Steve Snedeker’s Landscaping and Gardening Blog

I’ve taken a break recently from blogging here. This blog is always a labor of love and has of course changed in many ways as my circumstances have altered. To be frank, the break has been good for me. I have always cringed at – yet accepted the rules and time constraints of toil as a normal diet of maturity. I think we all have.

I have been fortunate enough in my landscaping career to have encountered the tickling sensations of accomplishment, for which I am eternally grateful. It takes us nearer to an immortality as we devise what we suspect are permanent systems of substance for the pleasure of those to whom we labor. Both parties gain immeasurably – the client from his living aid – the contractor/designer from his gift to the world and his labors. His crew experience their own brushes with Righteousness as the projects close.

Work itself, as we all know, offers redemption as well as accomplishment. As Eric Hoffer says:

“No matter what our achievements might be, we think well of ourselves only in rare moments. We need people to bear witness against our inner judge, who keeps book on our shortcomings and transgressions. We need people to convince us that we are not as bad as we think we are.”

I agree. This is exactly why you need a waterfall!!!    (Made by me!!)

Back to work…………and the reality of My Work:

On the negative end (at work) the injuries, the occasional dust-ups with anger from all sides, the incredibly helplessness in the face of a mean-spirited Weather God, bereft of humor save for Irony – all form an alternative Universe which seems to descend inexorably on us all.

What to make of all this? All these Opposites!

Recently, in the space of a month, the faces of the remote and oddly-disconnected Love and Death settled in, affecting my heart and soul to degrees I am scrambling to catch up with. Fate decided to present me with the exquisite pleasure of finally meeting someone who means as much to me as nearly anyone I’ve ever known. A reunion of souls occurred which had its origins here – on a computer. My virtual “family” became one in fact as an indescribably lovely series of events scrolled across my human life and perceptions like an Early Christmas for the Soul. I felt rich beyond measure as we conversed, face to face – as if I had done something very Right.

Subsequently, a dear Soul mate and member of my extended family passed away, God bless her. She loved me and my family extremely dearly, did Katie Short. Without resorting to the maudlin, I will just say it reminded me of something more obviously substantial as time goes on: that life compresses with age. Events actually gather momentum and stream helplessly as the Eternity imagined from Youth becomes less of that. The pain is real, much as was the Love I have gained from the former event.

On a lesser – but incredibly evocative and meaningful level – I also watched myself  literally “lose” 2 living friends, as emotional events created another graveyard – this one mired in vanity, loss and misperception. It made me wonder if somehow I had not been paying attention to the parallel Universe where persons and events smack together like loose Protons and Quarks, as we continue sightlessly forward, immeasurably confused about the human motives and all of our human frailties. Our tiny egos march ahead like lions as our suspected courage makes us less than we once were, robbing us of our destinies and presenting us with problems we must actually wait for others to decide on. The absolute, complete absurdity of life never stops………. and all we seem to be able to do is endure it. This is inarguable for us all. I have therefore finally learned something – “It is”, as they say, “what it is”.

Not much of a prize, is it?

Heavy thoughts on this Saturday morning.

It’s been a Summer of stunning emotional variety and not all of it good whatsoever. Challenged by these events, I feel somehow chastened – as if I am realizing truths and factoids which exist in the amazingly huge gaps between the human atoms.

I arrived to my 60′s like March does – with a roar and a massive red hot club, playing the crap out of softball, embracing an evolving life like a vain 18 year old. A couple years into it, I have gotten myself beat to crap, lol.

As I often quote Mike Hammer: “It was like the kiss at the end of a hot, wet fist.”  ;-)

Here’s an irony: I admit I do still feel pretty darn good. I now wonder if this blanket, unthinking optimism is some style of curse, leering at me like The Last Temptation. I know – I am waving my weenie at Fate Itself in this unusually sophomoric fantasy which recognizes pretty much my feelings as some sort of bottom line. In a sense, even a beaver or maybe even that tin can over there can see the futility of that.

Right now, I don’t think so. For better or for worse, I feel my connections to real folks and they warm me. When I analyze my wide-ranging and numerous life mistakes, they Tazer me back with massive, clinging regret and they cool me back down. My regrets are Huge. Massive. The tale of them forms a line of shame. These ‘faux pas’ could destroy anyone. I smile and nod and hug others, and I feel unworthy as hell sometimes. How does one live with his guilt, I often ponder?

I now realize this is life itself. Our mistakes are a field of accounting which never realizes Black Ink. Nor can we “take them back”.

I have come to believe we need to begin each and every day with a clean slate.  I know – it’s a perfect dodge, lol. But I confess this aphorism has more merit the more I entertain its relevance to this planet of ours:

“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” Matthew 6:34

How many of us have met a Legend? I mean in the flesh – shook his or her hand, spoken with for a substantial period? Among many others – some of whom I can name to their surprise – I have indeed met one of these Beings.

His name is Jack Hicks and he is a former high school teacher, now retired, of Government/Political Science, something he has always taken very seriously and the results of which even hijinks-obsessed young men such as myself learned from about the workings of our governments. He also ran a vital organism in his town, the entertainment venue which seated 5,000 people comfortably for such events as the traveling Duke Ellington Band and those bizarre Dick Clark Rock and Roll Caravans. Jack ran the Parks and Recreation Department for Owensboro, Kentucky where I found my first, very nepotistic job.

Jack Hicks was also the coach of Owensboro High School’s baseball team.

Was he ever. In 22 years of coaching Owensboro High, Jack’s teams won 606 ballgames, The overall record of 606-196 includes the fact that Jack attempted not only to schedule games to play every single day of the season – with doubleheaders on weekends – but that he would play the best teams who would dare to schedule him. Games in Illinois and Indiana were not the slightest bit unusual, particularly inasmuch as Owensboro is on the Ohio River. It was a festival for those lucky enough to find themselves playing for Jack.

This is “us”, at the end of the Regional Final game. (I am the very middle guy,   ).  There is another picture lying around somewhere of us after the State Final game. Believe me when I say the expressions are far less serious!

Jack won four state championships in 1964, 1969, 1976 and 1977. My younger brother played on the 1969 team. Under his direction, the Red Devils won 20 district titles and 15 regional tournaments. I was fortunate enough to play shortstop on Jack’s 1964 team, his first Championship, for a team he now sometimes refers to as one of his “favorites”. Here’s the real news – the team the year before us was 59-2 on the year and lost in the Finals to Louisville Manual High School – the reigning power team at the time. When we won our regional tournament in ’64, Jack was quoted before our run that “this is not one of my better teams”, lol. He may or may not have realized it, but he probably served to make us pay just a bit more attention. Sure enough, we brought home the trophy, as unlikely as that seemed at the origins. The truth is, what he prepared meant that any team he put on the field was now able to win it all – at any point in time.

Beginning with Little League’s start in the 50′s, Jack worked with the organization known as Owensboro Youth Baseball to keep the topic and sport very much at the forefront of young men’s minds. The later legacy of all this was the establishment of a virtual powerhouse of female sports as well, also stemming from Jack’s work in this this absurdly sports-centered town which Sports Illustrated called the Number One Sporting Town in Kentucky in its 50th Anniversary edition. (click this link here)

Polio

So what are the chances a kid with an atrophied leg, ravaged by polio at the age of 2, would become one of the greatest names in a sport? Jack will wince at this description – as he undoubtedly has throughout his life – and it does not remotely even bear on his achievements – not for someone who was far too active-minded and ambitious to dwell on any personal impediment. It is the superficial package which hides him and which acts as that immediate persona which we all also wear, just in different clothing.

It bears because he had an obvious handicap, nothing more than that. Whereas we all have “handicaps” as well, he had what may have been the good fortune to encounter his own personal impediments a few decades earlier than the rest of us. The rest of us are also hampered by maybe our poor self-esteem or maybe its opposite – unencumbered entitlement – or our handicaps of prejudice in all its guises. No matter, because in the end the bittersweet lessons of life will pound us all into motes of dust, where all we leave behind is our various legacies.

Jack, in this regard, was and is an absolute Giant.

Jack’s essential character not only produced fabulously talented ball players, but he also shepherded young men through their high school years focusing on the discipline required to play as a team and to maximize potentials. He was a disciplinarian of unquestioned power who led by example, ironically, a tactic which succeeded beyond any measure. His players and coaches became such luminaries as esteemed doctors, lawyers, business persons and one – Tom Meredith – Chancellor at both The University of Alabama and of U of Georgia as well. David Watkins – who saw time at the AAA level and who hit tape measure home runs as a high schooler – is now President of Jewish Hospital in Louisville and widely-regarded as one of the foremost doctors in the United States. Jim Howes, now an attorney practicing in Louisville, not only pitched our team to the afore-mentioned State Championship, but also won the State Championship in the discus and shot put, then went to Tulane on a basketball scholarship. Jim also became the world’s largest Green Beret in one of their very first classes, during the Viet Nam conflict. All of Jack’s players did well in later life – well, almost all. His legacy is often even overlooked by his protege’s, his touch was so deft. Jack’s talent was people. That he loved baseball may have been incidental to where they all ended up.

And having said that made me throw up a little in my throat, because it’s probably both less and more than that. The “inside baseball” tricks, knowledge, and sporting IQ of Jack Hicks’ players was always outside the known envelope. We traveled in some rare air, in my opinion, verified by results.

Strictly Personal – Recollections

Readers of this blog might be surprised to know my goal as a child never varied for 15 years: to play baseball for the rest of my life. I was pretty good, too. I was one of those kids who stood out as an 11 and 12 year old Little League ballplayer, bashing homers, pitching and fielding my way onto All Star teams and excelling there as well. This continued into high school where I encountered Jack at Owensboro Senior High School. Playing for Jack was equal parts incredibly good luck and an absolute learning adventure.

Somehow, in that Spring of 1964, as a wide-eyed inexperienced 10th grader, I made the team and was able to travel to Paducah, Kentucky for our first games of the season over Spring Break – we had scheduled a doubleheader with a local high school there. In what still seems a blur, our starting shortstop broke his finger in infield practice for that first game and I received my first starting assignment – a position I maintained for the next 3 years. I’ll absolutely never forget my nerves prior to the first ball being hit to me. The guys around me were all these big borderline “heroes-from-a-distance” and suddenly I found myself not only in the midst, but playing shortstop.

I thought my hair had caught fire!

We did fine. In fact, we did fine all that year. We won Jack’s first of 4 Kentucky High School  State Championships, we did so fine. That also made my hair catch fire.

His too.

The baseball incidents encountered under Jack’s tutelage could scroll on for literal miles. Back then, before rules limited the number of games teams could play, Jack scheduled us to play games every single day, with doubleheaders on weekends. We had 2 seasons I can recall with records of 36-11 and 25-9 (a year of too many rain-outs).  The above-mentioned Velvet Bombers also played – every single day or night, all Summer long, after the high school season ended. These games included Sundays as well, yet another opening for playing ball. Oh, the stories.

For a baseball kid like me, imagine those drives through Springtime’s lime green young leaves of those dense, sweet-smelling Kentucky forests en route to play baseball, of all things. I’d find myself in one of the big old 1960′s convertibles driven by some other hilarious kid equally giddy over our great good fortune, allowed out of school for the last period for purposes of travel, crammed in with 5 other guys with mayhem and baseball in mind, as serious as apprentice monks except when the comic or anarchistic urge hit – and it did – laughing our way to another game of baseball.

I’ve been to Heaven is what I often tell people. And Jack Hicks was an affable, smart, but thoroughly uncompromising “God”. He also hated losing, which, fortunately, didn’t happen all that often. He made good players and he made much of the system that produced them.

A couple years ago, during a quite improbable run of yet another Owensboro team to the State Final Game, Jack attended and was announced to the thousands in attendance. This was not his first acknowledgment to these crowds – he had been elected to the Kentucky High School Hall Of Fame much earlier. The ovation – according to those in attendance – was pretty off the charts. They honored who in my humble opinion – and that of countless others – was the greatest high school baseball coach in the history of the State of Kentucky.

I am so honored to write my little unasked-for piece on this shy and great person that it causes me to well up at the memories – all so equal parts triumphant, humiliating (hey, that’s sports!), fascinating and so full of the cooperative sweat equity earned by honest effort and shared by team mates with whom I still speak. I love it all.

Thanks, Jack. For everything – and that’s a lot of stuff!

Since Burning Man begins in a month – always over the Labor Day weekend, giving yet another insane rendering of “Labor” – and make no mistake, for those Black Rock Rangers and the other intrepid workers who lay out and construct what you see below – there is a ton of work they labor at, in a pleasure so pure it hurts:

(left click images to enlarge)

In the end, a city of 40,000 campers looks just like this:

The efforts get cleaned in a rather dramatic fashion, later, including the burning, as mentioned below, of everything, no matter how temporarily cool:

I’m doing this post to please a friend who asked about what all the hubub was over Burning Man. She had never heard of it. Since I’ve been there, I have my own very personal opinion. So, Marcia – here ya go. The event is coming soon. Adventurous, thought-provoking, anarchistic, artistic – the adjectives flow like water over the Niagra Falls………..in the end, while it is indescribably interesting, make no mistake – it’s fun!

I guess I’m stretching a bit to present what to many is a scandalously misunderstood event in here in my nice conservative, construction and design-related blog, but I feel somehow almost obligated to. I enjoy sharing my life in every way and I obviously appreciate products I consider items of artistic genius.

My interest in this popular and controversial event  stems from these underpinnings. And I am one who fully believes Burning Man is an event of Timeless value.  There are many sayings and diatribes on how we contaminate reality with belief, but the purity of the vision here and the enthusiasm of its participants, is wholly off the charts. This event is unique in the world – thus drawing so many travelers who design visits around it. I guess that pretty much says it all.

(click any image to enlarge)

Burning Man is a week-long event of something more than epic proportions, held on the same “playa” or lake bed where the world land speed record was set a few years ago by the crazed Englishman piloting a virtual jet car at above the speed of sound. Gerlach, Nevada is about 60 miles Northest of Reno and it is an otherwise sleepy, oppressively hot burg of a scattered population of every political persuasion known to man. But the world class events which happen out its front windows are some crazy stuff.

What began in 1986 with a few guys hoisting up an 8′ high wooden “Man” and then setting the sucker on fire on Baker Beach in San Fransisco, has now evolved into something of a virtual culture. This year, 48,000 people will congregate in the Black Rock Desert to participate in this year’s version of Burning Man – a festival like absolutely no other. Here, from the Burning Man’s own website is the timeline and history of the event.

You can see some strange stuff out there!

Nature gets gorgeous and pretty crazy during a stay in the desert like this. One sure needs good shades, some serious sun screen and a ton of water. Dust storms are normal, not rare – it seems every year is good for a nasty, good sized dust storm: Here comes one now!

But Nature also gives………..

It may surprise people to realize that the average age of a Burning Man attendee is around 35. After a walk around, through all the amazingly well-organized streets of campers, sporting silliness and wonder, it becomes more obvious.

Burning Man is a “barter zone” – money is only allowed for use at the Main Tent for coffee, lemonades and for the purchase of Ice. Otherwise, you can leave your wallet back where “civilization” rules. The Burning Man experience is so creative, large and literally engulfing, that you find yourself contributing. In the end, in fact, this is the energy behind the event. It has indeed become something of a culture of its own, led by enterprising artists and Internet-savvy art geeks and it provides a wonder of stuff – nearly indescribable, really. Night time scenes see amazing high tech lighting and nocturnally-inspired art work:

And the “Mobile Art”, lol. The Art Cars have institued their own world of whimsy, now featuring an Art Car Festival in Houston, Texas and a natural outgrowth of the male need to tinker and play, lol. Needless to say, these were always my favorites:

Some are just for fun

Some are more serious:

And these are just the “cars”. The art?

This is what grownups can do, lol…………

A pretty solid visual feast, no matter how you look at it.

Then it disappears – in 3 days, it will be as if no one had even been there.

From these, the Fire Temple of wood, above and two years of The Man below:

2008:

From this……….

To this:

It’s all good, interesting, exciting and always weird  – which is the point. It’s is the single most Artistical Artical Event ever.

Kablooey!

(enlarge pictures by left clicking)

Bobby’s freshly unceremonious ceremony…………. Perfectly-held for the man who may have been the least pretentious person his friends and acquaintances will ever meet in their entire lives.

We really and truly had a great crowd……..there were some tears, some grateful and comforting and oh-so-human hugs and lots of laughter in an absolutely captivating series of loving memories. If I had to capsulize my impression of things, I would probably say the day was an utter delight – in spite of its function – which was also served.

Saying goodbye.

Bobby’s daughter Morgan and her friends and equally gorgeous soccer mates were there to provide the perfect splash of youth, beauty and the caring spirit which Bobby was always so instrumental in somehow manufacturing in a world which seems not to value that as much as it once may have. His touch was everywhere, in the modest and grateful spirit of his wife, Kim and in the freshly-bereaved Morgan, whose support system is the envy of the English-speaking world. (She is the beauty on the left in the picture below). Let me be as clear as possible – these are some of the nicest persons on the planet.

Let me add this, in praise to the arrangers – of whom there were so many. If food were a measure of a man, judging by what was given at this event, Bobby Miller was a daggone Giant. Suffice it to say, the comfort food was off the charts – not only in quantity, but in quality.

And so the weekend ends………………

I just drove back from Owensboro after attending this nicely informal ‘wake’ for my great friend Bobby Miller who passed away last week. The party was held outdoors and indoors, enduring torrential rainfall a couple of times during the affair and even the sounds of tornado warning sirens in the distance more than once. It was sort of a revelation – In this iPod, Blackberry world, we were able to access more specific local weather events immediately and we did hear of a twister which landed not so far away, just to make things more exciting. Man, it is also truly an rather severe April to remember, weather-wise, with more electrical storms than many natives have ever seen – all in a non-stop series of storm  events, tumbling along one after another.

Crossing the Ohio River and dropping down into Owensboro from the Indiana side revealed a cresting river, spilling over it banks into nearby fields, the farmer’s plains, as it were. This area is so flat near a river which – like the Yangtze or The Nile – is quite famous locally for its Spring Time flooding and dropping some rich silt onto these fields which, in 5 months, will be sporting corn or soybeans in a vast green swath of agricultural Plenty.

But for now?  You can’t see much dirt, can you?  ;-)  That, for the record, is those afore-mentioned fields – they are just a bit underwater currently. The river itself is a good 3 miles North of this, in the distance..

But it was gorgeous, too – warm, sultry air, the humidity completely off the charts in 73 degree weather – the Springtime features like the profusion of young lime green leaves maturing in this deciduous forest, dogwoods and other ornamental blossoms bursting out with even some shrubbery nearly ready to join the horticultural party.

As I mentioned, my friend Bobby was quite an amateur landscaper, having done all his landscaping work himself as well as building the home. He used the local flora to augment his planning, making this gorgeous green expanse butt up next to the forest in a seamless, natural way, transitioning the parking area to domestication up a small set of stairs and surrounding his home with absolutely luscious perennials and azaleas.

I’m kicking myself for not getting a picture of the Columbines which were just beginning to act out, but then, there was so much compelling interaction to be had on the human level, I would go hours before remembering I had a camera. Low tech Man!

Here’s a glimmer of the activity above, complete with the dead White Pine in the rear yard to the left which someone asked my analysis of.

“The Pine? Oh, it’s dead.” (I kept it short and sweet  ;-)  )

It was especially deeply rewarding for me in that I had grown up with so many of these folks and then moved so far away for so long. What was so especially rewarding for strictly selfish reasons was the sense of “return” on such a deeply emotional and thoroughly “connected” basis.I was seeing old friends I’d known when I was 12 years old and who surrounded me and influenced me all those long years ago. These people are a part of me, embedded so deeply they can’t be peeled away. They are the statues, the icons in my own native experience and they all make up who I am this very day.

The amazing sense of unconditional love, of friendship and of our human commonality on this day filled me with a religious type of spirit. I turned away with a couple of tears more than once as I saw others breaking down on their own, over a story, a memory or simply just because of the overall sense of the moment itself. This was a very religious event, in the end, our bidding goodbye to our precious friend, father and relative. Bobby Miller sooo got the send off he would be so proud of.