Tunnel Vision

The Appalachian Trail is a 3,200km (2,000 mile) path that runs from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine. The path runs mostly through the woods and passes through Maryland about a 40 minute drive from where I live.

I grew up hiking this section of trail. My first backpacking trip with my dad was on the Maryland section of the AT when I was around 9 years old. When I was 13, I did a week-long trip on the Virginia section of the trail with my friends Schulyer and Eric. I was somewhat surprised that my parents gave me permission to go on this trip with no adult supervision, but they agreed as long as there was no hitchhiking. I promised and then promptly tried hitchhiking for the first time. It was pretty great.

Over the years, I completed the Virginia and Maryland sections and most of Pennsylvania as well as bits in North Carolina and New York. The AT has come to feel like a second home, especially the section between Harpers Ferry, Va. and Gathland State Park which I have hiked bits of on day trips or short overnights perhaps 30 times or more.

This spring, Barbara and I are planning to hike in the Adirondack Park in upstate New York as we usually do. There are 46 mountains in the Adirondacks that are over 4,000 feet above sea level and if you climb them all, you can join a club officially organized in 1948 called the Adirondack 46ers. The cost to be a member is $10 per year and it offers no privileges except to say that you are a member. I began climbing these peaks in 1969 with my dad and finished 40 years later in 2009, claiming my sequential number of 6495 in this exclusive club. It is all on the honor system. You have to report your mountains and the dates you climbed them but there is no way for anyone to check that you actually did it. Of course, what would be the point of lying about such a matter? Not withstanding the insignificance, it is one of my proudest accomplishments (right up there with raising two incredible human beings who also love the wilderness.)

My dad is a 46er as is my sister and her husband. Barbara was with me on most of the peaks I did in later years but not the ones I did in my childhood and so to support her in finishing her mountains, I need to haul my sorry ass up those mountains one more time.

These mountains are not technically difficult. There is little rock scaling and no technical equipment needed. Just a sturdy pair of boots, a day pack and a will to walk up and down steep, rocky, often muddy hills for up to 12 hours at a time. For those so inclined, the rewards are sweet air, sore knees, and when the weather is favorable, occasional majestic vistas of some of the most beautiful parts of this lush, green world.

Which is not to say that they are easy. Neither of us is in the ideal physical condition for this kind of exercise. Barbara has recently come off of 12 weeks in a boot after breaking her foot when she stepped on a black walnut while running and me… well, I have no excuse. There is also the knowledge every year there are those who come to the mountains ill prepared and get into trouble. Wander just a few meters off the trail and one can become disoriented and lost leading to an unexpected night in the woods or worse. One needs to be properly prepared and it decent physical shape.

To prepare for the trip we have committed to a long day hike on the Appalachian Trail every weekend between now and then. Our first hike on President’s Day was 13.5 km, and we plan to increase the distance each week. Nothing on the nearby AT can compare to the steepness and rockiness of the trails in the Adirondacks but we will be better off for the training even if we are never completely ready.

Part of the preparation is mental. ‘Through hikers’, those who hike from Georgia to Maine more or less without stopping, speak of the ‘green tunnel,’ the mind-numbing effect that comes after long distances on the trail when the eyes take in only a narrow path weaving its way through the forest. One can sometimes go into a meditative state while one’s feet pick their way among the rocks and other obstacles. The trail is beautiful but can also feel monotonous particularly to a mind habituated to the constant stimulation of the internet, social media, and text messages. Part of the experience is simply to forget all one’s responsibilities except for the task of putting one foot in front of the other for hour after hour. It requires full attention if one doesn’t want to slip on a wet rock and go flying.

The hikes also remind me of just how important it is to get into the woods. Even though I walk for an hour almost every day, nothing compares to getting into the forest, where some of the sounds of humanity begin to fade. I am looking forward to seeing spring unfold over the next few months as we return to the same stretches of trail again and again. I do not take for granted these old feet and knees are still able to rack up a 15-mile day with a bit of soreness but no real pain.

There is something magical that happens in the Adirondack mountains somewhere between 3,800 and 4,000 feet above sea level. The trees become smaller and the deciduous give way to fir and pine. This magic can only be experienced when traveling by foot. Knowing that the only way back to civilization is a 6- or 7-mile hike back the way you came is part of the magic. It is that magic along with the sure knowledge that a day will come when I can no longer make it up these enormous hills that calls me back to the mountains year after year. Hope to see you on the trail!

Repairing What is Broken

A few weeks ago, I pressed the button on my Honda Civic’s key fob to open the trunk. Nothing happened. Well, not nothing exactly. The trunk made a click sound, but where it normally pops up, it just stayed closed. I could manually open the trunk but the door was heavy instead of light as a feather as it usually is and once open it would often come crashing down on my head when I was loading the groceries. Ouch.

Upon closer inspection, I saw that one of the two torsion bars (no, I didn’t know what they were called until I searched YouTube) was broken clean off at one end. “Gotta get that fixed,” I thought and then promptly forgot about it until the next time I opened the trunk. Now more than two months have passed and I still haven’t attended to this. It is a small problem that doesn’t affect much except when you are trying to put things into or take things out of the trunk and then it is surprisingly irritating and inconvenient. But I’ve had other broken things to deal with that seemed more pressing.

Ever since Homo habilis started making stone tools about 2 million years ago, humans have been dealing with broken stuff and just as then, there are two approaches to the problem. One is the throw the thing out and get (or make) a new one and the other is to fix the broken one.

For millennia, the preferred way was to repair. Most of the time it was cheaper (in terms of labor expenditure or currency of exchange) to put a new edge on your stone axe than to acquire or to make a new one. Even in near ancient times, like my childhood, when stuff broke, you just got it fixed. Telephone stopped working? The phone company came over to your house and repaired it. TV on the blink? Probably a bad tube. Your dad (always your dad) removed the screws from the back, found the tube that wasn’t glowing and picked up a new one from the repair shop for a dollar or two and popped it in. Good as new! Which is to say fuzzy picture in black and white.

But during last 30 years, it has become more common when something breaks, to toss it in the trash, send it to the landfill, and buy a new one. Many modern things often can’t be repaired, were in fact designed to be unrepairable. Or even if they can be fixed, we tell ourselves, “it isn’t worth it.” By which we mean, we’d rather pay to have a new one with all the bells and whistles. With more expensive items like phones and cars we have even devised elaborate schemes like “leasing” and allowed ourselves to be convinced that they make good financial sense (they don’t) so that we can justify getting a new one every couple of years.

I prefer to get things fixed. Even today, it is still often cheaper to get something fixed, especially an expensive thing, than to get a new one. Plus, anytime you can fix something that is broken, you keep it out of the landfill for a while longer and a new one doesn’t need to be manufactured with all the environmental impacts of doing that. We keep most of our cars for 20 years or 200,000 miles. We bought our coffee maker in 2002. Even my laptop is seven years old and has had its battery, keyboard, and trackpad replaced. Still going strong, I might add. Not gonna lie – I upgrade my phone every year or two but then I pass along the old phone to my wife and her phone goes to one of the kids. Each phone has a long life and I have the latest technology. Best of both worlds – at least for me.

I have always envied folks who could fix things themselves. I have always thought of myself as someone who was not handy, and my culture milieu reinforces the stereotype that Jewish men are not handy. When I was working I justified “calling the men” (as my mom refers to it) to fix stuff because my time was “too valuable” to be crawling around under the sink.

But in the last two years I have been trying to claim a new identity: a person who can fix stuff. Three factors are at play.

First, though I still consider my time valuable, I seem to have more of it than I used to. Not having to commute to and work in an office from 8:00-18:00 everyday has been a huge boon, and trying to fix things is a luxury that comes with the extra time.

Second, I am home a lot! When I was in Rochester, if something broke, I just reported it at the rental office on my way out the door to work. By the time I came home, it had been magically fixed. A stove burner that wouldn’t heat up, a clogged bathtub drain, a loose kitchen tile, a closet door off its track all put right by guys (they were always guys) earning their livelihood while I earned mine. Now, I don’t have a livelihood and I am at home face to face with the broken stuff day after day until I do something about it.

Third, YouTube! Whatever in your life is broken, someone has made a video showing how to fix it and posted it online. Invariably, they make it look easy or at least doable by mortals.

So back in March of 2020 I took my first tentative steps by replacing the fan in the bathroom. This involved not only standing on a step stool but also (simple) electrical wiring. I neither fell off the stool nor electrocuted myself and was thus emboldened! What followed was a flurry of long delayed home repairs. Here is a small sample of my home handiwork:

• I replaced the bulb in the microwave oven

• I replaced the faucet gizmos in the kitchen sink that was dripping

• I replaced the hoses under the kitchen sink that were dripping

• I unclogged the trap under the bathroom sink

• I replaced the oven glass (after breaking it while making pizza)

• I changed a flat tire by the side of a dirt road in Kansas at sunset

• I installed a new HVAC system in our house (okay that is not true).

I did take down one of the venetian blinds and figured out how to fix it but when I called the company to get the plastic part I needed, they were closed for 3 months because of Covid and I never got around to calling them again. So, my record is not without blemish.

Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition teaches that our world has been broken from the beginning. God’s energy was too powerful for this poor universe to contain and God’s light ended up scattered throughout creation like shards from a delicate glass knocked to the kitchen floor. It is the job of the human being to collect the shards and assemble them back into something resembling a glass. We are not permitted to just collect the shards and throw them in the dustbin. It’s God’s light after all. The task is not finished until we have fixed everything that is shattered.

The thing about fixing stuff is that the odyssey is never-ending. Things are always breaking. No sooner do you fix one thing than another breaks. I understand why it is so tempting just to chuck the worn thing that is not working and to get a shiny new one. But keeping the old thing going often makes more sense for your life, your wallet, and, of course, the planet and, I have learned, if you can do the repair yourself, it can feel very empowering.

Russian bombs are falling in Ukraine, the stock market is in a tail spin, energy prices are soaring, and the political chasm in America seems to grow wider every day. I’d like to be helpful, to do my bit in fixing these things but, truthfully, I don’t know how to begin. Today, I’ll have to be satisfied with ordering a new torsion bar for the trunk of the Civic and attempting to install it with the help of a kind dude on YouTube who made a video.

Right now, it is the only part of this broken world that this dad/guy has the confidence to try to repair.

Render Reckoning

By the end of next week, I should have all my required documents in hand and I will be ready to plunge into one of the beloved annual rituals of American life, filling out Form 1040, the income tax return. Or, I should say, returns since I also have to do one for the State of Maryland. In addition, I also help my son with his returns as well as my mom so come April 15 I will have completed six tax returns. Some years I have completed up to eight. 

Of all the arcane knowledge stored in my brain, one of the seemingly most random collections is the skillset needed to complete my federal and state income tax returns. I do them myself and for the most part always have except for a few years when my confidence was shaken from having made a mistake that led the IRS to think that I owed thousands of dollars of unpaid tax. An accountant friend got it straightened out for me and I let her do my tax return for a while.  When she retired, I went back to doing it myself. 

This year, the process will be slightly simpler for me as this is the first time I won’t need to file in both Maryland and New York since 2015. Likewise, my son, will only need to file in one state (one year he had to file in three states plus Federal!). But they will still be plenty complicated for an average citizen. 

I first became aware of the need to file a tax return sometime in the early 70s. In late March or early April, my dad would take over the dining room table for 2-3 days. The tension emanating from that room was so thick you could cut it with an electric adding machine (he had one). Whatever it was he was doing, it looked stressful!

I filled out my own tax return for the first time around 1980 using the Form 1040 EZ using a number 2 pencil and one of those new-fangled calculators. It only took an hour or so and I am pretty sure I got a refund. 

As I got older my tax situation got more complicated and US tax law became increasingly obtuse. Today, the return must account for local taxes we paid, charitable deductions, inheritance of tax deferred accounts, earnings and expenses from my wife’s business, and investment gains and losses, which further must be sorted into long-term, and short-term dividends and interest, each of which is taxed differently. Mortgage interest is deductible but other loan interest (not that I have any) is not. Thank goodness I don’t have to worry about reporting gambling winning or losses! But soon, I will have to determine the tax due on withdrawals from my retirement accounts and maybe on up to 85 percent of my Social Security income. 

When I completed last year’s returns for Uncles Sam and his nieces Maryland and New York, the PDF file of all my returns was 478 pages - all for what amounts to a very modest amount of taxable income. It is understandable that many are happy to turn over tax preparation to a 3rd party and to pay them to do it. I wouldn’t even be able to consider doing it myself without a computer and the most popular software, TurboTax. Even then the amount of information one needs is staggering. (Intuit, the company that makes TurboTax actively lobbies Congress to prevent changes to tax law that would make it easier or simpler to file your taxes! By using TurboTax I am literally paying to keep my taxes mind-bogglingly complex. 

Here are some of the questions I find myself looking up every year:

·      What is the maximum contribution we can make to a Roth IRA?

·      At what income levels do the contributions phase out? 

·      Can we itemize my deductions or should we take the standard deduction?

·      What is the limit on deductions for the local tax I paid?

·      Can I take a deduction for our home office? 

·      How much can I contribute to my Health Savings Account? 

·      How much Social Security tax will we owe on my wife’s self-employment income? 

·      Did I pay enough in estimated taxes last year to avoid penalties? 

How did our tax code get to be so complicated? Even with the software and my decades of experience, I am always afraid I will forget something or that a 1099 got lost in the mail or that I neglected to report some minor bit of income and that as a result the IRS will come and impound my 1st Edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking or my vintage Matchbox cars (warning Mr. Taxman, they are kind of musty).

Doing your own taxes comes with risks. A few years ago, my employer didn’t properly report my state withholding and I got a bill from the state of Maryland for $5,000. Without an accountant, I had to deal with it myself and ending up having to fax (yes, fax) all of my pay vouchers for the previous year to the state. Eventually, the error was fixed and they sent my refund several months and many headaches later. (My wife says that actually it was she who resolved this, which seems quite plausible.)

Having said that, I kind of like doing my taxes the way some enjoy a crossword puzzle or Wordle. There is something satisfying about figuring out where all the figures on those pieces of paper go, and it is the only time I am rewarded for my meticulous bookkeeping throughout the year because I am able to retrieve all the required information by running a few reports. I enjoy electronically submitting my file and getting that upbeat text message saying that the IRS has accepted my return. (It’s like the 21st century equivalent of offering up a goat to a hungry and jealous God except that you actually get a response.)

Still, it feels like it shouldn’t be like this for a couple with one income and a pretty simple situation. No real estate other than our home, no foreign investments, no venture capital funds, no oil wells or pork belly futures. I have a little crypto that I could sell (if I could find my password) but nothing more exotic and yet… 478 pages of tax return last year! In most countries the government figures out your taxes for you and withholds the proper amount from your paycheck or just tells you what you owe. And yes, I can understand why we would not want our kind uncle to do that on our behalf. I have more confidence in my ability to figure it out than in his. 

To be clear, I am not someone who complains about paying taxes. Indeed, I am continually astonished at just how low taxes in the US are and how much we get for them. The national parks alone are worth what I pay every year especially now that my wife has a Senior Pass entitling her (and whomever is with her) to enter every national park for free for the rest of her life. We really do want to pay our fair share. I just wish it were a little easier to figure out exactly how much that is.