Storm King Mountain Memorial Trail

Our friends, the Shepherds, were in Colorado last weekend for their annual summer visit. They have a timeshare in Avon that they use twice a year, a week in the winter for skiing and another in the summer for hiking and biking. On Sunday morning, Nan, Scout and I met them at the Dairy Queen in West Glenwood, which is a fair distance compromise between Avon and Grand Junction. From there, we proceeded west on I-70 to Canyon Creek exit 109 and then doubled back on the north-side frontage road to where it dead-ends at the parking lot for the Storm King Mountain Memorial Trail's trailhead.

On July 6, 1994, fourteen firefighters died while battling the South Canyon Fire when high winds caused the flames to blow up suddenly, trapping them on an isolated slope. The memorial trail was created by friends and family wishing to visit the place where their loved ones lost their lives. It has since been improved by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, but it retains its original characteristics as a steep, rugged climb of a thousand vertical feet in a mile and a half. Hikers can't help but think of the brave young men and women who labored up this same slope, carrying heavy firefighting equipment, for the purpose of controlling a fire which threatened the nearby community of Canyon Creek.

The temperature was at least 93 degrees when we arrived at the trailhead in the early afternoon. We each carried CamelBaks full of ice and water, which we generously shared with Scout, who hurried quickly between shady spots while dancing over the hot dust of the well-worn trail. We stopped frequently to rest in the shade and to read the many informational signs along the way, which pointed out the sights and explained how forest fires are fought. The trail eventually leveled out and followed a hot, treeless ridge line to an observation point across from the deadly slope.

In my mind, I had imagined this place many times in the eighteen years since the fire, but it was nothing like I thought it would be. Instead of a canopy of evergreen trees, the steep slopes were covered in chest-high brush and junipers, and I pictured it engulfed in wind-driven flames, racing directly at the firefighters. There would have been nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Twelve of the firefighters died just below the opposite ridge and two others in a wash a few hundred yards away, directly below the peak of Storm King Mountain. If it had not been so hot, we would have continued our hike to those locations, where memorials have been erected, to pay our respects. We will need to return sometime soon to do so. You should too.

Thank you, Arthur C. Clarke

Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke has died. All through the day today, my thoughts kept returning to him and his influence on my life.

On a winter weekend day in 1968, when I was ten years old, my father packed the whole family into the station wagon and drove us to a movie theater in downtown Milwaukee to see 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was shown on a giant curved screen that made you feel like you were inside the movie. I don't think my father knew what to expect, taking my mother, my younger siblings and me to what is a serious adult film. Even he didn't know what to make of the loud psychedelic scene near the end when astronaut Dave Bowman is hurtling along at tremendous speed in his space pod one second and then has suddenly landed in a large beige-colored bedroom the next. I didn't understand it either, but it changed the way I thought about the future: Boy, are things ever going to be different in 33 years!

I saw 2001 again a few years later with my friend Mark Wiars at the Tosa Theater, just the two of us. We both thought it was cool as heck but we still didn't get it. What was up with the obelisk? Was the one the pre-humans encountered the same one the astronauts found on the moon and then later floating in space? It never occurred to me that there might be a book based on the movie's screenplay until I saw it in my high school library. It answered all my questions and got me hooked on science fiction.

My friend John Shepherd was reading lots of science fiction at that time, but I couldn't get into some of it because it was too fantastic and implausible. I was more interested in stories that followed the laws of physics and yet imagined wild futures full of extra-terrestrial encounters and technological marvels, which is exactly what Arthur C. Clarke provided in his "hard" science fiction. To this day, I am much more interested in seeing a movie like Alien than I am in seeing Star Wars. Over the years, I have read almost all of Arthur C. Clarke's fiction. Most recently I read a collection of short stories that included The Sentinel, which was first published in 1951 and was the inspiration for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In 1983, when I bought my first computer, a Commodore 64, it included a built-in version of the BASIC programming language. I had struggled with FORTRAN in engineering school, but BASIC clicked for me. I started writing programs to balance my checkbook, calculate pi, wake me up in the morning and do all sorts of other pretty worthless things. Then a friend gave me a printout of the code for ELIZA, the artificial intelligence program written in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum, who died earlier this month. The program is designed to respond intelligently to the user's input, simulating a conversation between the user and the computer. It took several nights, but I transcribed the entire thing into my computer and started playing around with it. The program reminded me immediately of HAL, the mutinous computer from 2001, so I rewrote it with HAL's personality. If it couldn't come up with an appropriate response, it would say things like, "Dave, my mind is going..." or "I'm afraid I can't do that."

What I discovered by working with these programs was that I had a knack for computers and programming. They made sense to me. So I pursued a career in information technology that started back in 1985 and continues to the present. I am currently the Database/Internet Administrator for Aspen Valley Hospital. In a way, I owe it to Arthur C. Clarke for opening my eyes to a future where anything, within the confines of science, is possible. Thank you, Mr. Clarke.

So it goes.

I was saddened but not surprised to learn of Kurt Vonnegut's death last week. I had been sure he would die back in 2000 when he suffered smoke inhalation from his apartment catching fire, but what's a little smoke after a lifetime of cigarettes? Still, he had been on my "death watch" list since that incident and I had been dreading the news of his death for years.

I was introduced to Kurt Vonnegut in my early teens in the early 1970s. My mother brought a copy of Cat's Cradle on one of our summer lake vacations to Waupaca, Wisconsin, and she thought I would enjoy it. I did. And I shared it with my friend John Shepherd. Before long, we had each read all of Mr. Vonnegut's fiction. His stories validated our adolescent discovery that life was absurd and that nobody really knew what was going on. We especially enjoyed Slaughterhouse-Five and its premise that Billy Pilgrim had become unstuck in time. As I have gotten older, that idea has come back to me frequently as random memories of my life leap to mind at odd moments for no apparent reason. Of course, I only live in moments that have already occurred, not also in the future as Billy Pilgrim did. "So it goes."

The many excellent short stories in Welcome to the Monkey House were a revelation for John and me. We laughed out loud at several of them and were deeply moved by others. I still reference the equality-at-any-cost idea behind "Harrison Bergeron"; get misty thinking of the young lovers in "Long Walk to Forever"; and wonder if my dog is as smart as "Thomas Edison's Shaggy Dog".

In 1976, while attending the University of Iowa, I had the great good fortune to see Kurt Vonnegut speak at McBride Auditorium. He spoke of his work with the university's Writers' Workshop and answered questions from the audience, but what I remember most clearly was his reading of the first chapter of his work-in-progress, Jailbird. When he came to the description of the homeless woman with old love letters stuffed in her shoes and revealed that the letters were from the story's narrator, Walter Starbuck, there was an audible gasp in the auditorium, followed by a raucous standing ovation. Such was the power of Kurt Vonnegut as a storyteller.

To use the greeting of Billy Pilgrim's Tralfamadorian abductors: Mr. Vonnegut, hello. Good-bye. Hello.