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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Nov 24, 2012 - 03:05pm PT
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That ranger would be Karen Anders, the nice person who might have been on duty at the kiosk in Camp 4 early on. (I know Chris Perry, Larry's lady, worked in the kiosk, too. Her hair was a delicious shade of strawberry blonde.
I dDon't know the gal you call "Red Karen." Is she a friend of Conan's?
The picture on the last post on the previous page is Liz, my second wife, showing up the Rostrum's prow.
Dolores is a high school algebra teacher and got her doc at Mills in Oakland. I guess she took it in Mathematics, likely, all things being equal. (Phew! Sorry!)
Another Flames Mamma, Sha'a'la (Shawla), married and left John Yeates, the "dimmest Flame," and eventually did the same number as Dolores, but she got Doctored about five yars before Dolores.
That's Ron Cagle on the left in back of Sonja H. Can't ID the wimp in the glasses. Whoever you are, lol... :O)
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Nov 24, 2012 - 03:26pm PT
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That sure looks like Randy's mom ought to look. There is a strong resemblance in their noses and their "smiles."
The Rev seems to remember your sister Lynette fondly, but that's his tale.
The poor kitty-cats! We called Priscilla that when we first took him and his brother out from under Ike's shed in Oxnard, braving the claws of Momma Cats. She was a blubbery old thing with a nasty temperament. He didn/t care, so we left the name stand. He was the most marvelous jumper, and cat-fishing was our most popular indoor recreation. Siamese, if you please.
Izzy led a short life, sleeping under tires of parked cars on Dwight Way will have that effect on a dozing cat. Priscilla met a somewhat similar fate in the parking lot of the shop that ran on "sidereal time" in the rear of our building. It was in the stars.
Spot, who the heck remembers cats named Spot? We had Mike, Nancy, Linda, Ziggy, Tigger, and Gary over the next seven years. Baby Gary came home with me from the shelter in my shirt pocket and grew into a monster, able to leap tall anythings gracefully. And Tigger took leave when the neighbor took off one morning and Tig was in the bed. The last he saw, Tig was on the divider on I-80 at the Hilltop Drive on-ramp after leapin/falling from the ledge outside the passenger window onto the freeway. He saw him in the rear-view mirror. Tig showed up back at the house months later, his claws shredded from the landing on the ashphalt.
Cats! Sheesh.
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throwpie
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Nov 24, 2012 - 03:28pm PT
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Our Mouse hisself in the Vertical World of Yosemite. The same photo was incorrectly labled as George Meyers in an issue of Ascent.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Nov 24, 2012 - 03:48pm PT
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The G.M. was with the party that day, which included Andy Cox, his buddy, and Jean Neal, Galen's friend, and it was fail for me, fail for Cox, and Jean failed over on Little John. I came down right after the 5.9 wouldn't go. Galen needed a second to finish up on LJ and I volunteered while the others had their go on MD.
We had a whale of a time ss Cox's lense fell out of his eyeglasses and perched on his shoulder! Ludicrousness and failure go hand in hand in this avocation, methinks.
It's funny that Galen put that photo in Vertical World. He didn't even remember my name, but that's OK, you know who I am, Pie!
And Millis got his fifteen minutes of fame when Sherry A. doodled him. And he got labelled Millis, not Dennis Miller. You would think GR might have remembered "Mouse" as a nickname, but GM is far better-known, so it's really a no-brainer why he called me that. I never saw that issue of Accent on Climbing.
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SCseagoat
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Nov 24, 2012 - 04:26pm PT
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Still so good! Feel like I'm reading a novela! Loving it
Susan
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throwpie
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Nov 24, 2012 - 04:39pm PT
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Not doubt it's you mouse...if you look real close you can see the non thumb.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Nov 24, 2012 - 04:51pm PT
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You loosey-goosey, that's a lot of close looking, because the non-thumb's no eht tfel dnah, nevets.
Santa Cruz seagoat, a wee thank you, but I must say it's fun writing about one's many selves which one has been in the past, and the elves who appear in my Middle Earth, like Odd (and CosmicC just phoned, too!), and the guy upstairs who knows the Rev from his days at Bagger Ass, they all help to string the thread out a bit more, leading where?
Don't want to know, just want to keep on truckin'.[Click to View YouTube Video]I'm a rubber-legged boy from Bedlam. My brother Mike recently sent a picture of an old Bucyrus Erie 22B, which is just a drag-line getting old. :) It's not an old steam drill, like in the song, Down the Road Apiece, by Chuck Berry. For the last fifty-odd years that to me sounded like Osteen Grill and I just now looked the lyrics up, so there ya go, around and around (B side to Johnny B. Goode) in a circle and you're back where your started.
I believe I'll ride. I believe I'll go back home.[Click to View YouTube Video]
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Gypsy
Social climber
NC
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Nov 24, 2012 - 05:12pm PT
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No, I don't think that is Cagle in the photo with Sonja. They were two climbers I didn't know--even at the time. They were from elsewhere...I think this was when Randy and Gene Foley were doing the Leaning Tower.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Nov 24, 2012 - 05:49pm PT
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Look achoo! Gesundheit!
The past staring at me, so here's looking back achoo! (Bless me!)
The Nuke Asshole looks delicious and I'm sure the brownies were nutritious, Dwain.
Here's looking achoo, Locker, Bird, and CosmicCragsman.
Those coals can only bring to mind [Click to View YouTube Video]
Can you dig it?
[Click to View YouTube Video]
Nye lye kit.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Nov 24, 2012 - 06:52pm PT
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Simply done, Tad. This will have to do till later.
MFM
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Nov 24, 2012 - 07:09pm PT
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This is what many city dwellers my age and older might call a steam shovel, thoughtlessly. It's a drag line, and it's purpose is to put thousands of chinese out of work by doing their jobs, which was to dig for gold out on the banks of the Califaornia streams or to dig irrigation ditches, and so forth.
Then there were the dredgers and the dredges (the first being the operator, the second the actual floating machinery).
When Mike sent me the photos, his email read in part, "...the old wooden dredges that screwed this place up in the first place (back in the 1930s)."
The rows of cobbles, as most of you know from our State's sad mining history, represents the last gasp of relatively high-volume mining here.
The rocks and the consequent uselesness of the land they lie on are the reason he was able to buy so much land (twenty acres) with frontage on the Merced. What used to be fertile bottom land that held the world's largest single fig orchard (reputedly), in the thirties was flooded and worked over to a depth of maybe as far down as suction would work. If you don't understand hydraulics, you aren't missing a thing. Spelunkers, now...
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Nov 25, 2012 - 12:49am PT
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I forgot about this flyer I received from VonD and Mary Lou. I was not in attendance. The flyer is printed on both sides.
Did anyone else get there? I'm betting not one Flame went to see his shade do whatever his shadiness does after he splits the scene.
"Constant gardener" you bet!
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Nov 25, 2012 - 01:02am PT
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This is an article trying to unravel the skeins of an ongoing fight over unscheduled water releases by PG&E on the Stanislaus.
My brother's picture was featured because one picture of a Bermingham is worth lots, and there is more to the article, but it's surely out-of-date.
Tim made one comment, which I thought a lot of. He said:
"We had been concerned about what was happening (on the Feather River), but now it'sall of a sudden in owur own back yard on the Stanislaus. It's a long, convoluted mess we're getting into. The fishermen are starting to separate apart from one another and you can't fight something like this if your are divided."
His group is the Anglers Committee Against Artivicial White Water Flows (ACAAWWF). A-sea-double-A double double-U Ef.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Nov 25, 2012 - 01:22am PT
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The story told by my great-grandmother's mother of coming to California in 1851. Edna Bermingham married to Tom Bermingham, who emigrated from Galway in the 1870s and worked for the SPRR as a switchman in the Sacramento canyon below Dunsmuir at a little place called Delta, where the family owned some land.
It's a great fising stretch. The rapids invite you for a ride and there are cliffs to dive from. And it's Shasta water. It just hasta be.
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Patrick Oliver
Boulder climber
Fruita, Colorado
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Nov 25, 2012 - 07:19am PT
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Thanks for the shots of Shiela Slattery. I took a liking to the
sweet lass that year in Yosemite, right when Higgins and I did
Nerve Wrack Point, in Tuolumne in the early 1970s.
She rubbed lotion all over my body for nearly a week,
because I got so horribly sunburned on that climb I couldn't move.
One day when I was bouldering, she followed me around Camp 4. I had
been working on a problem I never finished, as the top-out had
almost nothing, but I was up there, almost had it, and when I realized
I was about to have to jump, I asked her to stand under me. I put my
foot on the top of her head and stood there. At one point, in quiet
humble distress, she said, "Honey...." I had never been called that
before, and being a bit immature, to say the least, that was the
beginning of the end of our relationship. I was that superficial.
But I sang and played piano for her at the lodge and at the chapel,
nice nights when we were alone. And I talked her into quitting her job
at Degnan's and riding the freights with me back to Colorado. She was
ready to marry me. In some kind of playful mood I asked her to
change her name, spell her first name backward. It would now be
Aleihs (ahhleece). In Boulder, I promptly ran into another woman I
also had met in Yosemite, whom Higgins and I referred to as
beautiful Peggy. We met her in Tuolumne at that same time, when Tom
and I went into the little cafe in the Meadows. She worked at the
Lodge somewhere and transferred up to the Meadows at times.
We made her blush when Tom and I sang Dylan's "Love to
spend the night with Peggy Day...." Anyway, I fell for Peggy
instantly, and Ahleihs had a kind of breakdown, where she came after
me with both fists... Can't imagine why, but she did return to
Yosemite and got her job back at Degnan's. I ran
into her several times, and I always felt terrible about what I did.
Each year that went by, I realized what a great woman I had there
but was too stupid to know it.... Then when I tried to find her years
later, it was impossible, and only now do I learn she got married
and all those things. Peggy was closet-gay, and on Halloween the next
year, Higgins and I met in the Valley and climbed and attended
the Halloween party at the Ahwahnee. I dressed up as a woman, wearing
one of Peggy's blonde wigs, to fool Higgins' pilot friend who was
looking for a date, and when Peggy saw me dressed as a female she
knew for the first time truly that she wasn't after men. And when
the disguise came off, we were history..., strange as things go
sometimes.... I do remember glancing out a window of her cabin and
seeing a very large bear gazing right into my eyes, a few inches
away, with a big tag on its ear. Wow, that was 40 years ago.
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Gypsy
Social climber
NC
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Nov 25, 2012 - 11:11am PT
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Gypsy
Social climber
NC
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Nov 25, 2012 - 11:35am PT
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Nov 25, 2012 - 12:01pm PT
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Good Morning, Tad! Good morning, Ron! Good morning, Gypsy!
Gray's a beautiful color today. It's foggy as heck and the bones are creaky and it's hard to warm up, too.
The Delta stretch sounds like the local liars' club. I drove hundreds of miles one Labor Day in our pickup, the red Courier, before I built the camper shell for it, with Dolores and the dog kClover to the Mad River in the mid-seventies, the drought years.
We slept overnight on the Claire Engel Reservoir (Trinity Dam) and drove to Covelo, then through the woods to the Mad River below the Ruth Reservoir. The Mad yielded the best-eating little trout we ever had. Straight from the stream to the pan.
Then we headed down to the Eel, but not much water, not what I looked for. So we hit Delta. I landed a huge old rainbow hen on a night crawler (pot-shot, really) and we took it to Redding where my Gramma cooked it on a plank for us.
Every boy should have memories of Gramma's house. I sure do and I'll share those over a bottle of Glenlivet with you and Ron over the campfire. Can we camp at Tom's Thumb?
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Nov 25, 2012 - 12:10pm PT
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Today Is a Gray Peak Day In Peachtree Merced.
11/18/12
It is cloudy and gray here today in Merced.
It could be cloudy and grey if I were somewhere in England (because of the vowel change, don't you know).
It is a gray peaked day over in the Clark Range, too.
It reminds me of a Randall Hamm photograph I saw once, with a barely discernible human subject standing atop Mt. Lyell like Ernest Hemingway at his typewriter--just standing there looking gravely and discerningly at the lens of another's creativity.
I guess that it's just my imagination. It gets fired up by lovely women. Especially when they are on the best possible, the highest, the Betty of Yowlsemite peaks. Or behind a library circulation department desk.
It is a good day to read a book.
It is a better day to watch football.
It is even a still Betty day whenever I go to visit our local County Library, which I can see from my window--along with Mt. Clark, all grey and granity on the horizon, backed up by his posse, Gray Peak, Red Peak and Merced Peak,running south. I can see them also from the top floor of the library.
Ho! for Southern Yowlsemite and eastern Madera County, the friendly neighbor to the south, which has a fine Central Library of its own, I've heard. And Balls, and Bass Lake and Ahwahnee and Nip in Mariposa is so jealous. I get to Madera only about never any more. I only care about their lovely mountains. And the history of the place is part of Yowlsemite's history, so there it is.
And I shall tell you why it's a Betty day whenever I go to visit the library, but first please give me a couple of seconds to find a bookmark (I said in an aside).
[Thanks. I'm reading Going Up, standing up at a bureau-dresser-clothes- storage unit, like young Papa Hemingway did, according to many, whenever he wrote; and it's going slow because it's really climbing porn and I want it to last. I usually use a bookmark made of pink thread, but it ran away with the jazz thread, so I am using an old piece of TP, autographed by JK--the beat poet? He goes well with Fitschen. They were contemoraries, nearly. I'm not positive of that, but it fits my mental time frame. See how time telescopes when you talk of others' lives and loves? I like that about life. I could talk about myself for hours, just like Joe, only my life wouldn't be nearly as interesting nor as lust-ridden as Joe's, to be sure, but it just might help me to live longer. But I digress--at signifiant risk to my longevity, and then there's the Forty-Niner game, too.]
There is a library here where the books sleep under their covers on shelves in rows like a climbing hostel in the Gunks.
The librarian calls the shots on who is allowed to check them out.
What do you want--she's a County Employee, hardcore about rules, but with a gushy heart. She controls some of my beta, some of my entertainment, but is concerned that I don't have to work very hard to acquire my knowledge or to entertain myself with the words that she has graciously provided.
Each time any client leaves with a stack of books or has paid a fine for forgetfulness, laziness, or just plain rude behavior with "her" books, Betty faithfully utters these words, "Have a peachy day."
She's a black woman, wearing a different daishiki each day, one that corresponds to the fruity avoir of that day, because I got her started by telling her one day, "Your routine is too routine, liven it up."
As the astute lady in green one day; the wise woman in kiwi brown another day; or miss melange of lilac and pink and fruit-ka-bab blue with a head scarf of black and white booka-dots, she took to using a different kind of fruit with each person she served.
"Have a raspberry day, honey."
"Go on and have a honeysuckle day, y'all."
She was from Baton Rouge originally, so it's just not any wonder she is so colorful.
I still owe her two and a half dollars for a late return on Confederate General from Bigster, NV.
It's not exactly money well-spent, as you might not think, because he's such a good writer, that Ron Anderson; and the stuffed teddies he encountered in the woods that day--what a special treat!
I had simply misplaced the book and finally found it ten days later in my stack of porn.
The wages of sin.
I would sin with that sweet-talking librarian.
She swings.
I wonder how she looks in a grey teddy--I'm taking Betty to London.
[Thanks to In Watermelon Sugar by RBr]
Good morning, Patrick Oliver! I can only say, in response to that poignant reminiscence, Top that, Kerouac! I was hoping like heck you might respond. Our thanks.
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