sticks was almost 3 feet higher than my stream level, and I found that I could use my figure skates’ front teeth to tip-toe up the frozen-solid weave of sticks making up the dam.
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Reaching up to this level of the broad frozen beaver pond, I was skating on the biggest area of ice I’d ever been on before. But I was feeling very cold now. This clearing in the swamp’s usual forest cover of trees and brush allowed the wind to reach me, and I was shivering and exhausted. I skated over to the beaver lodge, but all was still and silent there.
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Determined to explore a bit more, I skated in the upstream direction as the pond thinned out into little streams. Then I came upon another upper beaver dam. The dam was smaller, only about a foot and a half high. I front-pointed up it with my skates’ teeth and skated around a bit on this smaller area, but it was even more exposed to the wind. I now think that I was at that time suffering hypothermia from the wind-chill and my mind was getting sluggish.
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I don’t remember much about skating back except that I took a bad fall trying to go down the upper dam. By the time I got back to the lower dam I figured out that I must turn around and go down backwards while facing the dam, kicking my skates’ teeth into the wood of the dam much like modern ice climbers do. I do remember a painful return trip after leaving the forested swamp and going into the open fields again while skating back up Brand’s Creek, upstream and against the wind. I was frozen, with aching fingers and toes, and delirious. The open fire in the fireplace at home never seemed so comforting.
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I never made it back to the swamp that winter, because we had a January thaw and heavy rains that ruined the ice.
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The swamp was usually a remote, unknown and protected world, hard to reach. But the miracle of that winter’s hard-freeze allowed me a brief moment to peek into its inner mysteries. Truly a winter wonderland.
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-Zenwind.

Contents of Climbing Log

2008-05-18T15:40:00.001+07:00

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Here are the titles (linked) of all entries in my Climbing Log in order of their arrangement from the top to bottom. To access all of these entries on one page, click on the “a Climbing Log” label either below this entry or on the "Index" list of labels to the right. To access a single entry, click on its title here.
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Silver Moonlight
The Banshee Cry
Ancient Boundaries
High Slab Climbing
Nietzsche quote: On the Mountains of Truth
Photo: Zenwind high at Seneca Rocks
Gothics North Face
Minus 40 Degrees
The Coldest of Ice Climbs
Chouinard’s Gully
Roped Solo Technique (old style)
Encounter on a Rocky Ridge
The Frostbite Trip
Breath Control and Extreme Climbing
My Cousin
Purpose of my Climbing Log
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-Zenwind.

Silver Moonlight

2008-05-18T15:36:00.000+07:00

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(Part 1 of a 4-part saga about my September 1981 Adirondack trip. Part 2: “The Banshee Cry.” Part 3: “Ancient Boundaries.” Part 4: “High Slab Climbing.”)
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This was one of the most beautiful – as well as unusual -- nights I have ever spent in the mountains. It was the September Full Moon of 1981, and my objectives on this mini-expedition were Mt. Algonquin via traversing trail and Mt. Colden via its north face slab climb.
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It was to be a lightweight and fast trip with minimal gear. Instead of a sleeping bag I used a half-bag with a parka, both out of good synthetics. No tent, just a 1-pound Gore-Tex bivy-sack, which was really only a water/wind-resistant mummy-shaped sleeping bag cover.
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Starting from the Adirondack (ADK) Lodge Trailhead, I got a very late afternoon start straight up from Heart Lake to the summit of Mt. Algonquin, the second highest mountaintop in the ADK range, and the highest peak of the triple-peaked mountain mass that is also called MacIntyre Mountain.
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Before reaching the Algonquin summit, I stopped to examine the nearby off-trail site where a B-52 had crashed in bad weather into the top of the mountain decades before. An engine-mount is still embedded in a crack.
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On Algonquin’s summit I enjoyed a great view in all directions. It was a beautiful end to a beautiful autumn evening, but the air was fast becoming chilly and the sun was low. On the general summit area I found the only spot suitable for a bivouac, which was a small flat ledge about 40 yards from the summit, to its SE.
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I took off my boots and cooked supper while sitting in my half-bag and parka. As I put my cooking gear away, I watched the sun go down on my right and the full moon rise on my left over Vermont. My feet were pointed south toward Avalanche Pass below and its beautiful lakes: Avalanche Lake and Lake Colden. My next objective, Mt. Colden’s north face, looked very steep and very big. Exhausted from a 10-hour drive and the hike up to the summit, I fell right asleep.
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I woke up at midnight in a beautiful world of silver. There was no color, only shades of silver. I was disoriented at first, not least because the entire world seemed to be below me. The moon was centered in the south, looking me right in the face and reflecting brightly off the lakes below my feet. The whole universe was silver, the moon and sky above me, the mountains and valleys all around me and below me, and especially those lakes and streams below to the south. I saw a small glimmer in the distance that I finally identified as a silver waterfall on some mountainside far below.
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The night was still and peaceful, and this was among the finest moments I have ever had in the mountains or anywhere else. In times like this, my heart aches because I want so much to show such beautiful mountain sights to family and friends. But they never choose to come this way, to make the effort of the ascent. So such beautiful experiences seem to be both the blessing and curse of a solo rambler like me.
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I enjoyed the silver moonlit world around me and below me for as long as possible, trying to keep my eyes open and to sit up. But eventually I fell back asleep.
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(This saga is continued in Parts 2, 3 and 4.)
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-Zenwind.

The Banshee Cry

2008-05-18T15:35:00.000+07:00

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(Part 2 of a 4-part saga about my September 1981 ADK trip.)
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While bivouacking close to the summit of Mt. Algonquin, and after falling asleep to a beautifully calm midnight view of clear silver moonlight, I woke up at 3am to an entirely different world, one of chaos, loud blasting wind, and shards of torn cloud pin-wheeling past my face. The moon, now in the SW, was barely visible behind racing cloud formations.
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Then I started to hear an absolutely unearthly sound, and it got steadily louder. It was unbelievably frightening, and I do not frighten that easily. It gives me chills as I recount it now, decades later. It was an earsplitting sound like a ghastly scream. All I could think of was legends of the “Cry of the Banshee.” It was blood-curdling and insanely loud. I was terrified. I could not explain it. In all my experiences, no natural forces could ever produce a sound like this.
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I am not a superstitious person, but my emotional experience at that moment was as if there were, in actual reality, a raging supernatural demon out there, the kind of demon-greeter one could imagine meeting at the very Gates of Hell. I consulted my rational mind and easily agreed with it that only natural forces operate in the universe. But what the hell was making this ghastly noise? I could not even begin to rationally explain it.
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Thinking that I absolutely must explore this weird phenomenon, I got out of my bivy gear and put my boots on. The screaming sound was coming from the summit, 40 yards away and a bit higher up to the NW of my bivy site. I put rocks on my gear so it would not blow away, and I started climbing toward the summit and the noise’s source. All the hairs on my body were actually bristling with fear, but I just had to check it out.
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Moving toward the summit rocks, a gust of wind blew me off my feet. I got up and moved onward, crouching low, and the terrifying screaming sound just got louder. The final few yards were the scariest, as I was about to peek over the summit rocks.
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Finally reaching the summit on all fours, facing into the full force of the wind, I looked over the far side of the mountain. Between me and the valley of the Olympic town of Lake Placid to the NW was a huge storm cloud. Its base was far below me and its top was far higher than the entire mountain range. And it was advancing straight toward me – fast.
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“Oh,” I thought, “it’s just a storm.” (Albeit a really horrendous and scary storm.) That completely explained the unearthly screaming sound. It had simply been powerful wind racing over the summit rocks upwind of me. All clarified, I quickly headed back to my bivy site. This was a hell of a storm.
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Back to my bivouac, I got out the only lightweight shelter I had packed, a one-pound Gore-Tex bivy sack. I got it over my half-bag and parka, but before zipping it closed I put all my other gear, including boots, into my pack and put heavy rocks on top of it all so it would not blow away. Zipped inside my bivy, I waited it out.
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Wind gusts were so sudden and violent that they actually rocked me with each gust as I lay there, almost rolling me off the ledge -- and I was on the lee side of the summit. I could not sleep, and the storm just got worse, accompanied by more loud ghostly sounds.
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Finally morning light came as the storm blew over. I felt quite beat. After all, I did not sleep much, and the fear in the night had exhausted me. It had become very cold and wet, and I knew I would not try climbing the smooth friction slab of Mt. Colden today in wet conditions, so I declared this a rest day.
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(This saga continues in Parts 3 and 4.)
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-Zenwind.

Ancient Boundaries

2008-05-18T15:34:00.000+07:00

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(Part 3 of the 4-part September 1981 Adirondack saga.)
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While still on Algonquin’s summit after the night of “Silver Moonlight” and “The Banshee Cry,” I took a side trip to hike over to the other, slightly lower, summits of this MacIntyre Mountain massif. These are Boundary Peak and Iroquois Peak, which few people visit although they are only several hundred yards off the main trail. This is a highly recommended detour.
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The Native Indian tribes of the Algonquin to the north and the Iroquois to the south were said to have had boundaries between them through the center of the Adirondack Mountains, on a SW-NE line, and this boundary went right over the top of MacIntyre Mountain. The boundaries of their hunting grounds were defined by the watersheds.
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You cannot really appreciate this from Algonquin peak alone; you must walk over Boundary Peak to Iroquois Peak (where you get a unique view of Wallface Mountain’s sheer east face and the wilds of Indian Pass in between). Then walk back to Boundary Peak and stand and look around.
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Looking SW you see the line of great boundary passes dividing the watersheds of the range between Algonquin tribes to the north and Iroquois tribes to the south, e.g., Indian Pass. Then turn to look NE and you see the line of boundary passes continue to trend off in that direction, e.g., Hunter Pass. I know of no spot in the range where you can see the divide so well as at Boundary Peak, and that is the origin of its name.
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The detour completed, I packed up and stumbled down the south trail off Algonquin toward Avalanche Pass and the lakes area. I studied Mt. Colden’s north face, my next objective, which loomed across the valley, as I descended. I bivouacked early in the Pass, looking for an early start the next morning.
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(This saga continues in Part 4.)
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-Zenwind.

High Slab Climbing

2008-05-18T15:31:00.000+07:00

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(Part 4, final part of the September 1981 ADK saga.)
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The next day I climbed Mt. Colden’s north face as an easy free-solo rock climb (or “slide”/”slab” climb) in hiking boots with no rock gear. It is not too technical, but is very high, the entire face being somewhere under 1,000 feet high.
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You start by going up a waterfall gully (geologically called a trapdike) on the left of the face, which is an easy rock climb if not too wet. At a certain point, you escape the gully to the right when you can climb out onto the slab. This slab is a long, huge, moderately steep and very exposed friction climb to the top, with no real foot- or hand-holds, and very little places to put climbing anchors even if you had them. You just rely on balance and friction techniques – and dry rock.
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(This Colden’s north face is also one of the classic Adirondack ice and snow climbs in winter, if the snow on the slab is consolidated enough. One climbs up the now-frozen waterfall/trapdike and then out onto the moderate snow climb of the slab. I have never got the chance to do this as an ice climb, as it was never in good condition when I was ready for it, but it is still at the top of my list.)
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The rock slab was not too bad for me. The exposure was not freaking me out as I moved up, as I had been climbing a lot of rock that year. I was hundreds of feet up, at the top of the slab section and very close to the summit, when I came to the little 12-foot wall at the top of the slab that blocked the way to the wooded summit.
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But there was a thin layer of morning ice glaze on this wall, right where I did not need it, and I was a bit concerned about what to do. Down-climbing was out of the question, and there did not appear to be any escape off the slab to the right or left. I could not even rest comfortably on the slanting slab, and my legs were starting to cramp up badly. I consulted the climbing guidebook and realized that I had no choice but to go up the icy wall.
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It was a bit dicey. If you fall off this short wall, you land on the upper reaches of the steeply-sloping slab with nothing to grab, so you are looking at a long, sliding, bouncing and accelerating skid of hundreds and hundreds of feet down into the trees below. Not pretty. My concern was getting close to real fear as my leg muscles started to cramp into knots.
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I actually remember very little about the specific climbing moves that got me up that last short iced wall. All I remember about that spot was the battle to control my fear and to think, to look carefully at the ground I must climb, and to act decisively. But I somehow did gain the summit of Colden, which is somewhat disappointing as a summit because it has trees that obscure any 360-degree view.
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I descended the west ridge, picked up my gear and very humbly limped down the valley trails back to the roadhead.
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-Zenwind.

Striving On

2008-03-11T10:03:00.003+07:00

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Trying to become a Buddha is easy,
But ending delusions is hard.
So many frosted moonlit nights
I’ve sat and felt the cold before dawn.
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~Shih-wu~ (14th cen. Chinese Ch'an/Zen mountain hermit)

Impermanent as a Bubble

2008-03-11T09:57:00.002+07:00

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This body's existence is like a bubble's.
May as well accept what happens.
Events and hopes seldom agree.
But he who can step back doesn't worry.
We blossom and fade like flowers;
Gather and part like clouds.
Worldly thoughts I forgot long ago,
Relaxing all day on a peak.
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~Shih-wu~ (14th cen. Chinese Ch'an/Zen mountain hermit)

On the Mountains of Truth

2008-02-23T17:11:00.002+07:00

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“On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.”
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-- Nietzsche.

Cold Mountain Poem #12

2008-02-11T13:03:00.000+07:00

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In my first thirty years of life
I roamed hundreds and thousands of miles.
Walked by rivers through deep green grass
Entered cities of boiling red dust.
Tried drugs, but couldn't make Immortal;
Read books and wrote poems on history.
Today I'm back at Cold Mountain:
I'll sleep by the creek and purify my ears.
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~Han Shan (8th century Chinese Ch'an/Zen/Taoist mountain lunatic/poet)

The Men That Don’t Fit In

2008-02-11T10:48:00.000+07:00

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“There’s a race of men who don’t fit in,
A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
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“They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain’s crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsies' blood,
And they don’t know how to rest.”
...
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~Robert Service.

Wanderer's Night Song

2008-02-11T10:16:00.001+07:00

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“Over all the summits
it is calm.
In all the treetops
you can feel
hardly a breeze -
The birds remain silent in the woods.
Just wait, soon
You will rest as well."
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~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Symphony of Triumph

2008-02-11T10:07:00.000+07:00

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“It was a symphony of triumph.
The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance.”
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~Ayn Rand~ ("Atlas Shrugged")

Allegheny Mountain Poem #1

2008-02-11T09:52:00.001+07:00

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“On high hilltop.
Storm roaring through the trees.
Snuggled next to a big boulder,
I am warm and dry.
Ha! Ha!”
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~Ross Barlow. (1975)

Invictus

2008-02-11T09:47:00.000+07:00

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Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
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In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced or cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
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Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
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It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
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~ by William Ernest Henley (1875).

Zenwind high at Seneca Rocks

2007-06-11T16:32:00.000+07:00

The Lives of Others (2006)

2007-05-30T11:05:00.000+07:00

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An unforgettable movie. It is in the German language with English subtitles [Das Leben der Anderen (2006)]. It won the recent Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, which it richly deserved.
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It portrays a Stasi (secret police) officer of communist East Germany before the end of the Cold War who watches his system work its corruption and ruin on the lives of others, on real people. We see the lives of intellectuals and artists who are trapped within the insanity of a society of “actually-existing socialism.” Can good men preserve any traces of their goodness in such a brutal world?
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Socialism sucks. This truth had to be told, and you will not see Hollywood doing it. I found myself going through many emotions while seeing it. I was outrageously angry at the ruling elite’s contempt for human liberty, and I will refrain from telling you the raw expletives that leapt to my mind to describe these monsters. I was fascinated by the scientific discipline and methodical routines used for the perverse purposes of totalitarian control. I laughed at some of the sheer absurdities of a rigid socialist system. I shook my head in wonder at the fine acting and filmmaking. And I ended up weeping in release as this great sad, dark, but redeeming story wrapped up. Wow.
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-Zenwind.

Equilibrium (2002)

2007-05-30T10:29:00.001+07:00

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Equilibrium (2002) is a film that I highly recommend. Written and directed by Kurt Wimmer, it portrays a dystopian future. It stars Christian Bale, and also appearing are Taye Diggs, Emily Watson, Angus MacFedyen, with Sean Bean and Sean Pertwee. It was filmed mostly in Berlin and has the creepy feel of Nazi-era architecture.
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It is possible that Wimmer borrowed much of his vision for this flick from Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury, Fritz Lang, Rand, etc. But his championing of individualism against conformity is very powerful here and worth watching for its own virtues. I like the mood of this movie. And libertarians should like the overall story.
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Without giving spoilers, I will just say that after a devastating World War III, the rulers among the survivors try to build a world in which war will never happen again. They see elemental human nature to be dangerous and evil (a “Hobbesian” or “original sin” outlook). To prevent war and murder, all war-like human emotions such as anger and hate must be eliminated. So everyone is required by law to take regular “interval” doses of a drug which completely kills all emotions, all feelings and all passions.
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All positive feelings and passions are killed also -- all emotions connected with love, empathy, art, literature, music, etc. -- but this is considered to be a worthwhile trade-off as long as murder and war are gone. It is a world of humorless zombies (sort of like my image of an Objectivist Hell run by the ARI elite). The shuffling human masses remind me a lot of Fritz Lang’s great film Metropolis (1926).
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The punishment for "sense crimes" (i.e., not taking your interval dose and thus being enabled to "feel") is prompt execution. All artworks, books and music are destroyed immediately when discovered. There is no compromise. The primary enforcers of this totalitarian rule are the Grammaton Clerics, whose implacable dedication and extreme "gun kata" martial arts training makes them indomitable.
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I did notice one piece of artwork that was apparently allowed to be in the office of one of the top rulers (Angus MacFedyen). It was a statue of Atlas, crushed down under the oppressive weight of the world. Hmm. There is something familiar here. Will he shrug? This makes me wonder about Kurt Wimmer’s intellectual lineage.
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There is a underground resistance movement in this society, and they consider their best ally to be human nature. This would be the Lockean or Jeffersonian view of humanity. Can you imagine if the very first piece of music you ever heard was Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? How would you feel?
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-Zenwind.
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Gothics North Face

2007-05-29T22:20:00.001+07:00

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This was one of the most memorable winter mountaineering experiences I have had.
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In late winter 1985, a Bruce Springsteen song was on the radio all the time. So we called this ice climbing trip the Great "Born in the USA" Ice Tour.
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Steve Landin and I went to the Adirondack Mountains in late winter 1985 to do some ice climbing and hoped that the North Face of Gothics Mountain would be in condition to climb. It is almost 1,000 feet of bare rock that sometimes ices up in later winter with good frozen snow. It is one of the great Adirondack winter classics.
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The mountain is located up in the High Peaks region. Fast and light skiers can leave their car, ski up to the mountain's base, climb the north wall, retrieve their skis and return to the roadhead in one day. But for us, the trails were covered in hard ice, and it would be a three day expedition with two bivouacs: one day to the foot of the mountain, one to climb the face and one more to return.
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Saving weight was imperative, so many things had to be left behind. We decided to leave the tent, the snowshoes and the rope. We would carry ice boots, crampons, two hand-tools apiece, sleeping bags and pads, and a cooker and pots.
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Day One: We carried up to the foot of Gothics Mountain and bivouacked. I was horribly cold, because I had been too fanatical about light weight gear, and I took too light a sleeping bag. The few more pounds of a warmer bag would have been great. I was experimenting with a "vapor barrier liner" concept for a sleeping system. Somewhere between theory and reality, I shivered all night.
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Day Two: The climb. The first section of the North Face was terrifying verglas.
This is hard water ice only a quarter of an inch thick over solid rock. It is too thin to get in a deep axe placement, but it is hard and slick. Only one of my picks was of the newer design that would hook in at all, so I had to front-point up one-handed. I momentarily thought of chickening out and climbing instead the tree-lined slope off to the side of the face. I was extremely scared climbing this section unroped but started up anyway behind Steve. He was a much stronger climber and had hooking capability for both his picks, so he found the route, led it and set an example for me. He gave me a constant "psychological belay." One scary spot was a traverse across a small gully. Steve was anchored only by one axe placement, but he swung over a sling for me to grab. This gave me the courage to make the move across.
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The middle section of the face was beautiful. It was that deep re-consolidated frozen snow that you can run up. Crampon points and hand-tool picks sink in easily and hold. It was fun, and we made good time up this. By the time I had caught up to Steve near the top of this snow section, he had chopped two "buckets" in the snow for us to sit in and rest. In traditional alpine manner, he shared chocolate as we looked down the mountain. A snowstorm was heading straight for us from the northwest, so we did not stay long.
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The top section of the face was more grim. It was mixed with a lot of bare rock, some powder snow and a little ice. Straight up was out of the question, for it was bare rock without weaknesses. We went up diagonally to the left through mixed ground. Steve did the route-finding.
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One small traverse involved carefully placing the right crampon front-points into a small iced rock depression for a delicate temporary movement of weight-distribution. I moved like a phantom, barely breathing, with hundreds of feet of void beneath my heels. I remember thinking: The entire consciousness of the cosmos is focused on the placement of one-and-one-half crampon points on a tiny bit of crumbling ice.
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Easier ground was eventually gained with the summit ridge in sight. As we gained the ridge, the snowstorm was swirling around us, almost a white-out. We got to the summit and took some photos. The void below us that should have been the North Face was completely enveloped in blowing snow. These are the conditions that the Scots climbers enthusiastically call "full conditions."
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We blindly descended the West Ridge and got to the pass between Gothics and Mt. Saddleback (the same pass I had camped at with frozen toes in January 1976 - see blog entry "Frostbite Trip"). The snow was very heavy as we trekked down to our bivouac gear by dark. We hauled it to an ADK leanto on the trail below. We cooked a supper and tried to sleep as snow swirled around our noses.
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Day Three: It was a hellish labor to haul our packs down through thigh-deep snow. We should have brought the snowshoes! Agony and discouragement, I wanted to just lay down and die. I thought of Albert Camus' discussion of the Myth of Sisyphus. The only thing that kept me going was Marine mentality and a dose of Ayn Rand. Perhaps it was also the pathos of Springsteen's lyrics, still going through my head, "Born in the USA," that gave me some grit.
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As we finally called an end to this climbing trip and started the drive back home, guess what song greeted us on the radio? "Born in the USA... Born in the USA." It was one hell of an ice tour.
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-Zenwind.

Minus 40 Degrees

2007-05-29T22:03:00.002+07:00

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(Part 1 of a 3-part saga. Part 2: “The Coldest of Ice Climbs.” Part 3: “Chouinard’s Gully.”)
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My coldest experience in the outdoors was in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York in February 1979. I (barely) endured 6 days and nights bivouacking out in temperatures that got down to Minus 40 degrees every night. (-- 40 F = -- 40 C.)
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It was the week that I went there to ice climb and bivouac. I had picked the week of the Full Moon, of course, for reasons of aesthetics and zen.
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Back home on my father's farm in Pennsylvania, the pre-dawn temperature was --28*F every day that week. It was -30*F that week in nearby towns. That is as cold as it ever gets in this part of Pennsylvania. My father kept a weather journal from personal observations and from TV and radio news.
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The coldest spot in the USA (including Alaska) for that entire week was -45*F at Old Forge, NY, in the heart of the Adirondacks. Lake Placid, NY was -35*F. I was bivouacking up in Chapel Pond Pass, sleeping on the frozen pond. I had a good thermometer, but it was too damn cold to be fiddling much with thermometers. I rounded it off to -40*F from quick readings. There was a bitterly stiff wind, but it was too cold to think about the additional wind-chill calculations. "Desperately Frigid" sums it up.
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I had an excellent integrated sleeping bag system designed by Paul Petzoldt: an enormously thick Polarguard suit (parka and pants suitable for extended winter camping, with double insulated booties), and it all fit without constriction both over my wool clothes and also into a companion tailor-fitted Polarguard sleeping bag.
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At supper's finish, I would put a quart of hot water into a water bottle and throw this into the sleeping bag.
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Yet for the first 4 nights, I was extremely cold. I would wake up, shiver for 2 hours, then sleep for 1 hour out of exhaustion. Wake up, shiver 2 hours, sleep 1 hour, etc. On each of these mornings, the water bottle had a quarter of an inch of ice in it. I had to break the ice to drink. That bottle had been *inside* the sleeping bag all night, between my parka and the bag, and it still froze.
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During these nights, as I tossed and turned, shivered and cursed, the lone round Moon ruled the sky and lit up the entire snowy world. Cold silver silence. It was beautiful and severe. No pity from the big orb.
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Silence ruled, until the pond ice beneath me suddenly let up a loud echoing "Crack!!!" sound. This terrified me. I had imaginings of the ice suddenly opening up and swallowing me, trapped inside my mummy bag. But it was just the groans of the ice forming deep below me. The Moon remained silent above it all. It was spooky.
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The last 2 nights were better, yet the temperature and wind-chill were the same. The only adjusted variable was my food intake during the night. During the 4th of my sleepless nights, I had remembered reading advice from the great mountaineer Paul Petzoldt about taking a bag of food into the sleeping bag with you. If you wake up cold, eat.
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It worked dramatically. I would wake up chilled, and, without waiting for it to get worse, I would sit up (not even opening the mummy bag opening) and feed myself. I had chocolate, cheese, pepperoni, nuts, dried fruit, etc., though I had to chop up the frozen pepperoni and cheese into bite-size chunks with my ice axe prior to bedtime.
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I would eat, but the warmth did not come until about a half hour later. Initially, I felt chilled. It took time to metabolize the food. Then, a cozy glow of warmth spread completely over me, and I fell into a delightful sleep. I would wake up 3 hours later, chilled. I would eat again, like throwing wood on a fire. Again, I experienced a half an hour of chill before the food metabolized and warmed me up. For those last two mornings, there was no ice in the water bottle. My increased body heat prevented it.
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Lesson: food creates warmth. I am a slow learner, but this is one empirical lesson that is high on my certainty scale. (Having extra food in your home or car if you are stranded may save your life.) Paul Petzoldt had written this clearly in his *Wilderness Handbook*, based on his decades of experiences, but I had not taken the lesson to heart until my very bones were shaken with deep chill.
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It was the coldest Moonlight I have ever experienced. The Hobo of Chapel Pond made it through, gaining some wisdom and feeling humble.
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(This saga is continued in Parts 2 and 3.)
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-Zenwind.

The Coldest of Ice Climbs

2007-05-29T21:58:00.001+07:00

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(Part 2 of the Minus 40 Degrees Saga.)
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My entry above described the agony of bivouacking in the extreme temperature of minus 40 degrees F in the Adirondacks (February 1979). These next two entries will describe the ice climbing that week.
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All the climbing was done in Chapel Pond Pass. Chapel Pond Slab is a 500 foot face with a long, high, steep direct line at the very top. There are a host of other, mostly shorter climbs nearby.
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The great American climber, Yvon Chouinard, had just published his book, *Climbing Ice*, an incredible Bible of ice climbing. I had studied it diligently. Every ice climber around was discussing the techniques and lore of this work, and we were eager to see what we could do.
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One morning, I met two hardy North Carolina climbers who had never experienced an Adirondack winter. They were also relative novices at ice climbing like myself.
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I was alone and really wanted another human on the other end of my rope, so I schemed to team up with these guys, since they seemed sensible and reliable. The problem is that a rope of three climbers is too cold in winter, because there is a lot of wait-time while only one climber moves at a time. A rope of two is faster and warmer.
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I plotted to con them into roping up with me. I wandered up to the foot of the Slab area with them, giving them a guided tour. The entire lower section of the Slab is lower angle and was covered with extremely climbable firm frozen snow - very solid and very good for using the flat-footed French Technique, which is restful and really saves the leg muscles from the strain of Front-Pointing.
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Front-Pointing is more instinctive, like climbing a ladder, but it tires you out quickly. It is the necessary technique on extremely steep ice. French Technique is awkward and hard to learn, but I had been practicing. So, I started "French-stepping" immediately up the face, un-roped, looking like a French guide, chattering away about climbing techniques and history.
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It worked. They thought I was an accomplished ice climber, and, when I asked them if they wanted to rope up with me, they said yes. We worked our way up the lower part of the snow-slope, me teaching them how to conserve energy by French-stepping.
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We got to the steep direct section of the Slab and decided it was too hard for any of us to lead, as it would require sustained Front-Pointing on steep brittle ice. So we opted for a shorter, less steep, leftward route up an icy gully that bypassed the harder section. I led up, Front-Pointing and placing several ice screws for protection, then anchored to a tree and belayed them both up to the top with me. We rappelled down another gully.
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They camped that night near my bivouac on Chapel Pond, then they decided the next morning that it was too cold, and they headed home. I never even got their names. I now had to look for new climbing partners.
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I ran into two climbers from southwestern Pennsylvania, Andy and Bruce. We talked and decided to climb the direct steep Slab route tomorrow. These guys were great technical climbers with excellent knowledge of climbing and its history. They were safety minded and cool. But they were not prepared for Adirondack winter and were not dressed for it. They wore knickers and knee-socks, suitable for a summer climb in the Alps. Gloves instead of mittens. And, worst of all, they stayed the nights in motels, ate in restaurants, and drove in their pickup truck to the climbs. By being in heated environments, the shock of minus 40 degrees was too much, and they would become frostbitten in the end.
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We started up the Slab, me free soloing again up the snowy lower part French-style, while they were safely roped up but going too slow. By my being in constant but relaxed motion, I neither sweated nor got cold. We got to the steep ice wall at the top section of the Slab, and I roped up with them, tying on to the second man, Bruce. Andy led, and I was third. He led boldly and decisively up and over the top. The second man climbed up next, while Andy belayed him.
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I was all ready to follow on belay, when a voice from above asked, over the screaming wind: "Can you climb off the face on your own? We cannot bring you up." They could not belay me up to them, and my guess was that they were too cold in the brutal summit wind. I yelled back: "Okay, but untie my rope and let me retrieve it." My rope fell back down to my feet. I went off to the left and ascended the gully I had led with the Carolina guys, but I did it roped solo this time. Damn, it was cold up there on top in the wind.
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I traversed over the top of the Slab to meet my two former rope-mates, only to see them slowly staggering up to me. From a distance, I assessed the situation immediately: these guys were severely hypothermic and in great danger in this frigid wind. When I reached them, their speech was slurred and eyes glazed. Their thinking was slow and indecisive, and all I could understand was that they were cold and their hands and feet hurt terribly. They asked: "How will we get down?" I started feeding them chocolate, nuts and other stuff, and giving them lots of water. I tied them to me and led them over to a wooded cliff with plenty of trees for rappel.
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Their hands would not function well, so I tied all knots and rigged all rappels. After many rappels, we got down out of the wind and to the bottom of the cliff, then we trudged back to where their truck was parked. They headed back to town, while I settled in for a night's bivouac again as the Dharma Bum "Hobo of Chapel Pond."
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We had planned to climb Chouinard's Gully together the next day, but they never showed up, and I had to climb it alone, roped solo. When I rappelled to the bottom of this climb, after completing it, my friends showed up, looking a bit beat. Andy's earlobe was frostbitten and Bruce had badly frostbitten fingers. They were easily chilled all over, in pain, and on their way home.
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I had decided that morning that this would be my last climbing day this week and that I would head home by dark. I could not bear to spend a 7th night in bivouac at minus 40 degrees. My fingers were cracked and bleeding from the cold, and it was painful to do anything with them.
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I had honed my winter camping skills, avoided frostbite, had done some ice climbing at a higher level of boldness than anything I had ever experienced before. I had watched a cold Moon travel across the skies, lighting up a vast, frozen world. I had a great week's vacation.
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-Zenwind.

Chouinard’s Gulley

2007-05-29T21:32:00.001+07:00

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Part 3 of the Minus 40 Degrees Saga
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This is the third and last entry about my February 1979 ice climbing trip to the Adirondack Mountains when it was 40 degrees below Zero all week. On the last day, I climbed Chouinard's Gully, the ice climb I had most wanted to do.
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This is an ice-filled gully named after the great Yvon Chouinard who first climbed it in the late sixties. It is at Chapel Pond Pass.
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My two buddies from the day before did not show up, and it was too cold to wait around, so I decided to do a solo climb of Chouinard's Gully – roped solo.
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The hardest parts of Chouinard's Gully are near the bottom. The easier upper sections go on through the trees for near 400 feet above the pond. I was armed with an ice axe and a short hammer, both with the classic curved "Alpine" style pick that shattered ice more than penetrated it, and which has been replaced since by more re-curved styles. The crampons on my boots were old-style, and my boots were non-insulated French Galibier Super-guide boots.
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The first crux near the bottom went alright, with only a few scares. I felt like a real mountain climber now.
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Way up, on the second crux, I found myself on a vertical wall of hard, blue, brittle, shattering water ice, while I was running out of strength and starting to freak out. I had "sewing-machine legs," where my legs shook violently, threatening to pop my flimsy front-point crampon placements out. My arms were tiring out quickly and my hands were numb. For every one good axe placement, I had to hammer four times, breaking huge plates of ice off which almost knocked my foot placements out. I looked down below my heels at my last ice-screw placement, far, far below. I got really scared. I thought: "I'm going to fall." And I almost did.
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The Zen of Fear.
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I looked down, and knew that down-climbing was unthinkable. I looked up to my right and to my left, and I decided to make one desperate attempt to climb up and to the left to escape off the wall. Crampons almost coming out, I loosened my left-hand hammer-pick and tried for a quick and adequate stick off to the left.
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As I was doing this, a lyric of poetry or song came to my mind from somewhere: "Don't stop me now...." I swung, and the pick stuck. Not a bomb-proof placement. Just marginal. But it stuck. So I kicked in my left crampon further to the left, and then my right one. Then I loosened the right-hand ice axe and, as I was getting ready to plant it directly above my head, the lyrics repeated in my head: "Don't stop me now...." And, after three desperate swings, the axe grabbed a rather feeble hold. Now, with two marginal hand placements, I started to climb up with higher foot placements, and, while doing so, the rest of the lyrics came to me: "...‘cause I'm havin' such a good time." Then, wack in another, higher, left-hand placement, and then the right.
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As I moved up, the lyrics kept cycling through my head. At one point, my axe was shattering the ice and not getting any kind of stick at all, and I got that old feeling of "I'm going to fall." The legs were crapping out, my left-hand hammer would never hold me by itself, and the fear was at my throat. "DON'T ... STOP ... ME ... NOW...." Swing, kick, kick, hammer, kick, kick, sweat, tremble ... "...'cause I'm havin' such a good time." "Don't stop me now...."
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And I moved up and off the vertical wall onto a gentler slope. That song saved my life – or at least saved me from a most grievous fall -- and I could not identify the singer at that point.
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I finished the rest of the climb above, which was much easier. At 400 feet above Chapel Pond, I felt like the champion of the world. I rappelled down the entire climb in several sections, while fragments of that song were triumphantly running through my mind. "Two hundred degrees, that's why they call me Mr. Fahrenheit. I'm traveling at the speed of light."
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"I'm a shooting star, leaping through the sky." "Don't stop me now, ‘cause I'm havin' such a good time! Don’t stop me now!"
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As I rappelled the last pitch down to the pond, I noticed the two guys from the day before that were supposed to do this climb with me. They were quite damaged by the cold from yesterday's Chapel Pond Slab climb. They were badly frostbitten and were going home. They could hardly believe that I had soloed the Gulley (even if using rope as a safety backup).
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I had had enough of bivouacking and climbing in minus 40 temperatures for 6 days and nights, so the road sounded good to me also. As I fired up my car to head home, the radio played a song that had been on the air a lot in the last few weeks. I suddenly recognized it. It was my song: "Don't Stop Me Now," by Queen.
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"I'm havin' such a good time. Don’t stop me now!"
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-Zenwind.

Roped Solo Technique (old style)

2007-05-29T21:18:00.002+07:00

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I have done a lot of solo climbing, and find these moments to be among the most rewarding and memorable of my experiences on rock, snow or ice. But it was really not always my choice. In my earlier years of learning to lead big climbs, I could not find any climbing partners. Thus, I had to go it solo. When I pulled it off, it felt like a kind of instant satori.
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There are two types of solo climbing: Free-Solo and Roped-Solo.
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"Free solo" is climbing completely un-roped. (See my early entry, below, "Breath Control and Extreme Climbing," for a sample of this insane style.) No net to catch you. This is *fall-and-you-die* climbing, not for everyone. It is my sinful secret, my favorite style.
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(Do not confuse "free soloing" with "Free Climbing," the latter term simply meaning using only hands and feet for the means of going up, without artificially using rope or anchors for aid in ascending. The Free Climber may, and usually does, use ropes for safety back-up just to catch a fall. Free soloing is a species of "free climbing," but it is a rare breed, as free climbers usually do use ropes.)
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"Roped solo" climbing is a slightly safer variation of the solo climb. Roped solo free climbing utilizes a rope and anchor system, not to help you ascend, but solely for safety, to shorten any fall. It, also, is a species of "free-climbing" but is more a type of free lead-climbing, with all anchors and ropes below you, except that you are in this case alone. It is still not as safe as having a living, thinking human on the other end of your rope, feeding out only as much rope as you need while you lead upward above all the anchors. Roped soloing uses trees, rocks and climbing anchors below you as a last-ditch means of keeping you on the mountain. If you fall, you may still fall way down past your highest anchor for a long way before the system stops you with a jolt. Maybe.
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In more recent years, I acquired and use a piece of gear called "The Soloist," made originally by Rock Exotica, which makes the whole roped soloing thing much safer. It is a truly wonderful gadget. But there was no such gear when I was really pushing my limits and learning to lead climb. So I had to rely on written advice from climber Royal Robbins' books, *Basic Rockcraft* and *Advanced Rockcraft*, and, though it was state-of-the-art at the time, it was touch and go. A bit scary.
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The technique was to tie one end of the rope to a tree or other anchor, then give yourself enough estimated slack rope-length to get to the next rest ledge above. You tie a loop in the rope at that point and clip it to your harness. As you go up, you place anchors (slings around trees or rocks, rock anchors, or ice-screws) and clip your rope so it runs through the anchor's carabiner. This is similar to the normal leading of a free-climb. If you fall, the distance fallen is at least twice the length of rope between you and that nearest anchor below you. You should not fall all the way down the mountain, but if there is a ledge below you and you have a lot of rope out you can hit it hard. The old mountaineering advice was always: "The leader must not fall." So the soloist must not fall.
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One of the tricks is to find a rest spot before the slack runs out so you can tie another loop further along the rope's length to clip into. Then you must un-clip the old loop in order to give yourself enough slack rope to move further up. Often, the rest spot is only a place where you have one hand momentarily free, and you find yourself tying and untying knots with your teeth while hanging on for dear life with your other hand. These are some of the scariest times, in which you truly get to know yourself well.
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Once you get to the top of the pitch, you tie the rope to a good anchor and rappel down the entire pitch, removing anchors, knots, slings, etc., and untying the bottom end of the rope. As you climb the pitch again, it is no big deal because you are tying and clipping into loops that are on a top-rope, anchored *above* you. Any falls now will be much shorter than they would have been on the first, leading, ascent. Essentially, you have to climb the pitch twice, so roped soloing can be slow work.
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Once you have cleaned the pitch and retrieved all anchors and freed your rope, you start the next pitch, tying the bottom end of the rope to an anchor, giving yourself slack, clipping into a loop, and going up again into new territory above.
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I have used this system countless times on rock and ice when I had no climbing partners, and it gave me that small extra margin of confidence that meant the difference between chickening out or going up.
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Not only did I teach myself how to lead climbs on rock and ice this way, I also learned a lot about facing fear of death when I was totally alone -- without fellow Marines as back-up. On my solo climbs, it was just me, my fear, and the mountain. Mountains have no sympathy. They just sit there, soaring above you or gaping below you. The rest is up to you.
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"Be still as a mountain,
Move like a great river."
~~Wu Yu-hsiang~~
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Roped solo climbing has provided me with moments of deep meditative calm and bliss at the top of the climb, but of course these zen moments are sometimes preceded by moments of sheer terror on the journey upwards. I am a richer person for having ascended these paths.
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-Zenwind.

Encounter on a Rocky Ridge

2007-05-29T20:54:00.001+07:00

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I could have easily killed the furry caterpillar. I could have squashed him or just flicked him off the high rock, condemning him to a very long and treacherous fall. He was unavoidably in my way, just inches away from my face, and he scared me with his bristly, spiky "horns," which looked like they could sting. I met him on the scariest part of a high rock climb in the days when I was still learning to climb.
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I decided to view him with compassion as a fellow climber, and it changed me somehow. This was over 30 years ago, and it is still one of my greatest memories.
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I was free soloing a "chimney" climb. It was fairly secure for the first 90% of the climb, because you are inside a big crack and can just jam your body into place against the opposing walls. But the crux of the climb is the ending, where the chimney crack narrows and forces you out unto the face. The very top turns
into a thin ridge with the narrowing crack on the left and a sheer drop to the right.
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The technique here is to hug the ridge for dear life, straddling it and inching your way up. Your left leg and left arm are jammed into the crack for anchor. Your right leg and boot are applying pressure to the outside wall of the ridge, while your right hand grips the spine of the ridge. Your belly and chest are tight against the rock, as is your face. One tends to get nervous here.
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On this sunny, late spring day, I was moving up this crux section when I saw the caterpillar directly in front of my face on the ridge's spine. He was blond-colored with a pair of black bristly spikes or horns on each end. The spikes looked like stingers of some sort. At this close range, I could see the breeze ruffling the creature's fur but not the spikes, which were rigid. I surely did not want to touch him.
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What to do? Down-climbing was out of the question in those infant climbing days of mine. I thought that he would have to go and that I would have to flick him off the ridge. But, as I watched him inch his way up the rock with graceful caterpillar-like movements, I felt a kind of sympathy and compassion for him. He was pursuing his own project and was not bothering anyone. Besides, what was a human doing in such a strange place? I was the intruder, the trespasser, the unwanted guest. So, I decided to somehow climb over him without hurting him. It was not going to be easy.
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This was extremely awkward and gave me a feeling of far less security than if I bellied up the rock, hugging it closely. As I started moving over him, I lifted my face about 6 inches above him and noticed that the exhalations from my nostrils were blowing his fur as if in a strong wind. He stopped still, probably wondering what manner of huge beast was hovering over him. I carefully found new positions for my hands and feet, planning out the crucial move when I would move my torso over him, with my weight dangerously out away from the rock.
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As I started the execution of this critical move, I let out a strong, measured exhalation. My poor caterpillar friend looked like he was in a howling gale, with his fur positively flattened by the wind of my breath. He hunkered down, seemingly gripping the rock tighter. I kept 6 inches distance between him and me, and I started climbing up. Looking down between my body and the rock, I moved my chest past him, then my abdomen, then my knees. When it was time to move my feet past him, I looked down with special care, lest my heavy boots would accidentally hit him.
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When I had finally cleared him and when my feet were several feet above him, I looked back to see him continuing on his original path across the rock. It was as if we never had crossed paths. The top of the climb was immediately above, and, when I reached it, I sat in the sun while watching my little friend go about his measured pace to whatever destination he was bound.
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I think of this encounter often. I learned an important lesson about compassion from this caterpillar bodhisattva. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" for all of us. Laissez nous faire (i.e., "Leave us alone").
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-Zenwind.

The Frostbite Trip

2007-05-29T20:40:00.000+07:00

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January 1976. I froze my toes. This is a very long entry, as I want to record the entire four-day expedition. Perhaps you can learn how better to keep warm outdoors from hearing of my mistakes here.
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I was new to winter mountaineering, a rookie, a boot. On this backpacking trip in the High Peaks area of the Adirondack Mountains (ADK) of New York, I suffered some superficial but extremely painful frostbite on three toes, resulting in losing half of the toenail on my big toe. A lot of skin on these three toes also sloughed off later. I learned a lot about keeping warm through my mistakes that week, and it severely tested my Zen equanimity.
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The Buddha said that life is full of Dukkha (i.e., suffering, unsatisfactoriness, etc.), and this trip was full of it. Yet the beauty of the winter in high cold mountains made all the pain and suffering worth it.
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It was January 1976 and the temperature got down past minus 20*F every night with brisk winds. I had assembled some good new equipment and had done my homework. I just lacked experience. I had a new tent, goose down sleeping bag, cooker, goggles, boots and snowshoes. On the advice of Jim Wagner, the great Keene Valley climber/outfitter, I rented an ice axe. I could not afford to either buy or rent crampons also. My total backpack load weighed 65 pounds, not counting clothing worn and hardware in hand.
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Clothing in those days was wool, head to toe. Polar Fleece and the miracle synthetics had not come out yet. Soft merino wool was worn next to the skin. The two layers of wool were enclosed in an outer wind layer of nylon/cotton blend.
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There were several reasons that I froze my toes. 1.) My boots were too tight. 2.) I put on cold boots in the morning and just sat around cooking breakfast. 3.) I was not eating enough to generate body heat to combat the terrible cold.
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I left the roadhead at nightfall, climbing up the forested mountain trail in the moonlight. Here was a Dharma Bum who did not yet know what agony awaited him. I reached an ADK leanto shelter and bivouacked for the night. I failed to cook a meal because I was exhausted from a 10 hour drive. This was a big mistake, because my metabolism needed fuel to produce heat.
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[Day One.]
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The next morning I froze my toes. I got out of my sleeping bag, put on my boots (which were cold and too tight), and started cooking breakfast on my one-burner cooker. I had to melt snow for water for cooking and drinking, and I had not practiced the technique enough. I sat in cold, tight boots while waiting for the long slow breakfast process to unfold. My feet did not cease hurting for 16 hours.
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There were many lessons learned from this painful ordeal:
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Wear larger boots. I had too many socks packed into a boot that could not contain them without restriction. Your toes must have wiggle room so that blood can circulate. (Later, I moved up a boot size and I now wear less socks.) Loosen the laces until you are climbing and need the support. Put boots in the bottom of your sleeping bag during the night to keep them warm. Or, do not even put the boots on until ready to climb. Cook while your feet are either in sleeping bag or in warm moccasins. Do not put on cold climbing boots until ready to move out. Gather snow for melting in a garbage bag the night before, so you can feed it into the pot while in the sleeping bag. Melting snow is a complete art in itself.
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After breakfast, I packed up, laced on my snowshoes and headed up the trail. The snowshoes were laced up way too tight, which further cut off the circulation in my feet. I was in tremendous pain but continued on. Perhaps this was due to Marine Corps stubbornness, or I could have been hypothermic and just slow-minded. My feet were cold all day. I climbed up the Ore Bed Brook Trail for the entire short January daylight.
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I had always wanted to climb over the Range Trail, reputed to be the most strenuous but most scenic trail in the Adirondacks. It ascends up from a high pass, up and over Saddleback Mountain and over Basin Mountain, leaving you deep in the High Peak area, with astounding views all around.
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At dusk, I reached this high pass between Saddleback and Gothics Mountains. The wind was ferocious and the temperature was plunging. I desperately set up my tent in the gathering darkness. It was brand-new, and the guy-lines were not properly adjusted (big mistake), so I had to take off my mittens and tie new knots and make numerous adjustments. My fingers and hands became so cold, I could not feel anything but extreme pain.
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I managed to unzip the tent door and throw my pack inside, falling inside after it. It was now dark, and I was horrified to be lying there with frozen fingers and toes, in unspeakable pain and relatively helpless. I thought I was going to die. I had read true stories of mountaineers freezing to death or losing their fingers and toes to amputation after frostbite. I was crying from the pain.
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I managed to shut the tent door, get my sleeping bag and foam mat out of the pack, get into the bag and zip it closed around me. I could not cook because my fingers were useless, so I just lay there in agony. Dark, pain and stark fear. Dukkha, dukkha,
dukkha, ... this is the First Noble Truth: All Life is Dukkha. Indeed, it was.
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I thought about what options I had. I thought that I might be able to race down the mountain at first light of morning and get to civilization. I would have to put my boots on with frozen fingers. I was certain that I would lose fingers and toes to amputation but was hoping that I could save my life. I would have to abandon all this new equipment, because I could never re-pack it into the pack.
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After a while, I realized that I could salvage the new backpack by putting it on my back and I may be able to save the small cook stove by throwing it into the pack, but I must leave my tent and sleeping bag behind. For hours I lay in pain like I have never experienced, before or since. I cried and moaned. I felt bleak and alone.
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I woke up at midnight. My feet were still hurting intensely, but my fingers were numb and painless. Good, I thought. My fingers might work. Now I may be able to salvage the sleeping bag, which was a big investment. But the tent would have to be left. I felt a little bit better and more confident that I could live through this. I fell asleep again.
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[Day Two.]
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At dawn, I awoke with no pain in my toes. This was such a great relief. I had to urinate, so I got out of the sleeping bag, into my boots and out of the tent. My fingers and toes became cold and painful almost immediately, but not the intense pain of yesterday. It brought tears to my eyes, but it was manageable pain.
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Realizing that I was quite hungry, I thought about trying to cook a meal before retreat down the mountain. Before entering the tent again, I looked up at the east face of Saddleback Mountain above me, the beginning of the original Range Trail objective. In the blinding sunlight of a cloudless day, I could see the trail winding upward through untracked snow. It was so seductive. I have always been easily seduced by the prospect of a dangerous adventure.
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Breakfast went well and refreshed me. I lay back down in the sleeping bag and let the food digest and warm me. I drank a quart of tea. The pain was gone, and thoughts of Zen contentedness came back. Distantly, thoughts of options and decisions to be made lingered. What should I do? Should I go down or - unthinkably -- up?
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Deciding that I would make the choice later when I got booted up again and outside the tent, I packed my cooker and sleeping bag inside the pack and laced the boots and gaiters for major travel, in either direction. Then I stepped outside, donning snow goggles for the dazzling snow-reflected sun.
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I looked down-trail at my old tracks leading up to this high pass. The idea of the warmth below was tempting. Then I looked up at the Range Trail above. On impulse, I opted to continue upward. I tore down the tent, stuffed it into the pack, strapped on the snowshoes and shouldered all my gear on my back. During this packing ordeal, my fingers and toes became terribly cold again, making my eyes tear up. But, the snow above was without tracks of human or beast, and it lured me on. I committed to the ascent.
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The snowshoes (original Sherpas) were designed for steep climbing, and there was a primitive trail up Saddleback's east face. I waded through deep untracked snow, up zig-zagging ledges, hooking my ice axe over boulders or around roots. I struggled all day up and over Saddleback, catching views of the surrounding mountains that I could not believe.
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It was when going down the south side of Saddleback that I almost died, nearly falling off the series of large rocky steps. There was a coating of verglas ice on these huge ledges and it was a very steep face, so the snowshoes had to come off. Looking down the face, it was obvious that any fall would cause you to bounce and skid down these icy ledges until you plunged down into the snowfield and forest far below. Falling could not be contemplated at this point. Crampons would have been nice, but I could not afford them, and a climber on a budget cannot complain.
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As I started down these huge iced steps with heavy pack, my feet slipped and I sat down hard on the step with feet hanging over the edge. But I continued sliding down toward the step below, and as my feet hit the next ledge they slipped off that one too, causing me to sit hard on it, continuing to slide downward. There was clearly no end to the trajectory, and I was picking up speed.
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I took one look down at the treetops far below and instinctively executed a "self-arrest" with my ice axe, turning toward the ice and leaning all my weight upon the axe's pick. (I had read about this many times in the history of climbing but had never practiced it.) The pick was 6 inches from my eye as I watched it dig deep into the verglas, catching solid after skidding for about 9 inches. I was anchored, but my feet were in mid-air.
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I felt around with my feet and found a spot of rock that was not iced. Moving to the right, I got onto a ledge that led away from the icier ledges. Off the face, I lay in the snow, trying to re-gain the composure of the Zen mountain hermit. Whew! We know all about Buddhist detachment, but the thought of becoming *detached from the mountain* was just too scary!
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In snowshoes again, I stumbled over the pass between Saddleback and Basin Mountain and up to Basin's north ridge. With one hour of daylight left, I found a flat spot high on the north ridge suitable for a tent site. The trail was untracked snow, with no sign of a human presence. The powder was deep. I stomped the snow with my snowshoes on to pack a platform for my tent, then I set it up, going around it to adjust the guy-lines.
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What a beautiful wind-swept wilderness! Not a sign of living tracks. There was only endless powder snow, rocks, and some scrub balsam. It reminded me of a Zen rock and sand garden. The wind was cold, with gusts that nearly knocked me over.
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Thinking that the snow in the immediate area was packed enough to support my weight, I unlaced the snowshoes and stepped off the left shoe. To my surprise, my left leg plunged completely into the power snow until I was up to my crotch, and my foot still did not touch ground. My right leg was horizontal to the surface, supported by being across the snowshoes, while the left side of my body was buried up to my left armpit. I struggled to get up until I was exhausted. Finally, I used a snowshoe as one would use a raft on water, and I muscled up onto it. After that, it was always snowshoes on when outside the tent. It was the deepest snow I have ever floundered in.
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Supper, a very deep and restful sleep, and then breakfast. I was feeling better and without pain, except when first booting up and whenever doing anything with my hands. Life was good, or, at least, exciting.
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[Day Three.]
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Now it was time to saddle up and ascend the north face of Basin Mountain. Bright sunlight on the east side and freezing cold northwest wind on the other, it was an exercise in extremes. My sunward left side would be hot and sweaty, with the left eye of my goggles fogged up, while the windward right side would be freezing cold, with the right eye of my goggles clear because of wind ventilation. The wind was threatening to blow me off the mountain. I had to execute a scary traverse over very steep ice close to the summit. Then came one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen.
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As I reached the top of the north side of Basin Mountain, I stumbled in the cold over the summit plateau. Suddenly, in the distance I saw Mt. Marcy and Mt. Haystack ahead in the brilliant sunlight. Snowy, alone and aloof, Mt. Marcy looked like the perfect mountain. I felt at the top of the world.
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I wish so much that you were there with me to see it, but I realize that not everyone is willing to go through the hazards and discomforts necessary to experience such environments. (Han Shan would have understood, however, and he would have laughed with glee, scampered off and written another stanza to the Cold Mountain Poems.)
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Coming down Basin's south side trail was pure fun. It was a long sloping descent on deep untracked powder snow. I was able to take long plunging steps downward with my snowshoes, and it was much like the "kick and glide" technique of cross-country skiing. With a 65 pound pack on my back, I took bold plunging strides down into the endless powder. It was effortless, and I was covering a lot of ground quickly. The snowshoes hit the cushioned snow and slid down in a controlled floating glide, one foot, then the other. I remember laughing at the fun that I was having. Then, I was overcome by darkness.
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I had suddenly and without warning fallen face-first into the snow, head downhill and feet uphill. I fell so fast, I did not have time to put my hands up to break my fall. My arms were still at my sides. The 65 pound pack drove my head and shoulders deep into the snow. Snow was packed into my nostrils, mouth, and between my glasses and face.
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I could not get up, and I was practically upside-down. The weight of the pack kept me down, and, as I thrashed in the snow, I realized that my right foot was caught on something on the trail above me. Finally, I realized that I must undo my pack harness to get out of its weight. I pushed the pack behind a log nearby to keep it from rolling down the mountain, then I struggled up to my entangled right foot. The snowshoe’s frame had been hooked on a root, which stopped me cold and pitched me face-first downward. I moved down the rest of the mountain with more humility after this.
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Finally down from Basin Mountain, I came to a trail crossing. I decided to stash my pack near there, quickly do a day climb of Mt. Haystack, come back here to my pack, take the trail northward that leads down to the valley and camp somewhere on that trail. As I started towards Haystack, I saw the first person in days, at his camp by the trail. He was a lone rambler like myself, seeking solitude and the beauty of the High Peaks. He may have been a Dharma Bum, but we only talked briefly of the philosophy of equipment, weather, snow, wind and trail.
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On the climb up Haystack Mountain, I ran into a party of five coming down. I noticed how easily they walked with crampons on, and they used ski poles for balance against the gusting wind. All of them nodded a friendly greeting to me as we passed, except for the last guy, who reproached me for my lack of wisdom in climbing solo. He was, of course, right, but it still disappointed me that he could not tolerate my own choice to pursue happiness in my own way.
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After a delicate climb up rock and ice (crampons would have made it safer), I reached the long ridged summit of Haystack. It was in the Alpine Zone, with no vegetation bigger than mosses. There were mountains in all directions. Mt. Marcy was close by and directly to the west, with Panther Gorge between us, yawning open at my feet.
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The day was wasting away quickly, so I carefully down-climbed to the trail and hiked back to my pack. Taking the side trail towards the valley, I made my last camp on a windy spot on the trail. Like so many end-of-trek camps, this one was cold, bleak, windy and lonely. It was a miserably cold night. My goose down sleeping bag was not as warm on night Four as it was on night One. The night temperature was minus 20*F, just like every night, but the bag was not as warm.
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Goose down is not adequate insulation material for really desperate expeditions in humid weather, and, in fact, it can be dangerous. It does not handle moisture well, and I had been thrashing through snow, sweating, etc. Goose down just absorbs moisture and will not dry out. It may be excellent for desert treks, but not for winters in the northeast. For a few extra ounces in weight and a bit less compressibility, the new synthetics tolerate moisture, provide more warmth over a long wet outing, and can save your life.
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[Day Four.]
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I awoke cold. I ate a breakfast, packed up and hit the trail downwards with the goal that I would make it to the roadhead today. I was cold, tired and beat.
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Climbing down a mountain is often the most painful part. Your feet are bruised and your legs, back and body are so sore. You feel like an abused refugee from some unspeakable war, staggering toward civilization, beat and alone. It is hard to find the strength to take another step. In times of torment like this, I think of Gary Snyder's teaching of the "meditation of the trail," where he taught Jack Kerouac that it is all about just placing one foot in front of the other. I call it Trail Zen, and it has kept me walking out of many a wilderness when all I wanted to do was lay down.
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As the trail descended into the valleys, its slope leveled out more, and the nature of the winter landscape was not as harsh as on the peaks above. Without the wind, it seemed almost warm. I was terribly thirsty. (Little did I realize it, but I had been drinking water without minerals in it for many days, because I was melting snow for water, and snow is distilled water.) It was at this point, only several miles from the roadhead, that I experienced The Best Drink of Water in my Life.
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As I was crossing the narrow footbridges over the streams of the lowlands, I could hear the gurgling of the water flowing beneath the snow. This drove me half crazy from thirst. Finally, I found a footbridge where the stream seemed close below. I took off my pack and pulled out a goblet that I had been given as a gift before my trip. Laying on my stomach on the bridge, I reached down through a hole in the snow to the flowing stream. I scooped up a goblet-full of water and drank.
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It was a shock of absolutely wonderful taste. The full mineral content made it taste as rich as champagne to my deprived senses. Merely water from a mountain stream, it was delicious. I toasted the sport of winter mountaineering and also my escape from danger and pain, and I drank my fill.
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End of epic.
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-Zenwind.

Breath Control and Extreme Climbing

2007-05-29T20:32:00.001+07:00

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There have been a couple of noteworthy times in my climbing career when proper control of the breath has literally saved my life. Together with a sober Aristotelian respect for reality, the Buddha's advice on mindful breathing has made the difference between success or grievous injury. When engaged in extreme climbing, one is often a knife's-edge away from losing the psychological control necessary to stay on the wall. Physical strength and skill is taxed to the limit, and it is only the mental part of the game that adheres one to the mountain.
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By "extreme" climbing, I mean pushing oneself beyond your limits, climbing harder than you ever have before. Thus, for the great Reinhold Messner, an extreme climb would be a world-class record-breaking endeavor, but for me (never a strong climber) an extreme climb would be a simpler, easier one that would nevertheless tax my limits to the hilt. For others it would be a piece of cake. It's all relative to the ability level.
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In 1978, I decided to "free solo" a rock climb that is rated moderately easy. I had climbed much harder climbs with top-rope protection, but “free soloing" means climbing without a safety rope of any kind. To fall means to hit the ground, and that can make it an extreme climb if it taxes your abilities to their max. Free soloing is dangerous, but it is also great style and is very satisfying if you pull it off.
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It was my second year of technical rock climbing. I had provisionally named this climb "The Law of Identity" or “A is A” after Aristotle's law of logic. (Reality is what it is – “A is A” -- and you cannot pretend that it is different from its actual nature or identity.) On this climb, your technique, called a "Lay-Back," had to be without contradiction, the rock had to be dry, and your psychological stuff had to be together and completely sorted out.
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I had climbed this route many times before on a top-rope, where trusted friends had belayed me with a safety rope to catch me in case of a fall. I had fallen on many of these early attempts, but I had successfully climbed it many times, so I knew the moves.
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This time I was alone. The rock was dry. I had just come from several intensive rock climbing trips in the Adirondack Mountains and was in fine shape, and I had practiced the Lay-Back move on rock and in my head (using subliminal rehearsal before sleep and immediately after waking). I was ready, and I was tuned.
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Standing at the foot of the climb, I let my breath find the right relaxed and even place, the mindfulness of breathing that the Buddha advised. Then I got on the climb and paused at the very bottom to assess both my sense of adhesion and my finger strength. It felt good and right, so I committed to the climb, took in a full, slow breath and moved up. It is a sustained difficulty in its first half, so you must move quickly, surely and confidently.
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I aimed for the first rest spot, a little slanting ledge that you can just barely get your feet on. All my strength and endurance was nearly spent as I moved up to the ledge, and I reached it, panting for breath. I think that fear was taking as much wind from me as was the physical effort. You are off-balance on this little spot, pushed out by the over-hanging rock wall, so you have to jam an arm into the crack to hold you in.
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As I jammed myself into position on the tiny ledge, I realized that I needed to keep from becoming the least bit psychologically unglued, or I would fall off. And I was scared. I had barely enough reserves of strength to finish to the top, and fear was causing my legs to shake. Climbing back down was impossible, because that first half was the most sustained part of the climb. I could only go up.
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So I concentrated on the breath. Easy, full in. Easy, full out, with the anxieties and fears leaving me with every exhalation. I looked out at the forest and lake, which were level with my eyes. I looked up at the climb above. But I never once looked down. I imagined that I was standing on a little ledge that was only one foot off the ground, and that I was merely trying to perfect my climbing moves with no danger involved, refusing to fall off merely as a matter of pride in one’s craft. I found myself enjoying the scenery with delight, tuning out the fact that I was in a precarious situation. The breath returned to normal.
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When I would look up to plan my next moves, my heart would start to race. I would then concentrate again on the breath, look at the beauty of the rock crystals that were an inch from my eye, and listen to the wind in the pine tree on a ledge above. Never look down. Regain control of the breath. Regain equanimity. It took a number of attempts before I could calmly work out my strategies.
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One more rest ledge before the top. The wall over-hangs, so I could not afford a mistake. I grunted and huffed, scraped and scratched, and fought and battled my way up, pausing where necessary to work on the awareness of breath. When I reached the rest ledge, I let my exhaustion work itself out in a series of breaths, first deep and heaving, then more moderate and measured, and finally easy and deep. Concentrating on the mindfulness of breathing, control of mind and body rebounded back.
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The final move to the top was an awkward foot placement, requiring more mental concentration than brute strength. It was terrifying. I completed it with one controlled exhalation.
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I was on top. I breathed more easily for the rest of the day. This remains one of my favorite memories in rockcraft.
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I assume that I was the first to climb this route in a style more sporting than that of protection from a top-rope, so I claimed the right to name the climb. I dubbed it “The Law of Identity,” although it was often difficult to explain it to those who were unacquainted with philosophy. Years later I came across visiting climbers from far away who did not know of my connection to the route, but they did know something about it, calling it “Aristotle’s Law.”
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Respect for reality and for mindfull control of the breath. Excelsior!
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-Zenwind.

My Cousin

2007-05-29T18:44:00.001+07:00

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Mountaineering has been my life's great love. It can take the form of hiking forested trails in the hills, backpacking deep into the mountains to summits, bivouacking on airy perches high above the world, pure rock climbing on short walls and pure ice climbing on short frozen waterfalls, or the long desperate mixed climbing on the rock, snow and ice of high mountain walls, i.e., alpinism. It is the craft of movement through the mountains.
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I want to honor and thank my first cousin for his influence on my mountaineering avocation. He gave me the focus to really start climbing. He introduced me to the world culture of mountaineering, and he made the dream of climbing real to me. To him I am eternally indebted.
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I had always seen adventure and romance in mountain climbing, but it also represented some sort of unique twisted spiritual quest. The great French mountaineer, Lionel Terray, referred to himself and to all others with a similar calling to be "The Conquistadors of the Useless." If you haven't been addicted to the sport, you won't understand its allure.
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As a young boy, I watched Lowell Thomas Adventures on TV. I remember seeing a documentary on the 1953 British Mt. Everest Expedition, the one that put Tenzing and Edmund Hillary on the top of the world. I saw men struggling under huge loads up immense mountains during horrendous storms. It was heroic in a crazy sort of way, and very fascinating.
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But it was my cousin who introduced me to the world of real climbing. He was a world traveler - from a family of world travelers. (My uncle and aunt had traveled to many exotic and far-off places in the world, my cousins grew up in the world at large, and I learned a lot from all of them.) He had been to the Alps and the Andes. Although not a radical technical climber himself, he knew the culture and the spirit of the craft. He told me of alpine places and peoples that fired my imagination.
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He would often stop at our farm on his way through the area, especially at the time when I returned home from Viet Nam. I was always into Dharma Bum things like hiking to hilltops and bivouacking under the Moon. He showed me the real gear for the first time: heavy European mountain boots, rucksack, down bag and jacket. He told me of Alpine culture when describing the places he had been. He was a man completely at home in cold, rocky, snowy environments.
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Then, he gave me a book, which I still have: "The Sierra Club Guide to Ski Mountaineering," ca. 1950s. (This was when the Sierra Club actually still climbed mountains.) This gave me the technical knowledge to navigate safely in the winter environments of America. It also had a good explanation of the rope techniques of rock climbing and rappelling, and it was the first technical manual I ever had. This lit the fuse for me: I became a climbing fanatic.
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Climbing was the greatest medicine I ever took. For sure, it is risky, but it was the healthiest activity I have ever done. Many personal demons were exorcized after I aggressively pursued my passion for mountaineering. It is a clean and pure craft, and it makes one really know oneself.
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Thanks, Rex. You really lit a fire that has enriched my life.
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-Zenwind.

Purpose of my Climbing Log

2007-05-29T16:54:00.002+07:00

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I am using this Climbing section of my blog to record memories of my experiences in mountaineering. It has a strong relevance to my practice of Buddhism.
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My earliest introduction to Buddhism (in the late 1960s) was through Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, the Beat Zen mountain climbers. They wrote about the ancient Chinese Ch'an/Zen hermit and mountain man, Han Shan, who had written the Cold Mountain Poems.
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When I returned from the Viet Nam war, I trekked through my own loneliness, seeking healing through climbing, bivouacking, watching the Moon. Some of these memories are seared into my psyche. They define my practice. They define me.
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-Zenwind.

Fibromyalgia Syndrome (FMS)

2007-01-17T12:46:00.000+07:00

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I have suffered from FMS since 1981, and understanding what this malady is all about is important for understanding me. It is a syndrome that cycles between sometimes long-lasting remission (e.g., 1991-1994, years when I felt great and was climbing in my forties at the same level as I did in my twenties) to debilitating flare-ups that put me down in bed. FMS mainly involves intense bodily pains, incapacitating headaches, overall fatigue, sleep disturbances, and a frustrating temporary “brain-fog” or cognitive deficit.
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The first spot of intense pain (and the most painful when it reoccurs) was between my shoulder blades around vertebrae T7, an old farm-work injury. Since then I have accumulated over a dozen sore spots all over my body that knot up in incredible pain.
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The physical and mental fatigue and cognitive deficit (the “fibro-fog”) are the hardest to accept. When hit with this fog, I feel like my IQ has dropped 20 points in a minute. It is probably connected to the severe sleep disturbances during a bad cycle.
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Causes of FMS in my experience include: Stress; lack of adequate rest; and lack of regular exercise. Any one of these factors can trigger a flare-up, and then they all kick into combination as I spiral down into pain.
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To avoid FMS flare-ups, I need a regular exercise program, a lot of sleep, and a radical reduction of stress. Meditation to reduce stress is very helpful.
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Dukkha: the First Noble Truth.
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-Zenwind.

The Road

2006-12-19T02:56:00.000+07:00

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“The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way,
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.”
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~Bilbo Baggins~
~J.R.R. Tolkien~

Song Upon the Northwind

2005-10-07T07:04:00.001+07:00

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I am that Spirit of the Mountains – that one in the wind.
I race over remote summits, careen around craggy ridges,
and leap into a laughing, breakneck glide
down the snowy slopes.
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The climbing can turn heavy, arduous, fearful, and slow.
The weather becomes hostile, and night devours the light.
Sir Alpinist will master himself, slay the dragons of dark,
and traverse whole ranges ... yet still covet the Grail.
‘Tis now the time to break out of this cold bivouac, to defy
the Spirit of Gravity, and move on up to a higher realm.
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Upon the boldest heights, achieving a universe of dawn;
alone and wholly conscious, I am the breath of free motion.
Light in being, ecstatic, dancing, taking to wing and soaring;
I pause – as even winds sometimes do –
on this mountain’s very top;
and I turn my gaze, across the distances, to your summit,
which I’ve always wanted to ascend.
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-Ross Barlow. (1980s).

Moon Risings & Phases

2005-09-22T06:22:00.000+07:00

Below, I have provided links to find the times of Moon-rise or general info on phases. The Moon is an integral part of my aesthetic and religious life, and I want to share this info with anyone who might not be accustomed to watching her mysterious appearances and wanderings across the skies. She is elusive, ephemeral and shy. It is especially difficult to keep track of the Moon’s cycles if you are in a city with its lights and buildings. But you can often sneak a peek if you know when and where to look.
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For over three decades, I have tried to schedule my mountaineering trips and backyard bivouacs on Full Moon phases. (The week of First Quarter through Full is best.) The weather, however, is not so easily scheduled.
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For daily and weekly purposes, this is my primary site for Moon phases and for local weather: WeatherUnderground.
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http://www.wunderground.com
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Just plug in your zip code or city info. There is an astronomy option, which displays times of sunrise, Moon-rise, etc., plus dates of the four phases ahead. E.g., tonight will be clear in my area; the sun is setting at 7:15pm EDT, but the Moon will not rise until 9:04pm EDT. Therefore, if I am hiking to a bivouac after sundown, I should bring a flashlight, as the first couple of hours will be Moonless and dark. But the great Orb of the Night will rise thereafter. I will be sitting, facing east, in a front-row seat.
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Phases of the Moon tables (through 2010). U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO). These do not tell you the time of rise, but the exact time of phase. Make sure you scroll down to the correct year.
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http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/MoonPhase.html
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USNO Data Services. More astronomical info than I will ever need. Sunrise times, Moon-rise times, etc.
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http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/
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The four phases of the Moon mark Buddhist observances. Gotama the ascetic became The Buddha under a Full Moon. Taoist and Ch’an imagery in poetry and painting is illuminated by the Moon. The ancient Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival is a Moon observance. Humanity has marked these celestial movements for millennia. I invite you to watch the Moon with me, even if your spot is far distant from mine. Enjoy.
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"Climb high. Watch Moon."
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-Zenwind.

Pine Tree Wind

2005-09-01T04:33:00.000+07:00

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"My old friend lives on East Mountain
Treasuring the beauty of the valleys and hills.
Spring now green, he lies in empty woods,
Still sound asleep under a midday sun.
A pine tree wind dusts his sleeves and coat,
Cascading rocky brooks clean his heart and ears.
No clamor, no confusion – all I want is
This life pillowed high in emerald mist."
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~ Li Po (Li Bai) Chinese Taoist poet, 8th century ~
~~"At Yuan Tan-Ch’iu’s Mountain Home"~~

Ryokan's Surprise

2005-09-01T04:26:00.002+07:00

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"At night, deep in the mountains,
I sit in meditation.
The affairs of men never reach here:
Everything is quiet and empty,
All the incense has been swallowed up by the endless night.
My robe has become a garment of dew.
Unable to sleep I walk out into the woods-
Suddenly, above the highest peak, the full moon appears."
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~Ryokan (1758-1831) Japanese Zen mountain poet

Shih-Te's Wanderings

2005-08-19T22:52:00.001+07:00

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"Partial to pine cliffs and lonely trails,
This old man laughs at himself when he falters.
Even now after all these years,
Trusting the current like an unmoored boat."

~ Shih-Te ~ (Shide)
8th cen.? Chinese poet in Ch’an/Zen/Taoist style.
Friend of Han Shan

The Buddha is NOT Hotei, the fat laughing monk

2005-08-16T04:51:00.000+07:00

It is common to confuse two Buddhist figures who are, in fact, separate characters. The fat laughing monk with the pot belly, is NOT "The Buddha." That is, he is not the same as the founder of Buddhism, Gautama Buddha. Myth asserts that this fat monk, Hotei, will be reborn as the *next* Buddha, an immeasurably long time from now.
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The founder of Buddhism -- 2,500 years ago in India -- was Siddhartha Gautama of the Sakyans. *This* is the historical Buddha. He left a life of riches to be a starving ascetic monk in the forest for six years. He nearly died of undernourishment and realized that this was not fruitful for his quest, so he decided on a Middle Way between starvation and gluttony.
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He then sat in meditation and reached Awakening, thus becoming known as The Buddha, meaning "The Awakened One." He is often identified as the Sakyamuni Buddha ("sage of the Sakyan clan"), because legends say that there were several Buddhas eons before him and one to come in the far distant future.
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For the rest of his life, The Buddha ate just one meal a day. Statues of Gautama Buddha show a figure that is trim and not obese. The controlled smile is usually one of benevolence, equanimity, serenity and wisdom.
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The jolly pot-bellied monk is Hotei. (Japanese: Hotei. Chinese: Pu-Tai Ho-shang.) Hotei is said to have been a monk in a former birth. He is a bodhisattva and will be the next Buddha, named Maitreya, in the far distant future.
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A bodhisattva is a saint, primarily emphasized in Mahayana Buddhism, who has taken a vow to postpone his own entry into the bliss of Nirvana until he has helped ready *all* sentient beings in the world to enter with him. This will take *many* rebirths.
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So, Hotei was believed to be a "Pre-birth" of a future Buddha. He is now residing in a heavenly realm for an extremely long sojourn before someday, eons from now, being reborn as a human again and becoming Maitreya Buddha. As Maitreya, he will lead *all* beings to Awakening. So Hotei laughs, for he knows that all sentient beings will eventually enter the bliss of Nirvana with him.
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Theravada Buddhism, in Southeastern Asia, is more centered on Gautama Buddha and his teachings. The various traditions of Mahayana Buddhism in East Asia honor other Buddhas and bodhisattvas in addition to the historical Buddha, and this is the area where the traditions about Hotei are more widespread.
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Many people today confuse the two characters. Hotei would just laugh out loud about it. The Buddha would smile.
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-Zenwind.

Beginner's Buddhism

2005-08-10T06:53:00.000+07:00

I have been asked by a lot of people for an introduction to Buddhism for those not too familiar with it. Although I have been very much into Buddhism, especially Zen, for 35 years, I still consider myself a real tenderfoot in my understanding of it. But I will give a bare-bones sketch of the main traditions for anyone interested and then provide several links that may help in one’s own research.

A caveat. I am quite a skeptic about most things, so I take many things in Buddhism with a bucket of salt. Much in the traditions are, to me, mythology and unbelievable miracle stories. Beautiful mythology, to be sure, and mythology that is often capable of teaching profound truths. But belief in myths is not of primary importance in Buddhism. The Buddha said that many questions and doctrines "do not tend toward edification" and should, therefore, be put aside so that the important questions can be focused on. He was always looked at as a kind of physician that healed spiritual ills. He said:

"The non-doing of any evil
The performance of what is skillful
The cleansing of one’s own mind.
This is the teaching of the Awakened."
~(Dhammapada, 183)~

Buddhism is actually better thought of as a *family* of religions. Over the last 2,500 years, it has developed into a vast variety of loosely related systems. I will just briefly outline the three big divisions here.

*Theravada* (formerly called "Hinayana") is dominant in Thailand, Burma, Cambodia and Sri Lanka, and its name means "teaching of the elders." Its Pali canon of writings are some of the oldest of composed Buddhist texts. I have been attempting to study this a lot lately, because I am interested in early historical Buddhism as close as possible to the Buddha’s original teachings. My wife, Sudawon, is Thai, and she grew up in the Theravada tradition.

*Mahayana* is a wide tradition of sects that you find in China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam. It includes such different schools as Zen, Pure Land, and many others. Zen is the Buddhist tradition I first got acquainted with, and it defined my practice very early. (Zen is called Ch’an in China, where it originated, and it has some Taoist elements.)

*Vajrayana* (or Tibetan Buddhism) is the school you find in Tibet, Bhutan, and in the areas of Tibetan refugees. This school is very popular in the West and among celebrities. When the Dalai Lama makes a world tour, it is a big event. I do not know much about this tradition.

Some links:

http://accesstoinsight.org
Access to Insight. This site is one of the best for Theravada Buddhism. Click on "What is Theravada Buddhism" for a good intro.

http://www.buddhanet.net
This is BuddhaNet, a site that tries to cover it all, and does a very decent job. At upper left corner of page, find a link to "Buddhist Studies," then to "Basic Buddhist Guide." I have not personally explored this much, but the site has long been known for its integrity.

http://www.saigon.com/~anson
Buddha Sasana by Binh Anson is highly recommended and said to have good intro pages, but I have not explored this well.

http://www.lioncity.net/buddhism
This is E-Sangha. It is a huge, wide-open e-forum for people interested in Buddhism, and I have been spending a lot of time there, both asking and answering questions. Because it is a public forum, there is a lot of uneven quality of posting. Some are very helpful, some not. Try the forum there called "Beginners Buddhism," and look for useful topics among the many listed.

The book, *Buddha*, by Karen Armstrong is very good. (See my brief review of it below.)

Check out the movie, *Little Buddha* with Keanu Reeves as the Buddha. It has two story lines: one following the biography of the Buddha; and the other deals with a 20th century Vajrayana story, with beautiful footage of Bhutan and also of the temple (with the "eyes" on top) in Kathmandu, Nepal that is said to have been built by the daughter of King Asoka.

-Zenwind.

Buddha by Karen Armstrong

2005-08-05T07:48:00.000+07:00

I just finished reading *Buddha* by Karen Armstrong, and I really liked it.

From my limited knowledge of the scholarship of Buddhist history, I think Armstrong did a decent job of writing a book for the general public in 187 pages (a Penguin paperback) and still keeping a historian’s objectivity and covering many important topics. I was pleasantly surprised. It should do well informing curious Western readers about the founder of Buddhism, his historical context and his message.

-Zenwind.