"One crowded hour" on the road to Telluride

My brother was dying of ALS. His wife had leukemia. Kids were in the back seat. I drove.

[Edit on 5/9/2024. This is the story I sent out in 2023. I was tempted revise the meandering introduction, but decided to just change the sub-heading. jrs ]

There’s a book-marketing guru named Derek Doepker who writes a ‘go get ‘em, tiger!’ type daily newsletter that I subscribe to and read regularly to get myself all fired-up and motivated to become the best Famous Novelist I can be, kinda like how James Bagwell, AKA “Mr. Success,” the parole officer in the TV show Sneaky Pete, listens to motivational tapes in his car while tracking down felons who have missed their appointments. Mr Success is highly motivated to be the best parole officer he can be, and he is highly motivated to get the paroled felons for whom he is responsible to make the most of their new opportunity to turn their lives around. Two things Mr. Success says all the time are, (1) “Do you want to be an eagle, or do you want to be a shitbird?” and (2) "I'm not here to argue. I am in the business of making eagles."

Mr. Success: What kind of Famous Novelist do you want to be, John? An eagle or a shitbird?

Two things that book marketing guru Derek Doepker says all the time are (1) if you want to to have any success as a self-publishing author you have to have a newsletter, and (2) when you write your newsletter you should have an audience of just one person in mind whom you’re writing it, as this will improve your focus. Says Doepker, “if you’re writing for everybody you’re writing for nobody.“

Well, I do have a newsletter, and you’re reading it. But only time will tell it it helps me sell any books. As for writing for ‘an audience of one,’ I don’t know about that either. I’ve never found that writing for an imaginary reader helped me focus. Now, I could say that I’m writing for you, yes you, you very special reader now hearing these words in your head, but actually I just write for me, mainly. Anyway In this issue I’m going to talk a bit about my brother Paul, who left this vale of tears in 2008.

Paul, at about age 15

Housekeeping

Gentle reminder that over the next 7 months, in preparation for the release of my forthcoming novel Mountain of Devils (prequel to Acts of the Apostles and Biodigital), I plan to republish my four extant novel(la)s, each with an introduction by a prominent literary-cultural observer:

Acts of the Apostles, with an introduction by Cory Doctorow;
Biodigital, introduction by John Biggs;
Cheap Complex Devices, introduction by David Weinberger;
The Pains, introduction by Ken MacLeod.

AS I’M SURE YOU’VE NOTICED, all ‘founder’ supporters of Sundman figures it out! will receive, in or before October, 2023, print editions, autographed by me, of all five of these books. So you rich folks who can afford it, don’t squander this opportunity. Just say’n.

At some point I’ll be looking for ‘beta’ & ARC (advance reviewer copy) readers for each of these five titles. Subscribers to Sundman figures it out! get first priority.

Pre-orders and lots of quality reviews that post on Day One are key ingredients of a successful book launch, and I hope you’ll be part of that process for me. With your help when each of these books come out I’ll fly like an eagle. We won’t mention the alternative scenario. I’ll keep you apprised.

OK. On with the story.

Elevations

Five of us in a van in fall, 2007, heading from Colorado Springs to Telluride, a distance, according to Mapquest, of 301 miles, and a driving time of 5 hours and 38 minutes. I was driving, my brother Paul was riding shotgun (I think?) and in the back were my sister in law Jennifer, my niece Jillian who was about 9 years old and my nephew Kyle who was about 13. We were listening to one of the Harry Potter books on CD. I think it was the one about the prisoner. We were going to Telluride for the wedding of Jennifer’s sister Cindy. Every once in a while we’d make a pit stop — you know, to use a restroom, stretch the legs, have a snack, pump out Paul’s lungs — that kind of thing.

Here’s one route. Wait til you see the ups and downs.

Somewhere along this journey Paul played for me a song he liked by the Australian indy band with the evocative name Augie March called ‘One Crowded Hour.’ (Did Paul have their CD, or did we just hear the song on the radio? Or? I forget.) It’s a simple tune soulfully sung with impressionistic lyrics evidently about some doomed love affair that almost but never happened. The chorus goes like this:

But for one crowded hour
You were the only one in the room
I sailed around all those bumps in the night
To your beacon in the gloom

I thought I had found my golden September
In the middle of that purple June
But one crowded hour
Would lead to my wreck and ruin

I don’t remember how Paul told me about the song, because by that time he had pretty much lost the ability to speak. He had some kind of tablet he pointed to that voiced words and phrases, but he was not very adept at using it. No matter, when Paul liked something (cliché, but true), his face lit up. He had a world-class smile, and I remember him smiling at the song’s morose but clever lyrics at it played on the car stereo. I remember that he particularly like the line One crowded hour would lead to my wreck and ruin. He thought it was funny.

Sky anvils

You’re walking down the street on a lovely sunny day, just a few clouds in the sky, birds chirping, puppies and children playing in the park — maybe it’s springtime, and some tulips are coming up, you’re talking with a friend, it’s a good day to be alive, summer’s coming after a cold dark winter, everything’s groovy, when BLAMMO! out of nowhere a fucking fifty-pound steel anvil falls right on your head.

The anvil that fell on Paul’s head was a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as ALS, when he was about 40 years old. Another anvil fell on Jennifer’s head a few years later when she developed leukemia. Think about that. Young couple, prime of life, two young children, we can stipulate the usual yin & yang of married life, but in general things are not bad at all, things are pretty darn good, and then before you know it, the husband’s facing an all but certain death sentence, the wife’s prognosis is pretty damn scary as well, and the kids, well, they’re children. They didn’t deserve any of this stuff.

So that’s why I was driving the van to Telluride. Paul was several years into his ALS experience; Jennifer perhaps six months into her leukemia adventure, but on the mend. All of Paul & Jennifer’s friends and family were finding ways to help them out. My way of helping was going out to Colorado Springs to live in their house and help around the house for a few weeks.

Jennifer, Paul, Jillian, Kyle. And me.

I was employed at the time as a technical writer for a software company based in Silicon Valley. I mostly worked remotely anyway, so it didn’t matter too much if I was home on Martha’s Vineyard or in ‘The Springs.’ During my first stint, Paul was still working. He had a robot wheelchair that could go up and down stairs, and he could drive the van, and he could speak, and eat. I helped out with shopping and driving and laundry, but I also had plenty of time to do my day job. It was a struggle for Paul and Jennifer and their children but they had lots of friends and family in the area and they were getting by.

So after a few weeks I went home. But some time later, I don’t remember how much later, when Jennifer was quite ill, and Paul’s condition had worsened, they asked me if I could come back. This time I stayed for quite a while. I wasn’t just doing laundry and driving this time. Shit had gotten a lot more real. Hours each day using machines to help Paul breathe. Helping him with bathing and hygiene. Driving Jennifer to the hospital for blood transfusions. Laundry. Schoolwork. Shopping. I even re-sealed the driveway with that tar stuff that comes in five-gallon buckets from Home Depot, not because the driveway was in such bad shape, but because the cracks in the driveway had somehow become important to Jennifer, whose husband was only dying.

I don’t remember how long that second stint was. Weeks? Months? I don’t have any conception of the time, the hours were all crowded, but there are several incidents from that time that are kind of seared into my brain. An ice storm. A wheel chair accident. A bear in the garage. A phone call from my boss.

You got momentum

Paul was ten years younger than me, and the last of my parent’s seven children. I remember the day my mother brought him home for the first time. We still lived in the farmhouse then, all eleven of us including Nana and Pop; twelve of us before Uncle Harry went off to the Marines. . .

The farmhouse in New Jersey where Paul lived until he was 3 and I lived until I was 13

When I was twelve, Paul was two. When I began commuting to high school in New York City he was in first grade. When I went off to college he was eight. During college I spent my summer vacations away from home, and after college I went off to Africa and spent three of the next five years there. For twenty-some years, Paul and I didn’t really hang out a lot.

While I was in college and, later, in Africa, he wrote me letters. They always had panache. While I was living in Fanaye, Senegal and Paul was 11 or 12 the Park Theater, in Caldwell, NJ, burned to the ground only an hour after he had been there watching a movie. “Just think,” eleven year old Paul wrote. “If that fired had started just one hour earlier I might have been immolated in the conflagration!”

By the time Paul went to college he was a tall handsome man and gifted athlete (soccer, skateboarding), and after college by a string of coincidences he became one of the pioneers of the sport of snowboarding — employee #2 at Burton Boards, and arguably the first person ever paid to ride a snowboard. It was around that time, when he was 22 or so and I was 32, (married, with two children), that I began to get to know Paul as an actual, complex, person, not merely my kid brother.

Paul riding at the first U.S. Snowboard Open, which he helped organize

After several years with Burton Snowboards — watching, and to a considerably degree helping ensure, the sport’s getting a foothold in the early 1980’s — Paul found himself a married man, living in his wife’s home town of Colorado Springs. He opened his own mountain bike and snowboard shop that he named “Momentum.” He always answered the phone there with an emphatic ‘you got momentum’.

A Cinderella Story

Up and up and up into the mountains of Colorado we drove, endlessly up, and I found myself wondering how in the hell anybody ever found their way up here a hundred and fifty years ago? And why were they here in the first place? It's breathtakingly beautiful, that’s true, but it’s not exactly what you might call prime farmland. Telluride’s elevation is 8,750 feet, nearly three thousand feet higher than The Springs’ 6,010 feet, and Paul was having a harder and harder time breathing. We were stopping more frequently to use the machine that sucks the gunk from his lungs

No caption necessary.

.We get to Telluride, finally, pull into the hotel, get situated —I think it was Kyle, Paul and me in one room, Jennifer & Jillian in another, but I don’t remember the arrangements. But I do remember that there was some kind of portable hoist that Kyle and I used to get Paul into and out of bed.

Next day was the wedding, high up on the ski slope overlooking the town. A long ride in a gondola took us there, higher and higher into the thinner and thinner air. I had a hard time getting my breath. It was a lovely outdoor ceremony. The bride was radiant, the groom was handsome, Jennifer looked like royalty in her matron of honor dress.

For the first several years of Burton Snowboards’ existence, money was extremely tight. Making payroll for the ten-person company was a challenge, and Burton Snowboards nearly shut their doors permanently a few times. Then snowboarding finally caught on. And when it did, it took off like a rocket. Burton’s founder Jake Burton Carpenter got rich. He took Paul snowboarding in the Rockies, the Andes, the Alps, and in New Zealand. Burton would rent a helicopter to drop the two of them off on the tops of mountains.

At the Telluride wedding I wondered what Paul was thinking about as we witnessed the exchange of the wedding vows.

After the ceremony, back down in the impossibly quaint old town there was a reception at a restaurant on Colorado Ave, the main street.

Telluride. I still find everything about that place improbable, barely believable.

Later, as we jostled about the crowded reception — Paul with his speaking tablet, trying to communicate in the din, Jennifer by his side — word came that the wedding party was passing outside on a hay-bale-covered horse-drawn wagon. We made our way outside onto the sidewalk to see them, and when the people on the wagon saw us, they begin to call for Jennifer.

At first she hesitated, deciding, perhaps, whether she should stay there with Paul. But everybody was calling for her to go get on the wagon that was slowly pulling away and, with a nod from Paul, she decided to go, running to catch the hay-wagon like Cinderella running from the ball to catch her pumpkin coach.

And as she hops up & gets caught and hoisted onto the back of the wagon, laughing, one of her slipper-like shoes falls off, and everyone, friends and strangers alike, everyone in the entire impossible town of Telluride, Colorado, is laughing and calling Cinderella! Cinderella! Cinderella!

Crowding the Hour, weaving the threads

Several years ago, on the interior walls of the Steamship Authority terminal in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, there was an exhibit from the oral history project of the Martha’s Vineyard Museum. One of the people interviewed was Rosalie (Tilton) Spence, and there was a printed excerpt of her talking about her father Captain Zebulon “Zeb” Tilton, who, according to the exhibit, was ‘born in Chilmark in 1867, [and] was known as the last of the coastal schooner men, sailing from Maine to New Jersey hauling freight, long after most of the world switched to mechanized power.’ She spoke of how ‘[her father']’s life was the sea,’ how seldom he was home, and how, as a child, she missed him. When she was a little girl, she said, when her father came home, at night he would lie down in bed next to her, and she would hold on to him with both hands as hard as he could so that he couldn’t get away. But in the morning, when she awoke, she always found that he was gone with the tide.

And so we too try hang on to our memories of our crowded hours, but the likewise are gone when we awake.

Paul in his bedroom in Colorado Springs.

I was going to conclude with some profound meditation on the unknowability of time. We know what an hour is, crowded or not, as we experience it, but once it’s in the past what is it then? Physicists who’ve spent their whole lives studying time can’t quite get a handle on what it actually is, so how am I to make any sense of it? Forget it, I have nothing add.

In my last issue I promised that Sundman figures it out will not be just a miscellaneous collection of stories and observations, but that, over time, it will cohere into a narrative as various threads are developed and interwoven. And so it shall, just you wait. Things I’ve said today will come up in the future, so I hope you have paid attention and read closely.

Jennifer made a full recovery and is doing well in Colorado Springs. Kyle is a licensed pilot and climate-focused entrepreneur. Jillian is an elementary school teacher; she got married last spring.

Jennifer’s father Jim, an architect in Colorado Springs, told me a great story once about something that happened to him when he was a young lieutenant in the U.S. Marines. It had something to do with some money that he had been charged to deliver to someone, for some reason, in some village. I believe it was in the Philippines, but I’m not sure about that. A helicopter was put at Lt. Jim’s disposal for this mission, and off he went. But something went wrong, I don’t remember what, and he decided that he had to abort the mission before having delivered the cash.

But he didn’t know what to do with the money, and so, as the helicopter took off, he just pushed the bag out the helicopter door, and it fell — like Jake Burton and my baby brother Paul falling from a helicopter into the snows of the mountains of New Zealand — into the throng of villagers gathered below. And Jim asked me, “What would you have done, John?” and I said, “I don’t know.” So that’s all I have of that story. I don’t know how Jim is doing today. He must be almost 90. If I ever find out the rest of the story I’ll let you know.