by David Frey | Dec 15, 2009 | Essays, The West
It was a December day 68 years ago when Ralph Ball’s destiny changed.
“We were playing touch football on the fraternity house lawn,” he once told me. “One of our classmates came down and said, ‘Hey boys, don’t worry about what you’re going to do next year. We’re going to be in the Army. We just attacked Japan.’”
When he learned of the newly-formed 10th Mountain Division, spearheaded by ski pioneer Minnie Dole to counter Nazi ski troops, he had little doubt where he would aim to enlist. Ball ended up at Fort Lewis in Washington, a camp was full of familiar faces: young men he knew from the ski racing circuit of Northeastern colleges.
“It was like old home week,” said Ball, a Massachusetts boy who had been captain of the ski team at Deerfield Academy and Williams College.
The 10th Mountain Division was an anomaly in the Army, comprised largely of well-educated young men, some from wealthy families, with a passion for skiing and mountaineering.
Training mostly in Rockies above Camp Hale, near Leadville, Colo., they would be among the last to deploy, but they secured legendary status in the war by breaking through what had been the Nazis’ impregnable Gothic Line. Using their mountaineering skills, they stormed northern Italy’s Riva Ridge and the Nazi outpost on Mount Belvedere and didn’t stop until they had taken over Mussolini’s mansion on the shores of Lake Garda.
I knew Ball as a neighbor, hearty, kindhearted and quick-witted, with a 10th Mountain Division sticker on his car. Into his 80s, he was a model of health and strength. He would scramble onto his roof to clean out his gutter, wrestle dandelions out of the grass one by one, pedal his bicycle to the supermarket and beat his buddies at tennis and golf.
I recently learned of his death at the age of 90, after a battle with melanoma claimed him last October. Some battles you can’t win. (more…)
by David Frey | Dec 1, 2009 | Essays, The West
Throw your weight forward. Lean into the abyss. Let go.
My skis are turned parallel to the edge of the cornice. The ground drops away and plunges into steeps and gullies studded with snowdrifts, trees and tree wells. Hints of rocks and downed timber break through the surface.
I stand on the cornice – too long – and wonder how I am going to negotiate it. I should know by now: The less I wonder, the easier it will go. There is only one answer.
Release the edges. Let the skis drift. Go. (more…)
by David Frey | Jul 1, 2009 | Environment, Essays, The West
At the end of March, as spring began to crawl into the High Country, the radio transmissions from the collar fitted on a female wolf stopped moving.
The stagnant signal emitted from a spot in western Colorado, and when state and federal wildlife investigators descended, they found her dead body. Her epic journey across some of the West’s wildest lands had come to an end in a state where native wolf populations had been decimated some 70 years before.
Authorities aren’t saying what killed the two-year-old wolf or whether foul play was involved. Until a necropsy and an investigation are complete, they won’t even say exactly where they found her. While her death remains a mystery, though, her travels in the months before are unusually well known. They were tracked by satellites that followed her every step and remain recorded on a tiny computer within her GPS collar. (more…)
by David Frey | Apr 24, 2009 | Essays, The West
In the evening a strange thing happened; the 20 families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of a home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream.
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Long before Tom Joad and his family set out for California in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the West was a cradle of hope and tragedy for migrants seeking a new life in a strange land. It’s still that way today. For many like the Joads, the West remains a place to re-invent themselves. Unfortunately, many discover a world that’s even harder than the one they left behind.
Seventy years have passed since John Steinbeck described the odyssey of the Joads — a family driving a Dodge jalopy filled with the salvage of their repossessed homes out of the Dust Bowl, fueled by California dreams of trees heavy with fruit and a little white house in an orchard somewhere.
On the book’s 70th anniversary this April, the nation finds itself in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. (more…)
by David Frey | Sep 15, 2003 | Essays, The West, Travel
Route 666 is fading in the distance. That stepson of the Mother Road –Route 66 –is headed toward oblivion. That’s a shame, because for me, like plenty of pavement pilgrims who arrived in the West over the last half-century in RVs, SUVs or astride Harleys, the Devil’s Highway was the road into God’s Country.
U.S. Route 666 was a lonely stretch of asphalt stretching 194 miles from dusty Gallup, N.M., across the rugged Navajo Reservation, through southwestern Colorado into Utah, where it ended at Monticello, Utah. The stretch of asphalt is still there, but it has shed the number of the beast in favor of less ominous numerology. Exit Route 666. Hop on Route 491. (more…)
