Dropping the ball on 2012

With the Holiday-That-Must-Not-Be-Named behind us for another year, the secular/politically correct/mainstream media world can at last stop using the politically correct “Happy Holidays” and begin wishing us all a specific “Happy New Year.”

With next week’s big celebration in mind, the only time I’ve ever thought it would be fun to live anywhere near the city of Las Vegas is on New Year’s Eve. I mean, if you’re looking for a good time, that place must throw the mother of all parties to ring in the New Year, right? The blinding bright lights, the head-pounding music, the human crush of drunk-out-of-their-skulls party goers … um, never mind.

On second thought, what happens in Vegas can happen to someone else, as far as I’m concerned. Our family’s own New Year traditions have always been much milder and, well, subdued. How mild? Let’s just say they usually involve Dick Clark on the tube, a few minutes pre- and post-midnight standing on our balcony overlooking the Crescenta Valley, a bag of “exploding” confetti poppers and a glass of Martinelli’s non-alcoholic sparkling cider for each of us. But wait, there’s more. If we’re really feeling festive and rowdy any particular year, our big celebration may even include the banging of pots and pans with wooden spoons. I know … woo hoo! We don’t exactly need a doctor’s clearance to participate.

It’s not like we don’t ever socialize, though. The past couple of New Year’s Eves we’ve actually spent the evening with some great friends in Altadena and haveenjoyed a wonderful dinner, excellent conversation, a somewhat sedate card game or two and a quick side hug at midnight. Then it’s back home to warm, flannel sheets and hopefully enough sleep to get up early enough to watch those shock-jocks, Bob Eubanks and Stephanie Edwards do the pulse-quickening play-by-play on yet another Rose Parade. Again, woo hoo!

Least you think I was born old and boring, I have been known to camp out all day and night along the Rose Parade route on several past New Year’s Eves. Yep, there’s nothing like sitting for days in a broken down lawn chair and “sleeping” on a damp grass median or filthy concrete sidewalk with the soothing lilt of air horns lulling you to sleep and Silly String wafting all around you through the cold night air like flying neon-colored spaghetti.

Then again, being right there when a 200-plus member high school marching band passes by close enough to count the pimples on the tuba-players’ cheeks has always been worth any hypothermia, loss of hearing and superficial wounds inflicted by flying tortillas and stale marshmallows. Good times, indeed.

My all time favorite way to welcome in any New Year, however, is to do it in the mountains above Mammoth Lakes. I like nothing better than to leave the warmth of our family’s log home a few minutes before midnight, walk out into the middle of the street – usually lined with shoulder-high berms of snow at that time of year – and simply gaze up at the inky blackness of the midnight sky while one year ends and another begins. That high up in altitude, the nighttime sky is filled with a blanket of stars that are simply not visible down here in Southern California. As I look up, I like to say thank you to God for the grace that helped me make it through the past year and to pray for His blessings throughout the new one. 

Next Monday night, we unfortunately won’t be up in the Sierras or at our friends’ home in Altadena, and thankfully, nowhere near Las Vegas. Barring a surprise invite to a party, we’ll likely be out on the balcony again with our sparkling cider in one hand and a party horn in the other. But the prayers for the coming year will be the same, nevertheless. Happy New Year, and I’ll see you ‘round town.

When She Flew, We Soared

I refer to last week as “geek week,” not only because that’s when Apple began selling their new, highly coveted iPhone 5, but also due to the spectacle of a low-altitude flyover of much of Southern California by the Space Shuttle Endeavour. Not to be outdone, my lovely and talented wife deemed last Friday – the day both events actually happened – as “nerd-vana.” (Kindly address your letters to her, not me.)

While I’m sure the world will see many more versions of the iPhone in years to come, Friday’s flyover was billed as the last ever “flight” of a space shuttle orbiter. Pretty heady stuff.

Mounted on top of a modified Boeing 747, the Endeavour’s flight plan over the Golden State included the skies above Sacramento, Santa Monica, El Segundo, the Getty Center and Griffith Park Observatory, a “money shot” flying low over the iconic Hollywood sign, a quick pass over JPL and the east end of the Crescenta Valley, then south to Disneyland and finally, back to LAX where it would land one last time, never to fly again.

As the son of an engineer/private pilot/aerospace junkie, during the heyday of the shuttle program I heard regular commentary describing the orbiters as the most complicated, over-engineered machines ever built by mankind. Dad would watch the broadcast of a shuttle launch or landing, shake his head and say that there were so many thousands of moving parts, interconnected electronic circuitry, first-of-its-kind software and critical systems in those kludges that even a hiccup in the works could cause the things to fall out of the sky.

I’ll never forget watching one orbiter do exactly that one awful January morning in 1986 when – 73 seconds after liftoff from the launch pad at Cape Canaveral – the Shuttle Challenger exploded high above the Atlantic Ocean. My soon-to-be-wife and I were among the many millions watching the tragedy as it played out on live TV.

In a coincidental quirk of fate, the shuttle that flew over the Crescenta Valley last week was the one built to replace the ill-fated Challenger orbiter. I hope that in the years to come, the sight of the Endeavour flying over JPL, then banking left and low over the San Rafael Hills will be the image I remember more often than that awful smoke plume of the Challenger’s twin solid rocket boosters corkscrewing out of control as the orbiter with seven crew members on board disintegrated in mid-air. Sometimes our reach exceeds our grasp with truly painful results.

On a much lighter note, waiting and wilting in the near-one-hundred-degree heat with the thousands of other people near JPL last Friday, I quickly realized that the real show was already happening on the ground all around me. I’ve never seen so many near-collisions between cars and trucks and motorcycles and motorhomes and cyclists and pedestrians and even strollers. As the hours passed and the temperature soared, shuttle spectators became increasingly distracted and impatient – those arriving too late to park legally simply double- and triple-parking wherever they felt like it – even on the 210 freeway. Just amazing.

Everywhere, car stereos blared the voices of KFI radio reporters calling out the current location of the shuttle over Southern California. The reporters’ breathless over-the-air updates echoed off the parched hillside above Linda Vista. And then, suddenly, there it was, gliding above the Arroyo Seco towards the waiting multitude. A scorched white, winged testament to a nation of innovators, risk takers and bold imagineers. When the space shuttles flew, our nation soared.

I hope those daring days of wonder and exploration are not behind us, and I look forward to when we once again have the visionary fortitude and economic firepower to reach for the stars. In the meantime, however, I think we already have more than enough evidence – judging by the crowd around me last Friday, at least – that space cadets and other-worldly beings are already among us.

I’ll see you ‘round town.

Hooked On Annual Event

On the Friday before the last Saturday of any given April, the northbound freeways out of southern California are choked with SUVs and pickup trucks towing boat trailers and loaded to the gills with work-weary fishermen headed for the same general destination – the streams, reservoirs and lakes of California’s Eastern Sierra mountains.

If you aren’t an avid angler or married to one, you may not know that the last Saturday of every April is the annual Opening Day of the Eastern Sierra Trout Season – often shortened to just “the Opener” – as in, “Are you doing the Opener this year, or waiting for warmer weather?” Also affectionately known to participants and those they leave behind as “Fishmas,” the annual Opener sends Southern California anglers by the tens of thousands up Highway 395 and into Inyo and Mono Counties to try their lucky lures against the wild and planted fish stock that have had the long, bitter winter to grow bigger and hungrier.

On Opener weekend, fishermen head out by the carload, bleary eyed and caffeine-fueled, visions of rainbow trout dancing in their heads. This legion of lake loiterers becomes progressively more alert as they drive through the Owens Valley towns of Lone Pine, Independence, Big Pine and Bishop. Signs and banners in shop windows and hung across the highway greet the wader-wearing warriors as they pass with graphic shouts of “Merry Fishmas!,” “Welcome, Fishermen!” or “Land a lunker!”

As part of the Opener ritual, most if not all of this convoy of casting characters will make a stop at one or more of the many bait and tackle shops along the way – many of which stay open all night on “Fishmas Eve” (and yes, they really call it Fishmas Eve). After all, it doesn’t matter how much fishing equipment you’ve brought, there’s always a new flavor of bait or type of hook that simply must be purchased in order to ensure a successful weekend.

The high school kids in Independence (a tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town along the way to hallowed fishing grounds) sell Styrofoam containers of night crawler worms on Opener weekend to raise funds for various school activities. I’ll bet the clean up.

Having a son who’s been a certifiable fishing addict since the age of five, I know of no other hobby – some would say affliction – that requires the near constant addition of new gear and accessories. (Although, golf may come close.) To be a true fisherman, one needs to invest a sum worthy of Goldman-Sachs bailout on new and improved ways to catch fish.

I’m not saying that fishermen are gullible (“gill”able?), but I would bet that you could take a simple size 12 single salmon egg hook, repackage the exact same hooks with a new label marketing them as revolutionary left-handed technology designed exclusively for use in water flowing right-to-left instead of left-to-right – and a million fishermen would spend perfectly good cash to add these special “new” hooks to the arsenal in their tackle boxes. You never know when you’ll run into reverse flowing water, after all. Or ambidextrous trout.  

As we have for many years, my above-mentioned son and I often take part in any given year’s Trout Opener weekend – getting up before dawn on the Saturday morning in question to put our small aluminum boat into the frigid waters and await the first rays of sunlight, and with it, the official start of the Spring/Summer fishing season.

How do we usually do? Well, if you measure the “success” of a fishing trip by the number of rainbows brought home in the cooler, we typically fail spectacularly. Depending on the year, either most of the lakes are still covered by ice and the water just too cold for the fish to bite – or the wind is blowing at gale force – or there are enough boats crowding the prime lake locations that you can’t cast your line without hooking another angler, or … you get the idea.

But as far as I’m concerned, the chance to sit in a boat with my college-age son (and sometimes my father-in-law) for most of the day, in the high altitude splendor of the snow-covered Sierras, sharing a cheese and cracker lunch with a side of priceless conversation – well, it’s pretty hard to classify a trip like that as anything but successful.

Besides, I hear there’s a brand new sun-dried Tuscan garlic flavor of bait that I’m going to pick up before our next fishing trip. Yeah, that should have ‘em absolutely jumping into our boat.

I’ll see you ‘round town.

Note: A version of this post was originally published in the April 29, 2010 edition of the CV Weekly Newspaper (www.cvweekly.com).

The Porta-Potties Are In Bloom

I know Spring has arrived in the foothills of Southern California not because of the clouds of yellow pollen that waft through the air with even the slightest breeze (or leaf blower), turning our cars a bright, powdery shade of saffron. It’s also not because our family pops antihistamines like Tic-Tacs during these days.

No. I know when Spring has sprung because of all the Porta-Potties popping up on neighborhood lawns from Sunland in the west to Flintridge in the east of our quaint suburban valley. Our all-too-brief rainy season is essentially over, with months of bone dry, hot-as-a-muffler weather just around the corner. Mortgage meltdown and shrinking home equity lines of credit be damned, homeowners everywhere seem to have pulled the trigger on long-awaited remodeling projects.

So, up go the Porta-Potties set far out by the curb. In come dumpsters to driveways like ships to berth. And out come the sledgehammers, crowbars, saws and enough power tools to dim the lights two counties over.

Homeowners who wait until Spring to begin remodeling are smart. Unlike my wife and me, who foolishly began our first, and last, major home remodel at the beginning of winter many years ago – a winter of near record rainfall. And cold. And wind. And what were we thinking?  

Within days after our contractor and his horde of hairy-handed helpers arrived, half of the roof and at least a third of the exterior walls in our house were gone, leaving most living areas exposed to the ravages of winter.

Our Christmas tree that year was on wheels. We had no undemolished corner of a living room in which to put a traditional tree, so we bought a small, live tree in a planter and sat it on a 4-wheeled moving dolly. Then, whenever rainwater breached a new location in the ceiling and threatened to short out the decorative lights festively strung on our tannenbaum like spiral slices on a holiday ham, we would simply roll the entire yuletide display to a less-damp location elsewhere in the house.

I spent the better part of the next four months waking up during the night to the sound of howling wind, flapping tarps and flowing water. I would jump out of bed, dash outside with a flashlight in one hand and hammer in the other, and climb up onto the remains of our roof to frantically refasten blue tarps that had become unfurled sails.

I have pictures of our then school-aged son and daughter, standing on a rough plywood subfloor in what would months later be a beautiful new kitchen. They are bundled up in their bathrobes, with a “hurry up and take the picture, Dad, it’s freezing in here” look on their faces. Behind them where a wall should be, is more half-inch plywood, temporarily nailed onto 2x4 studs – a laughable (yet in no way funny) imitation of walls to keep at least some of the wind and rain out of the “kitchen” until real stucco and wallboard versions could be installed. In the picture, rainwater can be seen pouring through the gaps in the plywood.

How we made it through that period without a visit from Child Protective Services, I’ll never know. Seeing the many blue and white plastic porta-potties dotting the streets around town today, reminds me all over again of that unforgettable time when the porta-potty in our front yard was the only place to go to get out of the rain. Ah, good times.

But then, really – aren’t Porta-Potties all about good times? I mean, what other industry (other than hair salons) has companies with so many clever names? You just gotta love “Happy Can Portable Toilets,” or “Best Seat In The House,” “Johnny On The Spot,” “Royal Throne,” “Gotta Go Potties,” “UrinBiz,” “Willy Make It?,” “Ameri-Can,” “Tanks Alot,” and my personal favorite, “Doodie Calls.” I’m not making these up, folks. Then again, if your business is Porta Potties (What did you do today, Daddy?), you find your fun where you can.

With that thought, I’ll officially welcome the new season by taking yet another walk through the neighborhood, where the scent of Spring – and other things – is in the air.

(AUTHOR’S NOTE: This post is an edited version of a column first published in the April 3, 2008 edition of the Crescenta Valley Sun newspaper.)

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