|
|
SUSTAINABILITY, EQUITY, DEVELOPMENT SOMETHING ELSE: Survival Is Not An Option CHAPTER EIGHT - Viability and a Future
Web Site Home
|
The Blog |
|
VIABILITY AND A FUTURE Treat
employees like partners, and they act like partners. What helps
people, helps business. The secret
of business is to know something that nobody else knows. The magic
formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like
guests and employees like people. Not
everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted
counts. The best
leader is the one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants
done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do
it. A. SAIAT Sailing, Mental Models, and TREO The taste of razor blades and the smell of blood filled the air. SAIAT veered away from the trouble. We leveled off and started to slowly gain altitude. November 2004 posted another modest gain. The noose slackened around SAIAT, and the water cleared quickly. At GTEC the noose tightened and the water turned bright red. GTEC no longer swam in water. At its annual meeting on October 7, 2004, it reported that it had recruited seven companies leading to 926 new jobs. The Citizen gave the green light for a Teya Vitu piece the following day having confirmed the real number of jobs created came to 570, with 500 in one call center, Citi Cards at the Tech Park, a move orchestrated more by the efforts of Bruce Wright and John Grabo than Weathers or GTEC. Titled, "Call centers create most jobs here," it distinguished that GTEC reported company estimates, NOT actual jobs currently filled. Weathers backtracked, "All the numbers we put on the board is what companies give us." Unlike the January article, the report hit the boat dead center. Since 1998, call centers accounted for almost all of the jobs created. Given the exploding population of southwestern Arizona, the notion that every job created except a few hundred involved a call center occurred as appalling. With ten times the budget, Tucson could not compete with Sierra Vista or Casa Grande, and the growth of Phoenix, which had effective transportation infrastructure, completely eclipsed southern Arizona. While Tucson talked cloth, Phoenix built beltways. On October 13, 2004, City Manager James Keene resigned. I doubt it had to do with the Diamondback Bridge or economic development. Mayor Walkup spoke prophetically of the search for a replacement, "I think we're going to look closer to home this time." In mid-October, I drove to ASU's downtown campus in Phoenix to meet Dr. Alan Brown, Senator Giffords, and several other high-ranking Arizona State University professors and administrators. I presented the design and the distinctions of Magma's Leadership Development Program. I compressed the nine month program into six hours. To give the reader the slightest taste of a taste, consider the following role play we did to introduce the distinction "context." Notice I said "distinction," which is completely different from having an intellectual understanding of a word. I know that the reader understands context. I am talking about the direct experience of the distinction one cannot get reading a dictionary. Bob is a gym instructor, and Susan is a teacher at the same elementary school. They encounter each other on the playground where children aged 8 to 10 are on the monkey bars, swing sets, and other equipment. Read each context carefully and the conversation slowly, paying close attention to what runs in the back of your mind. It should work. I read as Bob. Senator Giffords read as Susan. We are going to read two short, extremely different conversations, even though what is spoken is identical. Context ONE: Two months ago, Bob lost a wife and two sons aged 8 and 10 in a traffic accident and was given time off. Susan attended the funeral for all three. His wife and sons were his whole life. Bob has not been at the school since. Susan is surprised to see him on the playground. Susan:
Bob? Context TWO: Same situation on the school playground, but no car accident. Four months earlier Bob was caught with a third-grade boy in his office. The boy's pants were down. Other boys then came forward with disturbing stories, but details were too fuzzy for a conviction. Still, he was fired. Susan is surprised to see him on the playground. Susan:
Bob? Clearly, the conversations are different because they occur in different contexts. Well, what becomes available if one can operate at the level of context? The distinction is anything but trivial, touchy feely, woo-foo fluff. The LDP devoted a DAY to that one distinction. People smile and nod at first, "Of course, we get it," but then we kept going, and one-by-one, in a priceless experience, the instructor saw the bulbs light up. By the afternoon, participants lived in a bigger reality. What a conversation. Well, I only had six hours, so I delivered the material on multiple levels simultaneously (also happening with this text). They would understand at whatever level suited them. Dr. Brown seemed to grasp the gist of it, as did Giffords. They expressed an interest in developing a way to deliver the program to government officials. Everyone found the ideas interesting and worthy of discussion, but in six hours one cannot hope to grasp the ideas like one who had participated in the program as designed. Another distinction: mental models. Human nature gives us the tendency to "thingify" every thing. Our language supports the process. Been a project manager? Think a project is a thing? Think economic development is a thing? Is downtown a thing? Is the University of Arizona a thing? Is SAIAT a thing? Is the 2008 election a thing? None of these are things, but we operate as if they are. We generate mental models as discussed in Peter Senge's Fifth Discipline. The house thermostat is an example of the tendency to have a mental model that does not correspond to known fact. Typically, our mental model for the thermostat corresponds to a valve. Coming home after a holiday vacation to a freezing house, we turn the thermostat to ninety as if it were a faucet and think the setting at ninety will "pour faster" than the setting at sixty-eight. We make our choices and live in the reality that corresponds to our mental models, not reality as it actually is. The worlds we live in and the realities we perceive are played on the view screens of the distinctions we possess and the mental models we have constructed. The ability to distinguish and operate with these can lead to extraordinary insights and breakthroughs. One more distinction tying directly to economics and economic development involves the game theory breakthrough from traditional economics based upon the premise of rational behavior pursuing self-interest. I will spare the reader a lecture on The Wealth of Nations "invisible hand" and Adam Smith's idea that the self-interest of each served the best interests of all. Dr. Nash brilliantly refuted the theory as featured in A Beautiful Mind. To illustrate the lack of rationality and how real economic theory must incorporate culture and the local mindset to obtain a genuine understanding of the game to be played, consider the following. Suppose you live near Broadway and Swan and learn that a DVD collection you want is regular $75 price at the Best Buy on Broadway, but on sale for $30 at the Circuit City on Oracle? How many drive across town to save the $45? Answer: just about all of us. We'll all do it. Now, take a $2545 diamond ring for sale at a Park Place Mall jewelry shop, and find out that the same ring is available for $2500 at a Tucson Mall jewelry shop. How many folks drive across town to save the $45? Answer: almost NONE of us. We are talking about the exact same drive for the exact same savings, but the behavior is completely different. A predictable reaction, "Well the person buying the ring has more money and doesn't care." WRONG. The decision has nothing to do with the individual's wealth. Rich or poor, in the first case we overwhelmingly make the drive. In the second case, we overwhelmingly don't. It has to do with how the $45 occurs in the circumstance, its context. Traditional economics says $45 is $45 and a drive from Broadway/Swan to Wetmore/Oracle is a drive from Broadway/Swan to Wetmore/Oracle. Adam Smith, I kid you not, would argue that the economic decision would result from the rational analysis of the calculated costs and savings, the difference being the profit. The rational analysis involves the drive and the savings. $45 is $45 except when it isn't. Trivial? I wish I could have the spread between what people spend to drive to a cheaper gas station and cost of the drive to get there. Say your tank holds 15 gallons. A three cent spread for a complete fill up nets 45 cents. The reader can pursue further if interested. How does this relate to economic development? What's $45? Still don't get it? What's downtown? Still don't get it? What's a bat? Regarding the 2004 election, we re-elected the idiot and Randy Graf departed the state legislature to go after Kolbe in the CD 8 primary. He got 42 percent of the primary vote. Kolbe sailed to victory in the general election, but noticed Graf's numbers. So did Graf. On January 19, 2005, ten years to the exact day after my misinformed manager had ripped the side of my head open, the city and the county merged GTEC with the city OED and some county staff. The combined organization, the Regional Economic Development Corporation, quickly became known as REDC, a name that lasted less than two months. At first, Weathers said his future was unknown, but when offered the position of head of recruitment in the new organization, he submitted his resignation. The Star's Jim Kiser published a January 26 article expressing praise for the move but with "cautious optimism." What had initially been counted as ten, then two dozen, then three dozen had now grown to forty plus organizations involved in economic development. Kiser instructed his readers to put him in the "skeptically optimistic" column, duly noting the issue of obtaining private sector support. Both Mayor Walkup and Supervisor Bronson supported REDC, which meant the place would have a several million dollar budget at its disposal, almost double GTEC's largest annual budget. Kiser voiced a concern, "I find it hard to see how corporations will put money into an economic development organization that is funded by government and basically run by government." Weathers confused people by emerging as the head of the Tucson Association of Realtors. He remained in the spot for 20 minutes before leaving town. Not that anyone cared, he got weird by telling the press he didn't know where he was going, "somewhere back east." the same day the Regional Growth Partnership in Toledo announced his new position with them. Whatever. In February 2005, the city figured out who would replace James Keene, and indeed, the pick had come from closer to home. Deputy Pima County Administrator Mike Hein, who had not even applied for the job, was chosen. The forces behind this are beyond the scope of this document, but they involved local business leaders and other influential members of the community. The name most cited was the community restaurant king, Bob McMahon. While Hein was still with the county, I visited his office and briefed him on SAIAT. Pretty sharp, he seemed to understand all that I was saying. The community was getting tired of city and county bickering. The city trusted Hein to move the situation forward. The REDC name had to go, and by March, the organization had a new name, Tucson Regional Economic Opportunities, Inc., or TREO. TREO and SAIAT could have become a fabulous collaboration. Raytheon approached SAIAT that spring about a huge training project, 6,300 employees over six weeks to be conducted in the summer. They wanted to rent computer labs, as many as SAIAT had, to be locked down and reserved for over two months to allow preparation and a contingency for slippage. How many labs did we have? We had two computer labs and five classrooms. An engineer would have told them we had two computer labs. A CEO would have told them we had seven computer labs. I called Valerie at MAS real estate and inquired into the possibility of a three month lockdown of the space SAIAT had vacated. It had five classrooms. I offered to extend a buck a foot a month for three months. For MAS, the offer provided free money, a slam dunk where they simply turned off Picor Real Estate Agent Steve Cohen for a few months and accept $25 grand. I told Raytheon SAIAT had access to twelve computer labs and gave them a tour, talking detailed technology and capacity with their computer gurus. They wanted 16-24 computers with high-speed-Internet access in each lab. Could SAIAT do it? I said, "Of course." Raytheon wanted all twelve rooms. We needed 216 high-performance workstations and had forty. I needed 176 more at a cost of approximately $1100 each, a little over $200,000. The rental revenue would pay for them, but afterwards SAIAT would be drowning in machines it could no longer use. I called rental shops and learned that I could buy a workstation for less than the cost of renting one for eight weeks. Duane would have charged over to Dell and bought the units. Trucks of PC's would have arrived at SAIAT. In August, our balance sheet would show a whopping $200K+ of equipment sitting dormant. We have arrived at the practical application of the distinction mental model. Obsessed, I thought about the situation day and night, weekends, lunch, dinner, middle of the night, during the shower, brushing teeth, driving, and eating. I couldn't even go to the theater and watch a thriller without thinking about how to get 176 computers for eight weeks without renting them or buying them. The physics seemed locked up. What else was there? I woke up one Saturday on a mission to resolve the situation. Reflection over caffeine at Starbucks yielded no result. Waiting until I was hungry, I went to Luke's for a protein fix (the Italian beef with hot peppers). Then I headed to the cigar shop, chose a Montecristo, sank into a leather couch, and thought. I thought and thought. This was Raytheon. This was Raytheon! The experience had body sensations. Suppose one is the executive director of SAIAT. Raytheon wants 216 computers in twelve rooms. One secured the rooms, but only has forty computers. How to get the other machines? CEO kindergarten led to asking MAS for the five rooms. The computer situation required far better dancing. Some readers may not see it yet. Think. We were in the mental model of renting Raytheon computer labs. The customer had requested computer labs. Naturally, we quoted for computer labs, and the task involved acquiring 176 computers that would be used for about eight weeks. Both Raytheon and SAIAT were locked in paradigm of renting computer labs, and I would not accept it. Regardless of what happened to me or where my crazy career would go, I had the pleasure of shifting mental models on the street. I have done it on several occasions. In the baseball world of training, you would not believe the kind of pitches SAIAT got and could hit. Jana and Nancy could chase ecstasy tablets with cans of Red Bull and still never be able to dance with SAIAT at the training rave. We didn't even flinch at the notion of security guards meeting instructors in the parking lot at 2 a.m. I can't provide the pool, but I can dip the reader's toe in the water, right here, right now. Whatever little sense you can get from the toe, you understand Matt and SAIAT, what we were, and how I danced. I saw and knew exactly what was going to happen. It would be win/win for everyone. SAIAT would win, and Raytheon would win. Everyone would be delighted, but they were the customer, so they would have the experience of choosing the path, but I had built the paths. I had read Steven Lukes. The play was already over. I wrote another proposal. If they wanted, I could save them money, serious money. Instead of computer labs, we could rent them classrooms. How did this work? If they could find their own equipment, if they agreed to establish their own internet connectivity, servers, switches, projectors, network cabling, power cords, and workstations, then we were merely supplying a classroom. Under these circumstances, I could cut the rate substantially. Cleaned up that tennis ball, stroked its fur, and lobbed it softly over the net. A couple weeks later they wrote back, "We will provide everything and just rent classrooms." The drop in revenue from computer labs to classrooms with nothing compared to the drop in costs. SAIAT barely had to spend a dime. The insight came from grasping the level of resources and the reality of each organization. Now THAT was the distinction mental model, SAIAT, and your humble blogger. In its search for a CEO, TREO received 94 resumes. After reducing the field to three, they hosted an event at the Starr Pass resort so various individuals in the economic development community could meet the finalists. I attended and found myself sitting at a table with Ray Flores, the Chancellor of Pima Community College. I asked him if he had heard of SAIAT. He nodded and smiled, noticing my SAIAT badge. We discussed the Midwest, certain universities, and with my face I cut a look that was supposed to say, "Do we have a problem to discuss?" He understood, "There's so much work for everyone." Thomas Stauffer of the Star published an article on May 29, 2005 regarding the importance of education for economic development. Marshall Vest had quite a bit to say, "A city's success at economic development ultimately rests with just one measure - how many jobs it attracts. It's about jobs, about growing your economy," Vest said, "ultimately, the factor that will make the most difference in attracting good jobs to Tucson is the quality of the education system and its ability to turn out skilled workers." Vest continued, "But Tucson and Arizona in general must overcome major impediments in the state's public education system, which ranks near the bottom on virtually all gauges. Spending per pupil, teacher salaries, dropout rates - we just don't rank well at all," he said. "That's probably the biggest barrier that economic developers need to overcome, the perception of not caring about public education. In today's information age, more and more require at least a high school education - if not college - and in order to compete in high technology jobs, you just have to have a skilled work force." In July and August 2005, over 6,300 Raytheon employees attended SAIAT for training on the company's new software. We were packed. I had a vendor set up a coffee shop.
B. The 2006 Election and the Blogosphere Giffords formally announced her candidacy on January 24, 2006 to a well attended event at the Arizona Inn. The campaign would be a pleasure to watch. For me, the 2006 election for Arizona's Congressional District 8 would occur as an entertaining sporting event whose outcome I already knew. I remained primarily a spectator, but couldn't resist helping her a little in my own way.
Active GOP supporter Mike Hellon announced his candidacy on February 3, 2006. Ray Carroll and Bruce Ash appeared with Hellon to support him. Hellon was a good candidate, and he occurred to me as the strongest person for the GOP to put forward. His ex-wife, Senator Toni Hellon, had proven herself as an outstanding public servant in district 26 and campaigned to keep her seat. Mike had been former chairman of the Arizona GOP. Toni had worked as Kolbe's campaign manager in 2004.
I googled the names of all of the candidates and discovered these Web sites called blogs. What was a blog? Well, anyone could create a blog, a Web site where they could post whatever they wanted, as far as I could tell, and then anyone could write comments about what had been written. Bloggers and those who posted comments did not have to use real names. Behind the secrecy, people felt safe to say anything and did. By April I could no longer restrain myself and started posting comments. I found the blogosphere a fascinating place, an entire world of activity occurring in parallel with regular reality and mainstream media, but at ten times the speed. The traditional media of newspapers, television, magazines, and even the high budget news Web sites like cnn.com or abcnews.com seemed distant and slow. What one could learn on a blog about a situation would appear in the paper days or weeks later if at all. The blogs featured no-holds-barred, brutal exchanges of vitriol where entire squads of bloggers backing particular candidates went at each other, slicing both the candidates and each other. The threads could run over 100 comments long. A national, huge blog called Daily Kos, allowed anyone to sign up and post original stories. Anyone at all could say anything at all. Soon I was going at it. I doubt the blogs made a difference in an election, but it was so fun I didn't care. I started Sustainability, Equity, Development in September 2006. While the Democrats created a circus in the blogosphere, the Republicans created brick and mortar fireworks, the NRCC charging into the local scene to blast Graf and support Huffman over the other four possible nominees. Serious anger ensued. All four candidates running against Huffman held a press conference at the Doubletree. Huffman's shot at the nomination evaporated. The GOP behavior in LD 26 was almost as ridiculous as in CD 8. The Citizen, smelling trouble, chimed in to help Somers, probably superior to Lisa Lovallo and definitely superior to David Jorgenson. (Hershberger had a cake walk.) I won't comment on Lovallo, but Jorgenson came from Kookville, one of those Jesus people on a rampage to stop that one abortion that occurs for every twenty children who die in the country due to lack of health insurance. Somers was defeated, which would once again have profound implications for your humble blogger, and they even ousted the fabulous Toni Hellon. Kooks cheered for a couple months until Democrats, as many predicted, won both seats in the general election. I attended the October 24, 2005 debate between the CD 8 candidates at the Temple Emanu-El. Independent Jay Quick, having no stomach for the reality of running for such a seat, skipped the packed event. What a debate. On Sunday, November 5, the weekend before the general election, I was enjoying a Padron when RT Gregg, Randy Graf's campaign manager, came into the cigar shop. We recognized each other, said hello, shook hands, and proceeded to enjoy our cigars. Mr. Gregg and I had a delightful conversation that lasted almost two hours. We talked about Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged at length. We also discussed the philosophy of society, governance, American history, economic development, political systems and, in particular, had a rich discussion of the distinction between libertarianism and conservatism. After this exchange of ideas at a relatively high level, Gregg shifted to a street smart remark that the libertarians could be counted on to slit their throats on the legalization of narcotics every time. Without saying so directly, between the lines he showed he knew Graf was going to lose. Of course, anyone paying attention would know this. Obviously, I didn't know RT Gregg's future, but the staunch conservative had plenty of intelligence, which made it even more amazing when he insisted that Republicans never attacked their opponents. He believed what he was saying. In his reality, only Democrats attacked their opponents. I was floored. The election occurred. Giffords sailed past the 50 percent line and settled in at 54 percent, and surprise, Melviin and Jorgenson lost. Carol and Toni would have won. Naturally Janet sailed into her seat at nose bleed percentages. Janet Nepolitano is one of the best governors in the history of the United States. I attended the Democratic celebration party at the Doubletree. Bloggers like Ted Prezelski and Art Jacobson, as well as primary candidate Francine Shacter knew I was x4mr. Francine approached me, and we discussed the election. I ran into astronaut Mark Kelly, Giffords fiance, who also knew I was x4mr. He spoke first, "Hey, I really like your blog." We were standing by the computers showing the latest results. I told him how I'd watched him lift off in the shuttle on CNN on July 4, and we talked about blogging, my own blog, some of the other bloggers, the war in Iraq, and China. What a terrific guy. I could understand why she liked him. Gabrielle's father, Spencer walked up to us, "How's it looking?" I turned
to him and smiled, "She should hit fifty-five percent or close." I entered the fall of 2006 with a personal sense of satisfaction and excitement. SAIAT had become viable, operated in the black, had vocal support from everyone, and had cash reserves to use for an economic development training investment. The November elections were looking positive for those wanting to end the tyranny, the suppression of action to address global warming, growing economic disparity, and the restoration of democracy and the voice of the people. I had proven Cigar Man wrong. I had saved SAIAT. What was I thinking? C. The Daughter and Kathryn At 11:30 PM one Friday night, the phone rang. I do not get phone calls at 11:30 PM. Who was dead? The daughter was hysterical, "I got accepted to Stanford!!" Stanford? STANFORD!!!!! I became equally hysterical, and two shrill raised pitch voices could not talk fast enough at each other in a babble fest where neither had the slightest idea what the other was saying and it really didn't matter. A terrific kid, the daughter, an incredibly sharp straight A-student at University High School with extracurricular credentials off the map, had attained one pinnacle of academic achievement. We calmed down, and I congratulated her. After I hung up the phone, I stood in the kitchen, beaming at the thought of my daughter attending Stanford University. Then I started to think. Was Stanford expensive? On Saturday, October 6, 1984, I joined a group associated with the University of Arizona's "Rambler's" hiking club on a hike to Agua Caliente Canyon north east of Tucson. On this hike, I saw Kathryn for the first time. I could not stop looking at her. I could not stop thinking about her. I wanted her to like me. I wanted her to think I was a good guy.
Since October 6, 1984, not one day of my life has passed that I have not thought about Kathryn, and until my last day, not one will pass where she doesn't enter my mind. Sometimes the most precarious and difficult terrain was that spanned by the distance between two human beings. I kid the reader not. I think about this person every day. On Wednesday, September 30, 1987 at 9:30 p.m., I had the profound and remarkable privilege of participating in one of the most remarkable events in the cosmos, the creation of human life. Unlike most, I knew I was. The most articulate would find describing the experience in English more difficult than painting the Sistine Chapel with a Buick. I was not the creator or the author of life. No, I had the privilege of being a part of something infinitely beyond myself. What happened that night was completely different and remains one of the most profound experiences I have ever had. I will never forget holding this woman and staring at the bedroom ceiling in the house at the corner of Fourth Street and Second Avenue in Tucson, Arizona, thinking of God, knowing that we had just conceived a child. Humans could go places language could not, and language cannot touch the richest experience of "sacred" I have ever had. Children do not come from their parents. Children come through their parents. The shift in perspective has nontrivial consequences. The next night, Thursday, October 1, 1987, University of Arizona students and associates held an organized protest against the Reagan administration's meddling in Nicaragua and its obsession with the Sandinistas. Reagan seemed to think that Daniel Ortega and a few kids (average age of the population was 14) posed a dramatic threat to the security of the United States of America. Remember Iran Contra? Kathryn was solid bilingual and had spent the summer helping children in Nicaragua. Now age 28, she returned from Central America on a mission from God to have a child. Marriage and a relationship with a man were of secondary importance. Kathryn lived by her own rules. She was not politically active in the sense of walking or working for candidates, but she did contribute to numerous causes and joined various protests, like one in Nevada against nuclear testing. I knew she would be at the protest on campus, but I could not find her. On bicycles, we saw each other at University Boulevard and First Avenue at 8:45 p.m. I told her, "You're pregnant." She looked at me like I was nuts and shrugged it off. In a month she would not be shrugging, and I suddenly encountered a heavy dose of hiker trauma. Three events occurred in rapid succession. The first involved a full moon night hike in the Tucson Mountains. Moonlight hikes in the desert were something true Tucsonans understood. The full moon lit up the desert and created a world I will not try to describe. On Thursday, October 17, 1987, a full moon rose over Tucson and a group of us, including Kathryn, went on a moonlight hike. I will never forget looking at her lying on the rocks, illuminated by the moon and looking up at the sky with an interesting expression on her face. Meters tweaked. Months later, I would learn that as she lie there, she was wondering if she were pregnant. I ended up in front of the group as the trail descended into the shadows where everything was pitch black. I could not see the ground. All of the sudden, a deafening rattle shattered my senses. Rattlesnake. I froze instantly. My left foot dangled in front of me. The loud rattling spoke powerfully: go away. I very much wanted to go away, but going away was problematic given that the ground was completely dark, and I no idea where the snake was. Everyone heard the roar, and Jim called out, "Step slowly back, Matt!" I did not move. The snake was as upset and nervous as I was. The blackness blinded me, but the snake could see just fine. It sensed heat, and my warm legs made an easy target. It could have been worse. We were only a mile and a half from the cars. St. Mary's Hospital was close (20 minutes), and our group had men who could carry me. Even in the car, I could keep my heart a good three feet above the wound. My life was not in danger. I would have medical attention within 45 minutes, but fangs had a clear shot. It would hurt. I slowly pulled the left leg back from in front of me to a step behind me, praying the rattling would stop. It grew louder, sounding like the snake was everywhere; the volume suggesting a Diamondback. The next step would be the one that mattered, the now forward right leg. I raised my right leg slowly, wincing and bracing for the bite, and took a slow step back. The rattling stopped. A few weeks later, I went on a hike to the Nature Conservancy out near Sierra Vista, now officially aware that I was going to be a father. We were looking at the beautiful fall colors. I knelt down to take a photograph, and hidden in the brush was a small cholla cactus. Its piercing spike jabbed directly into the tendon under my left kneecap, deep, and when I instantly jerked upward; the thing broke off, embedded in the joint. I was in agony, almost crippled, and we were six miles into the mountains and over an hour from the nearest town. Jim loaned me his Exactoknife. I wobbled off to be alone, and crying, I tried to slice into my knee to get at the needle. I suppressed the nausea as the blood started to flow. I couldn't get to the needle, and I sure did try. So your humble blogger, a cactus spike embedded in the tendon under his kneecap, got to limp his way in excruciating pain six miles out of the mountains. In a Sierra Vista emergency room, a medical technician assisted by a bright light, magnifying glass, and a pair of tweezers, extracted the thorn. What an awful experience. I saved the thorn. A weekend or two later, the truly horrible occurred. A group of us including Kathryn backpacked into the mountains just south of Lake Roosevelt to a gorgeous area called Secret Place, a pristine landscape with fabulous pools and waterfalls. Hiking out on Sunday, Annette and I found ourselves separated from the others. No problem. We were seasoned, experienced hikers and retraced our steps until the familiar showed up.
Protocol did not call for denying oneself water. Ration, but keep drinking to remain as hydrated and functional for as long as possible. Once too dehydrated, the body froze in a terrifying experience where, robbed of electrolytes, the muscles locked up first at the extremities. The paralysis moved inward with a numbing sensation that caused the body to curl up tighter and tighter. The involuntary contraction turned the fingers and hands grotesquely inward like deformed claws, and the ability to speak was lost. When this occurred, one needed to guzzle water and soon to survive. Our water was gone by 3 p.m. We did not discuss the possibility that one of us might "seize." The other would have a choice, stay with for spiritual support, or keep going in hopes of retrieving help in time. Cell phones were not yet common. The others would not get out of the mountains until dusk, too late for search and rescue to look for us. I will spare the reader the next six hours of navigating mountainous terrain and jump to twilight when a miracle occurred. We found fresh horse tracks. The hooves pointed out, not in. Neither Annette nor I gave a rat's ass about the cars, shelter, or food. We had one thing on our minds and only one thing. I turned to her, "There's water at the end of these prints." The hoof prints led to a trail in the forest. We followed as best we could, but lost daylight. Now it was dark, then very dark. The flashlight, believe it or not, did more harm than good. Our bodies, no kidding, organically interacting with the wilderness, tracked the trail more effectively than our eyes and brains did with the flashlight. Our brains were no longer worth much. We kept going on the trail, lost it, found it, for hours. We took turns leading with the follower correcting missteps. We found the cars at about 10 p.m. after walking essentially nonstop for fourteen hours and nearly seven hours without water. Kathryn, with our daughter Nadina growing within her, stood by my car. Her eyes welled up as I approached. She extended a bottle of water. That was the sweetest water I ever tasted. My eyes welled up. As Steve walked to meet Annette, she completely collapsed. He dropped to the ground and seated her upright. He put the water bottle into her mouth. Now out of danger, she released the suffering she had withheld from me. Annette sobbed one of the deepest sobs I have ever heard, then drank, sobbed and drank. Steve cradled Annette, and Kathryn placed a hand on my shoulder. Minutes passed before people spoke. When we got to a place with a phone, Steve put the call into Search and Rescue to cancel the helicopter and crew prepped for lift off at dawn. Kathryn had borderline fanatical views regarding the environment. She rarely drove and usually rode her bike, buying organic produce, organic shampoo, organic soap, organic tortilla chips, and recycled toilet paper at the Fourth Avenue Coop and stuffed them into her bike bags so as not to waste paper. Bike bags bulging with organicity, she puffed her way to the famous house on Second Avenue where Dillinger hung out shortly before he was caught. Everything about me drove her crazy. She objected to my wearing deodorant, "Are you ashamed of the way you smell naturally?" Uh, YES. This is Tucson, Arizona. Think hot. Think lots of perspiration. Minus deodorant, think STINK. She criticized me for locking my car, "Why are you so insecure? Do you really think someone is going to break into your car?" Someone did in fact smash my driver's window and attempt to remove the stereo. The would be stereo thief, idiot, had brought nothing but a screwdriver, not realizing that most stereo extractions required an adjustable wrench. The car had nothing else, so he stole my sunglasses and forgot his screwdriver. The sunglasses, prescription strength at a minus 2.75, were probably less useful to him than his jettisoned screwdriver turned out to be for me. Many years later, one evening it clicked, and I realized that Kathryn's mother was what occurred when Dick Cheney is born female. She once declared, "I can't even hate you!!" The daughter, many years later, remarked, "Actually she's really good at that." Kathryn took orders from no one and did things her way. While pregnant, she touched no alcohol, no medication, and took her eating seriously. On Friday, June 17, 1988, she delivered Nadina at twelve noon. No drugs, no caesarian, no doctor, in her own bedroom on her own bed in her own way with a midwife she trusted, who commented during the delivery, "Strong mother, strong baby." Your humble blogger caught his daughter with his own hands and lifted Nadina up to her mother. Completely exhausted, disheveled, and utterly spent, what little remained of Kathryn held her first born, but she did so with the clarity, integrity, and purity of the ancient ones. Kathryn had a courage and a dignity. Although we could hardly be in each other's presence, we had a daughter. The daughter was going to Stanford.
Next Chapter |
b