CALIFORNIA AND CONNECTICUT
A Squaw Valley ski instructor with mechanical
moxie and a $950 rope tow has created a backyard ski
area. The Vail Daily says Ken
Wittel’s rope tow is powered by a 5 horsepower gas engine
that can pull skiers up Wittel’s 300-foot-high hill at 11 to
18 mph. If your backyard lacks the white stuff, don’t
despair: The Connecticut company Snow at Home sells mini-snowmaking
machines for less than $500, reports
Hemispheres, the magazine of United Airlines.
CALIFORNIA
A new breed of young singles is evolving in big cities,
and they’re sniffily demanding about things
environmental. That’s because they’re
“ecosexuals,” reports San Francisco
magazine, with green standards for everything from clothes and cars
to potential mates. “I won’t date a guy who
doesn’t recycle,” insists San Francisco designer Rachel
Pearson, 33. Another woman says: “I can tell instantly if
he’s my type by the deodorant he uses.” Food
preferences quickly separate the greens from the ones who
don’t get it. “I shopped at Rainbow; she shopped at
Safeway,” recalls Monte Gores, a Berkeley acupuncturist who
was once a stock trader. After his girlfriend told him she’d
eaten half a chocolate cake for dinner, he was on the way to
ditching her: “If you’re thinking about a long-term
relationship,” he concluded, “that’s a red
flag.” Passion may still triumph over ideology, writer
Stefanie Olsen observed. A landscape construction worker had been
scrupulously green and even celibate for a year and a half, until
he met a woman “who corrupted me with her wonderful
ways,” which included wine, sex and the occasional burger.
THE WEST
Thanks to a cell phone, a 75-year-old Oregon veteran was
reunited with his “prescription dog” after the
man’s car — with the dog inside — was stolen from
a gas station in Nebraska. Bliss Green had been given a
written prescription for a dog by a nurse practitioner, who hoped a
pet might ease his suicidal depression. The remedy was unorthodox,
but it worked. Green said, “If (the dog) was with me and knew
I was upset about something, her head would come on my lap. I
haven’t been depressed since I got her.” Because the
car thief used Green’s cell phone, police were able to track
his vehicle through Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho and, finally, Oregon,
where a suspect was arrested. Meanwhile, the dog, Melody, had been
abandoned in Wyoming, where a couple found her huddled under their
pickup. After a week with the couple, the dog’s next home was
an animal shelter, where authorities were able to connect Melody to
the stolen car. Green was thrilled to hear Melody was safe, saying
of their upcoming reunion: “I’m worried, but I have no
reason to believe it won’t be perfect. This is just like a
person-to-person relationship. I’ll handle it gently.”
UTAH
Since 1991, Salt Lake City’s basketball arena has
been called the Delta Center, named for the now-bankrupt Delta Air
Lines. But in November, Delta lost a naming battle for
the arena to EnergySolutions, an amalgam of companies that includes
Envirocare of Utah. Envirocare runs a nuclear waste dump on public
land and is probably looking to clean up its image, reports the
New York Times, especially since its founder,
Khosrow Semnani, pleaded guilty to charges of tax evasion.
Image-polishing won’t happen overnight. One Utah Jazz
basketball fan said she’d already heard the arena called
everything from the “Tox Box” and “Radium
Stadium” to “Half-Life Arena” and “HazMat
Center.” Another disgusted basketball fan said,
“Utah’s always been the ‘stick-it’ state;
whatever you don’t want in your state, stick it here.
We’re not tree-huggers, but these guys lend credence to
bringing all this stuff to Utah.”
CALIFORNIA AND MEXICO
It
sounds like a joke, but it’s not: The company hired
to build a huge fence to block illegal immigrants from crossing
into America from Mexico has agreed to pay nearly $5 million in
fines for hiring illegal immigrants to do the job, reports
The Week magazine. A recent investigation found
that of Golden State Fence Co.’s 750 employees, about a third
were in this country illegally.
THE
WEST
What a difference a letter
makes. A 21-year-old German booked a ticket for Sydney,
Australia. Or so he thought, until his plane landed in Billings on
the way to Sidney, Mont., population 5,000 and considerably colder
than the antipodean port city. Tobi Gutt, wearing clothes fit for
an Australian summer, was routed from Portland, Ore., to the oil
town of Sidney, only learning of his error when his plane landed in
Billings. “I did wonder, but I didn’t want to say
anything,” he told the German paper Bild.
“I thought to myself, you can fly to Australia via the United
States.” Gutt hung around the Billings airport for three days
before his family and friends sent him the money for a new ticket
for Sydney, Australia.
Betsy Marston is editor of Writers
on the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado.
Tips of Western oddities are always appreciated and often shared in
the column, Heard around the West.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Heard around the West.
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