31 Aug 2009: Dams

1. Today we published a piece about two bros hiking in the Ansel Adams Wilderness. They decide to change routes because they don’t want to hike along a bunch of dammed lakes.

2. Like me they need things to flow free.

3. Ever since yesterday’s ‘talk’ with my parents [I basically asked my mom if she could try and “lower the stress level” around the baby and around Lau] they’re both been stiff, non-comunicative, pissed. Their feelings are dammed.

4. Today we confirmed tickets to Santiago de Chile on Nov 10. It feels like it will be hard to ‘make it’ until then.

5. Tonight I found this crew who is living one of my dreams–paddling a river from its headwaters all the way to the ocean. They’ve chosen the Columbia, a river that has more than 400 dams. Part of the journey is researching the effect on dammed watersheds.

6. Think of how many places they’ll have to get out and portage around the dams. How hard it will be.

7. There are so many things you never learn in school, never learn from your parents.

8. My mom said “I just had a really special relationship with my Mother.”

9. For reasons I’ll never understand, when I was born, my mother’s mother was, according her friends, “afraid to touch me, terrified of me.”

10. She had some kind of depression. When I was a kid we didn’t visit one year because “Nanny was sad.”

11. For over three months, Chief Joseph led his remaining 800 Nez Perce over 1,700 miles across Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana trying to outrun the cavalry. They were freezing and starving.When he finally surrendered they sent them all to Oklahoma where most of them died of disease/starvation. In the mid 1900s they built a dam on the Columbia river and named it after him.

12. Nanny and I always had a really special relationship too. I liked her because she told you her fears, her dissatisfaction with things. “Judaism doesn’t give you any comfort,” she told me, “in the end.”

13. There are so many kinds of dams.