Sam -- from India!

Dad,
Missed the mail this week… I guess I’ll just have to re-read your letter from last week about how well Obama is doing.
My companion and I were attacked with more anti-american sentiment than I’ve felt since I left New Delhi on Saturday morning as we talked to an old man in front of his house. I walked up with a smile, and the next thing I knew we were in deep trouble. “Where are you from” came first out of his mouth. Followed by a feeble “He’s from Nepal and I’m from usa” I purposefully dropped my voice and tried to smooth over the on-coming berating I knew would come. “Your country is a christian country right?? So tell me this, did you elect that president of yours? Is it right for a Christian country to be doing what you are doing in the world? Can you really come into my country and try and teach me how to be more loving and good when the people in your country can’t get it right?” He let us have it Dad, I kept my mouth shut, and wondered how it’d be if we didn’t hate each other, if we learned to trust others, and put away our own selfish desires once in a while and helped somebody in need. That seems to me like it’d be much better than shooting missiles and guns at each other. But what do I know?
Love you dad, good hard week ahead and behind of me, and I like what I do.
sam


Dad,
I learned (from a 19 year old from Dakota) that only 4.5 percent of the whole world’s population (I don’t know how accurate that is or how even they could begin to calculate that) is over six feet tall.
Think about my surprise when I walked into the gym this morning at 6:15, my little run-downer gym that I’ve been working out in for the last three months, and was approached by a short fair-skinned and nicely bearded man. The first thing he said was “I notice that your skin is very white, where are you from?” “I’m from the United States” “Are you mormon??” and that’s how it started. Ha ha, I laughed, and we talked for three minutes about our backgrounds and lives. His name is Jay, he’s doing a work for a non profit organization that helps young children get an education at a cheap school with good teachers. “Let’s do some reps man,” was the next thing he said, and we laughed at each other’s inability to really do anything productive with the complicated machines. He asked if I was sad about Romney, I said no. He was surprised, and I asked if he’d be voting. His reply was that he’d be on the e-vote on the internet, but it didn’t matter much because something about his state being last or small or inconsequential or something. I told him that in my state if you didn’t vote republican you’re condemned as a sinner. Funny guy, and I enjoyed his attitude about life. Not to mention we’ve got a new gym buddy and I’ve never had a friend from the Dakotas before.
The week was sweet. I don’t think I can contribute to your blog. BUT, if you want to put any of my mails onto it, you’re welcome to edit and cut and paste what you’d like…
Love you dad
Sam

Tim's flower he made in Unified... wow huh?

Tim's glass flower!! So beautiful!

Tim... after!! :)

Tim... before :)

at 10:05 We were in our basement diong some laundry and cleaning some plaster off one of our putty knives when the phone went off. Our old rotary black phone. "Hurry run outside the moon is turning red." Carolyn, Ellie's mom, wanted to go and see the eclipse. So Ellie and I ranb outside in shorts and tights and shivered in the sigle digit cold and watched as the moon slowly turned orange and red. Saturn and some other planet glowing close. It was an amazingly cold and clear night night and it seemed to heighten the senses and give them a a focused crisp feeling. We pulled out our camera and turned it to manual so that Ellenoir could show me how to work a real camera as we tried to find the correct f stop number and shutter speed to capture what niether of us had seen before, that is according to our faulty memories. After about half an hour of running inside and out we returned to our computer and enjoyed sifting through the dozen or so photos that we had taken in order to get one that we enjoyed enough to put on the family bog. the next eclipse should be in 2010 if the radio connected correctly to my ear.

blues

(see bottom of this for a resolution!)

I just read Ben's honest and revealing and funny posts, and want to write about something real.

Two of my best and oldest friends have, in the course of a single week, blown up in my presence, once at another friend, once at me.

They're both wonderful human beings and I owe them more than I can ever imagine. But now I'm left picking up pieces, wondering just where we stand.

How much do you give before you say no more?

How accommodating can one be without encouraging bad behavior?

How can a friend act so aggressively?

How much does knowledge of sleeplessness and depression and past experience weigh on a balance against anger taken out on another person?

How much account should one take of alcohol?

Doesn't friendship endure through bad times and good?

What's more precious than friendship?

How lonely is life without friends and family?

All real questions.
All with the understanding that most real questions don't really have answers.

And, as a true friend would -- the friend who got angry with me came by and apologized and we talked and except for a slight wariness that will last for a while things are good again. Where would any of us be without apology?

Light in Fairbanks

Thursday, February 21, 2008
This morning I felt broken and covered in drowse and mold. The watch Cody gave me last summer, which I think of as a blue watch even though it’s grey, beeped at 7:45. Rachel said politely, “Your watch is going off.” She’s been working on being pleasant in the mornings—and quite obviously succeeding, this morning it was me who was the grump. The sun was already shining obliquely through our bedroom window when Rachel shook me a second time. She warmed up the shower as I lay curved in the fetal position in our bed. Glenna’s cigarette smoke still seemed to swirl under the bed and behind the television. I didn’t want to go to class.
Last night at 11:45 I finished “East of Eden.” Rachel was asleep next to me when I finally placed the book on the headboard behind me and wrapped my arms around her. I tried to cry, Steinbeck’s world seeming so hellishly honest and passive. Adam’s dieing word “temshil,” or whatever is was means, “you may choose,” but the rest of the book seemed to be saying, “You may choose, but it will all turn out bad anyway.”
In the car Rachel asked me, “Why don’t you ever cry? I mean with tears rolling down your face.”
We’re fasting today, a part of a forty day community effort to increase missionary work. I love how streamlined and efficient I feel when fasting.
The pleasant and capable bus driver told me about the lunar eclipse we missed last night. “You’re getting out at West Ridge right?”
I sunk into the square-cushioned sofa’s brownness in the lobby of the Irving building. Holding the article I should have finished this morning I read slowly and deliberately, intentionally delaying my already late entrance into the classroom. It felt good to understand the technical jargon and methods. The article was on phosphate introduction on the Kuparak River on the North Slope. “That’s where my feet got so cold I couldn’t flex my heel to get my waiders off.” I laughed aloud feeling like an old specialist in limnology.
Steinbeck’s damning descriptions, black in their inevitability and justice, create a world of vivid, endearing automatons. I want to read something less definitive. For a change in pace I picked up a French version of Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus.” It’s in a compilation that looks like the bible. I wonder who this text matters most to. It’s got to be someone’s favorite book.
Jay’s daughter was sick, “Class canceled” was taped on the door. I felt a burning need to write as I walked back towards Rachel’s office. I dreamed last night that we were watching a documentary on sex change operations. I also dreamed these lines of verse,
Your insistence weighs upon my joy like chocolate
On a piece of butter.
It seemed really good to me then.
Now we’re sitting together outside in an unfrequented corner on the Wood center roof. It’s 36 degrees and the sun’s out. I feel a desire to write still but the burn is gone. It’s one of the consequences of feeling so fulfilled and content with Rachel. Sometimes when we’re together, the intensity of my despair or rejoicing is dampened. She’s my muse too though.

an old river trip

Geomorphology of the Yampa and Upper Green

Friday 2:30 p.m. “We should be there in four hours,” Jack bellows to the dozen or so newly acquainted students huddled around the rented minivans. An hour and a half later, barely out of Brigham City and frozen in twenty miles of construction traffic, the driver in front of us rolls down the window of his sedan and rests his head on the highway median barrier.

7:20 p.m. Trying to distract myself from the sickening bounces of our cream-colored minivan, I peer out the overly tinted window. “We will be safe, respectful and successful.” The Duchesne elementary school’s motto seems strangely applicable to our expedition as we caravan into the volatile and educational Dinosaur National Park for our geomorphology fieldtrip. When we get to Vernal, Jack jovially addresses us. “McDonalds has been knocked down but there’s still a Taco Bell.” Sure enough, only a field of dismembered plumbing appendages and cement blocks litter the field beneath the golden arches sign which is still rotating proudly.

10:30 p.m. Our strange group of “carrot snappers” (Jim’s Idaho nickname for Utahans), “potato heads,” and easterners roll into Echo Canyon. It has been a long four hours. Beyond the fecund jungle of tamarisk, the Green River curls around Steamboat Rock, a 300’ sandstone butte bathed in blue moonlight. We set up camp in the sheltered amphitheater of stone and cottonwood.

Saturday 7:00 a.m. Today is qualitatively different—five river miles on a stream with a discharge double what we expected. “Don’t worry, we hiked up to Warm Springs Rapid over the weekend and it was only chest deep,” the seasonal employee’s reassurance is ominous at best.

9:49 a.m. The Yampa River, undammed, laden with sediment and highly variable in flow merges with the cool, clear Upper Green. Jack teaches that the constant 800 cubic feet per second minimum release from the Flaming Gorge Dam allows boating all summer long, “as much as we love to hate dams.” Incised meanders, layer-cake stratigraphy, and fan-eddy complex are the terms of the morning. The width of the river valley depends on the erodibility of the bed material. Bounded by the cemented silicate of Uinta and Morrison formation sandstone, the narrow canyon we stand in is the longest section of sandstone canyon on a free flowing river in the United States. The flood of record, which occurred in 1984, reached at least where we were standing—fifteen or twenty feet above the current water level. Tamra, the park botanist pulls a woody plant from the sandy soil. “Perennial Pepperweed,” she justifies her action, “an exotic that didn’t exist here before but got established in that flood.” Jack describes how with each flood event, the floodplain is raised by sediment deposition. The flood banks slowly separate themselves from their active channel, making it harder for the stream to interact with its floodplain. Eventually the fossil floodplain becomes a dry terrace. Somehow it seems like a metaphor for failed marriage.

11:43 a.m. Patrick waves his arms at us, describing how the Colorado Pikeminnow spawns on the descending limb of the hydrograph. As the river’s discharge diminishes, the fry are distributed in backwaters and eddy shelters. The fish are more pike than minnow—the largest minnow in the U.S., growing up to six feet long and ranging from the Sea of Cortez to the headwaters of the Green and Yampa. The river system’s fragmentation has endangered the fish which currently only have a few known spawning sites—one of which is next to us on the Yampa.

12:20 p.m. We skirt along the south side of the river until the trail cliffs out against the 1,000’ sheer walls. Most of the class descends to the river. Marshal and I stay high, watching the diminutive Lisa go in almost to her neck. “I bet she never did that at Texas A&M,” Marshall quipped as we shuffled across a precarious ledge. We ford the river after the constriction to join the rest of the group at the undeveloped rafting campsite, Box elder Park. We only get drenched to our bellybuttons.

1:27 p.m. We eat our lunch sitting on the fine-sand of the point bar. Patrick pulls out a camp stove and re-hydrates a gourmet pack of egg plant lasagna. I eat a pop tart and a slice of greasy American cheese. Tamara teaches us that while the riparian zone only makes up 1-2% of the park’s land area, it accounts for 50-90% of its biodiversity. I strip down to my shorts, swim across the river and jump off a 25’ cliff into what I know from class is theoretically the deepest part of the channel (right against the outside bank). Jack cautions me publicly when I get back to the group, “You never know what’s down there hidden by the silt, you gotta be careful.” but pats my shoulder and whispers, “nice jump Ben,” as I walk back to my gear.

3:00 p.m. Our group splits up and Jack asks me to make sure the river right half is doing alright. I lope past Lisa and Heather and tell Loles, a Spanish student visiting from Madrid to follow David and I around a boulder rather than going through the river. “I cann move!” I spin around to see Loles standing thigh-deep in the river. “I cann move!”

“OK then Loles, just walk back to the bank.” David assures her calmly.

“No I cann move.” Dave and I smile at one another, finally understanding her through her accent and step down into the stream to pull her out. She loses a sandal in the silt which David fishes out with his foot.

4:25 p.m. Jon and I sprint around the last meander to the famed Warm Springs Rapid. House sized boulders lie in the channel, half exposed like crocodile teeth slicing through the tissues of the muddy river. I toss my near-empty backpack to David and dive off a rock into the turbid channel—bound for the actual warm springs on the other side of the river. As I slip into the twisting flow I see Jon lower himself in and hear Jack shout “I wouldn’t . . .” from the bank but his warning is drowned by the power of the stream. I side stroke to the opposite bank and jog up to the spring’s source. Seeing the piles of bighorn droppings surrounding the pool like clumps of fibrous grapes, I decide not to quench my readily growing thirst but return to the group.

4:32 p.m. Christy is expounding on the creation of the rapid. In 1965 a giant debris flow completely blocked the river at this point. There were several groups of camper in the area who saw the stones and dirt march into the river—destabilized by a rain event. This area was particularly prone for such mass wasting events since it is the mostly denuded remains of a landslide which occurred 10,000 years ago when the canyon wall collapsed. In 1965, even two days after the debris flow, holes were still shifting in the rapid. The first raft to try the passage flipped and one of its crew drowned. They helicoptered in supplies to the remaining campers. Eventually the nique-point, or area of steepest gradient, migrated downstream naturally steepening itself to be able to transport the sediment. A large field of watermelon sized cobbles forms a bar downstream on the outside bank of the first meander below the constriction. Ten or so channel-widths downstream of that bar on the opposite bank, a bar of baseball sized cobbles pushes out into the channel. Jack names the whole feature a fan-eddy complex and says that frequency of these systems can determine overall stream slope.

6:45 p.m. Thunder rolls through the canyon like a Cadillac Escilade. We quicken our pace, following the river left trail that Marshal and I had discovered. Jack stands calf-deep in the river below shouting combat directions up to us. “Ben you take the lead! Marshal you run sweep, we need to get out of here!” We are still scattered across the cliff as the wind and thunder claps intensified. Dry, dust-bearing, gusts blinded us as we squeezed across the even more perilous ledge to get back to the main trail. The rain hit us as we sprinted back to our tents.

3:00 a.m. Christy wanders over to Patrick’s tent and asks meekly, “Do you think we’re on the active floodplain?” The curve of the Green around Echo Park does seem to swell around us like a coil of a constrictor as the rain resurrects the ephemeral desert tributaries around us. I slip out of my bivy sac, pad by Jon—lying on his back snoring like a mountain lion—and curl up on the uncomfortable floor of our Kia minivan.

Sunday 11:42 a.m. Everyone is tired and Lisa is shivering, despite the fact that she’s wearing three coats, gloves, and two pairs of pants—every article of clothing she has. We dig trenches in a reattachment bar below Steamboat Rock to examine the ripple deposit foresets. Like geomorphological forensic scientists, we draw arrows indicating flow direction when the feature was deposited. We dig down a few inches and brush the layered sand to reveal the ripple crests. “They’re perpendicular to the ripple’s travel direction.” Jack digs around a tamarisk trunk showing how you can use the germination horizon to determine sediment deposit age. “Once a section of stem is covered with sand, the growth rings from that point on get constricted. There’s a whole cottage-industry sprung up around sediment/vegetation dating.” Sarah uncovers an anomalous twist which Jack explains is a marble cake formation—caused by soft sediment deformation not flow conditions.

6:50 p.m. We eat the last of our wheat thins, on the road back to Logan. We’re no longer “newly acquainted.” I write a poem as the sun goes down

I’ve died and have been reborn

at least the quadrant of my flesh where you

were embedded has turned to history.

The pages have crystallized

in that dry wind which rakes

through my splayed fingers

and aches my brain—the mucous tacky,

binding up my tendons and conscience.

Oh what a painful shedding

this departure of our mutual dream.

Kindness is a forgotten river rock

but may we both touch it again

when the waters rise.

Skiing brothers

Here are a few more pictures--joe landed on his pole and tom let some flowers get in his way

New House In Fairbanks

Here's where we live and a few of the trails just down the road. On Saturday we saw an Alaska style dog mushing team--replete with poodle.

Day Before Wedding

It was a veritable Abbott Bonanza. Check us out.

Tuesday Afternoon

A gallon of orange juice costs $8.00 up here. Makes you want to swish it around your teeth a few times before swallowing.

Here are the mailboxes on our road.

Happy Dog -- He loves all the new posts

My brilliant children

481, 44 (30-34) Joe Abbott, Eagle Mountain, 5:19:40.8 marathon

Utah Snow vs. Pittsburgh Soot: 15 inches!

working in Pittsburgh

I found out pretty quick that all old houses in Pittsburgh are full of soot. No matter the house or the wall every housein Pittsburgh hides a wealth of soot. The upper set is a house that I'm working at currently where the plaster had water damage and the entire cieling had to be removed and I'm in the process of finishing it right now. The lower set is of a breakfast nook where the people wanted the old painted wood taken out and oak put in and stained. One of the pluses of living in an area where most houses are one hundred plus years old does make for a plethora of work.

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V


Tim, Me, Wrote this on Mare's deally

Yo whats up guys?? Hey this is my first blog, so stoked for this freakin cool web site. Dad you are such a genious to connect us all together. My play opens on March the fourth and goes until the 11th!! I have to cut and dye my hair on the 22nd of Feb. =( so everyone try and get used to me with short hair.

Family -- Multilayered Complexities

Sam's in India.

Nate's in Pittsburgh.

Tom's in Brooklyn.

Ben's in Fairbanks.

Tim and Maren in Orem, Joe in Eagle Mountain.

And I sit here in Woodland Hills and think of the rich layers of relationship that lap and overlap so richly and with such complexity across the world.

And it make me happy.

To my family..

Just wanted to tell everyone I LOVE YOU!!! You all are my most favorite people on this planet.. and how I got to be a part of "you" , i'll always be most grateful... Have a fabulous week :) & till next time.... Rock your life!! mar!!!!!

Playing with #7.. Kadon's b-day!

Kadon Scott Black! #7

Laughing :)

da girlzz in nyc!!

nate-dawg!! :) & mar!! :)

my favorite dad!

In the New School!

goodlookin' dudes :)

Samuel Oliver Abbott!!

Just 3 abbott's havin' a good time!

Snow nose

Blue asked me to say that he's getting cold waiting for other people to post to Roots and Blues.