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Books Into Movies: Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Books Into Movies


(Blogger note: This article was previously published in LamLight, physician newsletter of the Lynchburg Academy of Medicine)

Into the Wild

By Jon Krakauer

“Into the Wild” – the Movie

Screenplay and Directed by Sean Penn

“Climbing the Sphinx”

By Fred Bahnson

From “Fugue” Magazine and The Best American Spiritual Writing 2007, Philip Zaleski, Editor

“Solitude” by Lord Byron

To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest's shady scene,
Where things that own not man's dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne'er or rarely been;
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs a fold;
Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean;
This is not solitude, 'tis but to hold
Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores unrolled.

But midst the crowd, the hurry, the shock of men,
To hear, to see, to feel and to possess,
And roam alone, the world's tired denizen,
With none who bless us, none whom we can bless;
Minions of splendour shrinking from distress!
None that, with kindred consciousness endued,
If we were not, would seem to smile the less
Of all the flattered, followed, sought and sued;
This is to be alone; this, this is solitude!

Into the Wild is the story of Chris McAndless, an Emory University honors graduate who gave away the remainder of his college fund, packed his belongings into an ancient Datsun B-210 and departed on a “magnificent adventure,” purposefully neglecting to tell anyone where he was headed or why.  Jon Krakauer is a well-respected adventure writer.  The book, as well as the movie, are outgrowths of an article he wrote in 1991 for “Outdoor” magazine after Chris’ body was found in an abandoned bus in the wilds of Alaska.  The author has done a masterful job of tracking Chris’ two year odyssey through Arizona, California, Mexico, Nevada, Montana, North Dakota and, finally and fatally, Alaska.  He has interviewed many people whom Chris befriended on the road: employers, co-workers and fellow vagabonds.  Through these interviews and observations, the picture of a complex personality evolves. 

Chris McAndless appears to be a walking contradiction.  He wanted to live off of the land and survive on his own instincts (in the manner of his hero Henry David Thoreau) but dove into all of his quests completely unprepared.  Krakauer points out that his death was totally preventable if he had just taken a topographical map with him.  He had a strained relationship with his parents for reasons that are well enumerated in the book, but had a wonderful, caring and loving relationship with his younger sister.  Once he departed Atlanta he did not communicate with any of his family, even his sister who he had communicated with dutifully over the years.  He seems somewhat slovenly and unkempt but is described by employers (a MacDonald’s manager and the owner of a grain elevator in North Dakota) as diligent and extremely hard-working.  He proclaimed this personal philosophy of simplicity and humility, yet renamed himself “Alexander Supertramp.”  He introduced himself by that name on the road and left graffiti here and there over that signature.

The author spends a good deal of the narrative trying to justify Chris McAndless’ wanderlust and convince the reader that the youngster was not just completely off his rocker.  Read from a parents’ point of view, this book is a horror story.  The family did make an attempt to locate Chris through the use of a private investigator, but he had hidden his tracks too well.  Into the Wild also contains some of the author’s own experiences with mountain climbing and wilderness exploration.  He also includes stories of other ill-fated expeditions. 

In summary, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer is an entertaining but disturbing read.  The reader never really gets a grip on the motivations of Chris McAndless, but certainly comes away from this with a true sense of tragedy. 

“Into the Wild” (The Movie)

Screenplay and Directed by Sean Penn

This movie made it to Lynchburg over two months after its release and therefore my wife and I made a road trip to the Vinegar Hill Theater in Charlottesville to see it sooner.  It was well worth the trip.  Vinegar Hill Theater is a small arts cinema on one end of the downtown pedestrian Mall.  The movie is really quite stunning.  The cinematography is magnificent.  The outdoor scenes, especially in Alaska, are breathtaking.  The film makers use odd camera angles and unusual lighting to great effect.  The soaring bald eagles, roaming moose and antelope and even bear make you feel like you are watching a “National Geographic” or Discovery Channel special.  I was curious as to how anyone could make a movie out of a book with such little dialogue, but Sean Penn has made good use of some of the written messages from Chris McAndless printed over some scenes to make the story move along.  The atmosphere and “feel” of the movie is aided dramatically by a surreal soundtrack written and recorded by former Pearl Jam vocalist/guitarist Eddie Vedder.  The sound track album is exceptional by itself, but even more so after having seen “Into the Wild”.

The movie succeeds in several areas where the book falters.  First, Sean Penn makes Chris McAndless a very likable character.    The book spends most of the time trying to convince the reader that Chris just isn’t crazy.  The movie fleshes out the character and this version of Chris McAndless is really a terrific young man.   He comes across as the ultimate idealist and hater of hypocrisy.  The minor characters emerge as very sympathetic characters as well.  In the book, these characters are treated in a very journalistic or reportorial way, whereas in the movie they come to life.  It seems that peace and harmony follow Chris everywhere he goes.  Peace and harmony follows for everyone, that is, except for Chris McAndless.    In one memorable scene at Big Sur in California, Rainey, one half of a hippie couple who Chris helps resolve relationship problems, asks Chris: “Are you Jesus?”  He helps an old man (Mr. Frantz, played marvelously by octogenarian Hal Holbrook) come to grips with his loneliness and despair over being the last one of his family still living.  Mr. Frantz is so taken with Chris that he tries to adopt him.  Chris even helps a vagabond teenager deal with parental control issues.  This idealistic movie version of Chris helps everyone cope with their own demons even as he searches for the understanding of his own. The tragic death scene at the end of the movie is as haunting an experience as I’ve ever experienced in a movie.  I think it will stay with me forever.

“Climbing the Sphinx”

By Fred Bahnson

In contrast to the Chris McAndless story is the story “Climbing the Sphinx” by Fred Bahnson.  This was originally published in “Fugue” magazine and reprinted in The Best American Spiritual Writing of 2007 edited by Philip Zaleski.  This is an account of the author and his best friend’s climb of The Sphinx, a mountain adjacent to the Ennis Valley in southwestern Montana.  There is no doubt about Fred Bahnson’s motivation for mountain climbing.  He describes the area of Ennis Pass in the opening paragraph thus: “All that remains (after tourist season) is a comforting emptiness that broods over the bent world of mountain and valley like the Holy Ghost.”  These two decide to become the first to climb the icy slope without a rope.  This is a riveting description of a harrowing and near fatal trip.  The author describes one portion of the climb: “The passage upward was a passage through , a vertical portal into Meaning.”  Further along: “Flow dissolves self-awareness.  Gone are my flatland pedestrian worries about jobs and girlfriends – or lack thereof.  Gone my doubts and fears, even my joys and elations.  Those feelings will return, all of them magnified, but in flow I just am. Both climbers survive despite a broken ice ax and a sudden snow squall and return.  The author then asks the ultimate question: “This climbing business, this search for flow, for spiritual meaning – isn’t it just glorified selfishness?”  The author recounts a friend who died mountain climbing in Peru, leaving behind his new bride to grieve as a young widow.  “Where was Rob’s wife now?  How had she benefited from the risks he took?”  These are the questions that Jon Krakauer never answers in his examination of Chris McAndless in Into the Wild.  Sean Penn never really answers these questions either, although he does portray the anguish of Chris’ parents and sister quite dramatically.    Fred Bahnson eventually stops his high adventures while his companion on the Sphinx has an “Alexander Supertramp” type experience suffering a fatal fall while downhill skiing Mont Blanc in France.  Mr. Bahnson admits that even though  “from the mountains comes a welling up of deep-down things, a profound sense of life’s inherent majesty” that “the Sphinx and her pyramids had become idols.  Their loosening grip on me was being supplanted by the unshakable grip of God.  Augustine said that our hearts are restless until they find rest in God, but my Great Wanting was not so much a wanting to find as a wanting to be found.” 

Nowhere in the book Into the Wild is there a hint of a spiritual awakening.  The Chris McAndless story portrayed by Jon Krakauer seems like an aimless wandering, a wasted life.  Sean Penn does give more meaning to the “magnificent adventure” of Chris McAndless, scripting the last eighteen months of Chris’ life as an attempt to deal with the hypocrisy and lies of his father.  In the movie, just as Chris comes to an epiphany of sorts, he is betrayed by his lack of preparation and the cruelty and severity of the wild.  Therein resides the real tragedy of Chris McAndless. 

From “Guaranteed” by Eddie Vedder (Soundtrack to “Into the Wild”)

On bended knee is no way to be free

Lifting up an empty cup I ask silently

That all my destinations will accept the one that’s me

So I can breathe

Leave it to me as I find a way to be

Consider me a satellite forever orbiting

I knew all the rules but the rules did not know me

Guaranteed

Dinner With "Big Mike"

Michael DeBakey was an internationally known cardiovascular surgeon and a pioneer.  He was an unparalleled innovator and leader in American surgery.  At age 23 he invented the technology which became the central component to the heart-lung bypass machine, which revolutionized cardiac surgery.   At the time that I was a resident in General Surgery, Dr. DeBakey was one of the genuine giants of American medicine.  Having dinner with Dr. Debakey as a mere surgical resident would be the medical equivalent of a little leaguer having dinner with Mickey Mantle.  

      

In the early 1980s, Dr. DeBakey was invited to the Medical College of Virginia by then Chairman of Surgery, Dr. Lazar Greenfield, who was no slouch in the medical innovation department either. (http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/419796-overview)  The Surgery Department routinely hosted a dinner for visiting professors and included the Chief Surgical Residents.  For whatever reason (Dr. Greenfield wanted more people at the dinner, this was a once in a lifetime opportunity for most residents, whatever) the Senior Residents (me included) were invited to dinner with Dr. DeBakey.

The first challenge was finding a sport coat that fit and a tie and shirt that weren’t a mass of wrinkles.  The second was to try to stay awake through the entire event.  The third challenge was to not embarrass ourselves or the department in front of Dr. DeBakey.  That last challenge meant that no one would dare get more than one drink. 

I arrived at the old Bull and Bear Club in downtown Richmond and surveyed the room.  Dr. DeBakey was holding court near the bar.  Dr. Greenfield was hovering.  Dr. DeBakey was not a particularly imposing physical presence.  He was an older man, was a bit stooped and looked more like a college professor than the foremost cardiothoracic surgeon in the world.  The residents milled around and eventually Dr. Greenfield introduced each of us to “Big Mike.”  He seemed genuinely disinterested.

As the final preparations were made to serve dinner, my pager went off.  I went out in the hall, answered the page and solved whatever dilemma had been posed by my junior resident.   I returned to the dining room to find that everyone had taken a seat.  There was one long table set for dinner, with Dr. DeBakey sitting smack in the middle on one side.  I looked for an open place, expecting to find one discreetly on one end of the long table or the other.  I finally realized that the only open seat was directly across the table from “Big Mike” himself!

 “Holy shit!”  I thought, “I have to sit across from the most prominent surgeon in the world?”

I cautiously took my seat, put my napkin in my lap and tried to remember which stupid fork to use first.   Big Mike glanced up from his salad and emitted something of a grunt of acknowledgement.  I started to sweat a bit and my appetite disappeared.  Fortunately I was sitting next to a Chief Resident named Brad.  Brad had a baby face despite the fact that he was a few years older than the rest of us.  He served two tours as an infantryman in Viet Nam before coming home and going to college and medical school.  He didn’t intimidate easily.  After a few minutes Brad tried to pick up the chatter with his fellow residents.  Afraid of saying something which would expose our obvious stupidity, we all muttered monosyllabic responses. 

Finally Brad took a big breath and almost shouted “Dr. DeBakey!”

Big Mike looked up from his entrée and raised his bushy eyebrows in response.

“Dr. DeBakey, when I’m doing a vascular bypass and need a forcep, I ask the scrub nurse for a ‘DeBakey.’  What do you ask for?”

There was a long pause as Dr. DeBakey considered his response and we all collectively held our breath.

“Son, if I hold out my hand for an instrument and the nurse doesn’t know what I want, she’s fired.”

The rest of the meal passed in relative silence.  Dr. DeBakey had certainly made an impression.  The next day we all went back to our plebian existence, but none of us ever forgot dinner with Big Mike.

Two for the Beach - Book Reviews - The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly and The Third Rail by Michael Harvey

(Blogger Note: These reviews were published in the August 2011 edition of LamLight, the physician newsletter for the Lynchburg Academy of Medicine)

     My definition of a good vacation read includes the following:  First and foremost, the book should be entertaining.  There should be a believable plot, hopefully with a wicked twist at the end.  The characters should be interesting.  The book should last long enough to make it worth the effort, but it should be able to be consumed in several generous helpings (like two or three afternoons under a beach umbrella).  If there is good writing which makes all of this happen, all the better.  Here are two which I think fit my definition quite well.

The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly

     The  Fifth Witness is the fourth installment of Michael Connelly's series about Michael "Mickey" Haller, first introduced in The Lincoln Lawyer.  If you've read that book (or seen the movie, which is terrific, by the way) you know Mickey is a bottom feeder.  His clients include bikers, gang members and other assorted low-lifes. Mickey has used the home foreclosure crisis in California to enhance his practice.  He has taken out ads all over town, including on the sides of buses.  His business is booming.  He feels like a knight in shining armor for once, defending the common man against the greedy bankers and mortgage brokers.  One of Michael's clients is a diminutive single Mom named Lisa Trammel who has used social media to organize other foreclosure victims.  She stages protests outside of banks and has become such a nuisance that her own bank has taken out a restraining order, keeping her away from their properties.  When Lisa's mortgage banker is murdered in the bank's parking deck, she becomes the prime suspect.  The police investigation quickly zeros in on Lisa, she is arrested for first degree murder and Mickey suddenly becomes a defense attorney once again.

     The evidence against Lisa, although mostly circumstantial, is quite convincing.  Mickey builds a defense around discrediting the state's evidence and postulating a different killer.  Michael's new investigator (his first one was killed in The Lincoln Lawyer) digs into the victim's life and finds that he was heavily in debt himself.  The baner had leveraged himself with loans from a shady mortgage broker with mob connections.  When this broker is brought in as a witness Mickey asks a line of questions that would expose his organized crime activity and the broker is forced to plead "The Fifth."  Could this man have ordered a "hit" on the victim because of outstanding debt?  You bet.  Mickey's other ploy to create doubt in the jury's minds is to bring in a forensics expert who testifies that Lisa, who  stands 5 foot 3 inches, could not have struck the victim (who was well over six feet tall) on the top of his head where the fatal blows landed.

     The final half of the book is consumed with legal bickering and arguments over the admissibility of evidence and the relevance of certain witnesses and lines of questioning.  It is somewhat "Grisham-esque" in its legal detail.  It is worth the effort to get to what is a startling and dramatic turn of events and the conclusion.  Mickey (as expertly played in the movie by Matthew McConaughey) is at his best when he's the underdog and fighting for a losing cause.  This is a battle between a prosecutor who has what she thinks is a slam dunk conviction and a defense attorney who uses every trick in the book, occasionally bending the rules until they almost break.  Mickey Haller makes sure that justice is served in The Fifth Witness.  You'll have to read the book all of the way to the final page to find out exactly how he does it.

The Third Rail by Michael Harvey

     Michael Harvey has a Bachelor's Degree in Classical Languages from Holy Cross and a law degree from Duke.  He is a television and documentary producer and has won several Emmy Awards for that work.  This is his third crime novel, the first of which was The Chicago Way.  The main character in these books is Michael Kelly, a former Chicago detective who is now a private investigator.

     Kelly is waiting for a subway on an elevated platform when he witnesses a seemingly random murder.  He chases the shooter but loses him in an alley.  Later that same day the same perpetrator kills another random victim on the subway and poisons Holy Water in a Roman Catholic Church.  Forensic evidence links the crimes and suddenly the police and F.B.I. have a serial killer case on their hands.  Homeland Security becomes involved because of the possibility that this was a terrorist attack.  Michael Kelly is drawn into the investigation team because he was an eyewitness to the first crime in the spree.

     Michael doesn't trust the F.B.I. agent in charge of the team and conducts his own independent investigation using a computer expert and another former police officer as allies.  The computer expert uses internet search engines and some creative hacking to discover clues as to the motives for the crimes and possible suspects.  The site of the second subway shooting is actually in the identical location of a 1970s accident caused by faulty train brakes.  The company responsible for the production of the faulty equipment was never brought to justice and Michael and his team work around the theme of these killings being some sort of revenge acts.  In a seemingly unrelated way it is revealed that Michael was a passenger on one of the trains involved in the old accident and Michael's father was the train's conductor.

     Michael's girlfriend, a respected judge, is abducted by the serial killer and videotapes of her reading an ultimatum are delivered to Michael.  He then realizes that this is something personal directly related to him.  Could this be somehow related to the old train accident?  Michael has to search his childhood memory as well as the old case files from the accident investigation to cull clues as to the killer's identity.

     The plot is a bit convoluted but, somehow, it works.  The reader is taken down several false paths but eventually the whole story comes together with an unlikely resolution.  It's not quite as unanticipated as the ending the The Fifth Witness,  but it is close.  The characters in this book are well developed and the back stories are revealed in just enough detail at exactly the right times.  There is a lot more gratuitous violence in The Third Rail than there is in The Fifth Witness.


     If legal thrillers are more to your liking, read The Fifth Witness.  If you like more of a police procedural with some gore mixed in read The Third Rail.  If you've got a week off, what the heck, read them both!

Patient Stories...

     Patients like to tell me stories and jokes.  I don't know why, but they do.  Sometimes they are recycled jokes, but occasionally I get a new one.

     An older fellow came in today and said:  "You know, Doc, twenty five years ago we had Ronald Reagan, Johnny Cash and Bob Hope.  Now we got Obama, no Cash and no Hope!"

Book Review: One Minute to Midnight

(Blogger Note:  As many of you know, I write a monthly book review for "LamLIGHT" - the newsletter of the Lynchburg Academy of Medicine.  This review was published earlier this summer.  I will post my new reviews as they are released in LamLight and, occasionally, one of my favorites from the past.)

One Minute to Midnight

By Michael Dobbs

The death of Osama Bin Laden was met with many emotions and prompted much rhetoric in the press.  One of the commentaries which I found quite compelling was one by a talking head on CNN who spoke of “the children of 9/11.”  He was not referring to the children of victims of that tragic day’s attacks, but the children who have grown up under the specter of terrorism.  He wondered how growing up in an “unsafe and unpredictable world” would affect these kids as adults.  That got me thinking back to my childhood and the specter of nuclear annihilation which my generation grew up with.  I was ten years old during the Cuban Missile Crisis and I lived and went to school 3.8 miles from the Pentagon.  We had a Civil Defense air raid siren on the corner of our playground.  We were made to bring bottled water and canned goods to school in case we were trapped.  We practiced getting under our desks during a nuclear strike.  Who were we kidding?   We knew we were toast.  I have recollections of John Kennedy appearing on TV that fateful Sunday to inform the American people that the U.S. had discovered Russian   missiles on the island of Cuba.  I remember the Naval embargo and watching the TV with bated breath as Soviet ships approached the embargo line in the Caribbean.  Then my recollections get a bit fuzzy, but I remember that it seemed like it was quickly all over:  the Russians backed off, Kennedy had prevailed and the world was sort of safe again.  That was not exactly the case.

     Michael Dobbs has written what is probably the definitive book about the Cuban missile crisis.  He uses recently declassified American and Soviet documents and photos.  He also interviewed many of the key players (American, Soviet and Cuban) who were part of the Russian weapons deployment, the United States’ response and the Cubans who were ostensibly the pawns in this whole nuclear showdown chess match.  He has written a minute by minute narrative of every detail of the crisis which reads with more spell binding, fear inspiring, trembe inducing terror than any Ludlum, Clancy or Le Carre novel. 

     The opening of the book recreates the political atmosphere which created the crisis.  America was feeling technologically inferior to the Russians and the common thinking (albeit false) was that the US lagged the Russians badly in the production of nuclear weapons.  This supposed “missile gap” was, in fact one of the major issues which got John Kennedy elected in the first place.  The US had also been embarrassed by the loss of a U2 spy plane shot down over the Soviet Union and Dwight Eisenhower’s obfuscation of the plane’s mission (he claimed it was on a weather data collection flight over Turkey, when in fact, the Russians proved it was taking photos of military installations while flying over the Soviet Union).  Castro, not long in power and paranoid of an American led counter-revolution, was in fear of a more organized Bay of Pigs style invasion of his island country.  The Soviet Union felt besieged by NATO (i.e., American) nuclear weapons deployed in Europe.  This led to the unlikely alliance of Castro and Nikita Kruschev and the placement of Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba.

     What the US was unaware of then and until recently, was that the Soviets also had battlefield or “tactical” nuclear weapons in Cuba which would have easily annihilated an American invasion force.  The US was also unaware of the number of Soviet troops in Cuba and the fact that there were longer range missiles there which could have easily reached New York, Washington and many other Southeastern American cities.  There were, indeed, preparations in place (code named “Operation Mongoose,” organized by the CIA and under the control of Robert Kennedy) for an invasion of Cuba.  The American leadership was also under the impression that there were no nuclear warheads in Cuba yet, but this, again, has been proven to be false.

The American people had no idea of the division of opinion in the upper levels of government regarding how to respond to this Soviet nuclear threat in our own back yard.  The author makes it painfully clear that there were many who advocated a “first strike” approach with a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.  Air Force General Curtis LeMay, the commander of the Strategic Air Command and future Vice Presidential candidate with George Wallace (1968), when asked what he would do about the Cubans, replied “Fry ‘em.”   (Incidentally, LeMay was the inspiration for the crazed Air Force General Buck Turgidson in Stanley Kubrick’s classic movie “Dr. Strangelove.”)   Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara and others felt that Kruschev could not be trusted and that an aggressive first strike was the only acceptable response.  Fortunately, or we all would not be alive to learn about this, cooler heads prevailed.  The Naval blockade was implemented after much debate, and, after much wringing of hands, Bobby Kennedy met with the Soviet ambassador late on “Black Saturday”, October 27, 1962, the day which nuclear war seemed imminent.  He proposed the exchange of aging American weapons in Turkey and a promise of no American invasion of Cuba for the removal of the nuclear weapons from Cuba.

     While debate was raging in Washington, Castro became furious that the Soviets were backing down from their commitment to defend his island from America.  He demanded a Soviet first strike on the United States, anticipating an imminent invasion (which was, in fact, scheduled for the following Tuesday if talks broke off between the Americans and Soviets).  His willingness to die for his cause and take his island nation into nuclear holocaust with him is unbelievable. 

     The author also writes of many inadvertent events, any of which could have triggered a nuclear holocaust.  Another U2 wandered off of its flight path over the North Pole and mistakenly entered Russian airspace just as Kennedy and Kruschev were exchanging the beginnings of what became the ultimate compromise.  American ships dropped dummy depth charges on four Soviet submarines (armed with nuclear tipped torpedos) in the Caribbean to try to pinpoint their location.  These subs had lost communication with Moscow and they were uncertain as to whether they were actually at war or not.  One of the subs came incredibly close to firing its nuclear torpedoes which would have taken out an entire carrier group and, obviously, triggered a nuclear response.  Another U2 was shot down over Cuba, despite orders from Moscow to the contrary.  Any or all of these events could have triggered nuclear war. 

    This book is packed with facts and documented like an academic treatise.  It is suspenseful and terrifying at the same time.  It is an event which seems almost anecdotal nearly sixty years later, but had one small decision or event gone differently and the world as we know it would not exist. 

     So, this gets me back to my original question?   Do the “children of 9/11” have more uncertainty and lack of safety than previous generations?  I think not.  I think that, unfortunately, every generation has had its 9/11, its Cuban Missile Crisis, its Pearl Harbor, its near-Apocalyptic event.  This age of information may make us more aware of our dire straits, but they have always been there.  Awareness of these historical events is prudent, though, because as was stated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

“If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us!  But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.”

Trains, Planes and Automobiles - Vacation 2011

   I did not intend for our vacation to be an attempt to use every available mode of  transportation, it just worked out that way.  We left Lynchburg on Friday, July 29 on a U.S. Air (like we have a choice of airlines in Lynchburg) to Denver via a layover in Charlotte.  Both flights were late and we arrived in Denver in the wee hours of the morning on Saturday.  We had reserved a compact car from Hertz.  As I mentioned in an earlier post the gentleman at the counter suggested a larger vehicle if we planned any "mountain driving" (is there any other kind in Colorado?) so we upgraded to a Dodge Charger.  The Charger turned out to be an excellent idea and I miss the car already.  My '05 Maxima may find its way to the used car lot at our local Dodge dealership. On Saturday we drove to Colorado Springs, toured Pike's Peak, ran into Chaka Smart at our Marriott and ate at a micro-brewery.  A great day, all in all.

   On Sunday we drove to Cimarron, New Mexico where we dined at the Saint James Hotel.  Previous guests at the Saint James included Jesse James and Wyatt Earp.  Cool.  The search for the perfect burrito actually started and ended at the Saint James.  The "Smothered Burrito, Christmas Style" was hands down the best New Mexican food of the trip.  After dinner we decided to walk off the burrito and ambled out of the hotel and started our own self-guided tour of downtown Cimarron.  As we started our walk, a large lumbering animal crossed our path about half a block away (downtown Cimarron is only about four blocks long).  "Was that a bear?" I asked.  To which my wife replied "Let's go back inside!"

  On Monday morning a fellow named Gene, who is a school superintendent somewhere near St. Louis when he's not a Boy Scout, drove us to our son Brian's camp at Philmont Scout Ranch.  This is Brian's fifth summer working at Philmont.  It is Gene's twenty-seventh!  The only wildlife we encountered on this sojourn into the wilderness was a few chimpmunks (or "mini-bears" as they are referred to at Philmont) and some bedraggled Scouts who were in their sixth or seventh day of their trek.  Brian entertained us as he instructed these fourteen and fifteen year olds in black powder rifle shooting.

   Gene then took us back down the mountain with Brian who was off for a few days.  We then drove to Antonito, Colorado.  Driving through the Cimarron Pass we actually had a mountain lion sprint across the road in front of us!  He was too fast for a photo.  The only sites in Antonito are the Narrow Guage Railroad Hotel where we stayed (which made the Saint James look like The Greenbrier), the curiously named Windmill Restaurant where we had fairly decent Mexican food and the starting point for the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railroad.  On Tuesday the three of us took the train all 54 miles to Chama, New Mexico, seeing spectacular scenery and taking lots of photos.

We rode a bus back to Antonito and then drove to Mosca, Colorado (via Alamosa, CO) and checked into The Great Sand Dunes Lodge, which was lots better than the Narrow Guage Railroad Hotel.  We woke up to loud bird noises and found that we had a hummingbird feeder on the patio of our room:

   We then went to The Great Sand Dunes National Park (the newest National Park, established in 2007) and  had a great talk from one of the Rangers who discussed the delicate ecosystem which produced and maintains the: sand dunes.  We then hiked up to Zapata Falls and more photo opportunities:

   We took Brian back to Philmont and then Ellen and I spent two relaxing evenings in Taos, New Mexico, staying at a lovely bed and breakfast called The Inn on the Rio.  It is run by a very nice couple who are wonderful.  We stayed here two years ago also and this time it felt like we were visiting old friends.
    On Friday we needed to return to Denver to catch our return flight (which left at 12:50 AM on Saturday morning).  We decided against traveling via Interstate 25 and drove small roads through the San Luis valley.  We made several stops, including a great lunch stop at Mother's Bistro in Buena Vista, Colorado and an hour or so stop in Breckenridge.  We arrived in Denver in time to visit with Ellen's cousin Janet and her husband Wes who treated us to a delightful meal and a tour of their home in Denver.  We then returned the Charger to Hertz (with the gas tank empty warning light on for the last ten or twelve miles) and flew home.
   We arrived exhausted, but it was truly a remarkable trip.  We were amazed to see Brian in his "natural habitat", found the nearly perfect burrito in Cimarron, were very fortunate to see some wildlife and amazing scenery and enjoyed catching up with Janet and Wes.
   But, alas, tomorrow is Monday and it's back to work!