After a pleasant night rolling around in the back of the 4Runner (Don't tell Public Safety. Deal?), I happy to report that I am none the worse for the wear and my eyes are beginning to look normal again. The get all puffy if I stay away from home for more than a day or two, but get better as the day progresses, ya know.
I've learned a few good things and met a grundle of fine people, so I look forward to getting to that reportage in the next couple of days.
For now, I've got to go bum a shower.
Good day!

Still at Snowbird!
Was able to see my dear grandma and uncle, and enjoyed the hospitality of a couple of good friends overnight.
More later, for sure.

It's Troubled Youth Conference time again...
Snowbird's Cliff Lodge and some good trees.

'Tis a typical high desert first of May this year; with snow on top of the lilac leaves and school children's sandaled feet.

It would appear that Spring has finally arrived in our high mountain valley.
The circle of life begins anew; hopefully our little bit of earth will bless us with good and ample food this season.
That's our faith.

Laved in omneity of desert walls
together with the blue;
we stride, surrounded on all sides.
I thank You, Father, Mother and Action,
because you are yet found in syllables
and in sand grains.
Every seed on the wind is an arrival of hands in hand;
autos de fe lie in wait at every portent bend.
River King; thou who hast lent your body of water
connecting the oceans and seas and mountains and plains,
take this Rock and bear each mote to its new home.

The Vagabond for Beauty makes an appearance in Today's Salt Lake Tribune:

Rendezvous with mystery & loss
Utah playwright explores the story of the enigmatic Everett Ruess in part as one family's struggle with finding closure in wake of his disappearance
By Ellen Fagg
The Salt Lake Tribune

In the more than 70 years since Everett Ruess disappeared into the remote fringes of southern Utah's redrock country, the artist-poet has become the patron saint of wilderness adventurers and desert rats. A line from one of the 20-year-old's last letters to his family - "I am drunk with the fiery elixir of beauty" - sparks comparisons with Henry David Thoreau and other influential nature writers.
One attraction of his story is its enduring mystery: Was his November 1934 disappearance as elemental as running into bad weather or running out of food? Or was he murdered for his gear?
Another draw is the larger, cultural narrative. Whatever happened, this is what we know: Ruess has been transformed
into a cultural icon because he got - and stayed - lost.
"He's become an archetypal figure of canyonland country," says bookseller Ken Sanders, who has been obsessed with the Ruess story for more than 30 years. "He walked off from Escalante into the howling wilderness, and that strikes a chord with every generation." Sanders quotes the ending of a 1983 sonnet Edward Abbey wrote to Ruess: That blessing which you hunted, hunted too. What you were seeking, this is what found you.
Ruess' words, popularized through the publication of his journals, reveal a young man who followed his dream "to live more intensely and richly." Now that passion will be brought to the stage in Utah playwright
Debora Threedy's "The End of the Horizon," a world-premiere production mounted by Plan-B Theatre.
"It's amazing the passion that Everett Ruess incites in people," says Jerry Rapier, Plan-B's producing director. "He's become the West. He is the desert. He is the freedom to explore the landscape."

Call of the wild
Utah wilderness lovers have seemingly always known about Ruess, as the story of his disappearance was handed down on river trips and around campfires. "He was one of the first who went to the Southwestern desert just to be there," Threedy says.
Wallace Stegner recounted his story in the 1942 nonfiction classic Mormon Country. Then came W.L. Rusho's book A Vagabond for Beauty, published in 1983 and still a steady seller. Two recent documentaries have also kept the story alive: Diane Orr's "Lost Forever: Everett Ruess" and Dyanne Taylor's "Vanished."
One theme in "Horizon" concerns the friction between making a living and the call of the natural world. It's that strand of Ruess' story that is most often compared to the contemporary journey of Chris McCandless, whose fatal Alaskan adventure was explored in Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild and Sean Penn's 2007 film adaptation. "Everett becomes a stand-in for insert-the-name-of-your-person-struggling-with-a-career-choice-here," Rapier says.
On one level, Threedy's play owes a debt to Orr's film because it inspired her to write a play about the mystery, combining facts culled from Ruess' journals and letters with fictionalized scenes. But the play came to explore a more universal story, that of one family's loss. "This play is about coming to a resolution with the unknown," director Kay Shean says. "The unknown is very difficult for humans. We want to know. We want to know right now."
In one of many unusual connections that cast and crew claim with this story, Shean found herself drawing upon the emotional material of her own life. Specifically, she recalled a frightening time seven years ago when her stepson, Matt, was missing in Nigeria.
For nearly two years, she and her husband didn't hear from him and had reason to fear for his safety. Her family's story ended happily, with a "Hi, Mom. I'm at the airport in New Jersey" phone call, but that time of not knowing helped the director come to a deeper understanding of the heartbreak in the Ruess family story.

Mother figure
It's uncommon for a Utah-based actor to have the opportunity to create a character for the first time, and also rare to be able to question the playwright during rehearsals. "At this point in time, they know each of the characters better than I did," Threedy says.
More unusual still is that the playwright isn't just watching the production of her first full-length play take shape, but is actively involved. She's acting the role of Stella, Ruess' mother, a photographer and artist who taught her younger son the art of making block prints. "Debora is doing a very difficult thing, in being able to separate herself from her baby," says Shean, which is why the director originally balked at the idea of casting the playwright.
Threedy herself had to be talked into auditioning, but from her first line reading she revealed an uncanny understanding of the character. As the director says: "She had this fire in her."
The playwright, a Chicago native, studied theater as an undergraduate before attending law school. In the 1980s, she moved to Salt Lake City to teach at the University of Utah, acting on various local stages and writing short plays on the side. She describes "Horizon" as "a child of my mind and spirit," remembering how it felt to write the play in one 48-hour rush in the summer of 2000. "Horizon" received additional shaping through a 2006 staged reading at the Utah Shakespearean Festival's New American Playwrights Project.
As an actor, Threedy found new colors in Stella's character that she wasn't aware of when she was writing the play. Onstage, she also hears expressions of her own beliefs as channeled through other characters. "I gave pieces of myself to everybody," Threedy says, describing a speech by Ruess' father, Christopher, about how the soul might endure after death. "To me, when you love someone, that love doesn't end when the person leaves."

Art meets reality
Playing an icon like Everett Ruess requires stepping aside from the legend, says actor David Fetzer, who at 25 is just five years older than Ruess was when he disappeared.
He shares his character's desire for solitude, "and maybe a tendency to alienate ourselves from our friends because of our passion," the actor says, describing his own artistic obsessions, which include music, theater, filmmaking and, most recently, beer making.
"My future after this play is very much in the air," Fetzer says. "That's what I've come to admire about Everett. He really knew what he wanted to do and he did it, unapologetically."
That's why, in another unusual confluence of local story and local legend, Fetzer stood reverently observing the brush strokes in four of Ruess' recently discovered landscape paintings. On a recent morning, the cast and crew of "Horizon" gathered at the U. archives to examine the debris of the Ruess family's lives.
Waldo Ruess, Everett's older brother, who died last year at age 98, donated the collection, more than 78 boxes of family papers, photographs, journals and art. It's a rare gathering of material, says archivist Elizabeth Rogers, who spent a year organizing the collection. "I have to admit, I was obsessed," she says. "I read almost everything. This is really one of a kind. And it's not just Everett. This family was the 20th century."
On this morning, cast members made discoveries as they flipped through photographs and read the handwriting of their characters.
Shean, who returned to her native Utah in 1997 after living most of her adult life in Los Angeles, found records that her uncle in Richfield had helped with a southern Utah search party looking for Ruess.
"Do you know what happened to you in the end?" Rogers, the curator, asked actor Jason Bowcutt, who portrays a bounty hunter. "You were [hanged]."
Threedy, in her dual roles of author and actor, was visibly moved to tears at discovering an intersection of emotional truth and reality. When writing "The End of the Horizon," she had imagined a scene of closure where Stella journeys to southern Utah to camp at Davis Gulch. That's the last place where Ruess was known to leave his mark, the mysterious inscription "Nemo 1934."
"I have Stella sleeping at Davis Gulch," the writer said, triumphantly, looking up from her character's journals, "and she actually did."

How 'bout those Utah adults?
Seems we still have a bit of a problem with just being happy, for crying out loud.
Hm. I wonder what the problem is.
Hm. I wonder.

From a Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance solicitation I received yesterday.

February 2008
Dear Friend,
Arches. Bryce. Capitol Reef. Desolation Canyon. Zion.
You've seen southern Utah's soaring arches, magnificent buttes, and breathtaking canyons. You even may have visited them. Each view is truly unforgettable.

Yes. You may have even visited them. Indeed.
Because each view is truly unforgettable.
That's why we need your money; so that we can preserve your precious view, it's for your own precious damned convenience.
It's for nothing else; really, it's all about you, dear prospective contributor.

Let's not drum up support through love of the land, nor of the species inhabiting it, base it all on sentimentality and arouse yet another elitist cause célèbre.
Mind you, they didn't find me on some old roll of ancient and absent contributors or collaborators, they mined my information from some sticky-filthy bought-and-sold address list.
I don't have much respect for SUWA anymore, and that respect has been waning for quite a while.

As implied in the previous post, the last weekend was a harried jaunt down to Arizona to to spend time with some of my natal family. My dad took some time out of his work to hang out with me, as did my little brother, and my mom fed and fed me until I couldn't much keep up with the gastronomic flow.




















All in all, it was a sensory smorgasbord down there; the desert awash in green, not a bit of snow visible for miles, and I was happy to be out and about with my pop. The Sonoran is a wonder where it hasn't yet been paved over.

Many thanks to the Mesa Burninghams for picking me up from the 'port. Sumner kept me entertained while the elders were conducting a garage sale, and believe me, that Jedi can swing!

Another really quick trip...

It's been snowing here. Snowing and snowing and, yes, snowing again.
The newtimers say things like "Wow! This is really unusual weather we're having this winter. Sooo snowy and cold. Must be global warming."
The oldtimers just say "This is how it's supposed to be."
Who knows. I don't think very many people know what's going on, but I'd put my money on the oldtimers.

Fishing in the dead of winter in central Utah is like this from time to time. The temperature gets cold, the water runs short and the fish find places to hide that are way too comfortable and too close into willows for my gust-blown line.
That's if there are any fish left in that part of the stream, fer heaven's sake.

Miya is growing up and into all of the relic clothing of her brothers and sisters.
This is a puppy fleece well-beloved by Asher, so he's impressed with his and his sister's progress over time.
Miya is doing just fine.

What happens to rain, indeed. I wonder whose perspective it is that portrays 'the life blood of the world' as existing for the sole purpose of ending up in Lake Powell and producing electricity for businesses.







There you are. Another Escape from Alcatraz-esque quicktrip down south.




































Right now, my prose is much less than muscular or energetic; I'll leave you with this sampling from the areas between Boulder Mountain and Escalante over the weekend.

The sun was out and the temperature above zero degrees Fahrenheit, so Ryan and I ventured out for a quick 'splore on the Diamond Fork. Most of the area we chose was fairly sheltered from the southern sun, so the prospects were snowy and cold.
There is plenty of red rock and a tinge of sulfur in the air from all the geothermal features up and down the stream. I really loved the ambiance in spite of only hooking one fish before getting tired of flicking five pounds of ice back and forth on my rod.
Man, it was cold; but I didn't think it was that cold. Ice doesn't lie, though.
All the best for the new year!

Quick trip!
Down south!
Past the Damn!
Back to home!

After much debate, deliberation, and cross-eyed looks at one another in the midst of a dark and wintry week, we've arrived at a decision on the name of this delightful young girl.

Her name is Miya Prajna, and she'll be known as such as long as she has patience to carry the burdens of living with her mom and dad's odd decision making processes.

Here’s the latest from the clan Burningham, brought to light in the wee hours of the morn.

Name: To be fully determined later on today… (man, we’re tired right now)
Gender: Girly
Weight: 10 lbs 4 oz
Length: 23 inches
Date and time: 04 Dec 07, 00:51 hours
Healthy as an ox; roly-poly to boot
Mom and Dad and brothers and sisters: Pleased as punch!

Thanks for all of your prayers and wishes; they’ve come through once again.