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“Parting Words from Moristotle” (07/31/2023)
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of art, poems, stories, serials, travelogues,
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By James T. Carney
The Canadian West is in many ways a continuation of two parts of the American West – the Great Plains [“Visions of the American West (Part 1): Introduction & the Great Plains”] and the Rockies [“…(Part 3): The Mountains”]. When I fled into Calgary, I could see miles and miles of flat, fertile farm land – much like the American states of the Great Plains. The only difference is that the further north one goes – and Calgary is only about 100 miles north of the American border – the shorter the growing season. What has made Calgary has been the Canadian oil boom. Calgary has almost doubled in size in the last twenty years growing from 700,000 people to 1.3 million. The down town area is bigger than Pittsburgh’s – and cleaner.
In and about with people
By James T. Carney
[Sequel to "Why the Grand Canyon?"]
Actually, one of the most interesting and enjoyable parts of the trip involved interacting with the other 16 people (including the two guides) in our group. I suspect that we had an unusual group in two respects. (1) These people were physically hardy—unlike me, they were all outdoorsmen (and women); and (2) they were extremely friendly and the group got along very well. There were two couples (one from Wisconsin and one from British Columbia), two groups of two friends (including John and myself), one aunt and the niece from Kilimanjaro, and six unattached individuals (although one, David, a North Jersey boy like myself, had left his wife up on the South Rim.) Some of them had done some training for the trip; many, however, were taking it in stride. One fellow traveler was Susan Wilson from Miami. She was a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve and a retired financial analyst for the DOD. I asked her how she had trained—Miami tending to be flatter than a pancake—and she said that she went up and down the stairs in her apartment building. That sounded even more boring than going up and down the Southside Heights.
Why the Grand Canyon?
By James T. Carney
Why the Grand Canyon? was a question I was asking myself resentfully on the morning of March 3, 2013 as I woke up constipated and filled with fear that I was embarked on an expedition that I was not up to. I remembered the wise words of my college roommate Mo’s invocation of Nancy Reagan’s “just say no” defense when I told him years ago about my concerns about making a trip to Italy with my son’s in-laws, who were going to spend half the time with their Italian relatives who spoke only Italian,which—contrary to my sister’s bold assertion that it was readily comprehensible to any Latin scholar—was unintelligible to me. I didn’t say no to that trip and I didn’t say no to the Grand Canyon either but at that particular moment I was heartily regretting not having learned from the prior experience. Sometimes the spirit of adventure gets the better of my normal, conservative, lawyerly self.
