Highlights from Day 2 of the Recreation Planner Conference

My coworker K and I attended one day of this conference, being held in Austin this year, on Tuesday. We went to three presentations in the morning, had a lunch of good-tasting food in fairly small portions (including the thinnest sliver of Italian cream cake I have ever had the good fortune of encountering) at the hotel while being serenaded by a cowboy singer, and took an afternoon field trip to a couple locations in Wimberley (where I had never been).

Unbeatable Visual Highlight:
Floyd fell into the water at Jacob's Well when the unstable planks making a bridge across the water slipped off the rock they were rather half-assedly braced against. He took this in much better spirits than one might expect, especially given that his cell phone was ruined. Fortunately, he fell into the waist-deep water on the near side of the planks and did not fall into the actual cave. A couple young swimmers, including one with full body tattoos that a fellow visitor aptly described as giving him the appearance of a scaled fish (and not, in my view, in a bad way), held the boards steady so I was able to get back across with dry feet, though I was prepared to walk back through the water with my backpack held over my head.

Best Nature Sighting:
The locally rare Chatterbox Orchid growing along the stream bank. Pretty.

Coincidence #1:
I let K pick the seminars we went to, so not having paid much attention at all to what they were about, I was surprised about 90 seconds into the very first one to discover that it was about the development of trails and parks by Jefferson County Open Space in Colorado, where Tam lives. It kept me awake (who had been half-snoozing in a comfy chair in the hotel lobby before the session began) hearing about and looking at photos of places I had actually been - Crown Hill Park (which Jeffco Open Space did not originally support, by the way), Wheat Ridge Recreation Center, the trail along the creek in Golden, Golden Gate State Park (not operated by Jeffco, but in the area), and more. Otherwise, the most interesting thing about this session was seeing how fucking much money these people have to play with. (Presentations at these kinds of conferences are generally given by groups with the kind of money that my agency - and many to most others - can only dream of. I wish there were more "Public Input Processes on a Shoestring" and "High Quality, Fast, Cheap, Pick 2, Maybe: Planning in the Real World" type sessions available, but somehow, nobody has really figured out how to do a good job of things in those situations.) The other was a comment by another attendee that surveys of users of their park/trail system have found a higher percentage of people bringing dogs than bringing children. This pointed up to me the strange disconnect, common to a great many park systems, between actual visitors and the interpretive programming that is made available; too often interpreters provide "family" or "child" oriented programming but nothing for adults.

Coincidence #2:
Our musical entertainment, Jane Leche, is a member of the US Forest Service group "The Fiddlin' Foresters." One of the items available at the Silent Auction was their CD, which featured a cover of one of my favorite songs, "Cold Missouri Waters," which tells the story of the famous Mann Gulch fire in Montana. The leader of the fire crew independently came up with the idea of setting a fire to an area of grass and lying down in the burned out area; because the fire was deprived of fuel in that spot, the flames went around him, saving his life. I was disappointed that Jane did not sing "Cold Missouri Waters" for us at our lunch concert, but we can all listen to her version here. Not as great as Richard Shindell's amazing, goose-bump-inducing version, but it's a good song nonetheless.

Silliest Question:
After I attested to the difficulty of shooting a traditional English longbow given a draw weight of 100 pounds or more that you have to hold to aim, unlike a compound bow that has a much lower hold weight, Floyd of the wet pants asked me, "Sally, are you an Englishman?" I said no. (I'm not much of an archer either. Or an expert on medieval weapons.) This was in the context of discussing the story (story, not reality) that the origins of the raised middle finger and phrase "fuck you" arose from the English bowmen at the Battle of Agincourt raising their middle fingers to the French (who had threatened to cut the middle finger off any captured Englishmen, thereby making them incapable of shooting bows which required three fingers to pull) and saying that they could still "pluck the yew" (the tree from which the bows were made). Although this story is not true, it does make for an amusing bon mot. May "pluck yew" join "Chuck you, Farley" in my personal lexicon of "fuck you" alternatives.

Most Surprising Overheard Comment:
"I spent $5,000 on it used and got another 320,000 miles out of that [American - can't remember which brand] truck before I rebuilt the engine."

Unplanned Side Stop for the Wimberley Field Trip:
Sally's apartment complex! Robert had taken me to the hotel downtown in the morning and was planning to pick me up after the field trip was over. But since we were driving by the apartment on the way back from Wimberley, I asked if they would mind dropping me off on the way back to the hotel. Either they really didn't mind or they admired my pluck/ballsiness in asking enough that they went along with it, though a couple of people said that a spot of single malt scotch would go down quite well before they returned to the hotel. (Little did they know that I actually do have several quite nice bottles in my kitchen.) This saved me a good 45 minutes of commute time, possibly more. I had fun calling Robert on my cell phone and, barely able to hear him and uncertain how well he could hear me, saying "Go home. I have a ride. OK? Just go home!" He got it. Somebody asked me how much my apartment cost, and I told him, and several people from other states seemed surprised - welcome to Austin real estate! (To their credit, they could not know that it's a luxuriously comfortable 1350 square foot 2 bedroom/2 bathroom apartment with two people and one rabbit. They did not actually get the tour.)