Put the paper down and get outside! This has been a wonderful fall. There can’t be a whole lot left of it, so drop everything and get out there and enjoy it. I rode the Wasatch Ridge with a huge group the other day. It was kind of a shotgun start, with the animals starting from town and riding up to Scotts Pass, the bulk of the group starting at Guardsman, and a small group of Spanish American War veterans taking a half hour head start. Though I would like to have ridden it from town, I got crowded for time and had to launch with the Guardsman group.
We rode it the day before the last big storm moved in. It was blowing like stink on the ridge, hard enough to knock me off my bike a couple of times. The colors were gone on the top, and the mountains were looking pretty white on the north exposures. Once we started down Millcreek, the colors were amazing. It was late in the day, facing pretty much into the sun, and the back lighting make the leaves glow like they were plugged in. The reds were especially bright. The ride ended up at Log Haven for a very good meal. The other guests were quite nicely dressed, so they had set aside a special room for the dirty stinky mountain bikers. It was a perfect day.
There is a place up on the ridge where the trail drops off the spine and down into the Summit County side a little. It’s not a big change, but enough that, for a few minutes, I was out of the wind. I stopped to adjust clothing, and was startled when a horse wandered over to greet me. A second later the sheepherder came over. We talked a little about the change in weather. He asked about the forecast, living as he does without access to the news. His border collie sniffed at the tires of my bike. He wasn’t happy to hear snow in the forecast.
I didn’t have a camera, though I had thought about shooting some fall color pictures. But the shot I really would have loved to get was the sheepherder standing there with his horse, overlooking Kimball Junction. He is living a life that hasn’t changed much for a couple of hundred years. He’s out there with his horse, his dogs, and a whole bunch of sheep. Almost everything he has fits in his saddlebags. The camp he lives in probably has a metal roof instead of canvas, and maybe even a propane stove instead of a wood burner. But the rhythms of his day are still dictated by the appetite and digestion of the sheep.
His little-changed 18th-century life was overlooking a community that defines change. I swear that in the five light cycles it takes to get through Kimball Junction, there are a dozen new buildings built. It’s all about consumption and connection. High speed internet, high speed commuters, high speed deals. The contrast was pretty amazing. On the valley floor, people run around with those goofy Star Trek phone things clipped to their ears with out embarrassment, talking to people standing next to them and to people a continent away at the same time. I was probably the only person the sheepherder had spoken with that day, and possibly for a couple of days.
The whole conversation was pretty short. Of the two of us, one is probably not more than marginally literate, the other has a post-graduate degree. So guess who was bilingual enough to make the conversation possible. And guess who was reduced to pantomime. Adios, amigo. Keep warm up there.
One big advantage to being a sheepherder is you would miss all the phone calls about the school-voucher campaign. The calls are interrupting dinner almost every night now, with a month left until the election. Under the proposal approved by the legislature, parents who want to send their kids to a private school could get a voucher that has the effect of transferring about half of the public funding for the kid in public school to the private school. The proponents argue that if they are not using the public school, they shouldn’t have to pay for it.
I couldn’t agree more. I don’t have kids. Yet under Utah’s tax code, 100 percent of the state personal income tax, and about half of the property tax, goes to funding the public schools. I’m paying plenty for the public schools. Since I’m not using the service, I don’t want to pay for it. So where’s my voucher? While we’re at it, I live on a private road that I have to maintain at my own expense. Can I get a private-road voucher? I’m not old enough to play golf yet, but my geezer friends who do prefer to play on private golf courses. Can they get private golf-course vouchers? Seems fair enough.
The voucher plan passed the State Legislature. That, to me, is the kiss of death. If something gets passed by that bunch of right-wing crazies, it has to be a bad idea. I fear it is part of some ideological dream of privatizing all of government. If they can get 10 percent of the kids in private schools, why not 100 percent? That’ll show the teachers’ union who’s boss. The social welfare system would surely be more effective if properly infused with the profit motive. We’ve seen how well the Pentagon’s use of mercenaries from Blackwater has worked in Iraq. Somehow, I sense this is more about making money than education.
I’m sure there are parents with legitimate reasons to want to send their kids to private schools. The Winter Sports School locally is an example of a private program that isn’t available in the public system. I get less supportive of programs that are based on teaching Biblical arithmetic for profit.
Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs On Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for nearly 20 years.