Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

 

Photos by Carole Huber

Even if you’ve arrived blindfolded, there are several ways to know you’re in Colorado. First (and this is obvious to most observers and already an old joke), the bikes represent more recent technological advances than the cars. And second (more specific to a visiting performer), the organizers of a live event are likely to (correctly) deduce that scheduling a guided morning hike up the nearest spine of the Rockies is a solid, inexpensive way to ensure an A Game (or at least a completely honest) performance in the evening. It’s what I’d ask of the Cosmic Cab Driver in most situations.

When my long planned visit to the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs finally unfolded recently, the shrewd organizers enlisted the terrific energy of several professors and students to take me on a morning hike to a pre-Columbian (or at least a Ute) Vision Quest spot. That was what was on the agenda they emailed me before my flight. Good thing, too. I packed different footwear than I otherwise would have.

How could they have known I love a good Vision Quest before lunch? Geography and Environmental Studies Professor Tom Huber filled me in on the archaeological and anthropological details as we scaled a ridge above campus on our way to enlightenment. I sat for a few minutes amidst the stone circle with the gazillion-dollar Rockies view, jazzed beyond words at the idea of people half a Millennium ago having enough time on their hands to, ya know, meditate for a few hours or days.

“It’s only once we stopped hunter/gathering that we lost our free time,” Huber pointed out. I noted that I didn’t have much of it this day. But then it was a paid work day, and I was having a Vision Quest.

On my ride back to the airport the next day (following a terrific event), one of the organizers, Marissa, was telling me about the “riders” that performers at the school sometimes write into their event contracts. The famously extreme example of the phenomenon is the “five pounds of M&Ms in a silver bowl with all the brown ones taken out” that Van Halen or Guns N’ Roses or someone used to demand. I find such riders fun reading — look online for ”Weird Al” Yankovic’s. It’s great. The demands all surround recycling and Veganism.

So thank you Tom, Linda and Nate, especially, for showing me what my own rider might at some point very soon read: “Organizer will provide performer with EITHER a one (1) hour hike to traditional Vision Quest spot OR transport performer to one (1) of the nearest wild hot springs, OR both.

If I really wanted to get demanding, I could add a section about always getting the lovingly prepared, locally derived lunch with a view of the Rockies (from soup to salad to pie to ice cream) that some of the UCCS geography and sustainability students and faculty provided me at 6,000 feet. But that might be asking too much of a university event organizer in Duluth in January.

Still, those UCCS folks got me at my most relaxed that evening. My mind on the Cosmic during the performance, I said what was in my heart more than I kept to my normal Sustainability Era Cheerleading program. So much so that an attendee not at her first show approached me at the book signing and asked if anything was wrong.

“Everything is right,” I said. “Except that the biggest scandal in the New York Times right now is about a solar power company. When the scandal should be that there are still coal mines.”

It was that kind of evening. During the Q&A session following the event, an audience member had asked me what I’d say to Rupert Murdoch if given the opportunity. And for some reason my reply was along the lines of, “He’s a pretty old guy. Is he in charge of anything? Is Fox News really the same entity for which Mr. Murdoch achieved U.S. citizenship? I just don’t know who’s really in charge. So of late I’ve been thinking of Kurt Vonnegut’s Bokononist faith from Cat’s Cradle. Don’t render unto Caesar, the faith’s founding saint advises. Rather “pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar has no idea what’s really going on.”

Thinking about this on my flight home (I’m not generally so cynical) led to a subsequent revelation: as a kid, the Doonesbury characters’ voices, particularly when emerging from a Walden football huddle or from the White House, seemed so quiet to me. Small letters, mouths barely moving. This, at least, compared to the “Good Griefs!” and “I Hate Mondays!” emerging from the neighboring strips when I was in elementary school.

Now it seems to me that the point of people yelling in media venues is to distract you from what’s really going on. Rather than the clown clawing for ratings, I’m looking for the quiet talkers who are the reason our society is ignoring the Climate Change-fighting imperatives that at the same time can save the economy and massively reinvest in America’s infrastructure and workers. That is, of course, by retrofitting our coal-based power system to solar and wind, and selling the knowledge abroad as well. Thus, ya know, saving the species while helping our nation remain a Superpower. These quiet talkers might be check-writers, and they might be “policy” makers. But I want to talk to the folks in charge to see if I can re-direct our policies to reflect what I believe is an all-win scenario.

To be against this, in my view, is to be part of the problem. Or, to put it more kindly (since we all derive from the same star stuff, even Karl Rove), to be against the above winning platform implies ignorance of it. Unless you are someone against a strong America.

Cumulatively, I wondered at 30,000 feet, what was the message of my own Vision Quest during that Colorado “work” trip? I thought about it for a while but didn’t come up with a satisfying answer until my run this morning. Safely returned home, I had just enjoyed a dewey “would that I create something as magnificent as a spider web” moment.

Then the message came to me. Granted it’s an easy one to implement since I’d be doin’ it anyhows, and it probably had to come in conjunction with a major book deadline. But I realized in that Rocky Mountain rock circle that a good part of my mission in life is to broadcast a working model of an at least relatively content working artist with family as his number one priority.

Home matters always trump. But work trumps nearly all else. Good nutrition and sleep and innertubing trips are in the mix, but distinctly leading a second pack.


Really this is just another way of saying that Everything I Needed to Know (except survival) I Learned From My Three-Year-Old. Kindness, humor, family focus, a profound respect for the restorative power of naps, and an overall desire to have, all other things being equal, the best possible time in the eternal Now.

Which leads to a thanks I’d like to send to the folks who have been prodding me to post a new Dispatch. The reason for the unusually long space between them is a happy one: I’m a month away from finishing the new book, due out next August. To say that it’s keeping me busy is an understatement akin to, “there are some problems in Washington.” All I’ll say now is I’m pretty thrilled at how it’s coming together. Thanks, UCCS folks, for helping launch me into the home stretch in (or with) top spirits.

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