(no subject)

[marcusmarcusrc]

48 hours in Salt Lake and I've climbed up a mountain, lugged 40 pound bags of salt around, and hammered 6 inch fertilizer spikes into soil that could almost be New England caliber toughness. Combined with the giant helpings of healthy food that my mother stuffs into me every time I turn around, and I should be in amazing shape by the time I get back to Boston on Wednesday.

The hike was wonderful. My friends Mike and Megan organized a bunch of people I knew to gather at a trailhead only 40 minutes from downtown. Ten minutes of climbing up a dry, dusty trail of the sort you expect from a desert climate, and suddenly we emerged into a picture perfect valley - the white foam of a cascade cutting through a slope of evergreens and falling into a cold blue lake, all with a backdrop of jagged peaks still graced with the remnants of winter's snow. Another couple miles up the trail and we found a roaring waterfall whose refreshing mist was quite a welcoming for hot and sweaty hikers. Perhaps I might get around to putting some pictures up at some point...

The other livejournal event of note was that my parents hosted a dinner party at which some great stories were told. A couple excerpts of some of the ones that stuck with me:

One woman had been at college in Arizona during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Apparently she got a phone call from her parents who told her that they were gathering the family at their Texas ranch. They then said "should things go downhill, we want you to come and join us. Only don't take your car, because you won't be able to fill it up, plus someone might shoot you for it. Instead, we think you should steal a horse. If you ride only during the nighttime, it should only take you a couple of weeks to make it here..."

Also, this delightful friend of my mother's told me a story about how she went to listen to the BSO on her very first date ever. Cost of entrance? 25 cents. Apparently orchestra seats went for 75 cents... of course, it was during the depression. Apparently she also used to enjoy visiting Tanglewood back before it got "all built up", and she said "Koussevitzky was a very nice man, I enjoyed meeting him".

And my dad told stories about his time in boarding school in England not long after the war, where apparently they all were required to leave their windows open at night (apparently ET wasn't the only place that foolish!), take cold showers in the morning, and go for long runs before classes started. The worst part about the cold showers was that prefects would lounge in a hot bath nearby with a checklist, and if they determined that a student hadn't stayed in the shower long enough they would make him go back. Of course, my dad lost his moral highground when he admitted that his senior year he had enjoyed being a prefect and manning the checklist... one of those scary lessons about humanity and how easy it is to go from being the tormentee to the tormenter...

Comments

[superjeannie.livejournal.com]

I'd love to see pictures from your hike. Sounds lovely.

[nuclearpolymer.livejournal.com]

I am always entertained by finding that some of the quirky things ET does are actually things that used to be so common. For example, having all the beds in the dorm. Or the road rallye event.