A Man's a Man for a' That

Every year on January 25th, Scots and those from Scots descent around the world (but particularly those who live outside Scotland) get together to perform a curious ritual known as Burns’ Night. Ostensibly to celebrate the birthday of Scotland’s best-loved poet, Rabbie Burns (not Rabbi Burns, he’s a Jewish guy), the evening revolves around a formal dinner with recitals of the man’s poetry, much whisky and of course, Scotland’s national dish, haggis.

Living as I do, in the United States I have long been accustomed to journalists working haggis into any story involving Scotland no matter how irrelevant. Naturally, they all have to list the ingredients, as if there is a person on the planet still unaware just how disgusting they sound. In a way, that’s fair enough, they do sound fairly gross and listing them makes for good copy. Any food that contains, among other things, a sheep’s heart, liver and lung (illegal in the U.S.), all cooked inside a sheep’s stomach is an automatic 10 on the eeeuuuww factor. My response to any Americans expressing revulsion at the concept of eating such a concoction is always the same, “But you eat hot dogs don’t you? What do you suppose is in those?” Not surprisingly, nobody can tell me because the precise ingredients of America’s national dish are a closely guarded secret. One thing’s for certain however, it isn’t sirloin steak.

True students of haggis lore will of course; tell you that these ingredients are merely used in imitation haggis. Faux haggis if you will. Real haggis must be caught fresh from the mountains, preferably early in the morning and whisked straight to the butcher’s before the flesh has had time to spoil. While the ingredients of imitation haggis have been well documented, little is known about the wild haggis, which has yet to be found outside its native Scotland. Naturalists have long attempted to study these shy, but charming creatures, but as with their better-known counterpart, the Loch Ness Monster, they have for the most part remained elusive.

Haggis hunting on the other hand, has a long and storied history in the Highlands and despite Scotland’s increasing urbanization; many natives still eke out a living in this traditional manner. Wild haggis are perhaps one of the easier beasts to catch due to a genetic marvel which causes the legs on one side to be considerably shorter than on the other; an evolutionary curiosity, allowing the haggis it to run at speed around the hillsides. Skilled haggis hunters are savvy to the fact that all one has to do is chase the haggis in the opposite direction and it will of course, fall over and roll helplessly to the bottom of the hill, where assistants are waiting with nets.

Such is the role of the haggis in the Scottish culture. Burns himself dedicated a poem to the animal. Entitled “Address to a Haggis”, it is the centerpiece of any Burns’ Night and is usually delivered by a respected guest, often by memory, before the dish itself is ceremoniously skewered with a sword.

Despite being a native born Scotsman, I’ve never actually been to a Burns’ Night and it’s perhaps telling that the first such event I did attend was in the good ol’ USA, last Saturday night here in Denver. For the last few months, I’ve been hacking around in an attempt to learn the snare drum, with the goal of becoming a functioning member of The Colorado Isle of Mull/St Andrews Pipes and Drums. I say functioning, because even though I’ve made two public appearances prior to this weekend, my performance has been somewhat…original. The phrase “marching to the tune of a different drummer” isn’t generally well received among the ranks of pipe bands, where conformity is actively encouraged, at least as far as the music is concerned.

After many hours of practice however, I'm able to play a portion of my limited repertoire more or less at the same time as everyone else. There’s a phrase in the middle of Scotland the Brave, which I can play just fine in practice but always, seem to screw up when attempting to play with the rest of the band. On Saturday night however, I nailed it for the first time ever. Well, we played that phrase several times and I still managed to goof it up on some of the passes, but at least twice, I got it exactly right. Saturday was a high point in my career.

So, buoyed by this success, I was rather looking forward to my second Burns’ appearance, the very next night. This was a far less formal affair, in our local bar; a recently opened, Irish themed pub, familiarly known as Sweet Fanny Adams. My friend Kris, a piper and I had encouraged a number of people from the band, including a couple of other drummers, to make the trip up the hill to Bailey and several had enthusiastically agreed. This was of course, before one of our periodic winter storms blew in and essentially shut down the roads in and around the city, while leaving Bailey and the surrounding areas, virtually untouched. Many band members decided, quite wisely, to give the whole thing a miss. Others struggled bravely on but as the clock ticked inexorably forward, it soon became apparent that my fourth public appearance as a drummer; was about to become my first solo performance.

There are many techniques for dealing with stress. Yoga, deep breathing and exercise come to mind. I chose panic, which on hindsight may not have been the best option. This manifested itself in my inability to remember the tune I know the best. The one tune every beginning snare drummer learns first, a tune, which even with my limited experience, I’ve played hundreds of times. Completely and utterly gone. I went out to the car to check my sheet music, which turned out to consist of a series of swimming tadpoles. I tried playing the tune anyway, hoping it would miraculously come back to me once I started. Nothing. I asked the pipers to play, thinking this might unlock whatever synapses were jammed in my brain. They tried but couldn’t really help, because their music is vastly different. “How can you remember the second tune, but not the first?” they asked, “Isn’t the second more complicated?” Their questions were pointless. I certainly had no idea.

So we agreed to simply play the second tune twice through. And I played it just fine. Well other than screwing up my usual phrase, but you can’t have everything.

Pray for me, I drive 285

Said a popular bumper sticker around these parts when we moved in. The reason behind these pleas for divine intervention, was the love-hate relationship many locals have with the picturesque, but overly trafficked and at times, deadly stretch of road known as Colorado State Highway 285, which leads southwest from Denver into the southern parts of the Rocky Mountains, before ultimately making its way down into New Mexico.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when SH285 was nothing more than a meandering mountain trail and old-timers tell how it used to take the best part of a day to drive down into town for supplies. Not surprisingly, they only made this journey once a month or so. Nowadays, it’s possible to do the same journey in under an hour, a fact, which has encouraged many people to, like us, make their homes in while making their living in the metropolis of Denver. In fact, the 50 miles of SH285 between Denver and Bailey, the route on which I commute daily, now serves one of the fastest growing commuter belts in the country.

According the 2000 Census figures, Park County where our home is situated, experienced the nation’s 5th fastest growth during the 1990s. Park County residents can also lay claim to the nation’s 5th longest average commute (44.8 minutes). I’m guessing these people work on the west side of Denver because I make my way to the south east of town each morning and would love to talk of a commute so short.

Sitting in a car has never been my idea of fun. Oh sure, like most people, I’ve daydreamed of roaring around the mountain roads of Europe in an open topped, sports car, with a supermodel in the passenger seat. However, I’m also well aware that for most of the time, those roads are choked with tour buses and nose to tail traffic, much the same as the roads here. I spend 2-3 hours a day driving to and from work, but the bulk of that doesn’t involve tearing up the highway, but crawling along at a snail’s pace, beside everyone else.

I consider commuting to be time essentially stolen from me. I’m not earning money, I’m not practicing a hobby, I’m certainly not getting fit – I’m just, sitting there. Book tapes help pass the time and if I listen to “intellectual” books I can even tell myself I’m improving my mind, but it doesn’t alter the fact; I spend a large part of my day wishing I was doing something else.

When we first moved here, I worked in downtown Denver, a drive shorter than my current one by only by about 3 or 4 miles. However, I could usually complete the journey in a good 20 minutes less. Curiously, the traffic into the center of the city moved faster than that heading into the sprawling office park where I work now. However, driving home that summer was a whole new adventure due to the fact the Colorado Department of Transportation was engaged in the painfully slow act of widening large stretches of SH285. You know, to accommodate all these people who like us, were in the process of moving in.

To make matters worse, my little car, which had served me well on the pancake flat, ruler straight roads of Phoenix rebelled when I asked it, not only to pull me up a twisting turning gradient, climbing from 5,250 to 9,000 feet ; but to do a large part of it in stop and go, low gear mode. To be blunt, it didn’t like it and expressed its displeasure by overheating every few days and leaving me stranded by the roadside for 30 minutes or so while the radiator bubbled and fizzed. If the summer heat was a problem, the ice and snow of winter made it throw up its hands in horror. OK, it’s a car; it didn’t have hands but work with me here.

I moved to Colorado in April and even though winter was almost done, we still had a few heavy snowstorms and the little car just didn’t know what to do. As it happened, the very first snow we had, 3 days after moving in, left me completely stranded. The roads were clear but I was unable to get out of our driveway. That didn’t tend to happen in Phoenix. Another winter was fast approaching and we knew the little car would be unable to continue the daily commute once the bad weather really kicked in. So, we shopped around and eventually cleaned out the remains of our savings account by investing in a 15-year old Toyota with 4-wheel drive, big chunky tires and battle scars. Now this is a vehicle for the mountains. His name is Angus, by the way.

I’ll admit, I got a bit of a disappointment the first time I drove in snow when I found my wheels mysteriously spinning and Angus slipping all over the road. After all, the little car had handled the snow better than this! A lesson I learned that day was to check that both the front hubs were turned to 4-wheel drive, not just one. I’m not sure if there’s a term for what I had; 3-wheel drive doesn’t sound right, but for the record, it’s nowhere near as good as 4-wheel, or even 2-wheel drive.

We looked for a car with a stick shift, working on the theory that they would be more reliable than an automatic of a similar age. That certainly made economic sense, but we didn’t allow for the fact that clutches installed in the late ‘80s require a lot more effort to pump than their modern equivalents. What’s the problem there? I hear you ask. Well, as I slide, kicking and screaming, into old fartdom, one of the symptoms I’m experiencing is an arthritis sort of discomfort in my left knee. My clutch knee. Regular shifting when changing gear isn’t a problem, it’s the constant up and down motion required to move along in heavy traffic. Oh, I don’t like heavy traffic at all.

There will come a time when I will figure out a way to live up in the mountains without having to commute down into Denver on a daily basis. As yet, I don’t have a clear idea as to how I’m going to do this, but winning the lottery will probably be involved somehow. In the meantime, “Pray for me, I drive 285”.

A Few Words about Karma

\Kar”ma\, n.[Skr] (Buddhism)
One’s acts considered as fixing one’s lot in the future existence. (Theos.) The doctrine of fate as the inflexible result of cause and effect; the theory of inevitable consequence.


The first few weeks we spent in our new house in Bailey, had me thinking a lot about karma. Specifically, bad karma.

Oh, we were thrilled with the move of course. Our house sits on a pine-wooded acre down a dirt road, with the foothills of the Rocky Mountains as a backdrop. After nine years in the concrete wilderness that is Phoenix, Arizona I was amazed at the good fortune that had brought us here and even now, almost two years on, the place we call home is still an endless source of delight.

However, back then, in those early days, I was beginning to wonder if I’d done something seriously not good in a previous life, and was now being required to pay for it. You see, in that first two or three weeks, we had a run of what can only be described as…shitty luck.

The day after we signed the contract on the house, a major wildfire broke out less than three miles from the house. Colorado has been in a state of drought for some years now and wildfires are the inevitable price we all pay for living in an area which once was virgin forest. Even so, we weren’t quite ready for our first to break out quite so soon. Some kids messing around with matches behind the High School managed to set the fire, which eventually burned over 2,300 acres of forest. After a few nerve-wracking days, the volunteer firefighters had it under control and our house, along with all the others in the area, survived unharmed.

The week after we moved in, a second fire broke out, slightly further away this time but much bigger and more destructive. For a spell it was headed our way, in the words of one firefighter “like a tidal wave”. Over 90,000 acres were lost this time, but once again we were spared. Nonetheless, we learned which news sites had merit and which were junk, then kept the good ones open on the computer most of the summer.

Unloading the moving van was a major project and we couldn’t have done without the assistance of the realtor’s son and his friend. Two strapping football players, they called Dear Wife Ma’am and treated me with a respect usually reserved for people over 70. They wouldn’t let me lift anything heavier than a shoebox and between them, had the entire load in the house within a few hours. Nonetheless, Dear Wife still managed to strain her knee in the process and for several days, was walking with a cane.

The next adventure was when our water ran out. Like most properties in the mountains, our property is served by a well so as part of the purchase process, we paid to have this tested. Or rather we didn’t. You see some previous prospective buyers had already done the honors and as the well passed with flying colors, there seemed little point. Of course, we weren’t to know that the contractor who’d performed the test was a charlatan and his figures were entirely fictional. The well had apparently collapsed some months before and contained no more than a few gallons of water. Having a new well drilled is a costly process, but not one that can be rushed. (Something to do with a too fast drill cauterizing the rock and sealing the fissures that replenish the water). So, for several days we had a trailer containing a water tank parked in our back yard, so we could bathe, wash dishes and flush the toilets. We could not however, wash any of the items we were still attempting to unpack.

I nearly ruptured myself loading our fridge onto the van in Phoenix, and then we damaged one of the front porch steps unloading it here. As it turned out, we needn’t have bothered as it had died somewhere on the journey. The delightful avocado fridge left by the sellers froze everything solid, so in short order we had two broken fridges sitting on our front porch. Does that officially qualify us as rednecks Mr. Foxworthy?

The sink, which worked fine during the home inspections leaked like Niagara Falls, as did both toilets. Somewhere between us buying the house and moving in, the sliding back door decided it would rather stay shut thank you very much and requires two hands and a lot of back muscle before it will open.

Our youngest dog, no doubt stressed from all the upheaval, decided to forget the rules of housetraining. The house we bought had very nice carpets. The house, in which we now live, does not. To be fair, she’s not entirely responsible for the carpets. Our eldest dog developed an allergy to the food she’d eaten for years and got into the habit of regurgitating it wherever she happened to be when the mood struck.

The insect screens inexplicably developed large gaps around their edges, allowing entry to all manner of curious beasties, including one particularly harmless looking thing, which bit me on the hand causing it to swell like a balloon. The insects were joined by a plague of wasps in the plaster ceiling of our living room and a family of squirrels in the loft.

Our problems weren’t confined to the house either. My car, which had provided 180,000 miles of semi-trouble free service, blew a cylinder head gasket and had to be towed to the repair shop. No doubt feeling lonely, Dear Wife’s truck coughed and ground to a halt at more or less the same spot, the following day. It’s not easy living in the mountains and working in the city without transportation. But we managed. Actually as it happens, we’d just purchased a third vehicle. A shiny new mountain bike as a sort of birthday cum mid-life crisis present for me. The first time out on it, less than two miles from the house, something went twang in my left knee and it still bothers me today. I doubt if I’ve put a hundred miles on the bike.

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not complaining. I didn’t then and I’m not now. We really do love it here. But considering this all happened in the space of about three weeks, I’m just…. wondering. Karma, hmm. Wonder what I did. Whatever it was, I hope I enjoyed it.

But don't you know it's cold up there?

Came the cry from, well, pretty much everybody when we announced we were leaving the sunny climes of Phoenix Arizona, packing up the dogs and our worldly possessions (or at least, as many of our worldly possessions as would fit in the largest rental truck, a Ford F-150 and a horse trailer) and heading north, to the frozen wastes of Denver, Colorado. Our Arizonan friends genuinely couldn’t comprehend that yes, we knew it would be cold, but really, we were OK with that.

I’d lived in Phoenix for 9 years, Dear Wife for 19 and frankly, we couldn’t wait to see the back of the place. It wasn’t without its good points; prices were generally low, NFL tickets were easy to come by, even on game day, and the nearby Sonoron desert made for good camping and hiking. However, as far as the weather was concerned, you could keep it. Oh sure, being able to play outside while the rest of the country was gripped in winter held a certain attraction, and I like the sun as much as anyone, but like anything else, when you get too much of a good thing it tends to lose it’s appeal.

I grew up in the North of England and as a child was always mystified when people talked of “blue skies”. The sky was gray; everyone knew that. Every day, summer or winter, always, forever. The only relief from the rain was when it snowed and most of us developed webbed feet. When I finally left to begin married life in Phoenix, I vowed, “I’m not going to become one of those boring British expatriates who complain how they miss the rain. I’ve had rain for 30 years and I will never miss it. I’d been there about five years when I looked out through the window blinds at Phoenix’s parched and washed out landscape, I thought, “Hmm, I suppose a little rain would be nice”.

The problem was; I’d gone from one extreme to the other. Built in the desert, the dry and at the time, clean air was popular with invalids suffering from breathing related illnesses. They happily embraced the heat, even in those pre-air conditioning days and coped with the blistering summer nights by soaking sheets in water and sleeping out of doors. Once technology made indoor living a practicality, the place boomed as people from cold climates flocked there in their thousands to take advantage of the cheap housing, open spaces and mild winters. For most, the fact that being outside was physically painful for a large part of the year was a small price to pay. “But it’s a dry heat” they would tell themselves. The same could be said about nuclear explosions, but they had a point. New Orleans, Chicago and Miami may not see the same high temperatures, but are certainly unpleasant in their own ways when the humidity is running high.

However, dry or not, 120 degrees is unpleasant and in summer, life has to be planned around it. Errands must be run first thing in the morning, groceries must be transported from the supermarket to the fridge within minutes, no other stops on the way home, and forget about getting a healthy tan. Haven’t you heard of skin cancer? The doctors in Phoenix have. Because the city grew up in the era of the motorcar, it’s an enormous, sprawling wasteland, stretching over 100 miles from one side to the other. All that concrete retains heat, which means that even overnight; the temperature doesn’t drop to a comfortable level. I used to get up at 5am to walk my dogs but even then, the heat would simply radiate off the sidewalk and we’d begin each day tired and cranky. The end finally came when I was driving over to a friend’s house to watch the Superbowl, and realized I had the air-conditioning on full. Remember, this was on the last weekend in January. Mild winters are one thing; hot winters followed by even hotter summers are something else. It was time to move on.

So for almost two years, we’ve been living in Colorado. Deer Creek Valley, to be exact which nestles in the foothills of the Rocky Mountain, near the town of Bailey, about 50 miles from Denver. And we love it. The reasons are many, but for me one of the most significant is that while summers are warm, winters are cold. Which is how it should be.

The low temperature by our house last night was –3F, the night before was –7F, which is a tad chilly I’ll admit. However, here’s the thing. Daytime temperatures are significantly more comfortable, and yet still within a range I consider acceptable for winter. The Superbowl will be played in a little under 3 weeks (no, the Denver Broncos will not be there) and unless global warming really picks up before then, I can pretty well guarantee I won’t need the air conditioning on in my car that day.

At first I tried to convince my Arizonan friends that no, Colorado really wasn’t buried under the ice caps for 6 months of the year; that no, the 4 feet of snow we enjoyed during last winter’s 100 year storm did not last for months, but was almost gone in about 10days; and that Denver only averages 30 less days of sunshine than Phoenix. Firstly, they don’t believe me and secondly, the locals don’t want me encouraging people to move here.

The important point is; I have no desire to live in a place where the weather is cold all year round, or even for most of the year. Greenland doesn’t appeal to me, nor does Minnesota. However, I don’t see the attraction in being hot all the time. Phoenix’s warm winters are attractive to many, but personally I found that when coupled with the seemingly endless, stifling summers, I simply lost my appreciation for them. Rain is a wonderful thing and frankly, Colorado could do with a lot more than it’s had in the last few years. Even so, I have no desire to go back to living in a climate where dry days are a novelty and sunshine a rarity.

“Variety is the spice of life”. Said old Bill Shakespeare. The weather in Stratford-upon-Avon isn’t really like that of Arizona, or Colorado for that matter, so I suspect he was referring to something else. That said, he was still a pretty smart chap.