Tim Geithner, the stressed-out Secretary of the Treasury. Photo by Saul Loeb.

The blonde surf instructor clinched the deal with an offhand comment. We stood outside her shack a few blocks from the beach in Rincon, Puerto Rico, just after New Year’s Day, as I sized up a surfboard I might rent.  “Tim Geithner rode this board just yesterday,” she said casually.

The United States Secretary of the Treasury rented this thing, seriously? The board, a nine-foot-four Greg Taylor in pale blue with lightning bolts down the rails, suddenly became an object of fascination.  The man at the reins of our creaking economy, whose signature is on every freakin’ dollar bill, had spent New Year’s…surfing?

This comes as a surprise if you know anything about surfing and have ever seen a picture of Tim Geithner. The man approaches his job with a deep, abiding and un-surfer-like sense of worry. It is written all over his face.

At his best he looks wary and at his worst he looks hunted, like a man who might at any moment turn a corridor and face an angry mob of Occupy Wall Streeters with torches and pitchforks. This is not an unreasonable fear. In 2008 President Obama tapped Geithner as the point man to pull the United States back from the lip of economic Armageddon, and things haven’t gotten much easier since.

He took hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to steer us out of the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression — and failed — and worst of all, did so without exhibiting Obama’s Hawaiian sense of cool. The middle-manager tension in his jaw has made it all the easier for the Left to brand him as a tool of our corporate overlords and the Right as the tax commissar of our Socialist-in-Chief. Naturally such a man would want to flee Washington for the tropics.

But as Treasury Secretary one’s options for a tropical vacation are severely circumscribed. Imagine if your choice to take a holiday in Acapulco prompted an indignant senator to declare on C-SPAN that you are exhibiting a dangerous allegiance to the peso. And so it was that over New Year’s the hunted Tim Geithner found himself vacationing in a corner of Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory where people use both Spanish and twenty-dollar bills, seeking anonymity and a brief sojourn as a surfer.

I pondered Geithner’s Yankee burden as I held his board under my arm and surveyed the waves at a serene palm-lined beach called Domes. Would the Secretary’s distress stick to me like a toxic asset, or would it dilute in the warm Caribbean water like so many shares of Citibank?

Only one way to find out.

Paddling out through frothy whitewater, I immediately encountered that bane of surfing: other surfers. Even in laid-back Puerto Rico a surf lineup bears some similarity to official Washington. A scramble for scarce resources. There is only one wave at a time and twelve guys who want ride it, just like there is only one tranche of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act at one time and two hundred lobbyists who want a piece.

We surfers waited for the next swell and eyed each other.

I played it cool, waiting to see how much skill and machismo existed out here on the reef. Took a position on the outside where I wouldn’t draw much attention. I stroked for a little wave that no one seemed to want and, to my great surprise, the Secretary’s board was stable as a barge. I popped up with ease and rode it almost all the way into the beach.

When I paddled back out to the lineup I could tell from the wordless glances of our Bermuda-shorts flotilla that this performance had promoted me from Beta to Alpha. I was welcome to park myself at the peak, where the best appointments — uh, I mean waves — were for the taking.

Not that I am some badass surfer. There was what in Washington they call a mitigating factor.

That factor is that the waves were totally sucky. Over New Year’s week the swell was small and pathetic, waist-high at best, the kind of conditions where only the rankest amateurs or desperate tourists with a departing plane ticket would bother getting wet.  The really big investors — er, I mean surfers — stayed out of the water in anticipation of a better day.

Me with the Secretary's surfboard. Photo by Anjali Kumar

Word was that the waves had been awesome a while back, and that a good swell might hit sometime soon. But right now it was almost flat. The ocean’s pulse was weak, flirting with recession, and you could pray to the sea gods or scrape together a few billion in stimulus funds, but really there was not a damn thing anyone could do.

As I bobbed out there on the blue I put my ear to the Secretary’s board and listened, listened to learn what it is like to be the Secretary of the Treasury on a surf vacation. This is what I heard:

The waves are small but you don’t really care because life has suddenly become so simple. Belly-deep in ocean and a blue horizon touched by a few clouds. No one recognizes you now that your Kennedyesque bouffant has been flattened by seawater and a layer of zinc sunscreen disguises your sharp nose. No one even seems to notice you except for that Brazilian surfer girl in a bathing suit so small that just a glance causes your interest rates to surge.

Your mind wanders, and in the next moment you’re back to fretting like you usually do. Durable-goods orders are down and that the trade balance is a friggin’ disaster, and you’re wondering what the hell you’ll say to the Chinese finance minister when you’re in Beijing next week to discuss sanctions against Iran. Before you know it, while you were preoccupied, a good wave has come through. Some grinning German with shoulders as broad as Angela Merkel’s is cruising by on a wave that should have been yours.

But, hey. Oh well. Even a bad day of surf beats a good day testifying before the House Financial Services Committee.

A swell bears down and you decide to go for it. The board picks up speed, you struggle to a standing position, and then it happens: You are surfing, riding your sky-blue board toward shore, looking down past the nose at a calm sine wave of water. It shimmers with the kind of transparency that any regulator would admire. Eventually the wave peters out and you bellyflop into the shallows with a boyish splash. You pop up to the surface and let out a whoop.

You put your belly to the board again and point your nose back toward the lineup, and realize, hey, maybe I need to hang loose, man. Maybe I’ve been a little too uptight. Maybe all the worry in the world won’t hurry up a recovery. Maybe just for today, before I return to the buzzards, I’ll enjoy a swell ride.

A Board Meeting with Tim Geithner is a post from: The Ferris Files

Image Credit: www.joyerickson.wordpress.com

I grew up listening to KQED, the public radio station for the San Francisco Bay Area, and I’m exhilarated to announce that I made it on the radio yesterday.

The piece, “Wilderness Calling,” is part of KQED’s Perspectives series, where regular people make their best case on a topic of the day. While some might question if I’m a regular person, I have formed an emphatic opinion about the growing use of cellphones in the great outdoors, based on a jarring experience I had in Yosemite National Park last summer. Listen to the whole thing below. (2 minutes 20 seconds)

Ferris KQED Perspective

Me on KQED: Wilderness Yes, Cellphones No! is a post from: The Ferris Files

http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200711/goodgoing.asp

New story in Sierra magazine is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Libby does have real, blood-and-feathers eagles, as evidenced by the Eagle Cam, but it’s the giant steel ones that really grab your attention. They are apparently the handiwork of the high-school shop teacher, who is displaying skills beyond the classroom.

City of Eagles is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Six tiny casinos, none of them any larger than a Denny’s, and two or three state health offices and, right downtown, an office of the Environmental Protection Agency. Curious.

I also saw a sign pointing toward a mine. “Is that how Libby makes money?” I asked our hosts, Jana and Dave. They were to be married the next day and my girlfriend Anjali and I were there to celebrate with them. We all were tucking into scrumptious plates of huckleberry flapjacks and hash browns at the bustling Libby Café on the street that comprised downtown.

“Well, it used to…” Dave said reluctantly.

The Zonolite Mine outside of town is the world’s largest repository of vermiculite, a mineral that is an ingredient in fireproofing, insulation, and many other products and that for decades made Libby a prosperous mining town.

Residing under the soil with vermiculite was tremolite, which, it turns out, is one of the most toxic forms of asbestos and thus a cancer-causing killer, according to the newspaper report that revealed the scope of the tragedy.

The mine ground up rock and spewed its tailings in the form of white dust that traveled home on the clothes of the miners. This dust blew into town sometimes, where children would draw figures in the dust on the cars. In the early 1990s a doctor called attention to the ridiculously large number of respiratory problems among miners and their families.

As of 2001, as many as 30 percent of the town’s population of 2,600 had contracted a fatal disease, and hundreds had died.  The W.R. Grace Company, which owned the mine and knew about its deadly contents, has paid out millions in settlements to the citizens of Libby. But legal reparations haven’t rehabilitated the town, where heathcare agencies are still the biggest employer.

It is startling to learn that the town you visit on vacation – lounging in a hot tub, eating flapjacks, admiring the Cabinet Mountains rising out of town – is, by the way, the epicenter of the largest community poisoning in U.S. history.

This Town May Cause Cancer is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Our collective debt to this Aussie quintet became apparent at a wedding I attended in Troy, Montana a few weeks ago. The DJs had pointed their speakers toward a wooden deck and served up a whiplash-inducing variety of music – country swing, then screaming grunge, and then a little hip-hop, leaving everyone confused and the dance floor pretty much empty.

Late in the evening, when the locals had taken some beer, the opening guitar salvo of “Back in Black” burst from the speakers, accompanied by AC/DC vocalist Brian Johnson, who sings like a parched desert nomad who has just been attacked by a cat. Suddenly, men who had been avoiding the dance floor like it was the perfume counter at Macy’s grabbed their gals’ hands and moved toward the floor.

It was as if a virulent strain of epilepsy had swept through northwestern Montana. People herked and jerked and scrunched up their faces and muttered along with the incomprehensible lyrics which, I’ve concluded after some research, include, “So look at me now, I’m just a makin’ my pay, Don’t try to push your luck, just get outta my way.”

I am unsure what these lyrics have to do with the holy union of marriage. I am also unsure what the sign of the devil has to do with marriage, or for that matter with AC/DC, but when listening to “Back in Black” the fingers just naturally stick out that way, as you can see (that’s me with the bride).

I can only assume that this song is an unlikely force for good.

Or at least a force for “it felt good at the time.”

Head-Banger’s Ball is a post from: The Ferris Files

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“It’s supposed to be right here!” Anjali said.

Photo Credit: Corbis

The capitol, we concluded, must be the adobe to the right behind a row of suburban trees. That it was made of adobe was not the surprising thing. Everything in Santa Fe is made of adobe – houses, office buildings, freeway overpasses. The modest brown rectangles everywhere charm the eye and create a strange anachronism: I am driving a Hertz rental car through an 18th Century pueblo.

(Imagine the titanic battles over building materials that must have been waged on the city planning commission. “Adobe bus shelters for the people!” one cried. “Keep the fire hydrants red!” another yelled.)

No, the surprising thing about the state house is how easily I could mistake it for, say, a medical-supply company or a Presbyterian church. Even when we drove around and got a full-frontal, it lacked everything I expect from a seat of government. No marble, no Greek columns, no sky-piercing dome, just a two story building with a flat top. There wasn’t even the obligatory obelisk to remind the legislators to stick it to somebody today.

This made me so curious that I did a little research. Did you know that state legislators in New Mexico aren’t paid? In odd-numbered years they meet for 60 days a year, and on even-numbered years it’s only 30. This is shocking to a resident of California, where we recently had to pass laws to make the legislators not spend their entire careers in Sacramento. Oh, and our governor is a multimillionaire movie star who made his name by flexing the biggest muscles in the tiniest bikini.

The motto of New Mexico is “It Grows As It Goes,” which, like the statehouse, is curiously unstatesmanlike, so un-Manifest Destiny. It’s like designing a whole city to be the color of earth. They might as well have painted the phrase “Easy Does It” or “Hakuna Matata” on the signs at the Arizona border.

It Grows As It Goes is a post from: The Ferris Files

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We drove to Big Basin Redwoods State Park, the oldest state park in California, which is accessed by curvy roads shaded intimately by pines and oaks. It feels mighty far away considering it is just an hour’s drive from the stucco-sprayed suburbs of my youth.

The wonder of a coastal redwood is that it grows straight up, true as a flagpole, to a height of more than 350 feet. It is covered by a furry bark that makes it near-impervious to forest fire, which is important if you grow to be 2,000 years old, as these trees do.

We set up camp that night at the Wastahi campground at the base of a giant redwood near a ridgetop. We awoke in the middle of the night to an urgent roar that came close and subsided, then came close again.

The answer was apparent as we looked up to the treetops framed in moonlight. A mass of air had rushed through the Santa Cruz Mountains, tripping over the trees and rustling a billion leaves. Where we lay the air was still. Other trees swung back and forth but our giant redwood was so massive and strong it barely shifted its weight.

Babes in Treeland is a post from: The Ferris Files

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I plodded like a slug. My Uncle Ken and Aunt Nancy had put me up the night before at their house on Bainbridge Island, and all day I had been eating. At lunch they served a huge pot of clam chowder. Now I had all the pep of a shellfish, with pure cream in my veins. 

“The great thing about Seattle,” Ken had announced, as he launched into the fifth great thing about Seattle, “is you can do all the things you could possibly do in the Bay Area in a week, and do them in one day.”

I ran past gardens where rhododenrons and magnolias pulsed in pink and purple, down streets of mossy asphalt, and through a wood choked with ferns and broad-leaf plants. I passed a sign to the Nordic Heritage Museum and down the steep steps to Golden Gardens Park, a pebbly beach on Puget Sound.

Nothing golden at the Gardens that day. The sky was iron gray and the Olympic Mountains, which I knew to lie just across the Sound, were buried in rain. Here it was dry, however, and the park was full of merry people grilling and chatting around bonfires and playing volleyball in flannel shirts and long underwear. The sun may not have been out but they acted as if it was.

The next day the sun did come out and Seattle was transformed. We visited the Museum of Glass (pictured) and sunned ourselves on the beach at Point Defiance. We walked through Pike Place Market and admired the freshly-washed buildings of downtown, the shiny skyscrapers and the stately brick facades, and the bustling port in the middle of it all. When the sun is out, Seattle is one of the most beautiful cities anywhere.

But this day the gray would not lift, and I trudged on home. I took off my Montrail shoes, covered in the dark brown mud, mixed with rotted vegetation, that is the signature of the Northwest woods. It was nearly nighttime, and I wanted coffee.

Sluggish in Seattle is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Descent from Base Camp to Pampa de Lenas (9,100 ft. / 2,800 m)

“…Bursts of wind and snow clattering against the tent…”

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Pampa de Lenas is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Plaza Argentina (Base Camp) (elevation 13,790 ft. / 4,203 m.)

“…it’s a question that hurts to ask right now.”

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Could I Have Made It? is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Audio Post:

Trapped at Camp 2 (elevation 19,000 ft. / 5,800 m.)
(map)

“it huffed and puffed and tried to blow our tent down last night…”

Click to Play (1 min  34 sec)

Wind Storm Delays Summit Attempt is a post from: The Ferris Files

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