August 25, 2021

The "Gray Man" Is Everywhere — Did You Notice Him?

Photo illustration from Survival Sullivan

The "gray man" is everywhere. You just have not been noticing him. Maybe the COVID pandemic with its lockdowns and "vaccination papers, please" has kicked a lot of people into thinking about how to go unnoticed. Gray Man is a movie title. There are two thriller book series: The Gray Man and The Grey Man, quite different from each other and not really what I mean here, except with the idea of "not attracting notice."

The "gray man/gray woman" concept is all over websites for preppers (formerly known as survivalists).

 "The Gray Man Concept," and How to Be a Gray Man"

The same attire and mode of behavior in the middle of a larger city’s financial district will see you blend in effortlessly with the tens of thousands of office drones and cubicle commandos going about their day will see you stand out like a neon sign in a small village an hour outside of the city limits.

How to Be a Gray Man"

The gray man is invisible. He is undetectable, unremarkable, and flies by a hysteric crowd like a stealth aircraft. The gray man can bug out safely to a secure location without raising any flags, or bug in without being suspicious to the Joneses.

 "41 Essential Rules to Become the Gray Man

Forty-one? Will they all be on the test?

"Urban Survival Tactic: How To Become A Gray Man"

Knowing how to be a gray man is quite possibly the greatest urban survival skill that anyone can learn. No fancy equipment, no fancy gadgets, just good old fashion common sense combined with intuition and innovation. Find out how you can be invisible in a sea of a million people.

Even without racheting up the paranoia, there are plenty of day-to-day reasons for not wanting to attract attention. Maybe you just don't want to look like a tourist — an obvious mark for beggers and hustlers.    

A few personal observations:

 • In some areas, my technique was to carry a local newspaper, back when newspapers were more of a thing. A shopping bag from a local grocer helps too. 

•  Outside the US and parts of Canada, no cargo shorts. How often, for example, do you see a mature Mexican man wearing shorts?

• Never wear a convention nametag on city streets. I have seen people astonished when some total stranger comes up with "Hey, Jason, how you doin'?" as an opening to trying to hit them up for something.

• As some writers note, sometimes you just cannot blend in, as when I lived in Mandeville, Jamaica, as a teenager. The best that I could do was not look like a tourist but more like . . . a British expat? My school uniform (DeCarteret College) was a help — in fact, it was gray, shirt and trousers! — but I wore it only when going to and from.

• In some areas, a middle-aged man and a woman walking together are obviously tourists, unless they do so when locals do, such as attending cultural events or church. Having children in the group may or may not contribute to that impression. (Funny, the writers do not mention children for the most part.)

• Most of the writing is pointed at men. Many women have figured this stuff out on their own already. ("Always wear shoes you can run in," and so on.)

• I have often tried to follow this advice as stated by Dan F. Sullivan

When you walk, especially from home, don’t always take the same route. Change it a little bit. Go faster or slower. Take entirely new or roundabout ways coming and going. This will also help you familiarize yourself with the different ways to get home, or to bug out.

Speaking of walking, this is key: "Learning to walk like the natives walk will hide you better than just about anything else." 

• It's funny to see professional preppers, etc., writing to endorse a trend for which they cannot sell you anything. You get your gray man/woman clothes at big box retailers, and if you want gray gray, you go to the work clothes rack at Tractor Supply, etc. Around here the "etc." would be a Big R store. I shop there now and then.

Some people are trying to sell "urban backpacks" and stuff — often in gray — but I think that "gray people" buy theirs at the thrift store. I did. It's black, has no dangly bits, and an inoffensive Toyota logo.

August 16, 2021

Brown Trout, Road Work, Yurts: Getting Re-located on the Arkansas River

Waiting for a pilot car on US 50 near Texas Creek. The driver is Darryl Godot.

I went fishing on the Arkansas River today, which should be normal as pie for a southern Coloradoan, but for me it has not been that way.

I just wasn't making enough time for fishing—and then COVID 19 fell like an old-time theatre fire curtain. That should have made for more time, me being already in work-at-home mode, but I was fooling myself: I was not invulnerable to the "languishing" and loss of purpose affecting many of the Laptop Class.

My last remaining two-piece medium-weight spinning rod had died in combat at North Michigan Reservoir in State Forest State Park in August 2019, and I finally replaced it last month. So today's mission was  to (a) try out the new rod and (b) go someplace.

I came out of a side canyon on a little county road, popping onto US 50 beside the Arkansas River,  where the traffic was pouring up the river — eighteen-wheelers, RVs of all description, and the repurposed school buses favored by the whitewater rafting companies, painted with names like "Chuck" and "Dionysus."

On the sound system, Mara Aranda is singing in Latin and Ladino. Lots of drums. It all fits —  a troop of medieval lancers on skinny horses might pick their way down these rocky slopes looking right at home.

Smoky haze from fires further west fills the canyon, obscuring "Precambrian rocks cut with black dikes and white dikes." It's like a haze of memory: I am driving down the canyon in my old pickup late at night, headlights on the granite walls, after visiting that girl in Salida. She ditched her radio DJ boyfriend and came down to my place, but the kindling just never caught fire, and she went back to  . . . LA?

Forward a few years—beer, chips and salsa on the patio of the old Salida Inn as local Trout Unlimited members strategize how to protect fisheries in the proposed state parks division's Arkansas Headwaters Recreation area, which seems to be all about commercial rafting, commercial rafting, and oh yes, kayaking. Colorado Trout Unlimited's state resource director, Leo Gomolchak (major, USA, ret.) was always there to keep us fighting. I walk out to the parking lot with him—the tires on his Bronco are worn down to the steel cords. (He resembled the actor Lloyd Bridges, don't you think?)

Another memory: coming down the canyon at night in my friend Dave's truck, and a mountain lion comes up from the river, dashes in front of us, and climbs the steep hillside on the right, at speed. 

The spinning rod is no longer a virgin, so to speak.  We will eat trout. I am normally a catch-and-release guy on wild trout, but at least once in a season, I eat some, if only to recognize that this is Serious Business for the fish, if not for us. It's not like a friendly game of tennis where the players shake hands across the net. "Good game!" "Great casting, man, total respect!"

But I had gotten so disconnected. The river seemed higher than I expected—I had not even checked a fishing report. The Wellsville river gauge, upstream from where I stood, was showing 766 cfs, definitely in the fishable zone but still a little higher than I had expected. 

I was back to wearing new-ish rubber-footed hip waders, which reminded me about how in the late 1980s and 1990s, you were a total bumpkin if you wore rubber-footed waders. All the kool kidz had felt-soled wading boots, and eventually so did I.  

Ed Valdez, the short and stocky original owner of the Cañon City fly shop Royal Gorge Anglers, used to refer to the Arkansas' underwater surface as "greased cannonballs," in other words, slimy rocks. He wore felt soles with strap-on cleats, and he cast a long fly line. "I'm short, so I have to cast good," he said.

Now many states have outlawed felt-soled boots because they can more easily spread invasive organisms. Deplorable rubber soles are cool again.

And I am feeling a little unsteady on the "greased cannonballs," even in ankle-deep water. Note to self: bring a wading staff. Yet as ever, the presence of the river draws a curtain between me and the highway traffic. There is only the rod, the lure, the water, maybe the trout. Until the sun is too high, and I feel my  concentration slackening.

So I had a hamburger at a little store. The gas pumps were plastic-bagged, and the the indoor restrooms were dead. What is this, the Other Colorado? There were porta-potties — evidently on the six-month service plan.

I drove down part of the highway that I had not seen for five years or more. How is this happening? It's the Covid Contraction. Must fight it! 

There was road work in progress. Cue the northern-states joke about there being only two seasons, "winter" and "highway construction."

A rafting company now offers "luxury riverside yurts." True, they were on the river bank, but they were in a gravel parking lot where the paying customers get off the buses, hear their safety lectures, and load onto rafts to run the Royal Gorge. And all this only a hundred yards from US 50's truck traffic. Maybe at night it is a "luxury" experience.

And so back up in altitude to home. Five stars, will do it again.

August 09, 2021

On the Perils of Navigation with a Small Screen

Oil pan cracked, the bus sits on Coffee Pot Road. (Photo: Garfield County Sheriff)
People in Colorado are having a good laugh over the hapless Greyhound bus driver who took his passengers onto a rough Forest Service road, following some app that was supposed to route him around the part of Interstate 70 in Glenwood Canyon that is currently closed due to mudslides.

Meanwhile, the state highway department  supposedly prevailed on Google Maps and Apple Maps to mark Independence Pass (Colorado 82) as "closed," which led to a lot of the Denver-based media saying it was closed "due to mudslides."

Not true — the closure was to keep oversize vehicles off the road. There is signage, but when people who don't know the road try to use it as a detour, inevitably some big motor home or tractor-trailer rig ends up stuck.

I am happy to let Siri on my iPhone guide me around a city, but the small screens just don't do the job when you need to orient yourself in a large area. Nothing — so far — beats a big paper map that lets you see the relationships of Place A, Place B, and Where You Are Now.

Last Friday, M. and I were driving down a long gravel road homeward-bound from mushroom hunting. Below us, a car with two kayaks on the roof pulled out from a popular creekside parking spot, and the driver turned left, uphill. As we came past, she waved. We stopped.

"Can you tell me where the campground is?" she asked, holding up her cellphone.

I blanked for a moment. "There is no developed campground up here," I said.

 "I mean the _______ Creek Campground," she said. "We made a reservation there."

"Oh," I replied, "You passed that about six miles back."

(True, the Forest Service signage there could be better. It is easy to miss the turn-off to this little public campground if you mistake it for a private driveway — you have to pass a small private campground and a couple of houses on the way in.)

She turned around and followed us, over washboard and potholes and cattle guards, until we passed the turn-off, when M. rolled down her window and made vigorous pointing gestures to the right. The would-be campers had only lost about 45 minutes wandering around and then being re-directed.

• I suspect that if she had zoomed in far enough to see the forest roads on her map, then her posiition and the campground would not be on the screen at the same time, making it hard to see their relationship.

If she backed out her view enough to see the campground (if it was on the map), she probably could not see how to get there.

• I did not know that that small campground was now in the Rocky Mountain Recreation Company reservation system. Makes sense though.

• Where they were going to use those kayaks I do not know.

UPDATE: As of Tuesday, August 10,  the state highway department was still feuding with Google Maps. Good luck with that.