Hitting The Links: 5/19/24
I start the Catskills Fire Tower challenge, escape from the Buñuel-verse, manage not to get bitten by any rattlesnakes, and still bring you a ton of links, so get readin'!
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El Ansiedad Exterminador
I didn’t leave the house for almost six days. I mean, I walked out in the yard, took the dogs around the corner (we’re dogsitting for a few weeks), carefully defused an encounter with a bear cub & mother in our driveway, kept up with hygiene, exercise, work, virtual appearances, etc., but that was it.
I couldn’t tell you why. It’s not like I had midwinter doldrums or some dread-inducing event on the horizon. I just didn’t go anywhere, even for a walk, and watched as my car grew more covered with pollen dust & seed-husks with each passing day. It’s like I was (un)living in the Buñuel (Un)Extended Universe.
Lucky for me, I had an escape hatch: the 2024 Catskills Fire Tower Challenge!
One of my oldest pals, an ardent hiker, pitched me on it a few months ago and we’d decided that yesterday would be our first fire tower hike. I didn’t ask him which one we’d be doing, what time we’d be getting started, or anything else, just whether he had a spare backpack (he didn’t, but everything I had fit in the capacious pockets of my old cargo shorts, except for my water bottle, which I carried in hand).
He arrived at 10am, and we lit out for the Catskills. A quarter-mile down the street, I told him, “This is the farthest I’ve been from my house since last Sunday.” He’s accustomed to my weirdness over the last ~45 years, and took that in stride.
He decided we’d hike the Woodstock, NY fire tower trail up Overlook Mountain. We gabbed throughout the drive, arrived at 11:30, had to park about a tenth of a mile away from the trail head because the parking area was packed, and got going.
The website lists the hike as “moderate to difficult”, which I guess . . .? It was a climb, for sure, about 1,370’ to 3,140’ elevation (at the top of the tower), but the trails weren’t tough; there’s a cell tower up there, so the trail is accessible for maintenance vehicles.
Atop the tower, we took in views of peaks in Pennsylvania & Vermont, incredible rolling waves of green, with trees in various stages of spring bloom as their elevation increased. It was a fantastic start to our project.
When we arrived at the peak, a volunteer in the information cabin invited us in, talked about the area, the views from the tower, some of the history, and most importantly, the threat of rattlesnakes. The cabin had various displays on the walls, including a few shedded rattlesnake skins, showing us how big some of them can get. There was also a brown snake’s shedded skin that measured 7’2”, which made us nervously laugh.
My pal told me that he’d love to volunteer in a site like this. We’d spent some time on the way up talking about our jobs, retirement trajectories, families, and other bits of midlife. We congratulated ourselves for being in our mid-50s and able to get out and hike like this. We also jokingly congratulated ourselves on still having our hair.
On the way back, we decided to take the side trail for Echo Lake, ~2 miles out. It was a little trickier than the tower trail, narrower, with more loose rocks and running water, and it went downhill for several hundred feet. All I could think was, “Unless he’s got some secret route back to the parking lot, we’re going to have to go back uphill.” He did not, and we did. (The lake was a little bit of a letdown, but we got there and back, is the important thing.)
I did fine, with a minimum of physical strain, although plenty of sweating (glad I brought the water bottle). It was only back when we were on the main trail, walking downhill back to the lot, that I could Feel It in my lower calves or maybe my achilles tendons. My Apple Watch said our total uphill was ~2,400 feet, and by the time we got back to the car, we had covered 9 miles. We joked that if we’d just got out earlier that morning, we could have parked 0.1 mi. closer to the trailhead and saved ourselves the extra distance. He hadn’t hiked this trail in 20+ years, and swore it wasn’t this crowded back then, but I didn’t mind the other hikers and day-walkers. I figured they’d get the rattlesnakes’ attention.
Then we were off, first to a charging station to top off his car, then to Rough Draft, a wonderful bookstore-bar-cafe in Kingston, NY. He had a beer and I recaffeinated while we browsed books, ate and talked more. I picked up a copy of Claire Dederer’s Monsters, figuring I may record with her someday. Then it was a 75-min. drive home. I pointed out Storm King both times we passed it, and he’s considering making it a Father’s Day trip next month with his family.
We talked all day, except for when we didn’t feel like talking. The guys next to us at Rough Draft were cinephiles and that got us talking about movies, too, but the conversation ranged everywhere over the 9+ hours we spent together. As I said, he’s just about my oldest friend, and we’ve shared crazy stories, experiences, secrets for decades. Measuring ourselves not against each other but against the work of time is a fascinating process.
The plan is for 4 more of these hikes (the 6th tower is just a quarter-mile walk from the Catskills Visitor Center, so no real hike for that one), and I’m looking forward to how weird the conversation will get.
Take it from a week-long shut-in: it’s good to get out.
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INTERNS BUILT THE PYRAMIDS!
One of my friends writes: “My daughter is completing her sophomore year at college, where she’s majoring in publishing & creative writing. Would you have any suggestions for people in the publishing industry she could contact about summer internships? Would any of the authors you interview like some free summer help so she can build her resumé?”
She’s based in the northeast; if you have ideas or want to find out if she’d make a good fit for an internship (paid or un-), hit me up & I’ll connect you.
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This email setup runs $29/month, so if you want to help out with it or otherwise Contribute To The Cause, you can support the Virtual Memories Show with a contribution of any size.
And now, let’s hit the links!
Links & Such
Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Adam Moss • Randy Fertel • D.W. Young • Jen Silverman • Leonard Barkan • Emily Raboteau • Trillian Stars/Kyle Cassidy (bonus ep.)
RIP Alice Munro . . . RIP Dabney Coleman . . . RIP David Sanborn . . . RIP Jerome Rothenberg . . . RIP Barbara Stauffacher Solomon
David Roth (no relation) wrote a nice piece on Paul Auster & the New York Trilogy.
Michael Dirda reviewed a pair of new books by Joseph Epstein, who I should probably pitch on recording a podcast sometime. (Soon.)
Hey! Go get Whitney Matheson’s new mini-book, Trudy Sellout!
Content churn means we’re kept in a state of agitation, never allowed to let art/culture/etc. settle and crystallize, and that sucks.
Speaking of, this Nathan Heller piece on the nature of attention looks fascinating but tl;dr. (Just kidding; I read the entire shebang, and you should, too.)
This story about anti-tobacco activist Cliff Douglas being named prez/CEO of Foundation for a Smoke-Free World, the anti-tobacco nonprofit, reminds me I never told you about the time they contacted me about being on their board of directors. I had an introductory call with their search firm, and apparently made it to the 2nd round of the search before they settled on another candidate. It would’ve been a nice supplementary gig. I tell you all this because during my interview with them, after I explained my history and how I launched a trade association for pharmaceutical manufacturing service companies, they asked, “FFSFW is funded by tobacco settlement money from Philip Morris; would that be a problem for you?” To which I replied, “You . . . just heard me tell you that I built a pharma industry trade association, right? I don’t care where the money comes from, as long as it goes to a good cause.” As mentioned, I did not get the board seat.
I laughed unreasonably loudly over the punchline to this Zippy strip. I’m glad Bill Griffith remains the master of the absurdist zen bomb.
I like that a tech columnist can spend his 10th anniversary column listing all the stuff he was wrong about and STILL hype AI by the end.
Maria Bustillos, on the other hand, sees through the AI bullshit.
TBH, I’d have a heart attack if someone charged me $9.99 for a single tortilla chip.
Current/Recent Reading
Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies - Stan Mack
I Love Dick - Chris Kraus
“Her voice seemed to tone into her poems, it wasn’t as if the poems came out of her mouth, I felt, rather, that they were already there in advance and she used her voice to access them. At the same time there was no room for anything else, her voice could only contain the poems, the few words that made up a rounded whole, with nothing of her in it.”
—Karl Ove Knausgaard (tr. Don Bartlett), My Struggle: Book 5.
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
I got in my full 5-day weights-yoga cycle last week (Fri-Tue), so yay me. I did weights this Friday, and subbed the aforementioned 9-mile hike for yesterday’s yoga. I’ll get to weights sometime today, provided my calves/achilles tendons don’t snap or otherwise debilitate me. But other than that part of my body, I got through the hike just fine, despite not having done much walking or cardio for a while. We were both winded early on, because the trail climbs pretty quickly (and I was gabbing a lot), but we adjusted. Seems that all this exercise helped me with hiking, so yay me x2.
Until Next Time
Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back on Wednesday with a new episode and (I hope) some art, and on Sunday with links, books, & workout craziness, & who knows maybe a little profundity or something.
Found a book of interest the other day,