This month was my Grandpa Westwoods 90th birthday. In celebration of this, I decided to write down some of the sayings my grandpa always says and also a few of my favorite memories of him.
Grandpa Sayings:
When asked how he is doing:
Finer than frogs hair, split three ways.
I can't complain, half the people don't care and the other half think I deserve it.
After saying "Thank You" to him for something:
You're a Welshman
When asked for advice:
Don't take any wooden nickels
Regarding food:
When we used to go on long camping trips, the rule was that if you complained about the food, you had to do the cooking. So whenever someone asked me how the food was, I would say "It's burnt, it tasteless, and it smells bad... and it's just the way I like it.
When someone says he/she is full after a meal:
Yeah, and we know what you're full of.
Some Favorite Grandpa Memories
Once, before Connie and I were married, we went to Grandpa's house to make him dinner. Connie was a little self conscious about meeting grandpa for the first time and wanted to make a good impression. Then she accidentally burnt the chicken and kept apologizing. Grandpa looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and said "Well, at least she's cute". From then on, Connie loved him.
Grandpa Westwood wrote an autobiography about growing up in Moab, UT called "Chompin' at the Bit". In one part, he describes a secret oasis that he and some friends found on top of the large plateau south of Moab. In the book he describes how they took a new kid up to the oasis once and the kid kind of freaked out because the final approach to the oasis was a kind of sketchy incline above a hundred foot cliff. So to help the new kid, Grandpa and his friends took off their shirt and pants and made a rope to pull him up the incline.
I had always liked this story and so I decided I would go to Moab and find this place and take some pictures of it to give as a gift to Grandpa. The books details about the location were pretty good and Grandpa had an old picture of the site from a distance, so I used some maps and figured out where it was. I found the best way to get to it was via the Moab Rim Trail. This is a rough and ledgy jeep trail that ascends 1000 feet in 1 mile. I road my mountain bike up this trail with my friend Peter. The trail was so steep and tough that as I was trying to shift gears in one place I put so much torque on the chain that it bent my gears and I ended up having to walk the rest of the way. By the way, this was the "easy" way to get there. The way that my grandpa would get there was a more direct route to the top of the plateau, where you climb up the steep talus and then shimmied up some of the big cracks in the cliff face. Once I got to the top of the plateau it took me a little while exploring the sandstone dunes to figure out where to go, but then I found the first hill described in Grandpa's book. This first hill was kind of steep but you could walk up it without using your hands. There were drop off on either side of it that Peter was not too keen on so he waited for me at the bottom. I made my way up the sand stone rock about 100 meters and then followed a couple ridges until I found the place that matched the book exactly. The book talked about a steep slope above a 100 ft cliff and that there was a crack in the middle of the slope that you could follow up to the secret oasis.
I had figured that I had done some rock climbing and any crack that some kids was scrambling up barefoot with no safety equipment barefoot in the 1930s would probably be no big deal for me. But when I saw that crack, my heart sank, the slope was glassy smooth sandstone going up at probably a 45-50 degree angle. The crack was shallow and wouldn't really allow for any good handholds. It was definitely something that looked doable with a little trial and error, the only problem was the high coast of error. If that slope had had a nice patch of sand at the bottom and you slipped and fell, you would have a painful slide down the sandstone and probably end up with some road rash and a few bumps and bruises. That would be a risk that I could take. But since the slope ended in a 100 foot cliff, if you slipped you would have a painful slide down the sandstone, followed by a few seconds of exhilarating free fall, followed by some painful bone crunching. I think at the bottom of the cliff there was actually some sand, so you might actually survive the fall, and instead lie there in pain with road rash and compound fractures, bleeding to death for a couple days (because it would be hard for anyone to find you there, without knowing exactly where you were). At this moment I thought of one of grandpa's other sayings "There are bold climbers and there are old climbers, but there are no old, bold climbers." Then I decided to turn around. I was disappointed I didn't get any pictures of grandpa's secret oasis, but I returned home with a new respect for the boldness of grandpa as a youth and for the guardian angels that had watched over him.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Sunday, May 8, 2011
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