John Steffen – Page 29

golf

Countryside Prairie

Post date 2012/06/23

I’m telling you man, that weekend about a month ago was a great weekend of golf. I played Village Links on Friday and this course, Countryside Prairie, on Memorial Day. Pinch me. I was lucky enough to hit two great, municipally owned suburban Chicago golf courses on beautiful, sunny mornings in May.

These are two different experiences. Countryside is much humbler than Village Links, but arguably a better value at $52 with cart for an early Monday , prime time, holiday tee time. That’s the only comparison I’ll make because it’s not fair to either.

Countryside Prairie is part of a 36 hole complex in Mundelein, IL owned by the Lake County Forest Preserve. The Prairie course is newer and, in my opinion, slightly better than the Traditional course. Wow, you have a crapload of options in Mundelein. Besides the Countryside duo, you have Pine Meadow and Steeple Chase, a couple of other great golf courses.

Countryside Prairie puts a solid layout at your feet with decent conditions at a reasonable price. It has smooth, bent grass greens and nicely mown bluegrass fairways. I gotta tell you, bent grass fairways are no longer a high priority for me. I used to be a fairway snob. No more.

Something just feels right playing courses like this. I’ll term them high value muni courses. Right now that means a good course worth driving to the suburbs for at around $50 primetime with cart. This usually means you can get around for sub-$40 if you walk or if you’re a local who likes to ride. That’s a pretty approachable leisure activity. Not cheap, but approachable. And made even more approachable by wide fairways, many beautiful, aesthetically pleasing views, mostly uncomplicated green complexes, and no houses or cars.

That’s what you get at Countryside. I think it’s the future of golf. Welcome to the future!

Pictured at the top of this post is a perfect example of why I like this place, the par three ninth hole. It’s a nice looking hole with trouble and a multi-tiered green that could have some tricky placements. But it’s a huge green, pretty short, with plenty of bailout space so it shouldn’t intimidate anybody. It’s peaceful and joyful to look at.

There are plenty of other examples, check out my Countryside set on Flickr. This course may not be appropriate for out-of-town golf snobs on a golf trip, but that’s the only drawback. Get here fast. And I’m not just saying that because I played well.

books

Brave Dragons

Post date 2012/06/19
Tags sports

I read one or two pieces of basketball nonfiction per year. This book is a mix of basketball and current affairs. It’s the story of a year in the life of the Shanxi Brave Dragons basketball team with occasional diversions into Chinese politics, history, and culture. Basketball is a great vehicle to give the reader a glimpse of the inner workings of China because it takes something distinctly American, something we can relate to, and charts its integration into Chinese culture.

The author, a foreign correspondent for the NYT, is basketball fan/Pulitzer prize co-winner Jim Yardley (stationed in China at the time, now in India I think). The team owner of the Brave Dragons, Boss Wang, gave Yardley insider access to the team as they tried to dig themselves out of the cellar of the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) by hiring an American coach named Bob Weiss.

It’s been a decade since Yao Ming first entered the NBA so you may have the feeling that basketball is kind of advanced in China, that maybe it’s free of corruption and played in shiny new stadiums like the ones we saw in the Beijing Olympics. Ah, no. There’s plenty of corruption and anything shiny in the stadiums eventually becomes dingy from all the cigarette smoke.

Basketball is managed by the state, like most things in China, and they start the managing early. Here’s what happens with kids:

The winnowing tool is the X‑ray machine. In elementary school, children undergo medical tests that include a scan of their skeletal structure, with special attention paid to their wrist bones. Doctors examine the distance between the developing bones, and that distance provides a projection for future physical growth. Kids deemed likeliest to grow the tallest are encouraged to attend government sports schools, where coaches will steer them toward certain sports, like basketball. Other kids, the ones showing narrower spaces in the bone structure of their wrists, continue attending schools focused on academics, many of which offer no team sports whatsoever. (Kindle loc. 411–15)

If you’re lucky enough to make it to the CBA, you’ll get a place to lay your head, practice your craft, and hang out with plenty of cool people:

The Chinese players slept inside a three-story concrete dormitory painted burnt orange. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were taken in a canteen on the first floor. The gym was an old warehouse, as high as a barn and constructed with sheet metal. (Kindle loc. 570–72)

But man, these guys are so thankful to be playing the game. The work hard and don’t complain. In fact, they have an overriding feeling that the only way they can compete internationally is to outwork the competition because they feel that they are genetically inferior to the rest of the world. The Brave Dragons coach, Liu Tie, tried to explain this to the author and the conversation became uncomfortable quickly.

I realized we were having a strange conversation, or at least a conversation that would run roughshod over political correctness parameters in the United States. Garrison had been helping with some interpretation, and he rolled his eyes when Liu digressed onto the kung fu warriors. Yet nothing that Liu had said was considered outside mainstream thought in China. Even as the rest of the world regarded China as a rising power, as the country most likely to dominate this century, most Chinese regarded themselves as genetically deficient, at least individually. Mobilizing the masses, not inspiring individuals, had always been the priority of the Chinese leaders. The X-rays and bone tests conducted on Chinese boys like Pan Jiang and Big Sun were a systematic response rooted in assumptions of physical inferiority. No country on earth believed in Darwin more than China. (Kindle loc. 903–909)

Wow, it’s a whole society that won’t accept no for an answer, that’s ready to do anything it takes to dominate the world. Yardley also spent time in India and has this observation:

Ask an Indian intellectual in New Delhi why the capital’s libraries are mediocre or their infrastructure was poorly built and he might shrug and say, “We Indians are not especially good at that.” The Chinese, or at least their leaders, could not accept such a lack of ambition or national will; for China to reclaim its place in the world, China must be great at every endeavor. Yet the price was that daily life was a grinding stone. Everyone worked hard, often separated from family, as rebuilding and rebranding Chinese greatness was a round-the-clock enterprise. (Kindle loc. 4244–48)

So will China ever be a power in basketball like they are in manufacturing? I don’t know, the sport just may take too much creativity and artistry, things that can’t be mandated by the state very well. And each team needs a star, or two. The stats are pretty formidable, you don’t win without a superstar, which is antithetical to the Chinese collective way.

Bob Weiss had an impossible time installing any sort of American style into the Brave Dragons. In fact, after only a week he was demoted to a “consultant” and replaced by Liu Tie, his assistant. Then he was reinstated, then he was moved back to a consultant. It was quite a soap opera. But Weiss and his wife fell in love with China.

Weiss wanted to meet Prada, too. Because if J. T. Prada was angling to get back to the NBA, Bob Weiss had decided he wanted to stay in China. He was having a ball. Tracy loved it. She could even imagine returning to Taiyuan for the following season, though Weiss had a harder time imagining that. He was curious about other teams, other possibilities, and Prada knew people. (Kindle loc. 4882–5)

That’s cool. Weiss seems like a good guy. Yardley paints a detailed picture of him and many other characters. He delves into the lives of players and management but doesn’t stop there. Heck, he even spends a holiday weekend with the teams DJ.

I love basketball. I have a few basketball books queued up. This Thunder vs Heat series is awesome. I gotta get back to it.

screen

Arrested Development – Season One

Post date 2012/06/12

This is funny stuff. It’s cool, funny stuff. It’s so wry and obtuse and, dare I say, edgy, that you can’t help but feel like you could hang out with the cool people who constantly spew out quotes from cutting edge comedies. Of course you can’t, but you can still watch this cancelled show, a decade after it was cool, on your iPhone, during stolen 22 minutes blocks of your life.

I’m channeling myself, sorry.

As far as comedic notes go, this hits them all for me. It’s not for everybody though. My wife gets bored fast. We don’t share many of the same tastes in comedy. Drama is another story.

When they played Taking Care of Business as the background music for burning down the banana stand or when Henry Winkler started to comb his hair in the bathroom mirror and pulled a Fonzy move, I got very satisfying chuckles. I didn’t get huge, uncontrollable laughs and I didn’t feel a burning urge to rush through this. Heck, it took my like six months to get through all 23 episodes.

But every episode was fun and inventive. It was very comforting to know that I had a stack of 20 minute time-wasters in my pocket at any time. Talk about an escape – a mental break – this was it for me in the first half of this year.

music

The Big Bach Set – Various Artists

Post date 2012/06/11

I grabbed this after seeing it on Andy Ihnatko’s Twitter feed. I trust him on a variety of topics, like computers, cameras, and mobile devices. I follow him because he tells me stuff I need to know or stuff I’m interested in regarding various digitalia. He gets paid for doing this, by the Sun Times and by Twit.tv, but I feel like he answers to a higher calling.

I’ve never heard Mr. Ihnatko discuss why he puts links to deals on classical music in his feed. I’m assuming it’s because he likes it. Whether he truly appreciates classical music or whether he uses it for background noise doesn’t really matter to me, I’m just thankful for the tips, because cheap is important for my purposes.

I just need background music, man, for the most part, but I feel the urge to dig a little deeper. About a decade ago I got a Handel CD from somewhere and just wore it out while working. I loved it, but can’t really tell you why. That’s a trend in my life I’m trying to end. I want to be able to give reasons for everything that I like, thus, this.

So now I pop on this Big Bach Set of 120 songs and try and decipher the very Bachian nature of this thing. Heck, it was $0.99, at least for that day, so it was a low risk purchase that I can tool around with without any buyer’s remorse. I’m going to start with the Wikipedia page and go from there.

Or maybe I’ll just play it and forget it, hoping it will sink in enough without any effort that I suddenly start to recognize Bach chords at weddings, funerals, or on TV news programs. But what if I do start learning the nuances of Bach’s music? Then I can’t use it as background music anymore because I’ll be thinking about the music, bringing it in to the front of my mind, so it’s not background music any more.

That seems to defeat the purpose. Hmm. I’ve just talked myself into one big circle. I’m out, we ain’t going around again.

golf

Village Links

Post date 2012/06/10

Village Links may be my favorite course around. I love playing here for so many different reasons. Primarily though, it’s an awesome layout. When I say layout I’m talking about the design and general feel of the eighteen hole set. Oh don’t worry, Village Links has plenty of positive aspects in the categories of conditioning, price, service, facilities, amenities, etc… But for me, the layout rules. It makes this a near-perfect golf course.

Tick them off; here are the layout traits I like at Village Links:

Well-spaced set of men’s tee boxes, combining challenge and playability
Varied and memorable hole mix, especially the par fours
Straightforward, walkable routing
Pleasant vistas, with a good combination of serenity and activity

I step up on an about every hole and think, “Yeah, I like this. Let’s play some golf.”

Speaking of tee boxes, when referring to Harborside Port I mentioned how the big gap between the second and third tee boxes made it difficult to balance challenge and playability. Not so at Village Links, look at this rating/slope/yardage breakdown on the scorecard (yeah, I had a good day on the white tees):

Black 74.9/138, 7,208 yards
Blue 72.9/134, 6,770 yards
White 71.2/130, 6,382 yards
Gold 69.4/128, 6,004 yards

That, my friends, is what you call “something for everybody.” In fact, that White tee is a great tee for both a single digit handicapper and a twenty plus handicapper. Unfortunately, it is slightly lacking in women’s tee box options. More on drawbacks later.

The par fours are magnificent. Two of my favorite par fours in the region are the 369 yard number five and the 409 yard number fourteen. They are both gentle doglegs, one left and one right, with water at the elbows and well guarded greens. They are beautiful to look at but scare the heck out of you. Great holes. There’s such variety across the par fours, here are the lengths in ascending order from the blue tees:

I feel like I have to take a different club into each one.

It’s a joy to walk also even though the turn does not end up at the clubhouse. It’s tightly bunched and flows nicely from green to tee, but you don’t feel cramped. In fact, they pulled out like 1,000 trees a few years ago when they redid it so it feels open, yet with plenty of secluded places on the course where you don’t feel like you’re in a bustling Chicago suburb (like on five green, fifteen tee, and seventeen green pictured at the top of this post).

I can’t say enough good things about this layout.

There are layout drawbacks though, but they don’t affect me that much. The back nine has back-to-back par fives on fifteen and sixteen, which I don’t like. The women’s tee box is especially long and difficult, which could make for a not-so-enjoyable day if you’re used to a 5,000 yard tee box. And three of the four par threes are roughly the same length. Minor things though, really.

I played it on a Friday morning in May at 10am and it was $72 with cart (no range balls). I think it’s a great value. It’s about $15 – $20 cheaper than Harborside but a better golf course all the way around I think.

It fares well in other aspects. It has bent grass tees, fairways, and greens, all of which are always in great shape. They have a grass range, although it’s not very well mown. The burger in their clubhouse is solid and they have a decent pro shop. This course should be on your radar if you’re local or you’re from out of town. It’s worth an hour drive from a distant north or south suburb and worthy of adding to your golf trip if you’re from out of town (little less than an hour from downtown).

Wonderful place.

golf

Harborside Port

Post date 2012/05/30

This Harborside place is a bedeviling couple of golf courses. I played the Port course a few Sundays ago and got my butt kicked; the place just has a tendency to kick the living crap out of you if you’re not careful. The blue tees on Port are 6,589 yards and rated at 72.3/130, but it feels a lot tougher. Throw in some 50 degree temps and blustery Chicago winds and you have the ingredients for some handicap restoration.

That’s what happened to me, I couldn’t break 90. Every green is well-guarded and often on a different level from your approach, each fairway is crowded by fescue, and the bunkers are huge and well placed. I haven’t played them back-to-back in a while, but sitting here slightly removed from the carnage it feels much more difficult than Starboard, which sports a 126 slope rating (even more difficult than the rating differential indicates).

That being said, it is an absolutely stunning golf course. Nugent and his crew layered three feet of clay on top of a garbage dump owned by the Port Authority of Chicago and they did it right. It’s a massive carpet of perfectly manicured bent grass, lush bluegrass, and mangy fescue all integrated with a lake and the surrounding industrial countryside. The views of downtown on a clear day are incredible.

The finishing holes on both courses will blow you away, but I think the Port course edges out Starboard for drama, distinctiveness, and beauty.

When I talk finishing holes in relation to Harboside Port, I’m starting with number fifteen, called Anchor. When you step on the elevated tee box you can see the last four holes splayed out for you by making a semicircular turn to your right. But don’t get distracted because Anchor is a long par three with a severely crescent-shaped green guarded by a huge bunker that outlines a grassy island in the shape of anchor. It’s quite an amazing site, but tough.

Up next, number sixteen, called Land’s End. It’s a par four that extends out into what appears to be a collection pond of Lake Calumet. It’s short but not easy. You need to be strategic about where you put your drive because your approach has to be accurate to avoid the water left and bunker right. The green sits out on a point with the seventeenth tee and you feel like you’re on the edge of the world.

Number seventeen is called Beach because of a large bunker that rises out of the lake like a typical beach at the corner of this dogleg left par four. You can bite off as much as you can chew with this tee shot; factor in how your legs feel, your tolerance for risk, and whether or not you need some beach time. It’s beautiful and serene back here in the far reaches of the course, but there are a million ways things can go wrong.

This all culminates on number eighteen, Needle, pictured at the top of this post. It’s a razor thin par five with water left and a ridge right. It’s a short par five so the trouble is manageable, but you need to be measured. The double green is shared with the eighteenth on Starboard. The beautiful, prairie style clubhouse overlooks the scene. It’s awe inspiring.

It sounds all find and dandy, but there’s a good chance you’re beat up at this point. My wife flat out refused to play this course back when she played a lot because it wasn’t any fun for her. They don’t build courses like this any more (well, actually, they don’t really build courses any more), but if designers and course builders want to contribute to growing the game they’ll figure out a way to retain some playability along with the beauty and challenge of places like Harborside Port.

Part of the problem here is that the second and third tee boxes are too far apart. The second toughest tee box is a brutal 6,589 yards but the third tee box is only 5,977 yards (it even lacks a 400 yard par four). I’m not sure what Nugent and the crew were thinking here. In a few days I’ll post something on Village Links of Glen Ellyn, which has a near-perfect tee box setup.

Regardless, I love Harborside and I’ll probably be back for another helping by summer’s end. It’s not cheap, $95 (including cart and range balls), but it has every amenity. It’s a top flight experience no matter how you slice it.

books

Mexico Set

Post date 2012/05/21
Tags pop-fiction, spy

This is the second book in the game, set, and match trilogy by Len Deighton, which is the first trilogy of the nine-volume Bernard Samson series. It’s classic, Cold War, British spy stuff. It’s a big undertaking and it’s going to take me a while to get through this, but I’m savoring it.

This book picks right up at the end of Berlin Game. Samson is dealing with the aftermath of his wife’s defection to Moscow, juggling job stress and family stress. His work task: get a high ranking KGB man to defect right out from under his wife’s nose. His personal task: find a way to take care of his two kids and protect them from his wife while warding off advances from two beautiful women.

It’s a great mix of spy craft and drama. So far it feels a little simpler and lighter than Le Carre’s Smiley series, but has comparable character development. There’s a lot of detail on Samson and I think he’s a little more approachable than Smiley. I’ll be able to talk more about this after reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (targeting late June).

** PLOT KILLERS FOLLOW **

Samson proved highly fallible in this book, almost ruining certain scenes. Twice he was duped by an attractive woman; in both cases I knew as soon as the women entered the scene. I felt kind of let down by the ease with which he was taken in. It’s a theme though that runs through Samson’s character, he is constantly confronted with women he can’t read correctly.

It adds an interesting dimension to Samson and makes the books a lot of fun. Deighton couldn’t pull it off though if he didn’t build some solid intrigue, which he does very well. The tension around who’s on who’s side in this game of spies doesn’t take a back seat to anything, all of the other fun stuff is just icing on the cake. The ending is packed with double crosses and epic spy stuff, truly unique batch of trickery played by all sides of the game. Awesome.

I have London Match queued up, which I purchased via Abe Books (like this one). I don’t think I’ll be able to hold off much past the end of summer. By the way, Abe Books is awesome for old books – cheap and reliable.

golf

Indian Boundary

Post date 2012/05/12

Indian Boundary causes more mixed emotions for me than any other course I play regularly. Sometimes it makes me angry and sometimes it makes me happy. Often I think it’s the future of golf in our country, then I’ll run into some dude fishing the pond on the par three eighth hole and think otherwise.

I rank Indian Boundary third in the collection of Cook County Forest Preserve courses behind George Dunne and Highland Woods. I paid $49.99 on a Sunday morning in May with cart for a decent sub-$50 experience. It’s a solid layout, highly convenient to downtown, and you’re almost guaranteed to see a deer. However, like many of the Forest Preserve courses, you have some frequent conditioning issues and a small percentage of golfers may not be challenged by even the back tees (they barely stretch 6,000 yards). If I’m just a little dialed-in I can really score at these short courses, like I did this day.

I was in a foursome with some friends and on the 7th tee and one of them exclaimed, “Wow, this is a great course. I can’t believe it only took me 20 minutes to get here.” We had just seen a deer on the previous hole and the tee box we were standing on was tucked back in a stand of trees overlooking a small lake that you had to carry. It was a picturesque, peaceful moment. Here it is:

There are a few of these moments, then there’s also a pack of bland, trouble-free, sub-350 yard par fours and no challenging par fives. But this could be the future of American golf. You can walk for $35 (includes 9% city tax) at most and its playability does not cost too much in aesthetics and challenge. That’s relatively inexpensive and it has to be cheap to run. There is no driving range and no significant clubhouse or bag services. This is fine because the first few holes are simple and provide a decent warm-up. Plus, you never have to deal with figuring out how much to tip a bag room attendant.

Every time I blow holes in this place I can find an offsetting benefit. The fairways are bluegrass and sometimes in poor condition, but the greens are bent (or damn close) so the putting experience is comparable to courses a little more expensive. In general, they do a good job on the conditioning on what I’m guessing is a tight budget. Here is the approach to the par four 6th, a short, tricky hole and one of the nicer ones on the course. Note the nice manicure on the bluegrass (including a first cut) and the well-bunkered green:

The place just has a nice, minimalist feel. Heck, there have been times when my complete time investment has been less than five hours out and back, including drive time and wait time. I’ll make sacrifices for that.

I’ve played two short, sporty, inexpensive courses this year so I’m ready for some juice. I’m hitting Harborside tomorrow so I’ll get bent grass fairways, fast greens, and trouble around every corner. I’m pumped! Hopefully the weather holds out for a morning round.

food

Table 52

Post date 2012/05/11

My sister is the frosting queen of Northwest Ohio. Her secret: Crisco. That may sound kind of repulsive to those who didn’t grow up with a can of Crisco on the counter like we did. To me, it sounds like a great way to add some density and texture to one of life’s small pleasures – frosting.

Yep, frosting-love is a curse of the Steffens. I was home a few weeks ago and found myself spreading my sister’s frosting on some cheap shortbread cookies and it transformed each cookie into a religious experience. It reminded me of a food item I had about a month ago that did not need any transforming, but the frosting still really stood out. That’s it in the picture – Art Smith’s Hummingbird Cake from Table 52 (note to self, when cheap shortbread cookies and Crisco remind you of a masterpiece by Oprah’s former chef it could mean something is horribly wrong with your tastebuds).

Smith’s dessert was described on the menu as such:

Banana-Pineapple Cake, Cream Cheese Frosting

That’s a big turn-off for me. I don’t like fruit in my cake. Period. I was on the brink of getting the chocolate cake thing or the pecan pie thing, but this was a special occasion (late Valentine’s Day dinner with G) and the wait staff did a good job of selling the fact that the fruit was “added only for moisture and sweetness, you don’t taste it all.”

In the end, I went with the Hummingbird and I’m glad I did. Actually, I was glad for three days because it lasted three separate sittings and held up very well in the takeout container. Yes, that’s two sittings of just shoveling it in right from the takeout container after dinner.

It’s kind of carrot-cakish but better. It has more brown notes, like a caramelish and brown sugar type of flavor. And despite the thickness of the frosting, it was light enough that it didn’t ruin the cake/frosting ratio and stood up to being hauled around in a takeout container and pawed at for three days. It just works and has completely changed my view of fruit in cakes.

I was so smitten that I’ve started asking southern folk about the Hummingbird Cake in my efforts to bond with them using something other than college football. Here’s the thing though, I’ve asked no less than four people from Georgia and South Carolina and they look at me like I’m nuts. I don’t get it, if you Google this thing Paula Deen is all over it. Oh well, maybe it’s not as southern as I thought.

This makes me wonder if I’m tapped in to food from my region. If you ask me about deep dish pizza, hotdogs, cherry pie, and Italian beef, I’m going to have something to say. I guess I can’t think of anything else really. There are probably a whole host of things that people identify as midwest/Chicago food that would make me say, “Huh?” Test me.

Oh well, it was a great cake.

books

The Ox-Bow Incident

Post date 2012/05/08
Tags literature, western

I finished the last two chapters of this book on a plane coming back from Charlotte on a business trip. The flight was half empty and I was seated behind two drunk guys on their way to a bachelor party in Chicago. As I was sitting there in quiet contemplation, the guys in front of me engaged in a long and sometimes animated discussion about Trayvon Martin, Robert Zimmerman, and vigilante justice.

It was a strange confluence of events that forced me to think harder about this book.

If you’re not familiar with the story, you need to know right off the bat that this is generally regarded as the greatest Western novel ever. As a kid, I read a lot of Westerns, so this reading experience really hit home for me. It’s an incredible read and very appropriate for current times.

** PLOT KILLERS FOLLOW **

The story takes place over about 48 hours in 1885 and chronicles a doomed hunt for three murderers by a 28-person posse from a small cowtown in Nevada. It’s told from the perspective of a cowboy in the posse named Art Croft, a sensitive and thoughtful person but a man ill-equipped for the deed at hand. He’s a perfect vehicle to tell the story.

It’s a short book, maybe 240 pages depending on the format. It’s broken down into five longer-than-average chapters. They aren’t titled, but if they were, I’d title them like this:

The Saloon
The Posse
The Hunt
The Hanging
The Saloon Again

I read it over the course of a week in four sessions, the last two chapters being a single session. You’d have to be one heartless human to stop after Chapter Four, or just someone with serious time constraints.

This book points out the the evils and perils of the mob mentality and vigilante justice, but it goes deeper. One of the subtler topics Walter Van Tillburg Clark explores is the moral implication of doing the right thing. I’ll use a scene in the book to clarify so you don’t think I’m full of $^|+.

During formation of the posse, the ensuing hunt, and the hanging, there was one man who campaigned tirelessly to cease the charade of justice and bring the suspects back to town to be tried. His name was Davies and he was the local shopkeeper. Davies did everything he could; he got the local judge out of his office to try and stop the posse from going out, he confronted the leader of the posse and tried to reason with him, and he begged other posse members to see his point of view to try and build consensus for stopping the hangings.

Nothing worked. Three men were hanged and their innocence was discovered only moments later on the way back to town.

The aftermath is ugly. The son of the leader of the posse hangs himself when he gets back to town. His father, Tetley, commits suicide by impaling himself on his own sword shortly after hearing of his son’s death. A local rancher promises to take care of the widow and children of one of the hanged.

The reader, I think, finds these pretty meaningless. I still had a sickening feeling for the injustice done to the suspects because it could not be undone. Davies has the same feeling, but he also has a more complicated set of emotions. He feels a tremendous, crushing guilt in his cowardice.

What? Croft, the narrator, is incredulous and tries to talk Davies down from this. Croft expresses that Davies was the only one talking sense and the only one standing up to the leader Tetley, he should feel anything but guilt because he did all he could.

Davies doesn’t feel the same way. He knew the suspects were innocent. He just knew. He also knew that only way he could stop the hanging was to kill the leader Tetley. His guilt resulted from the feeling of relief he felt for not bringing his gun. He was relieved that he didn’t have to make the hard decision to do the only thing that could have saved three innocent men, kill Tetley.

“Yes, you see now, don’t you?” he said in a low voice. “I had everything, justice, pity, even the backing – and I knew it – and I let those three men hang because I was afraid. The lowest kind of virtue, the quality dogs have when they need it, the only thing Tetley had, guts, plain guts, and I didn’t have it.”

…

“All a great, cowardly lie,” he [Davies] said violently. “All pose; empty, gutless pretense. All the time the truth was I didn’t take a gun because I didn’t want it to come down to a showdown. The weakness that was in me all the time set up my sniveling little defense. I didn’t even expect to save those men. The most I hoped was that something would do it for me.” (pg 234)

Wow man, this blew me away. It was an ultra intense scene in the book and it reminded me immediately of the feeling I had after reading the Pat Tillman book. This feeling that some people just hold themselves to a higher standard.

I felt like Davies was a hero but Tillman, like Davies himself, would probably feel differently. Would Tillman have been the type of guy to stand in front of the unjustly accused with a gun and kill anyone who tried to hang them?

This prompted me to re-read my take on the Tillman book and it just led to more questions about my (our) place in this world. How do I guarantee an appropriate response in times of crisis and conflict, especially when faced with crushing peer pressure? When do you step in and when do you walk away? When do you act on what you really feel? When is it right to decide to take a human life?

Tough questions.

This issue was foreshadowed very early in the book but I wasn’t able to connect it until I reviewed things. As the posse was developing Davies tried to nip things in the bud by first reasoning with the group. He even seemed to think one person standing up to them in a non-violent manner would keep them from going. Croft didn’t think so and noted this:

I wasn’t so sure of that. Most men are more afraid of being thought cowards than of anything else, and a lot more afraid of being thought physical cowards than moral ones. There are a lot of loud arguments to cover moral cowardice, but even an animal will know if you’re scared. If rarity is worth, then moral courage is a lot higher quality than physical courage; but, excepting diamonds and hard cash, there aren’t many who take to anything because of its rarity. Just the other way. Davies was resisting something that had immediacy and a strong animal grip, with something remote and mistrusted. He’d have to make his argument look common sense and hardy, or else humorous, and I wasn’t sure he could do either. If he couldn’t he was going to find it was the small but present “we,” not the big, misty “we,” that shaped men’s deeds, no matter what shaped their explanations. (pg 62)

So maybe my description of Croft as “ill-equipped” earlier was wrong and maybe Davies was even less-equipped to stop this charade of justice. Maybe only someone who could apply the “big, misty” morality to the here-and-now in the face of physical opposition could stop this thing. If Croft had this insight, why didn’t he take the action? Or, maybe worse, why didn’t he feel the same guilt that Davies felt? Is Davies just irrational and too hard on himself?

Food for thought.

This book is especially appealing to fans of the Western. It has many of the stereotypical western characters but does not have many of the stereotypical western scenes. There was no big shootout at a pre-arranged place and no hero swooping in to save the day with guns blazing. But there was a big woman called Ma who can fight like a man and a Civil war vet who still doesn’t think the war is over.

I’ve thought about this book a lot over the last 48 hours. I need to make a point to come back to it in a few weeks.