When I Grow Up ... and It Could Happen Any Time

When I Grow Up—and It Could Happen Any Time

I finally decided what I want to be when I grow up. When will I grow up, you ask? We’ll call it done at the undertaking where speakers undertake to say nice things about me (hopefully). Until then, I want to be a mountain man. No, not like the buckskin-clad outdoorsmen with muzzle-loader and traps, but like … well … me.  Disappointing perhaps, but I love being in the mountains.  Besides, what is a mountain man? Or does anyone really care? If not, I qualify … and might anyway. I have lived in the Rocky Mountains since age 13 and have walked or run in the Rockies a total distance of nearly 4 times around the earth. Thirty-five miles used to be a day’s walk; now twenty is plenty. My wife prefers that I maintain some semblance of loose ties with civilization, so I do middle-class yuppy as well as mountains—trying to stay versatile, you know. I grew up in Honolulu and Los Angeles, so I’m acquainted with big-city life too—part of why I prefer the rural Rockies.

Do I trap beaver? Of course not! Even the yester-year yahoos raced through those resources so fast that they had to become guides, traders, or whatever else after a brief flurry through the furry. I merely started with the whatever else, doing other jobs seasonally and on the side (as most 19th-century mountain men had to do too) to get by until I could get back to the mountains, where I feel more at home. I’ve done garbage collector, janitor, composer, writer, linguist, and teach college to pay the bills, but those have all been temporary subsistence patterns to hold me over until I can get back to the mountains, though teaching has annually taken a frightful chunk (9-months) each year out of two and half decades. Even the yester-year mountain meanderers left the mountains for the winter and came into town (Taos) from time to time. I just happen to have to stay longer.

The dangers that the yester-year mountain men met were grizzly bears, bullets, arrows, and nature. Black bears are not so dangerous, but grizzlies—they were the only animal that the Native Americans feared and for good reason. How many arrows did it take to kill a grizzly? Did anyone sticking around to count live to tell about it? So I stay south of grizzly country. Black bears I’m not so afraid of ... unless they don’t run away from me. Then I suspect I’d become dreadfully alert, but so far they have done the running away so that I don’t have to. Of course, one doesn’t run from a black bear, but stand and fight. Like everything else in life: easier said than done.

So am I fearless? Nope. Am I a coward? Yep. A common sense coward, like most people are or should be. Courage is submitting to calculated risks for good reason, but clumsily clambering into need-less uncalculated risks for no good reason is stupidity. Weighing the reasons and doing the calculations will vary per person, but hopefully we get better at it with time—which is why we get more cautious with age. So I carry pepper spray and a knife in case a bear or cougar figures out that I’m slower, fatter, and juicier than any deer; otherwise, the hand-to-claw combat would be pathetically unfair. However, men always have been the greater danger. Of mean men, the Old West had plenty, every race contributing some, but today the mean men are mainly in the cities. Of course, there are good people in cities too, mixed with the mean, but having grown up in big cities, I feel safer in the mountains with the black bears.

           Whether the early-30s life-expectancy of the old-time mountain men was due to men being more mean or due to different cultural approaches to conflict resolution is hard to say, but today is a much better time to be a mountain man. It lengthens life instead of shortening it. One can’t earn much at it any more, but it’s a most pleasant life-style with health benefits galore. Yet I do earn a little in the mountains (writing, researching), in case one insists that earning be part of the job description. So when you see me walking the mountains with a shoulder bag of books and rough drafts, I’m working. Honest! Just because it’s in beautiful scenery, in delicious fresh air, and is healthful relaxing mild exercise doesn’t mean that I’m not working. And it costs next to nothing—an occasional pair of shoes! Consider the savings of a day in the mountains, drinking from mountain streams and eating greens, vs. a day at the mall handing over greens. And the mountain’s greens are as good and nutritious as a grocer’s greens (if you care for either). Like a line from my musical Paradise Lost and Found: With inflation and the stock market’s swings up and down, my best hope for a retirement plan may be a good book on edible plants. So I’m practicing.

Also like the old-time mountain meanderers, I’ve learned a little of some Native American languages, but can converse in none. (Linguists mostly learn the basics of several languages relevant to a research area vs. fluency in a few.) Instead of hunting beaver, I hunt knowledge and new discoveries. Instead of exploring the West, I read and explore languages’ pasts while walking the West. So with only a little exaggeration, maybe I’m as much a man of the mountains as this day and age allows, albeit a self-styled one—but weren’t they all. Yes, walking the mountains is so much more beautiful, peaceful, and pleasant than the hustle, bustle, and guzzle of civilization.

My Musicals on Stage

Community Theater

            I recently realized a new definition of courage: community theater. Being on stage, blinded by lights, without a cue or clue of one’s lines, is such an adrenalin rush!  It is high risk adventure, yet perfectly safe, physically. One’s dignity is at risk, but who can manage maintaining much of that through life anyway? But among community, it all happens in a friendly atmosphere of regularly shattered comfort zones. My family was flabbergasted when I wrote my first musical. All they had ever seen me do was work, yard work, pay lunch money, correct papers, and read interesting books, without saying much. They had to do most of the talking if any happened. But then came a time when a daughter (who had done well in drama) did not have a lot to do at the time, and having toyed with the idea of writing a musical, I decided it was time and wrote one with her in mind, followed by 5 more in succession since.

The pattern is consistent: as performance dates draw near, a feeling grows within, a sick feeling, much like an honest effort at Golden Corral coinciding with the stomach flu bug completing its incubation period. And that’s only the worry for your own part, (1) when someone else wrote it, (2) when someone else decided to do it, (3) and when, outside of your own lines, you have no responsibility whatever for the whole mess—if that’s what it turns out to be—as dress rehearsals often suggest it might. But if you wrote it and it is happening because you decided to do it, opening night drawing nigh can seem like a leap of faith into a dark abyss with an old frazzled bungee cord. Yet it works: the performers come through and do well. It’s a wonderful feeling … when it’s over. And I would like to thank the various casts over the years for bearing with me the burdens and fears and joys of the loosely organized pandemonium!

My recent pastime of writing musicals has prompted many questions. We’ll address only those asked by others (not those I ask myself).
Q: Is the enjoyment for the audience worth the work? A: Maybe not, but we can pretend. That’s what theater people do, you know.
Q: When do you find time to write them? A: O there is no time to write them. The way I do that is to think up plots, lines, lyrics, and music while doing something else that I have to do anyway—walking, running, weeding, driving, and sitting in meetings—then I jot down the ideas between meetings.
Q: Do you do them for the money? A: (I try not to fall to the ground with laughter as I say) I have come within $200 of breaking even. It’s a community service.

Q: So why do you do them? What brought you to this? A: I started out as a shy quiet kid the first 45 years of life, so even my family is miffed as to what came over me. Years of being a college instructor first encouraged me to try to talk more than others in the room, which I am now able to do on good days. And when I really get wound up, I could be mistaken for an outgoing conversationalist. After overcoming my shyness in a mere 45 years, I decided we need to have more fun in our drab, duty-filled lives; and few things are more enjoyable than laughing at something funny and listening to entertaining music.

So the real reason I do them is to have fun and to make people happy. Doing duties may contribute to happiness, but those long-term connections need some help along the way: home teaching and handing out homework assignments evoke so few squeals of delight. But musicals scatter squeals of delight all over the auditorium—or at least I assume the events on stage were the sources of them. Many people are depressed. Then we stare at a future packed with drudgerous duties and it is enough to make anyone depressed who isn’t already. So it doesn’t hurt to lighten up a little, laugh more, enjoy some fun music, and figure out how to make life a little more fun sometimes. Rehearsing for a comedy is fun for the cast, and watching it is fun for the audience—a win-win financial loss.
Q: Isn’t it a lot of work? A: You have no idea—enough to question my sanity every time I do one, but that was in question long before I started writing musicals.
Q: What do these musicals do you for? A: Community theater has changed my life: the image of a self-respecting college professor is gone forever; and previous illusions of self-esteem are hardly recoverable. But it is enjoyable working with wonderful people in doing something fun.
Q: Would you recommend community theater for others? A: Certainly! If your life is the usual humdrum dullsville, and you want a thrilling adrenalin rush to wrench you from your ruts, do community theatre! Afterward, most families will still claim you … given some time.  Mine has … most of them.

The Marathon

The Huff-to-Bluff Marathon

My daughters, Shana and Sheila, and my good friend, Kline Carroll, all decided to do the Huff-to-Bluff Marathon (May 2012) and asked me if I would do it with them.  Sure!  What have I got to lose—other than life, use of a limb, or pride? Losing the latter was guaranteed; the former were probabilities difficult to determine without experimentation. So I agreed to bring the old Clydesdale out from pasture and do the Thoroughbred thing one more time. I had done a marathon three decades ago, in my 30’s, when I was a real runner, doing 16:25 5Ks to age 40, cross-country at BYU before that, etc, but after the marathon, I decided a marathon is an absurd distance—borderline crazy. In fact, scratch borderline. But we crazies do crazy things sometimes.

For the first marathon, I prepared diligently: 15 miles on Mondays, 12 Wednesdays, 18 or 20 on Fridays, with short 6-mile runs the days between, for two months.  I even did a 26-mile run two weeks before, just to make sure I could do the distance without stopping. I knew one was not supposed to do that, but if I was already scheduled to do something crazy (like a marathon), then what does one more crazy idea hurt? The preparation served fairly well. I did 7-minute miles the first 20 miles (2:20 at 20 miles), but then got leg cramps and occasionally had to stretch, walk, and baby some cramping muscles the last few miles to finish in 3:15.

            However, now in my 60’s (instead of 30’s) and 60 pounds heavier (220 vs. 160), I hardly pass as marathoning material, though I’ve always stayed in decent shape, jogging a few miles every day except Sundays, every week, year-round, every year since age 13. That only means that I’m living proof that exercise alone does not keep the weight down. But to do dieting in addition? No! I’ve tried dieting, but always have to resume eating. Let’s face it, mortality itself is a slow death and dieting only makes it slower and a lot less fun. Besides jogging, I also dot summers with walks from 15 to 25 miles, so as I considered my daughters’ and friend’s requests, I figured I could probably alternately jog-walk 26 miles whenever, with or without preparation, which is basically what finally happened. My only goal was to reach the finish line before the food was gone. Every week, I’d tell my daughters: “I’ll start training tomorrow.” But not until it was time to taper down the distances the last week did I finally conform to the training schedule.  I did taper the last week. Oh yes, and I also did the carbohydrate-loading … for months … years! I’ve read that many trainers have tossed out the carbohydrate-loading idea. Which is too bad, that was my favorite part of marathoning. I did do an 11-mile jog-walk with Sheila once, and a 13- and 15-miler with Kline, all weeks apart, with my mere usual and daily doses of 3-to-5 miles the days between. My lack of preparation and default approach had one advantage: I’d suffer only one day instead of 3 months.

            The scariest fact was the math. Math and physics said that carrying 220 pounds for 26 miles was the energy and effort equivalent of carrying 160 pounds 36 miles. So my doing a marathon at 220 was the effort equivalent of doing 36 miles when younger. That was unnerving. I thought about trying to lose weight in the preceding months, to make the marathon easier, but finally decided: Nah, it’s easier just to run 36 miles.

            The day came—as it always does—and I arose at 4 a.m. to dress, oil up, and drive to the starting line. Oh yes, I got permission to start at 5 a.m., an hour before everyone else. I knew I’d be slow, and like I said, I wanted to finish before the food was gone. More critical than the race to the food was the porta-potty competition. I did not want to start with the crowd of 80 to compete in the porta-potty lines, along the bushless barren between Blanding and Bluff. After some sweating, no problem, but the first few miles can be a problem. Leaving at 5:03 a.m., alone and under the cover of darkness, solved all such complexities. As for the food at the finish line, after I learned that aid stations had all kinds of goodies every two miles along the way, I thought, “Maybe I’ll be full by the finish line.” My daughters had to remind me that this was not a buffet-athon, but a running event. Ryan Heck, the race coordinator, said, “If you finish the race weighing more than when you started, you’ll be a first.” Maybe that is the record I should have tried for. Anticipating my hour-early start, I told some competitors not to worry: they’d probably pass me while I was in the White Mesa Store having breakfast.

            Beginning at 5:03, the first 10 miles were quite pleasant. Settling into a rhythm, alone in the dark and quiet of the gradual dawn, I then watched the sun rise, and quite enjoyed the jog to White Mesa, completing the first 13 miles in 2:20 (just under 6 mph), though 30 years earlier I had run 20 miles in 2:20 (8 ½ mph). (Of course, now I was carrying 220 lbs instead of 160, and 13 to 20 is nearly proportionate (inversely)  to 220 vs.160, so it’s less a loss of strength than a gain of weight.) Worthy Glover, Sr, saw me, but did not recognize me and did not know that I started 57 minutes early. He later told me, “So that was you? I saw you and thought: he doesn’t look much like a marathoner, but he’s way ahead of everyone else.”  A twang in a tendon of my right foot at mile 3 and again at mile 8 was remedied both times by a few walking strides. About White Mesa, the leaders passed me.  After descending White Mesa hill, the left hamstring began to complain, then the right knee. About mile 17, Neil Joslin was roadside taking pictures. I hollered, “Hi Neil, how are you doing?”

“A lot better than you,” he answered.

How did he know?  Was it that obvious or did he just make a good guess?

From mile 17 to mile 21, I completed the transition from a decent stride to not-really-a-stride-at-all to a ginger limp. Not long after the left hamstring and the right knee’s continuous complaints, both thighs felt like splintered baseball bats, then the left groin’s connect-place felt like it was disconnecting, and several other muscles joined in a growing choir of whiners—and not even in tune. After 21 miles, my walk wasn’t much slower than whatever else I thought I was doing. Of course, no one had figured out, like I had, that I was really doing a 36-mile effort equivalent. So through these last miles, the wimps only doing 26 miles began passing me during my 36-mile effort. About this time, a guy passed me with a T-shirt that said on back: “No whining!” What nerve! Who does that T-shirt think it is, telling me what to do? Whining was the only thing that felt good.

Along the route was a sign “Road Damaged.” I assumed it was referring to my legs. I didn’t mind when the sub-3-hour leaders passed me. I expected them before White Mesa, so to hold them off until the Mesa was a pleasant surprise, but as the miles passed, so did a lot of other people. Being passed by real runners like Josh Nielson and the Francom family—Steve, Taylor, and Brielle—was almost a privilege, but eventually even real slow guys were passing me. I’d look at each and think, “He’s barely moving!” Yet he had just passed me. That realization was nearly as hard as my cramping hamstring. I also got used to women passing me.  Until a woman passed me who was carrying a backpack. Then an old man, even older than me, passed me. Then, as if those two were not humiliating enough, an older lady, older than me, passed me.  And to think she had started an hour after I did! Of course, all of them were only doing a 26-mile effort.

Perhaps I shouldn’t feel too dismayed. As I explain to my classes: men’s faster times in general are not because men train harder. The only reason that guys, on average, can run faster and jump higher than women is because a higher percentage of men’s body weight is muscle to propel the lesser percentage of whatever else. Nature devotes a certain percentage of women's body weight to simply being beautiful, but nature knows better than to waste anything on trying to make men beautiful, so we men start out as lean mean being-mean machines, but as age endows us with more mass to make muscle lower percentages of the total, then trim women should be able to beat us, which was another fact verified in this experiment. It's simply physics. And it feels better to think of all this as my contribution to science.

Nevertheless, when the 70-year-old lady passed me, I quit running and started walking and writing this article.  I had thought about bringing a book along for the final miles, but decided I was already carrying enough extra weight. However, I did put pen and paper in my pocket for writing the article.

Actually, what more forcefully limited me to walking was cramps in my diaphragm or other rib-cage breathing muscles. I’d have to stop and arch my back to stretch the diaphragm and breathing muscles to stop the cramps so that I could breathe. I was fine while walking, but running 36 miles in 5 hours-plus required a lot of oxygen exchange and had me breathing very hard to carry that weight that far. So toward the end, my breathing-muscles began cramping and had me walking most of the last 4 or 5 miles. Those cramps happened in a workout too, but never had in all previous years. So I guess I am getting old, but doing 36 miles in less than 6 hours isn’t bad for an old guy!  My daughters did well—4:28 and 4:33—and I achieved my goal too: I reached the finish line before the food was gone.

The next day I saw Cory Raisor, another participant, walking ever so slowly and carefully. I rolled down my car window: “Hey, I recognize that walk!  I have one too.”

Charm and Selling

Charm and Selling

Some people have charm; the rest of us get through life as best we can.  First impressions are important in selling.  You have to get to know the rest of us.  As a charm-challenged chap, I never thrived at selling … perhaps because I come from a long line of shy reticent roots. At a Stubbs cousin’s wedding, she explained to us that her in-laws were shy and backward. Her brother thought a moment, then said what I was thinking: More backward than us?  As a whole, few families lay claim to social awkwardness more convincingly than my extended Stubbs clan. Some have married into more sparkly genes to give some lines some hope, but for the most part, Stubbs are known as quiet, strong, shy, hard-working, hopelessly non-sparkly people. Of course, blaming one’s weaknesses on genes is not recommended by motivational speakers or the mental health industry, but I try to avoid pushy people peddling perfection. 

            As a 10-year-old paper boy in Los Angeles, I delivered the newspapers faithfully every day.  Other than this drive-by biker missing a few throws onto a roof or two, I was doing a good job.  The trainer told me that I could go door to door and sell as many new accounts as I wanted, but he made it sound quite optional.  One Saturday I tried my hand at selling new accounts to the houses between the ones I threw papers at every day.  From a few dozen attempts, I acquired maybe two new customers. That was enough selling to last me a long time.  Months later, a newspaper manager came and spoke with my parents, explaining they were letting me go because I was not selling new accounts.  I was dumbfounded (am often found dumb).  After he left, my parents asked me about it.  My quiet answer was that I didn’t know I had to sell, but only deliver.  I knew I could increase my paper route if I wanted to, but thought that was optional.  My dad offered to go talk to them, explain the misunderstanding, and possibly get the job back, but I said if it involved selling, I wasn’t interested.

            Fourteen years later, I was a poverty-stricken BYU student with a family to support.  I decided that spray-painting addresses on curbs could bring in a decent hourly wage.  At $2 per customer and a “yes” from every 3^rd or 4^th house in a new subdivision, I calculated that I might earn $8 per hour, big money back when $1.60 was the minimum wage, the base for most part-time jobs in Provo.  I spent our last $5 on a set of stencils and a can of spray paint.  I started at my mom’s house, the traditional easy-sale confidence booster.  Mom said, “Oh, I don’t think we need that.”

Undaunted, I then drove 5 miles to a new subdivision on Orem’s east bench and began the door-to-door in the heat of summer. No one was home at the first few houses. Finally a live body appeared and said she’d have her husband do it. Following another empty house or two, a second lovely lady said, “O, that’s a wonderful idea. I’ll have to tell my son. He needs a job, and might go for a good entrepreneurial idea like that.  I’ll have him do it.  I’m so glad you came by.  Thank you sooooooo much for coming!”  Charmed by her effusive response, I might have said, “You’re welcome.”  I can’t remember.  But by now I was far enough from my car that it was time to retrieve it and drive to the middle of the next foot-work section.  I walked back and found that I had locked the keys in the car.  That put a damper on an already dampened dry day.  I walked the miles back to the house to retrieve the spare key.  In the meantime, Silvia was home tallying up the dollars in her head for every hour that I was gone according to the rate I had told her.  Aside from already having plans for all the money I had made at that rate, she couldn’t help but laugh when she learned what filled the hours.  I grabbed the extra key and began the walk back. 

A month or two later, my mom told me about this nice young man who came by with this brilliant idea of spray-painting addresses on curbs for only $4.  I looked at her, then at the curb—sure enough.  I reminded her that I had offered the same thing at half the price.  She had forgotten.  Of course, first impressions with moms are out of the question.  My status as a charm-challenged chap was solidified!  Who can’t sell to his mom?  Only me!  Then a stranger sells her the same thing at twice the price!  I always wondered if it was the kid of the lady whom I had given the idea to.