Minding Gaps

{Side Roads} Climbing Mount Rainier in the Middle of Night

 

Life shouldn’t be all work and no play. So a few years ago we began publishing Side Roads, an irregular, infrequent feature here at the Minding Gaps blog. It recognizes and celebrates passions, milestones, excursions, pleasures, relationships—everything that we ultimately work for. It’s all about life’s joys, both little and large.

We post these diversionary Side Roads columns only on occasion and only on weekends. The rest of the time, we stick to the mission of this blog, as explained on the Our Philosophy page.

Our previous Side Roads columns introduced you to my heretofore secret recipe for pesto; recounted my climb to the summit of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park; took you along on an African safari; shared the story and a few pictures of a visit to the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa; looked at the 90-year rivalry between two National Football League teams, the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears; and described a classic Midwestern snowstorm.

Today we recall my ascent of Mount Rainier, a 14,411-foot volcano in the Cascade Range just south of Seattle, in the middle of night ten years ago this summer. (For the record, I am no longer climbing mountains.) Mount Rainier is the fifth-highest mountain and the single most-strenuous climb in the lower 48 states. Though stopping a little short of the summit, I still regard the climb as successful for lots of good reasons. Here’s the whole story.

Mount Rainier      

by Thomas J. Lee

The first goal of any mountain climber is just to come back alive. That is especially true for tenderfoots like me on a heavily glaciated peak like Mount Rainier. So anyone who returns from climbing Rainier has already achieved his primary goal. If that’s a little simplistic, it’s also as real as a heartbeat; some climbers don't make it back.

There are two kinds of amateur mountain climbers. I call them the “reachers” and the “searchers.” For some climbers, reaching the peak is everything. The destination is all that counts, and they are determined to get there. For others, the journey matters more; the adventure and thrill are paramount. I was always proud to be a searcher.

All along, summiting this 14,411-foot volcano was secondary to the experience and to the knowledge and insight I was searching for. I took away profound lessons for my life, a grasp of nature's incredible power and beauty, terrific memories to last forever, and lots of deep, soulful satisfaction.

True, it all came at a cost: nasty scratches and hockey-puck bruises, feet full of blisters, a high-altitude sunburn, grime that wouldn’t wash away, legs that couldn't climb stairs, and a body that ached so completely and so severely that I constantly had a jar of Advil within reach. Worse yet, I was registered to run the Chicago Marathon a couple of months later, and running was out of the question for a couple of weeks.

I actually made it farther up the mountain than I had hoped, and I am convinced that we would have made it all the way if we had departed high base camp according to our plan, preferably by 1 a.m. and certainly by 1:30 a.m. at the very latest. Instead, my team finally embarked at 2:45 a.m., which was much too late (thanks to our guide, who chose this occasion for some extra winks).

The beauty we saw was phenomenal. Even from the elevation I reached, we were looking down at Little Tahoma (the state’s third-highest peak, visible to the far left in the photograph above), Mount Adams (the second), the ash-gray and hollowed Mount St. Helens, Mount Baker (the fourth) and, in Oregon, Mount Hood and the Three Sisters. The mountain snow was glaringly white but the glaciers were pockmarked with granular pumice. The air was thin, and the sunlight was almost painfully brilliant. We wore SPF30 sunblock on any exposed flesh and even inside our nostrils. People without sunglasses have actually burned their retinas.

After a day of training, we had set out in the morning and reached high base camp, at 10,100 feet, by 5 p.m. It was already a grueling climb with 35-pound packs on our back. Camp Muir turned out to be nothing more elaborate than a tarpaper shack with sheets of plywood on which we could stretch out our sleeping bags. But by the time we got there, it looked like an antebellum mansion. We enjoyed a marvelous one-course dinner consisting of all the hot water you could want.

Each climber carried his own pre-packaged heat-and-eat food like oatmeal and soup, along with plenty of Gatorade and candy bars. Stretching out on the hard plywood felt wonderful after climbing all day.

Our party consisted of 24 climbers and six professional guides, a couple of whom had done Everest. It was a group of overachievers. Among the climbers were four physicians, an attorney and his two grown kids, several executives, a Harvard grad student from Israel, an accountant, a magazine publisher, a couple of college students, a high-tech entrepreneur, a small businessman, a Microsoft programmer from India, a honeymooning couple, a manager, and I. There were 19 men and five women. From the main base (5,400 feet) to high base camp we hiked all together, through montane meadows and up rocky bluffs and finally onto year-round snowfields (different from glaciers inasmuch as snowfields don’t move).

After reaching Camp Muir, we had time for dinner and then bunked down for some ersatz sleep with blindfolds and earplugs. By 7:15 p.m., it was quiet. Everyone was tired. We dozed lightly until being awakened at 1 a.m.

That seems early but it was really too late, and we didn’t set out for a final attempt on the summit until much later. It's a strenuous, 11- or 12-hour hike just from Camp Muir to the summit and back. Thus, setting out at 2:45 a.m. means that you don’t return to high base camp until mid-afternoon, after the sun has had six or seven hours to bake the front of glaciers. That creates a serious hazard of avalanche, especially in late summer.

Just three days earlier a huge wall of ice (probably the size of an eight-story building) had come crashing down over the main trail across the Cowlitz Glacier, one of 26 glaciers that so gloriously drape Mount Rainier's summit. We would normally have followed that very trail. Because of the debris, we detoured around it; and from a high precipice we could survey the truck-size blocks of ice now littering the trail. Anyone in the way would surely have been killed by these colossal snowballs.

The night sky was bright with a million stars when we embarked from high base camp. We were roped together with carabiners in teams of four, each team three or four minutes apart and headed by a professional guide, as we traversed glaciers and climbed through ridges of rocks and
scree in the darkness. We all wore crampons and helmets with headlamps. Within each team we were usually about 10-12 feet apart from one another, but in especially dangerous spots we were “short roped” to about three or four feet. That way, if one of us fell, he would have no momentum to carry down the others.

To compensate for the late start from Camp Muir, my guide wanted to hike double-time up the mountain. I could do that for a few hours, but at my age and at such a high altitude, I just couldn't keep it up even with all my physical training. (On registering for the climb, everyone is advised to be in the best shape of their life and to train rigorously for months beforehand. I was and I did, but hey, there’s only so much a guy can do.) I also determined that, at least for someone like me, to continue on would be to court more danger than I wished. In that situation, a single misstep could be fatal. Better to be humbled and alive than to be proud and dead, I figured. Finally, after climbing steep inclines for four or five hours through the nighttime cold and a face-scraping wind, I had to confront my own limits.

We were atop a steep, rocky ridge known appropriately as Disappointment Cleaver when a couple of us (the Microsoft guy and I) chose to hunker down and watch the sun rise slowly on the mountain's eastern flank. Though the summertime temperature was 20 degrees Fahrenheit and the wind was gusting to 40-45 mph, it was phenomenally pretty, unlike any other dawn I have ever seen: first a scarlet eyelash, then a brilliant splash of magenta across the horizon for more than an hour.

Later a few more climbers came down the slope in retreat. We roped ourselves together, found our sunglasses and goggles, and began the slow trudge back down to high base camp in the light of day. Only then did we realize how close—just three or four feet, really—we had hiked in the darkness past glacial crevasses so deep we couldn't see their bottom even in daylight. The glaciers that we had crossed were massive (several miles in length and 300-500 feet thick) and repeatedly fractured with crevasses, some of the cracks just inches across but others wide enough to swallow a city block of houses. It was incredible.

Back at Camp Muir, we met up with others who had retreated earlier. All of us waited for the return of those who had soldiered on. After regrouping, it took several more hours of steep, knee-buckling descent (in double-time again!) to get back down to the main base camp.

By then, we could scarcely stand and couldn't walk another step. Our feet were covered with blisters. Our shoulders felt like stone. We were all in serious pain. But we were thrilled that we had tried, and we knew that we were forever changed by the experience. We were also profoundly grateful; two other climbers died in high-altitude falls nearby the previous week, so our own blessings were real indeed.

What did I learn from it? Well, things little and big.

At the very least I learned how to use an ice axe to stop sliding for miles down and off a mountain, whether on my face or on my back, and whether feet first or head first. I learned how to walk in crampons across a glacier and up a wall of ice or fragile, old igneous rock. I learned that volcanoes are covered with pumice that stings your face in the wind. I learned how to breathe at high altitude (frequently and fully expel the carbon dioxide from your lungs). I learned the importance of carrying as light a load as possible up a mountain; every pound, every ounce, counts for far more. I learned just how big a volcano can be and just how deep a crevasse can rive its glaciers. I learned the joy of eating cold pizza for breakfast and consuming a dozen candy bars a day while still losing five or 10 pounds. I learned that I really don't enjoy wearing a beard, and so it's gone already after only a couple of weeks.

I also learned some things that other people learn earlier in life. I learned to be much more careful than I have been, for each step I take through life may be my last, figuratively and literally. I learned that a timely start spares haste. I learned to cherish the moment, to see more in life than I have seen in the past. I learned that things around us may be vastly greater than we, but that we are no small creatures either. I learned that respecting both the fragility and the power of nature is a real and a vital paradox. I learned that reliance on oneself and on one's team is the same thing, for all of us must do both; we must respect both the individual and the team. I learned to go slow, one little step after another, ever upward. I learned to see compelling beauty in self-fulfillment and in the satisfaction of a challenge well met. I learned that we have more courage and strength in our being than we know but, for me anyway, it will be found only for the searching, never for the wishing.

The following quotation, attributed to the legendary Swiss mountaineer Edward Whymper in 1871, was posted inside the door of that tarpaper shack at Camp Muir: "Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are naught without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste, look well to each step, and from the beginning think what may be the end."

Indeed. Indeed.

 

Coming Next Week

The Work Product of Leadership

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

My Dad, a Humble Profile in Leadership

 

We are on our annual study and renewal period through June 30. During this time we will reprise some of our favorite posts of the preceding twelve months. We'll return with all-new essays on Friday, July 1.

A year ago this weekend, the Chicago Tribune published my Father's Day tribute to my late dad. We reprise it today.

 —TJL                         

by Thomas J. Lee

A fellow blogger posed an interesting question online, in anticipation of Father's Day. He asked: What kind of leader was your father?

I had to think a moment. My dad, who passed away in 2007 at the age of 93, was a wonderful man. But probably most people did not regard him as a leader. He wasn't an elected official. Nor was he a high-powered executive. Nor was he active in politics or community affairs.

Yet leadership is not only for the powerful and the prominent. Millions of people offer profoundly inspirational leadership in their everyday lives. So it was with my father. He lived a life of humility, decency, authenticity, and commitment.

Naturally outgoing and happy, he exercised quiet self-control even in the face of considerable adversity. He didn't lose his temper. He didn't curse or cheat or lie. He didn't gamble or drink to excess. He hated war, but he went, and his unit liberated Dachau. In 75 years of driving a car he never had an accident, not even a fender bender. He never even got a traffic ticket. In short, he was a rock, always there when it counted.

Most important, he knew how to love, and he did. The late Ann Landers, who could tell us a thing or two about families, often wrote that the greatest gift a father can give to his children is to love their mother completely, deeply, and unconditionally.

My four brothers and I were the beneficiaries of just such a gift. For more than six decades, probably from the moment he first noticed her at another soldier's wedding in Chicago, my dad loved my mom, and he let it show. He loved her completely. He loved her deeply, and he loved her unconditionally.

I have a particularly warm memory, framed like an old faded photograph in my mind's eye. When I was 10 or 12, I would wander into the kitchen before dinner, only to find my dad and my mom in a bear hug of an embrace while potatoes simmered on the stove.

Such a warm sense of security washed over me. Some of my friends had parents who yelled at each other. Others had parents who brooded in silence. Not I. Not my brothers. We had a security blanket up over our shoulders and snug under our chins. We had the luxury of never, ever worrying.

My dad always loved my mom, and my mom always loved my dad, and that's the way it was. It was just that simple and it was just that wonderful and it was always just that way.

Only a few weeks before my mother died in 2004, I visited the two of them in their apartment in Florida. What I witnessed on that visit was like a scene out of an old black-and-white movie starring Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson or Donna Reed.

My mother sat at the kitchen table, her days so very numbered, and yet with a smile of calm, divine peace across her face, as my dad, a gifted tenor who had once aspired to the operatic stage, sang love song after love song to her. He must have sung for an hour, maybe two, and he sang from his heart. He sang: "Everybody loves my baby, but my baby don't love nobody but me." My mother died a happy woman, for she was loved.

Most of all, I remember Dad as a man who worked hard, who made the most of what he had, who lived his life with passion for his art as well as for his wife, who humbled himself and honored others, who recognized duty, and who devoted himself to the things that matter, which is to say, to the people around him.

Will you abide one last anecdote? It is from the day I learned to swim. I tell it because it says so much about the man my father was.

There was to be a kind of commencement exercise at the old YMCA pool in my hometown. All the kids would swim the length of the pool, and then, one by one, we were to be called up by name and given a certificate.

Now it's odd what we remember from our childhood. Of that day, I remember a feeling of anxiety, knowing that my mother was home with my little brothers, and my dad was at work.

Back then, Dad always had to work on Saturday mornings. So the other kids would have families in the gallery cheering them on. But not I. I was on my own. That would be okay. I could handle it. I would be fine. I would just buck it up.

So one by one, in alphabetical order, the instructor called the names of all the swimmers. I remember hearing the instructor call out Ade, and Bobby, and Mike, and Steve. And one by one, each of them walked over to get his certificate as the gallery erupted in cheers.

The closer the instructor got to my name, the more alone I felt. I braced myself for a little polite applause from the other parents. The instructor called my name. I got up, walked over, and reached out for my certificate.

Sure enough, the applause was polite. But just then a voice rang out from the gallery, loud and clear and echoing around the pool: "Way to go, Tommy!"

I looked up. It was my dad. Somehow, he had got off work, and he had made it over to the YMCA to watch me get that certificate.

Ever since, whenever I have needed some encouragement, I have harked back to those few words, and I have picked up the pace and tried a little harder. My dad's voice is never far away. He is my cheerleader, even now, after he is gone.

By my measure, this is certainly the stuff of leadership. My dad was an ordinary, everyday hero. His achievement in life wasn't winning an election or getting a big promotion or living in a fancy house. Rather, it was leading a fine, long life and filling it with honor and love.

And so now, for another Father's Day without him, it's my turn, and I just hope he can hear me: "Way to go, Dad! Way to go!

 

Coming on Monday

 The Business Case for Communication on Change

 

 © Copyright 2011   Thomas J. Lee   All rights reserved.

[Side Roads] The Great Groundhog Day Blizzard of 2011

 

Life shouldn’t be all work and no play. So a few years ago we began publishing [Side Roads], an irregular, infrequent feature here at the Minding Gaps blog. It recognizes and celebrates passions, milestones, excursions, pleasures, relationships—everything that we ultimately work for. It’s all about life’s joys, both little and large.

We post these diversionary Side Roads columns only on occasion and only on weekends. The rest of the time, we stick to the mission of this blog, as summarized in the masthead above and explained more fully on the Our Philosophy page.

Our previous Side Roads columns introduced you to my heretofore secret recipe for pesto; recounted my climb to the summit of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park; reviewed a mesmerizing novel, The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett; took you along on an African safari; fondly remembered my extraordinary dad on Father’s Day; shared the story and a few pictures of a visit to the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa; and looked at the 90-year rivalry between two National Football League teams, the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears.

Today we wax eloquent on winter, Midwest style.

by Thomas J. Lee

I have lived my entire life in the Upper Midwest, and I really cannot imagine living anywhere else. This is home. Millions of other Midwesterners feel the same.

Even a week like this one, which brought one of the worst blizzards of my lifetime, is something to be cherished and remembered not so much as an ordeal, which it plainly was for some, but as a red-letter date in a legacy we all share. It's a cliché, but clichés are clichés because they are true: The Great Groundhog Day Blizzard is the kind of thing we will tell our grandchilden about.

Surely someone I know is cursing at the ten-foot snowbanks and making plans to move south, but not I. Not my closest friends. No, we chuckle at it all, and we pride ourselves in the resilience and character of our stout Midwestern stock. Then we look around, and we realize that we are living in the alabaster of a Currier and Ives lithograph. The sky is cerulean. The sunshine is buttery. The spruce trees are verdant with lace on limbs. Everywhere the landscape is holy, clerical, innocent.

Wednesday was a snow day here. Everyone was home. Offices, stores, schools, banks, the mall—you name it, everything was closed, and everyone knew that everything would be closed, so we all slept in. The predawn quiet was exquisitely still. Still dozing, I could hear the approaching grunts, scrapes, and beeping of two snowplows working in tandem. When I finally arose, I looked out on a splendid desolation of white.

Apart from the plows, not a single car or truck came past my home until 9:30 in the morning. When I opened the front door, I found myself looking at a five-foot drift. When I opened the garage door, I was looking at an eight-foot drift. Even for a boy from Wisconsin, this was serious snow.

The neighborhood kids were laughing as they headed off to the sledding hill in Century Park, just a few hundred yards from here. A young father pulled red plastic saucers carrying his little charges. They wore scarves across their faces, but their eyes beamed, because they were with their dad. Other grownups grabbed their shovels, yanked at snowblowers until they growled, and set to work. Eventually the sidewalks bore narrow canyons through snowbanks taller than the tallest tale I've ever told, and that's pretty tall.

After shoveling out, some of my friends decided to take a coffee break together, and we wound up at a friend's lovely home. Pete was just putting away the snowblower. He pointed to a twenty-foot snow tunnel that he and his son had carved. In the back of the house, on the deck, was a drift that almost reached the upstairs balcony. We coulda jumped off, we shoulda jumped off, and we woulda jumped off if only we were half as old and twice as dumb.

Live long enough in the Midwest, and you live through some phenomenal winter storms. A few of them you remember, if most of them you eventually forget. This storm—this one, the Great Groundhog Day Blizzard of 2011—this is one that we will all remember for a long, long time.

So here are some pictures (all from the Chicago Tribune's web site, which has hundreds more) of the Great Groundhog Day Blizzard of 2011. Above, some University of Chicago students take a break from the books for a snowball fight. Below, commuters come home early Tuesday and trudge from the train to their cars. Lake Shore Drive's longest-ever traffic jam. An abandoned CTA bus on Lake Shore Drive. Two young women put the finishing touches on their Frosty in Wicker Park. A crosscountry skier glides down LaSalle Street in the Loop. Terminal 1 at O'Hare Airport offers the shortest lines of the year. Picasso's famous sculpture winks at a passerby.

 

 

 

 

With appreciation to the Chicago Tribune

 

Text (c) Copyright 2011   Thomas J. Lee   All rights reserved.

[Side Roads] For the Packers and Bears, Their Greatest Game Ever

 

Life shouldn’t be all work and no play. So a few years ago we began publishing [Side Roads], an irregular, infrequent feature here at the Minding Gaps blog. It recognizes and celebrates passions, milestones, excursions, pleasures, relationships—everything that we ultimately work for. It’s all about life’s joys, both little and large.

We post these diversionary Side Roads columns only on occasion and only on weekends. The rest of the time, we stick to the mission of this blog, as summarized in the masthead above and explained more fully on the Our Philosophy page.

Our previous Side Roads columns introduced you to my heretofore secret recipe for pesto; recounted my climb to the summit of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park; reviewed a mesmerizing novel, The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett; took you along on an African safari; fondly remembered my extraordinary dad on Father’s Day; and shared the story and a few pictures of a visit to the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa.

Today we look at the 90-year rivalry between two National Football League teams, the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears.

 

by Thomas J. Lee

I grew up just outside Green Bay, Wisconsin. For the last thirty-odd years I have made my home in or near Chicago, Illinois. Each of these cities has a team in the National Football League. Both teams are as old, as venerable, and as legendary as the league itself.

Their rivalry is storied. Think of the Yankees and the Red Sox. Think of Palmer and Nicklaus. Think of Seabiscuit and War Admiral. Think of Manchester United and Liverpool, of Ali and Frazier, of Evert and Navratilova. Rivalries all, each pales against the heroic test of wills that has defined the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears since their founding in 1919.

The Packers and the Bears have played each other 181 times, twice a year for almost an entire century. They have each won more world championships than any other team. Curiously, only once before, in 1941, have they faced each other in post-season play, and never before have they played each other for a championship. That will change Sunday afternoon, when the Packers and the Bears face off in Soldier Field on the shore of ice-laden Lake Michigan in downtown Chicago. Without question, it will be their greatest game ever. Our grandchildren will probably hear stories of it.

The winner of this game, for the National Football Conference championship, will go to the Super Bowl. Now the Super Bowl is traditionally the crowning glory of American football, but this year it is so incidental as to be all but irrelevant and anticlimactic. Rather, this weekend's game, between the Packers and the Bears, is what really counts for these two teams. For them it is all that counts. If the winner of this game loses the Super Bowl, it will still be victorious in the eyes of its fans, for it will have vanquished the only team that matters.

Now I love Chicago. Truly I do. I went to graduate school here. I raised my family here. For years I wrote a newspaper column here, and I have spent most of my career here. I love the lakefront, the architecture, the museums, and the symphony. I love Navy Pier and Lake Shore Drive and the Archicenter boat tour and Wrigley Field and the University of Chicago and the rickety old Red Line and even O'Hare Airport. Almost all my friends live here, all but a few of them benighted Bears fans, and I even love them.

But I am not, and I never will be, a fan of the Chicago Bears. Never. Never, never, never. To the very marrow of my bones, to the synapses of my brain, to the soles of my feet and the tips of my fingers, to the valves of my heart and in the plasma of my blood, I am a fan, through and through, of the glorious Green Bay Packers, and that is the way it will always be.

It has always been thus, too. As far back as I can remember, the Green Bay Packers were the very center of every autumn in my hometown, a few miles down Highway 41 from Green Bay. My brother actually attended the famous Ice Bowl, the NFC championship game between the Packers and the Dallas Cowboys, when the temperature at kickoff was 13 degrees below zero. Today, I own one of those gaudy yellow foam cheese heads, and I even have a frozen brick of genuine Lambeau Field turf in my kitchen icebox. I really do.

Green Bay is an improbable city to have a major sports franchise. It has a population of scarcely 100,000 people, in sharp contrast to the millions in greater Chicago and other cities with NFL teams. That alone makes the Packers unique, but there is much more to the story.

The Packers are the only major sports team to release their balance sheet every year, and they are the only team to be owned by the general public and operated on a non-profit basis. The team's by-laws call for all its assets to be given to charity in the event the team is ever moved from Green Bay. That would be unlikely in any case; since 1960, the Packers have sold every single seat for every game in their stadium. Over the course of a half-century, not one ticket has gone unsold, and there is a waiting list of thousands. No other team in major sports can claim anything remotely close to that.

Even the great George S. Halas respected the Packers. In the 1950s, Halas, the founder and longtime head coach of the Bears, drove the 200 miles to Green Bay during the off-season to urge the citizenry to build a stadium for the Packers, which were struggling through a sustained slump and had little immediate prospect for success. Until then the Packers were playing at the Green Bay East High School field (just coincidentally, the alma mater of legendary New York Times sports columnist Red Smith). Without a new stadium, the NFL would move the team from Green Bay. Voters listened to Halas and approved the new stadium.

Still the hapless Packers continued to lose. Two years later a granite statue of a man named Vince Lombardi arrived from the East Coast. He would be the new head coach and general manager of the sad-sack team. The year before his arrival, the Packers had lost all but one game in their new stadium. That season still stands as their worst ever.

The next year, under Lombardi, the Packers began winning. They started the season with a victory over the Bears and finished with more wins than losses. The year afterward, they won their division; and the year after that, they won the world championship. They would win the world championship four more times under Lombardi, including the first two Super Bowls. Today the Super Bowl trophy carries his name.

There's an important lesson for leaders everywhere in the Lombardi play book, for the great coach won all those championships with most of the same players on that pathetic, losing team he inherited: Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, Jimmy Taylor, Jerry Kramer, Ray Nitschke, Forrest Gregg, Max McGee, Willie Davis, Henry Jordan, and more. They were all losers, and they knew it. Lombardi came along and made them believe in themselves, and so they did. Once they believed in themselves, they played like winners.

You can expect both teams to play like winners Sunday. The Bears have come out of nowhere to win their division; at the start of the season, experts were predicting they would win only four of their sixteen games. Bears quarterback Jay Cutler passed and ran for two touchdowns each last Sunday. The Packers have survived more than a dozen significant injuries, and they have rolled over two excellent teams en route to their NFC championship berth. Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers is at the top of his game. The Packers beat the Bears three weeks ago in the regular-season finale, but the Bears prevailed back in September.

The convenient and conventional thing for me to say here would be: "May the best team win." But I cannot bring myself to do that. Not for this game. Not for any game between these two teams. No, my sentiments are all to one side. They are all on the side of the venerable, the estimable, the great and glorious Green Bay Packers. I can only speak my truth, and this is it. 

GO, PACKERS!

 

Addendum on Sunday, 23 January 2011:  The Packers won, 21 to 14, in a hard-fought game on loose turf that made proper footing difficult. Chicago quarterback Jay Cutler was hurt in the second quarter, and third-string quarterback Caleb Hanie drove the Bears to two touchdowns in the second half but also threw two interceptions, one of which ended the game. Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers looked masterful on an early touchdown drive but was otherwise lackluster. Fortunately, the Packers defense stepped up to the challenge.

 

Addendum on Sunday, 6 February 2011:  The Green Bay Packers went on to win the Super Bowl and thereby become the new champion of the National Football League. The Packers defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers, 31 to 25, after pulling out to a dramatic lead early in the game but losing some momentum in the second half. Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who completed three touchdown passes, was named the game's most valuable player. For the Packers it is their thirteenth world championship; no other NFL team has nearly as many. (The Bears are in second place with nine championships. The Steelers have six championships to their credit.)

 

(c) Copyright 2011   Thomas J. Lee   All rights reserved.  

Side Roads: The Field of Dreams

Life shouldn’t be all work and no play. So last year we began publishing Side Roads, an irregular, infrequent feature here at the Minding Gaps blog. It will recognize and celebrate passions, milestones, excursions, pleasures, relationships—everything that we ultimately work for. It’s all about life’s joys, both little and large.

We’ll post these diversionary Side Roads columns only on occasion and only on weekends. The rest of the time, we’ll stick to the mission of this column, as summarized in the masthead above and explained more fully in the Welcome! post above and on the Our Philosophy page.

Our previous Side Roads columns introduced you to my heretofore secret recipe for pesto; recounted my climb to the summit of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park; reviewed a mesmerizing novel, The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett; took you along on an African safari, and fondly remembered my dad on Father’s Day. Today, we share the story and a few pictures of our visit to the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa.

 

Thirty-five miles west of the Mississippi River, just north and east of the Iowa community of Dyersville and nestled in a delightful dale protected by vast waves of corn, lies the venerable Field of Dreams.

This is the idyllic farm chosen by the producers of the 1989 movie starring Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones. Today it looks much as it did in the film, save for the addition of a souvenir stand and a gravel parking lot.

Now I often like to add a little excursion to business trips, the better to humanize the hard work of going hither and yon. So it was last week. While returning from a workshop in leadership communication for a corporate client, I took a little detour to visit the magical baseball diamond.

When I got there, I noticed that some other folks had brought bats and balls. However, they needed more people for a game. So I volunteered to pitch a while and later took a spot in the batting line-up. No one was keeping score or even counting the balls and strikes. We were just living a little dream . . . on a field made for them.

Not having thrown a baseball in probably 25 years, I was surprised to get a few pitches more or less across the plate. I hit the ball into the outfield a couple of times, too.

By far the best part of the visit was stepping into and out of the rows of corn. Just as in the movie, that was a mystical experience.

Here are some pictures.

 

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5 Reasons You Must Read (and Watch) "The Pillars of the Earth"

 

For those of you who missed my Side Roads feature on The Pillars of the Earth last November, here, once again, are the five reasons you really owe it to yourself to read the masterful epic novel by Ken Follett.

Trust me, there are plenty of leadership insights packed in this narrative. Besides, you will just flat-out love the story itself.

Don't take my word for it, though. Take Oprah's.

For those of you who already know how terrific the story is, a head’s up: the American cable channel Starz is premiering its eight-part miniseries of Pillars beginning tomorrow night. Don't miss it. Check your local listings.

Side Roads: On Safari in Botswana's Chobe National Park

Life shouldn’t be all work and no play. So last summer we began publishing Side Roads, an irregular, infrequent feature here at the Minding Gaps blog. It will recognize and celebrate passions, milestones, excursions, pleasures, relationships—everything that we ultimately work for. It’s all about life’s joys, both little and large.

We’ll post these diversionary Side Roads columns only on occasion and only on weekends. The rest of the time, we’ll stick to the mission of this column, as summarized in the masthead above and explained more fully in the Welcome! post above and on the Our Philosophy page.

Our first three Side Roads columns introduced you to my heretofore secret recipe for pesto, recounted my hike to the summit of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, and reviewed The Pillars of the Earth, a mesmerizing novel, by Ken Follett.

Today we recapture a once-in-a-lifetime experience: going on safari in Africa. We went to Chobe National Park (and stayed at the spectacular Chobe Game Lodge) in Botswana, via Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe.

At the time we went, Zimbabwe was a relatively stable country. It isn't anymore, and I wouldn’t recommend visiting it until things return to some semblance of normalcy. Most of our story took place in neighboring Botswana.

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

 One of the extraordinary joys of work that takes you around the world is squeezing in a few vacation days now and then in phenomenal, exotic places. Some years ago, making the most of one of my speaking engagements, I was able to realize a lifelong dream of a safari in southern Africa. Here is the story.

I had been invited to speak to a professional association and spend a day working with the senior management team of a global conglomerate based in suburban Johannesburg, South Africa. That provided all the excuse I needed to go.

With a nod from my daughter’s middle-school principal, we took her out of school for two weeks and flew to South Africa. After my work was complete, we spent several days in Cape Town—an absolutely delightful city—and then flew north to a small airport near Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, to see the incredible “smoking” cataract and to embark on our big adventure.

On driving from the airport into Victoria Falls, we could only chuckle at elephant crossing signs alongside the highway: a silhouette of an elephant with X ING printed below it. Only moments later our driver slowed, and our jaws fell slack as two trumpeting, rogue elephants lifted their enormous bulk out of the jungle and crossed the road just 30 or 40 yards in front of us. We certainly weren’t in Kansas anymore.

Several school kids in uniforms, walking home on a nearby path, briefly looked up, threw a few stones at the massive beasts, and then blithely continued on their way. A few miles on, we saw weary men pushing wooden barrows loaded with the day’s harvest and a gaunt old woman leading a donkey saddled with firewood, all on a dirt street in the center of town.

Setting out on safari the next morning, we entered Botswana at a remote border crossing awash in mud puddles. Over the next few days we saw unforgettable things.

One day, only a few hundred yards from the lodge in Chobe National Park, our open-air Land Rover pulled up right alongside a muscular lion on her own morning safari.

Two or three days later, we watched in the quiet of an African dawn as a steely-eyed lion stalked her prey right in front of us. For twenty or thirty minutes she inched closer and closer—one silent, slow, half step after another—to the rear of a kudu paralyzed by fear. Then in a few graceful bounds she lunged at his flank. He leaped high, kicked his legs, and barely escaped with his breath—for the moment, anyway. Our guide said the kudu was probably killed within seconds by another lion, waiting in ambush.

Later, we got real nervous real quickly—and boy did we ever get outta there fast—when a fierce, irascible hippo, the meanest of the mean, took a bead on our river cruiser and abruptly charged. He came at us with phenomenal power and astonishing speed. We lurched back into our seats as the boat whooshed away. This time our guide explained that the hippo was just trying to frighten us; had she been serious about attacking, she would have quietly capsized our boat and then drowned us. Hippos can hold their breath for 45 minutes, and they kill people for the sport of it.

On yet another ride, we edged too close to a slumbering crocodile on a riverbank. Suddenly a blur of teeth and hide flew at us like shrapnel. For an instant this ugly beast was two feet into the air: tail whipsawing, eyes glaring, snout wide open, its rows of teeth reaching for our flesh. Plunging into the water mere inches from our boat, and now stilled, he looked up at us with contemptuous regret (top picture). The attack took no more than two or three seconds. Never so happy to be ever so drenched, we looked at him with stunned and blessed relief.

Back on land, we watched matriarchal herds of elephant swaggering across the veldt. The littlest ones, scolded by mama, scurried along like Dumbo to keep up. Then we saw dozens of grazing impala freeze up in cold fright at the scent of an unseen predator. Giraffes, zebras, monkeys, and cape buffalo completed the wild menagerie.

Once we came upon a grandfatherly lion—his regal, resplendent mane straight off a Barnum & Bailey billboard. He had condescended to watch over a half-dozen cute but impudent little cubs. They were frolicking in their den, only a couple of arm lengths from our open-air vehicle. Then that aristocratic old king yawned so wide you could literally count his glistening incisors and the bubbles of saliva on his tongue. I exaggerate not the least.

Perhaps most memorably, we stopped to chat with four young Tswana bushmen (below left) working waist-deep in a rain-swollen Zambezi River tributary, just inside Namibia. The men were fishing with spears—literally hand-chiseled out of stone and tied together with strips of animal hide—and using dug-out canoes carved from tree trunks. Honestly, it looked like a scene straight out of National Geographic. I could not believe what I was seeing. Our guide, offering cigarettes and Coca-Cola for their courtesy, did double duty as a translator. They showed off their catch of the day: a huge tiger fish, surely enough to feed several hungry families. All four men smiled with evident pride.

The next day our long journey home began in a lashing monsoon. We bumped along a muddy two-rut path in the back of a leaking, tarpaulin-sheathed pickup truck. When we finally arrived at the airport 125 miles away, the electricity was out. Not to fret, there were no computers anyway. Finally, the sky cleared. We flew south to Johannesburg, north to Germany, and home.

That night, in the discomfiting comfort of a jetliner somewhere over the Sahara Desert, we could only wonder about it all. You cannot visit Africa without drop-jawed awe for her feral beauty, diversity, romance, size, and, most especially, abject pain. Africa is her pain.

In just the two weeks we were there, 40,000 children alone in sub-Saharan Africa alone died of malaria alone. Imagine, the equivalent of seven jumbo jets slamming into Mount Kilimanjaro every single day, all year long, and the world is almost mute on the tragedy. Getting shots for yellow fever and taking weekly malaria pills—not to mention watching aboriginal tribesmen fish for dinner with Pleistocene gear—swiftly brings you face-to-face with a starkly different world, and to a real appreciation for our own largesse of civilization, sanitation, industry, literacy, and medicine.

Fast forward now to 2010. A few weeks ago, I asked my daughter—now 23 and in law school—what her favorite memory was from childhood. Without hesitation, she replied the trip to Africa. “Even now,” she added, “there are times that I just can’t believe I went to Africa.”

Come to think of it, neither can I.

 

If you are in a position to take the time and spend the money to see Africa, you have my strong encouragement to do so. I can promise you that it will absolutely change your life. For now, avoid Zimbabwe, Rwanda, and Congo. My choice would be Kenya or Tanzania. Be sure to consult with the U.S. Department of State or, for those of you outside the United States, your own national foreign ministry long before finalizing your plans. You will need inoculations against multiple diseases.

Side Roads: "The Pillars of the Earth" by Ken Follett

Life shouldn’t be all work and no play. So a few months ago we began publishing Side Roads, an irregular, infrequent feature here at the Minding Gaps blog. It will recognize and celebrate passions, milestones, excursions, pleasures, relationships—everything that we ultimately work for. It’s all about life’s joys, both little and large.

We’ll post these diversionary Side Roads columns only on occasion and only on weekends. The rest of the time, we’ll stick to the mission of this column, as summarized in the masthead above and explained more fully in the Welcome! post above and on the Our Philosophy page.

Our first two Side Roads columns introduced you to my heretofore secret recipe for pesto and recounted one of the most phenomenal days of my life—the day I climbed Half Dome in Yosemite National Park.* Today we review a mesmerizing novel, The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett. Published in 1989, the story is presently in production as a television miniseries.

 

 

My off-hour reading tends to favor non-fiction: memoirs, mainly, and books on business and public policy. A few times a year I read a novel. For the most part the novels I choose are breezy and relatively short.

The Pillars of the Earth is neither breezy nor short. It is an epic story, spanning four generations in medieval England, about the construction of a Gothic cathedral. When I noticed the sheer girth of the book—at 973 pages, it is nearly two inches thick—and felt its heft, I winced. Surely I had better things to do with my time.

My daughter insisted otherwise. Now a law student, she had read Pillars during spring break on her junior year abroad. The college she was attending required courses in classical philosophy and literature, and she had explored Gothic cathedrals across Europe. With a week off between semesters, she tore through the book even as she was traipsing around the ruins of ancient Athens. She promised it would be the fastest 973-page book I would ever read; I knew it would be the only 973-page book I would ever read.

It took me appreciably more than a week—four is closer to the truth—and I could not claim the Acropolis as a distraction. Yet night after night, I curled up with this book and hours later fell asleep with it on my lap. In short, I loved it.

Pillars appeals on no fewer than five levels. First, like any other Ken Follett book, it is a spellbinding thriller. As he explains in a preface to a recent edition, he has written a series of melodramas, one on the heels of another. No sooner do you find the resolution of one crisis, and you are in the thick of another. All of them link together in a bigger picture. Well into the book, you think it is about a particular character, but that man dies with 400-odd pages to go, and life goes on.

Second, it offers an incredible tapestry of fully realized characters, all of whom are vulnerable to weaknesses of one sort or another, and most of whom ultimately have redeeming features that render them intensely human. The worst of the lot is William Hamleigh (above, being appointed an earl by King Stephen, in a scene from the TV production) and his parents, but a bishop by the name of Waleran Bigod and a monk known as Brother Remigius aren’t far behind. Even the saintly Prior Philip commits the sin of pride. At the other end of the spectrum are the beautiful Lady Aliena and Jack, the man she patiently loves. He is the son of Ellen, a mysterious woman who lives in the forest and whom Prior Philip regards as a witch.

Third, Pillars is a fascinating primer on the architecture and construction of cathedrals. These huge buildings were built with none of the tools that modern architects take for granted, and yet today they stand as testament to the power of religious faith and discipline. All medieval cathedrals took decades to build; in many cases, the men who finished them were the grandsons and great-grandsons of the men who started them. The story of their construction is absorbing—itself a moral lesson in dedication and perseverance.

Fourth, it transports the reader to a time and place that most of us know little about. It is filled with accurate details on the quotidian lives of Twelfth Century people: their housing, their clothing, their nutrition and health, their community, their traditions and customs, their farming, their fears and superstitions, their economy, their laws and government, their technology, and their passions and rivalries. Follett devoted the necessary time and effort to working with medieval scholars who provided him with extensive and colorful detail on the subsistence of our ancestors. It shows.

Fifth, and finally, The Pillars of the Earth reveals enduring truths about organizations and leadership. Depending on the culture of your own organization, the politics of governance can be brutal and dehumanizing, or it can be collaborative and ennobling. In all cases, the way people relate to one another has an enormous impact on their capacity to come together and work to everyone’s advantage.

All in all, Pillars is a rip-roaring good read, and I enthusiastically recommend it.

_________________________

* N.B. You can read the post on my pesto recipe here, and you can read about my hike to the summit of Half Dome here.

 

Side Roads: Hiking to the Summit of Half Dome in Yosemite Park

Life shouldn’t be all work and no play. So a couple of months ago we began publishing Side Roads, an irregular, infrequent feature here at the Minding Gaps blog. It will recognize and celebrate passions, milestones, excursions, pleasures, relationships—everything that we ultimately work for. It’s all about life’s joys, both little and large.

We’ll post these diversionary Side Roads columns only on occasion and only on weekends. The rest of the time, we’ll stick to the mission of this column, as summarized in the masthead above and explained more fully in the Welcome! and Our Philosophy posts.

In our inaugural Side Roads column on August 15, I shared my recipe for pesto. If you haven’t yet tried it, be sure to do so soon, before fresh basil becomes difficult to find for the winter.

Today, in the second installment of Side Roads, we will revisit one of the most phenomenal days of my life—the day I climbed Half Dome in Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevada of eastern California. If you have ever climbed Half Dome, you already know just how exhilarating, just how incredible, a hike can be. If you haven't, take a few minutes to come along with me. 

 

That’s me. In the navy blue shirt, waving to you. From the top of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. It was ten years ago today. Look closely, and you will notice the orange date in the lower right corner.

The view from the summit of Half Dome is spectacular, as you can see for yourself. That little bluff a couple of miles behind my arm is the legendary El Capitan—its own face so very intimidating.

From where I am sitting to the valley floor below is just about one mile, straight up and down. Starting from the valley floor, I climbed Half Dome in a single day, and I took the long way. My route was closer to twenty miles, plus the vertical mile on the ascent and the vertical mile on the descent.

It was pitch dark when I started around six o’clock in the morning, and it was pitch dark when I finished around eight in the evening. (The trail itself is only about eight miles horizontal and one mile vertical, each way. But without an overnight camping permit you cannot park close to the trailhead, and if you are embarking before dawn there are no shuttles to the trailhead. So you walk.)

By comparison, running the Chicago Marathon was easy and brief. I was in pretty good shape for this climb, and yet it was so debilitating that I couldn’t walk for three days afterward. I could scarcely stand. Even sleeping was painful, even with prescription-strength doses of ibuprofen.

Because I was hiking in the autumn, when the waterfalls are comparative trickles, I was able to climb right alongside the Vernal and Nevada falls. In springtime, thunderous cataracts prevent anything of the sort. It was straight up, rock upon rock, each a foot-high step. When I got to the top of each waterfall, I expected to see the bald head of Half Dome ahead of me. But the trail kept going and going.

At times, I thought I was lost. It was nearly noon before the rocky promontory showed itself, and I still had two more hours to the top. The last mile of the climb (from where I am in this picture) is extremely strenuous. Multiple switchbacks lead upward to the shoulder. There you discover a pair of iron cables draping down the final 150 meters of bare granite at a slope of maybe 40 to 55 degrees. To reach the summit, you pull yourself up hand-over-hand, and you hold on tightly. If you let go, you die.

When I finally stepped onto the peak, I had an odd feeling of disappointment that the climbing had ended. The journey was so exhilarating; now I would just turn around? Then I looked out across the valley. Oh. My. Gosh. Under a pure, cerulean sky, I could see probably fifty or sixty miles. A mile below, Yosemite Valley looked like a child's playset. Maybe, I thought, this is how we appear to God.

I noticed a little cairn of rocks in the middle of the summit. Each climber could contribute a stone or a rock to it as the only evidence of his presence. I placed mine alongside the others. In parks, as you know, you leave nothing behind but your footprints, and you take nothing out but your pictures.

Naturally I took quite a few pictures. Though climbing alone that day, I traded cameras with other climbers so that we all had photographic proof of our success. For the picture of me on the summit, I ventured daringly close to the sheer cliff. I felt eerily invulnerable. Below, I could see nothing smaller than a shed.

Though the hike would take fourteen hours, I could remain on the summit for only thirty minutes at midday. The descent would be long and grueling. Fortunately, the most frightening moments were the initial return down the granite slope to the shoulder. It took more upper body strength to go down the cables than up, and it was scarier—owing to the fact I was looking at where my body would land if I fell. 

The sun set an hour or so before I got all the way down to the valley floor. Fortunately, I had brought a halogen flashlight. The last few miles were excruciatingly painful. My quads and hamstrings were piercing with pain. Neither leg wanted to move. I needed both, and I forced myself to keep walking.

Only after my descent did I learn that an early explorer of the High Sierra had once confidently predicted that no one would ever reach the summit of Half Dome. The bald head of steep granite was just too forbidding. Eventually someone did summit, of course. Today, hundreds of climbers reach the peak every year.

A few weeks after this adventure, I was flying back to San Francisco on business, and the pilot took us right over Yosemite National Park. By then it had already snowed. But I could clearly make out Half Dome and the Vernal and Nevada falls. The memory of agony and of ecstacy they had given me that day in October brought a satisfying smile.

What a day it was. What a day.

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Side Roads: An Occasional Diversion

Life shouldn’t be all work and no play. So we’re beginning an irregular, occasional feature here at the Minding Gaps blog to be known as Side Roads. It will recognize and celebrate passions, milestones, excursions, pleasures, relationships—everything that we ultimately work for. Think of it as a photo album of life’s joys, little and large.

We’ll post these diversionary Side Roads columns only occasionally and only on weekends. The rest of the time, we’ll stick to the mission of this column, as summarized in the masthead above and explained more fully in the Welcome! post and the Our Philosophy post, both of which you can usually find among the first dozen or so posts.

For our inaugural Side Roads column, we’ll begin with a recipe—yes, a recipe.

 

I happen to enjoy cooking, and my favorite dish is a summertime joy: fresh, aromatic pesto. I cannot stop eating it. To my thinking, it’s better than chocolate.

The main ingredient in pesto is, of course, basil. Thanks to hydroponic growers, you can now buy fresh basil year round at the green grocer, and it is much less expensive than it used to be. That enables you to prepare pesto year round, which is a very good thing.

Still, I prefer to make pesto with only the freshest of basil. I don’t have an herb garden any more, so I typically obtain basil as gifts from generous friends or in bulk purchase from summertime farmers markets here in suburban Chicago. Either way, it is just hours from the garden.

Last weekend, after purchasing quite a bit of basil at an outdoor market, I made the emulsion described below and then froze it. Now I can thaw it and use it gradually for several weeks.

Almost any pesto is delicious. Some few are excellent. One or two are extraordinary. Mine? I personally think it is phenomenal. But you be the judge. If you disagree—well, that's silly. You won't.

Now I am happy to share it with you. Please, please; there's no need to nominate me for a Nobel Prize. Just don’t say I never give you anything.

To begin, have these ingredients at hand:

• 1 big bag (one pound) freshly harvested basil
• 2 cups virgin imported olive oil
• 1 stick unsalted, unsweetened butter, softened
• 4 teaspoons Kosher salt
• 8 tablespoons fresh pignolia nuts (pine nuts)
• 12 cloves peeled and crushed fresh garlic (or more, I won’t complain)
• 2 cups freshly grated, imported Romano pecorino cheese
• 8 tablespoons freshly grated, imported parmesan cheese

Now proceed as follows:

• Rinse the basil.
• Strip the basil leaves from their stems, and discard the stems.
• Combine the basil with the olive oil, pine nuts, garlic, and salt in a food processor (in several batches, and in equal proportion to the amount of basil you can fit).
• Mix by pulse for 30-45 seconds. That's enough to chop the basil and pignolia nuts finely and blend everything nicely. Do not blend excessively. You should have a textured emulsion. Combine the batches and gently stir. 

You can freeze the emulsion, as I did last weekend. It will also keep several weeks in the refrigerator. I cover it with a thin layer of olive oil to prevent oxidation.

When you are ready to finish it, proceed as follows:

• Fold the pecorino and the parmesan gently into the basil emulsion. Stir.
• Introduce the softened butter to the mix. Blend gently.
• Add a tablespoon or two of hot water to melt the ingredients together.
• Blend gently but completely. 

Serve over freshly made, al dente linguini or fettuccini.

That’s it, folks. Let me know how it tastes.

Have a great weekend, and see you Monday.

Remember: Monday will be the second installment of our new regular feature on data. We'll start each week with a statistic that is noteworthy, alarming, misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We’ll accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. Monday, we will present the data on nonverbal communication that so many otherwise intelligent people believe is true—but isn’t.