Uinta Mountains

Last weekend, I took my first vacation to Utah in nearly a year. The day after arriving in Utah, we packed our tents and headed out for a camping trip in the Uinta Mountains. Shortly after setting up camp, we wandered down to a nearby lake, where I was able to prove to Lincoln and Noah that I'm the greatest rock-skipper in the history of the world. Later that night, Lincoln and Noah crawled into their sleeping bags and requested that I tell them several scary, but true, stories about my childhood. Long after the boys fell asleep, I took a short walk outside our tent to count the stars and bask in the light of a full moon, (and ponder the reasons why everyone else in the world seemed to be able to sleep but me).

The next morning, we packed our tents and hiked a short way to some fly fishing on the south fork of the Ashley River. I somehow hooked a fish on my very first cast into the river, which apparently qualified me as the world's greatest rock-skipper/fly fisherman. After catching and releasing all of the fish in the river, we packed up our fishing poles and drove to a safe spot to shoot my dad's old single-shot 22 rifle and my grandpa's 22 pistol. As we shot a few rounds at an old rusty can, I was able to convince Lincoln and Noah that it would be best if we let the rabbits (and all of the other animals they wanted to kill) go free.

Despite foiling the boys' hunting plans, I believe Lincoln and Noah accomplished everything else they set out to do on our trip. They even succeeded in overwhelming their Aunt Melanie with an endless barrage of questions during the 4-hour car ride home. I can't feel too sorry for Melanie, however, because I had previously warned her to pace herself within minutes of our departure from Orem. But she recklessly spurned my advice and proceeded to answer all of the boys' questions (in even more detail than the boys themselves anticipated) during the first 30 minutes of the trip. Despite Melanie's poor judgment, I'm confident that she still found a moment or two to appreciate the beauty of another family adventure in the Uintas. I know I did.

I haven't been this excited since Bourne Ultimatum. I just hope it's really deep and dark so I can take my kids to it and freak them out. If they're not going to believe in Santa Claus (or WMD's in Iraq), then I'll at least make them believe in the Joker.

America We Stand As One

I'm proud to live in a country where anyone can make a patriotic music video. Would it be nice if some people didn't have that right? Definitely. But I'm still proud to live in a country where everyone is free to make complete fools out of themselves without the fear of criminal punishment.

All the Pretty Horses

I finally felt inspired to read Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain). I can already tell I'm going to love it. I've had a hard time getting into several other books over the past couple months--ever since I finished 100 Years of Solitude (how do you follow Marquez' masterpiece without experiencing at least some degree of letdown?) But prose like the following paragraph seems to be the way out of my boredom:

"They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rose out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in the tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing." (p. 30)