The Wasatch Front

The wind rose overnight, cold and blowing hard from the northwest. The leaves are rising in the gust, raking their dried points across the windows and doors.

Fifty days to the bottom of the year, but the darkness is pervasive and the chill tells me that I must find where I placed my Burberry overcoat last Spring. This could be a collar-up day.

A friend called me last night about the bombings. For a moment I was not sure which ones, though of course I should have thought of the latest ones, working back in the mental card file of headlines. Could it be the Palestine Hotel? Bali II? London ? So many bombings, so many dead that I lose track.

Then it came to me, the murmur on the radio coming home. Of course, it was the Raddison, and the Grand Hyatt and the Day’s Inn, all within walking distance of each other in Amman , the capital of Jordan .

The targets were symbolic of America , and the globalization of a business culture that expects reliably clean sheets at the end of the day, and a certain standard of service.

Many of my company’s corporate execs stayed at those hotels, waiting for the long drive overland to get to the Iraqi frontier. Or to conduct business in a place that was proximate to the theater of conflict, but not in it.

Amman has always been considered a safe town, and the Intelligence and Security Service one of the finest in the world.

It is no wonder that Zarkawi the Butcher considered the hotels a desirable target. He is a local boy, raised on the hatred in the old British satrap of the Transjordan for the upstart Israeli state. He is fighting in Iraq because that is where the war is, and it would be too dangerous for him to have stayed home. The Jordanians would have rolled him up like a burrito.

His three suicide agents killed 57, the count at this moment, and the majority were Jordanian. The Grand Hyatt was hosting a wedding party, and the groom said that his father and his father-in-law were among the dead.

I thought perhaps that meant that the American offensive on the Syrian border last week might have provoked this demonstration of resolve, a card held in reserve by the Bad Guys for when times were hard. But as I rose and looked at the leaves dancing across the pool deck, I heard that another few dozen were killed in a popular local restaurant near the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. Many were local security people, waiting for traditional breakfast, and some were police.

The Americans have offered $25 million for Zarkawi’s head. I wonder how many more people have to be blown to pieces for someone to want to cash it in?

I flipped quickly through the rest of the e-mail queue to see if there was going to be anything to bite me the rest of the day. I saw a couple. The Base Reallocation is complete; Congress did nothing and the results of the President’s recommendation are now law. I know two large building complexes that will start this afternoon, and both could be exciting business opportunities.

In another article, I saw an old friend’s agency was the subject of a heated hearing on the hill, and he will likely add a few dozen million to his budget. I resolved to take my briefcase over and see him.

The last note was from a pal in Utah , safely retired and a thousand miles away from any likely belt bombers. Ah, the front range of the glorious Wasatch Mountains , with the Aspen trees and the primordial valleys and deep snow-melt lakes! I sighed, thinking of the beauty, and the snow coming soon.

Enclosed was a humorous piece about the Wasatch Brewery, a micro-establishment that is famous for poking fun at Utah ‘s majority Mormon culture.

I lived in Utah for a while after college. Park City was still a little mining town with a modest ski resort, and the mountains were clean-washed, and you could still see deer in Deer Valley . It was possible to rent a falling-down frame house on Main Street up slope from Poison Creek, an spend the day not doing much of anything except perhaps drinking beer. It was peaceful there, filled with a tranquility of the Wasatch mountains. The hiking paths that lead from the head of the canyon into the green of the trees, and the steep path.

Each quarter mile up took you a decade further back into the past of the Wasatch Front, until you reached the first mine-shafts that the easterners plunged into the ground, looking for silver. Further up there was nothing but green and rock, and clear water in little rivulets.

The story said the brewery was going to retire it’s premier line of Polygamy Porter (“Why just have one?”) and “Unofficial Amber,” which was intended to tweak the nose of Olympic sponsor and beer giant Anheiser-Bush.

The new beer is to be called “Evolution Amber Ale,” and comes with the Darwin seal of approval on the label.

I sighed. There was time when you could open a cold lager at breakfast, just like Jim Morrison sang about in “Roadhouse Blues:”

“Well, I got up this morning,

and I got myself a beeeeer…”

I liked the note. I realized I needed a shot of whimsy, or maybe a peppermint schnapps to fortify myself for the day. But it all seems as serious as the iced tea we have for lunch now. Maybe there will be a time for that again. It does not feel like it this morning, not with the cold wind rising.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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