What if he got it only half right? Okay – 90% if you consider the other four papers in that Miracle Year; and 99% if you just take it as far as he got. Could he have gone further if he wasn’t exhausted from recreating almost the whole universe? Is it possible that his marathon debate with Niels Bohr distracted him and colored or clouded his judgment? Was the other half of Einstein’s monumental equation E = mc² just one step away? One more flash of intuition may have been all it took to reach the ultimate ‘eureka moment.’ Of course the penultimate was pretty astounding.

Do I know the other half? No – but I suspect the outlines. We’ll have a little more on that in a moment.

Modern physics seems to be a mélange of ‘almost there.’ Promising blind alleys abound; tantalizing tidbits scattered from here to eternity; fascinating possibilities almost created, but not quite complete. The recent Q2C Festival at Perimeter Institute is a case in point, and before that there was the Origins Symposium at ASU in April of 2009. Somewhere out there today – perhaps at Perimeter, possibly at Cambridge or MIT, even Caltech – is the next Einstein to bring order out of entropy – no matter which way the arrow of time points.

Physicists like to talk about standing on the shoulders of giants and that has often been the model. Einstein and Planck did indeed stand on the shoulders of Galileo and Newton. For years it appeared that Penrose, Hawking and/or Witten would replace Einstein and Planck as the clear giants of an age. They may yet, but time is running out. Youth is often served. Perhaps the 21st Century will coalesce around someone who we are just beginning to hear murmurs of.

The candidates are legion – PhDs, Professors and post-docs multiply. Some of my favorites are Sean Carroll, Frank Wilczek, Neil Turok, Fotini Markopoulou, Lee Smolin, and perhaps a half a dozen others. Of course many of them seem to be dancing around some of my favorite themes. Perhaps a new synthesis of time and temperature; mass and energy; light speed and the Planck constant; all taken together and remixed in something akin to DNA could produce the other half of that equation. Perhaps it might be inversely proportional. Perhaps we could conceive of space-time as the macro world and temp-time as the province of the micro world. Would then the speed of light correlate to absolute temperature? Perhaps in the end it could even lead to an understanding of the ultimate phase transition. Order and disorder just a Planck length apart. It is always symmetry, synthesis and simplicity. More questions than answers, but at least a direction for PI - that hotbed of cold calculation.

November 13, 2009 / The Other Half / AFW pg 116 © 2009 / CIP # 838, November 14, 2009 / Best / OAR

Our train picks up speed going downhill. Strangely enough our little Fish Camp actually does have a train. I’m not sure if I know of any other tiny town whose population in the winter hovers around a dozen or so – ballooning all the way up to a couple of hundred in the summer – that had, and still has its very own train. Yosemite Mountain Sugar Pine Railroad, a true blue logging railroad that actually operated till 1931. In the mid 60’s it was reopened by Max Stauffer as a scenic steam train for Yosemite bound tourists. It’s complete with a Vintage Shay locomotive, old number 10 if this memory of mine serves, chugging an 8 mile loop.

I mention all this mostly because our Bill Fisher was a wood cutter when he wasn’t being a poet. He wasn’t a real logger, but many of them still existed up here in the 70’s. The old mill still operated in Oakhurst, and another one in North Fork. While Bill was a woodcutter mostly for local firewood, he was big enough and tough enough to be a logger. He could drink like one too. So while our band of brothers couldn’t go all the way up and down the mountain on the train they could get looped.

Whatever mode of locomotion it was, it was picking up steam and headed downhill. Sadly to say I was serving them drinks. That’s how I met Bill. On my very first night as a bartender – at the time I didn’t even know how to make any drinks beyond my own bourbon and seven. I remember my very first customer – it wasn’t Bill – asked me for a boilermaker and I had to ask him what it was. Bill may have been my third or fourth customer and he only wanted a beer. I had mastered that. We became friends.

November 5, 2009 / A Free Man of the West (2) – Bill Fisher (2) / AFW pg 115 © 2009 / CIP # 785, November 14, 2009 / Better / SHE

In 2007 and early 2008 I watched it being done so I know for sure that it can be done. It inspired me to try to emulate – not to do it better, but to try to do it as well.

This is not about her - this is about me: my life, my first family, my future and my death. The latter, hopefully, will not come immediately; but, again hopefully, it is not far, far off. I just want, like her, to go with grace.

My life has been nothing if it hasn’t been learning how to love. First there was Ellen – I don’t know if that was love, but for certain I thought so at the time. I even had two hands back then with which to grope. She was the only person I might have loved who knew me whole. Before that there had been Adelaide and Diane, and maybe one or two others, but I know they were just youthful stirrings at best. Afterwards there was a series of which I am not proud. Then there came Nuisia (‘Niusie Baby’ to my first wife – as they were almost concurrent). Certainly she was my first intellectual love. So now we are up to Tanya – my first wife and my first certain love. It is worth remarking that I didn’t even know that I loved her until two or three years after we were married. I have been virtually certain ever since – sometimes it has hurt too much to be otherwise. I haven’t mentioned my children yet – Desiree and Danny – but I am positive I loved them from the start.

Strangely I am talking about love and I haven’t even mentioned my primary family. I did have a mother. I did have a father. I even had three sisters (and another sister and two brothers – one of whom was supposedly my twin – if my mother’s tale is true). Most of them are dead now. I didn’t know if, or how much, I loved them till they were. Later it will turn out that I have another different half brother and sister in England, but I don’t know that yet.

So we have the early cast of characters: some names, some relations – stick figures in the present, but many of them will have chapters in the bye and bye. There they will have meat and bones, they will laugh and bleed. There, there will be others too – some named, some not but mentioned in the thread. They will all, like me, become human. I hope during the telling that I will remember that I need to go with grace.

November 1, 2009 / Going with Grace (2) / AFW pg 113 © 2009 / CIP # 785, November 14, 2009 / Better / SHE

It is strange the lengths we will go to outwit and overcome our fears and superstitions. One year ago today I decided I would remain 65 for an extra half year and then become 67 for the next 18 months. It worked to perfection. I couldn’t, and thus I didn’t, die in that year with a horrible number. I didn’t even live in it. Voila! Now I am set for three and then we’ll see. I would like to live to seventy. Only a couple of little possible tremors or stumbles could block the path – the tick of an eye, the shortness of breath – all the frailties that age is heir to. Personally I don’t think they are likely to grow into anything to be overly concerned with. Besides I still have a couple of things that need completion. After that I would like to go with grace.

October 28, 2009 / Going with Grace (1) / AFW pg 113 © 2009 / CIP # 784, November 14, 2009 / Better / SHE

Certainly he was the brother of the brother who: “was the genuine article, a free man of the West.” ¹ That free man has been a dying breed now for at least a couple of centuries, but brothers keep up the rear guard action.

The brothers were Chuck and Mike Moulton, and their brother was Bill Fisher. These three and a few others made up a band of brothers. This is their story. I was a junior brother, a Johnny-come-lately – but I was there.

A tree; a truck; a deer; and a load of wood – these are the elements of an end, and a beginning. It was winter – early 76. The tree didn’t budge. The pick-up truck slammed into it. The load of wood shot forward. Bill Fisher and the deer died.

Bill died in 1976 and Chuck died in 1996 – they were the poets and poets die young. Mike and I are older now but live to tell the story. The quote above was written by another poet of some note – Philip Levine – it was written about Chuck when he died. A couple of other brothers – junior or otherwise – were Doug Gross and Les Pacheco. Four of us spoke at Bill’s service, but none of us were poets.

Let’s go back a few months and then we’ll go back further still. September 15th 1975. Mike Moulton moves up to The Whispering Pines, just out of Oakhurst in the Sierra Nevada. Within days – I don’t know the exact date but it was in the same September – I too move up to the mountains. I move in just a little higher – the White Chief Lodge in Fish Camp. It is a tiny burg at 5,000 feet – Les and Doug and Bill are already residents. The train is starting – all the characters are on board.

September 20, 2009 / A Free Man of the West – Bill Fisher (1) / YP 58/3 / AFW pg 108 © 2009 / CIP # 783, November 14, 2009 / Better / SHE