Dia de los Muertos 2018

In the spirit of the Mexican holiday Dia de los Muertos I am taking time today to reflect on two souls that touched my life and passed from this vale of tears in the last 12 months:

Chad Knepp (Oct 21)
Chad died of cancer of the gall bladder. It was discovered last April and did not respond well to treatment.

Our paths first crossed when he visited Sandhill Farm as a prospective member back in the late '90s. We got along well and he joined the community, but it wasn't long before he grew restless. While he liked what Sanhill has doing, he wanted the freedom to develop homesteading initiatives outside of central planning—because Sandhill was small, about eight adults at the time, our habit was to get full group approval before launching any project, especially if it entailed land use or building construction. Chad had lots of ideas about sustainability that he wanted to try out, and he chafed at being constrained by the need to get group approval every step of the way.

When we talked (at length) about allowing members more freedom to pursue dreams on community property, his request encountered push back from another member who wanted equality of opportunity. They were reluctant to extend to Chad the independence he requested, in part, because they didn't have the same homesteading skills. If they were not be able to make the same use of such freedom, then they didn't feel good about Chad having it—if all couldn't have it, then none of us should have it. Ouch. While I experienced this as the weaponization of equality, and left me both sad and disturbed, Chad's request was turned down.

To his credit, Chad knew better than to push, so he bided his time until he was able to join forces with Alyson Ewald and others to create Red Earth Farms in 2005, which was a community of homesteads, located on 76 acres adjacent to Dancing Rabbit—about three miles from Sandhill. At Red Earth, Chad could get most of what he wanted, experimenting with sustainable agriculture and permaculture systems on his own leasehold, with wide latitude to do things his way, so long as he operated within broadly defined ecological parameters. Even better, Red Earth had much lower expectations about the frequency of group meetings, and that matched well with Chad's predilection. He wanted to do, much more than to talk about doing. As frosting on the cake, Red Earth was close enough to Sandhill to maintain personal ties there.

The thing about Chad that I found most attractive was his creative, entrepreneurial energy. He stirred the pot. While this proved to be too much for the risk averse elements of my community, and thus Sandhill was ultimately not a good fit for him, we did not let that get in the way of enjoying each others' company.

Chad had a strong connection to family—both the one he was born into and the one he developed at Red Earth. One of my fondest memories is a time about 10-12 years back when Chad needed a last-minute ride to Iowa City, in order to rendezvous with a brother to drive to Michigan for a family health emergency. I volunteered to drive him, which meant a six-hour round trip starting at 10 pm and ending at 4 am. Uffda. While the drive home was brutal, it was worth it for the drive up—a rare chance for three hours of wide-ranging conversation with my neighbor. It was an uninterrupted chance to catch each other up on our disparate lives, which intersected in our deep connection to sustainable living.

There weren't that many of those long conversations, but the ones we had were precious.

I'll miss him.

Zeus (Nov 17)
Zeus was my son Ceilee's faithful dog, and a canine I bonded with inordinately. Ceilee carefully selected him from a litter after being impressed by the even temperament of his father, who lived next to him in Columbia MO. That was back in 2006.

Zeus was a pit bull/boxer mix, and Ceilee put in the hours to train him as a puppy—an investment that paid off in 12 years of faithful behavior.

Special memories:
o  I recall visiting Ceilee at his house in Columbia one morning. I'd arrived before he'd gotten up, and when he opened his bedroom door, Zeus boiled out and raced down the hall to where I was standing. I had just enough time to brace my footing before 60 lbs of enthusiastic puppy barreled into me and started licking my face. Good morning!

o  When Ceilee and Tosca moved to Las Vegas in 2007, they first lived in an apartment, and there were slobber marks all along the street-facing window in back of the couch in the living room, because Zeus would sit there all day, patiently watching to see when "Daddy" would come home.

o  Early in their tenure in Las Vegas, Ceilee and Tosca took Zeus with them on a visit to Tosca's grandparents (Juanita and Bob), for a party they were hosting at their well-appointed home in Henderson (a Vegas suburb). As the weather outside was hard on Zeus, Ceilee asked if the dog could sit quietly on the welcome mat inside the door, in the same room with the party. Juanita was skeptical about how that was going to work out but gave it a chance. When Zeus sat patiently for 60 minutes without moving—because Ceilee had not released him—Juanita went up to Ceilee and told him Zeus was welcome in her house any time. She'd never seen a dog with that degree of self-control.

o  One day Ceilee and Zeus visited Sandhill and we were eating lunch on the front porch. Ceilee gave Zeus a cow thigh bone to chew on while we ate. At the end of the meal we discovered that Zeus had systematically devoured the entire bone, even as we humans demolished our sandwiches. When I contemplated the power in his jaw muscles to accomplish that it occurred to me how easily Zeus could take off someone's finger—which he never did. He was always in control, and had an incredibly soft mouth. When children poked his face, he just backed away. He was never aggressive. I'm not sure I know any humans with that degree of self control.

For the last dozen years it had been a special ritual for me to greet Zeus as the first thing whenever I visited Ceilee, and we spent untold hours huddled together on the couch awaiting Ceilee's return at the end of his work day.

My life is a little emptier without Zeus, and his unconditional love.

Reflecting on the Light

I. Sunshine in the Desert
It's June in Las Vegas. While this is a city that prides itself on both the volume of the action and its availability independently of diurnal cycles (casinos are notorious for offering gaming floors that feature neither chronometry nor fenestration), I've diverted my business trip to the West Coast to see my adult kids—not to kid around with adult diversions. 

As such, I can tell when the sun is up. Having crept within three weeks of summer solstice, Old Sol is up early (and often), and it's hard to sleep in. Long days and a desert climate have translated into triple-digit daytime temperatures every day since I arrive last Wednesday, with hardly a cloud in sight. While that will mean excellent conditions for observing tonight's full moon, it also means I need to drink extra (non-alcoholic) liquids and have to be careful about when I go for my daily constitutional with Zeus, Ceilee's seven-year-old sweetheart of a pit bull. 

Whenever he sees me putting on shoes he gets excited, hoping that means a walk is imminent. While it more probably means a car trip to which he won't be invited, occasionally he's right and his tail wags at a metronomic rate that would tax a first chair violinist to keep the beat.

Much as both Zeus and I love our walks around the neighborhood, this time of year it's easier on both of us if I wait until after sundown—which means heading out north of 8 pm. That way his poor feet aren't as apt to suffer from contact with the black tarmac whenever we cross a street. After soaking up solar radiation all day, the streets are hotter than action on The Strip.

The long days are also good for my getting some work done. I never run out of reports that need attention or commentaries to write, and a consequence of my farming lifestyle at Sandhill is that it's hard for me to sleep in past sunrise. When I visit my kids this time of year I'm typically the first one up in the morning. I make the first pot of coffee and it opens up an hour or two at the keyboard before anyone else stirs.

II. Sunshine in the Dessert

Like a lot of families, food is a bonding experience for me and my kids and we look for opportunities to enjoy special foods at the same time as each other's company. While mostly that means particular cuisines—Japanese sushi, Thai curry, and Brazilian churrascaria—it also includes indulging in after-meal treats like ice cream, that are not a regular part of my diet. Already on this visit I've enjoyed two of my all-time favorites (on separate occasions, mind you): green tea and coffee. The soothing cool is a terrific contrast with the intense flavors and heat of the Las Vegas culinary experience in June (while the restaurants are invariably air-conditioned, the hot wings aren't). Yum!

III. Sunshine in the Deseret

It's shaping up to be another historic presidential race in the US. Four years ago the Democratic choice boiled down to a woman (Hillary Clinton) and a Black (Barack Obama). Whichever way it went, that person would be the first of that category vying for the top political office in the country.

Now, of course, Obama is the incumbent, and the Republicans are offering up a challenger who will break ground again: Mitt Romney will be the first Mormon candidate. I like that we're pushing the electoral envelope and shining light into the dark corners of political prejudice.

You may not know that in 1849, two years after they first arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, Mormons proposed to the US government the establishment of a new state called Deseret that encompassed almost all of what is now Utah and Nevada, plus southern California, northern Arizona, and bits of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon. While it didn't work out, and they had to settle for Utah in 1851, Mormons have never lacked for chutzpah. This year—163 years later—they're hoping to raise the Deseret flag over the White House. We'll see.

While I'm nervous about Mormon hegemony (it sends a chill up my spine whenever someone thinks they are God's chosen people, a line of belief that has been used since time immemorial to legitimize all manner of brutalities and outrage—once you view non-believers as the Unwashed, it is a surprisingly small step to seeing others as "them," thereby rendering most humans as no longer worthy of humane treatment), what truly disgusts me about today's public environment is not the persistence of theocratic zealots; it's the viciousness and lack of civility in political discourse. It's one thing to disagree and be passionate about one's beliefs; it's another to vilify and indulge in knee-jerk negativity. 

As sure as the sun shines in the desert, we—as in all of us—have to be able to do better than that.

Going to the Dogs

When I come to Las Vegas I rarely spend time on the Strip, but last night was an exception. I had a lovely evening with my son Ceilee, my daughter Jo, and her partner Peter. We started with a three-hour sake tasting at the Mirage (150 varieties!), and followed that up with a nostalgic visit to the Sahara, where we played some blackjack and roulette until midnight and my kids each pocketed a souvenir chip when it was time to cash out. The Sahara is one of the grand old ladies of the Strip (it opened in 1952), but the owners announced last month that they plan to close this icon May 16. We decided to pay homage to this classic casino whose time was coming to an end.

For a Vegas casino, 59 years old is ancient—not for its patrons, mind you, but for a business operating in the land of hype, where show-me-what's new is king and they overhaul the landscape of the Strip about as often as strippers change outfits (and with a similar degree of subtlety). The Sahara goes all the way back to the prime of Louie Prima & Keely Smith.

Sadly though, the glory days of the Sahara are long gone. There are many newer, glitzier hotels and casinos and the epicenter of the action has moved further south down Las Vegas Blvd. The Sahara had become a dog of a casino, and it couldn't survive the current recession.

Man's Best Friend
While many people who visit Vegas may consider casinos their best friend, I'm more of a traditionalist: I like dogs. Sitting next to me as I type is Zeus, a pit bull/boxer mix that Ceilee brought with him from Missouri when he and Tosca moved to the desert back in 2007. Occasionally he gets bored with my pecking away at the keyboard and suggests we go for a walk by placing his considerable muzzle on my thigh and staring at me hopefully (and when doesn't work he starts licking my ear).

Though I thoroughly enjoy my occasional forays to the Strip with Ceilee and Jo, the truth is that I happily spend way more of my time in town petting and roughhousing with my three granddogs (in addition to Zeus, Jo & Peter have two dogs: Yoshi and Zelda). When I stay at Ceilee's, Zeus is my regular companion. When I stay at Jo's, then I'm sitting on the couch next to Yoshi or Zelda.

[I can't help inserting here my fascination with these dogs' names. It isn't very often that you encounter a set of three arbitrarily named things and the one closest to the beginning of the alphabet starts with "Y."]

Growing up, my family always had a dog. In the years I lived at home there were only two. First Clipper, a Shetland Sheepdog (a kind of collie who left tufts of hair all over the furniture); then Beauregard, a Springer Spaniel (who was forever salivating on the windows looking onto the backyard, as he stared longingly at the birds and squirrels trespassing on "his" territory). In addition to their shared breed alliteration, these were both medium-sized dogs that lived more than 12 years, and were both well loved by the family. They were also dogs that had been bred for a particular purpose—herding sheep and fetching birds—that was spectacularly irrelevant to our suburban lifestyle.

It wasn't long after we started Sandhill Farm (back in 1974) that we had our first dog: Rochester. He was just a mutt that showed up one day and never left. He lived with us about 10 years (until the day that Mallie Phillips accidentally hit him with a pickup and Rochester died in my arms with a broken back). Though Rochester was essentially on outdoor dog, Annie would get me out of bed but letting Rochester into the house first thing in the morning. He'd race into the bedroom, jump onto the bed, and lick my face until I couldn't stop laughing.

While Rochester was the dog in my life that I bonded with most, we've had many dogs at Sandhill over the years. Mostly they're just pets, yet they help deter deer and rabbits from predating on our garden and that's a true benefit. It's wonderful that we can give our dogs so much room to roam (in sharp contrast with the 100-foot long fenced backyard that was all that was available to Clipper and Beauregard). The one strict behavior rule we have with our dogs is that they can't stay if they chase chickens.

Sandhill's current resident canines are Sammy and Biscuit, and they are loved just as much as their predecessors, though they have bonded more with other members than with me. I'm just on the road too much these days and the dogs that are closest to my heart today are the three I'm visiting this week in Las Vegas. Thus, whenever I make plans to come out here, it's not just to see my kids and my granddaughter—I am going to the dogs!