Tag: Hal Walter

It’s not dead yet. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
Just another bonehead with a podcast.

I’ve been casually pestering my friend Hal Walter, telling him he should launch a podcast to support his magnum opus recounting his adventures with son Harrison as the two navigated the postsecondary labyrinth at Colorado Mountain College in Leadville.

Whether this was a good idea is open to debate. Because it got me to thinking about my own long-neglected sonic sideline, Radio Free Dogpatch.

I have a love-hate relationship with the goddamn thing. It’s kind of like an old bike in a garage full of them. It’s been gathering dust out there, and you can’t remember what it was that you liked about it, so you pull it down from its hook, air up the tires, and take it for a spin around the block.

And holy hell, it all comes rushing back to you. Nothing works like it should. It makes funny noises. And you can’t quite remember how to make the old dog hunt. Is the braking U.S. or Euro style? Is the indexing buggered or are these friction shifters? And what in sweet holy motherfuck is all that racket?

Finally you manage to herd the beast back into its slot in the garage, mop the fear-sweat from your forehead, and limp into the house (because of course the sonofabitch bit you somewhere).

And you think: “Well, that wasn’t so bad. Needs a little work, but it’s not like I have a bunch of other stuff that needs doing. …”

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Also short on gas stations, rest areas, and cute hitchhikers. Might as well unplug the Bluetooth and surrender to the yellow fangs of the first Radio Free Dogpatch of 2024.

• Technical notes: The reboot was recorded using gear that was already available in the Infernal Hound Sound studios: An Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; my trusty Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, a soupçon of Auphonic to sand off the rough edges, music from Zapsplat, and crickets from Freesound. All the other racket is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.

Fall

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Oh, the days dwindle down, to a precious few. …

There hasn’t been much time for bloggery lately, with Herself’s sisters in town for an extended visit.

Having four females in the house, a fella hardly gets a minute to catch his breath, much less his thoughts.

To be fair, Miss Mia Sopaipilla likewise found her routine disrupted. The three sisters held their morning war councils at the kitchen table, which is the second step of Miss Mia’s ascension to the countertop, the first step being a stool. So instead of being all cute on the countertop she’d find some acoustically appropriate corner of El Rancho Pendejo to announce her annoyance.

Man, does her voice ever carry. Miss Mia may be a senior citizen, but she can still hit the high notes.

Anyway, that’s my excuse for the lack of “content” around here lately. (The fine weather for cycling may have played some small role.) We’re down one sister as of this morning — Heather flew back to Tennessee — but Beth will be with us for a couple more days, so I anticipate a continuing hitch in my digital gitalong.

The good news is, you can fill the lonely hours with the latest from Hal Walter, who is collaborating with son Harrison on a project that is something of a work in progress. “The Blur Goes to College: Full Tilt Boogie Too” is intended to be a book, eventually; in the meantime, they’re rolling it out on Substack, in serial form. Writes Hal:

It’s part comedy and part tragedy, part train wreck, part triumph. Moreover, this is a story of empathy and compassion, and exploring the rights of people with so-called “intellectual disabilities.” We wanted to get the story out as soon as possible. We hope you enjoy this serialized rollout on Substack as we finish the book and eventually get it into print.

If you enjoy what you see, you can subscribe to have chapters delivered by email. If you’d like to support the project, donations are gratefully accepted via Venmo @Hal-Walter (phone# 8756).

A month of Sundays and then some

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
The Colorado Mountain College running team’s 2024 graduates: bottom, (l-r), Brooklyn German, Aslynn Wardall; top: Nate Encinias, Harrison Walter, Adaline Fulmer, Paulo Aponte. Not pictured: Kenneth Obregon.

By Hal Walter

For the first Sunday in a month of them, there is no long training run on tap for cross-country or track. There is no homework. There will be no evening commute to Leadville to deliver Harrison Walter to Colorado Mountain College.

The Blur, it seems, graduated from CMC this past Friday with an Associate of General Studies degree and proficiency certificates in welding.

It’s really a strange feeling and I am still processing it all. For the past two years life around here has revolved around Mary and me supporting Harrison through college. We’ve put about 30,000 miles on vehicles in doing so, and untold mileage on our brains. We knew it was a big risk sending him to Leadville to live in a dorm, but anything worth doing is worth the risk of failing. We also didn’t have a clue what we were getting ourselves into.

Between the ages of 62 and 64 I spent about 150 nights in a dorm room. We traveled to six states to watch Harrison and teammates run for the CMC Eagles. As his academic aide I learned how to operate Canvas and Basecamp. I read textbooks alongside him and helped guide him through countless assignments. During both summers I coached him through his running workouts.

All of this was out of the belief that a person on the autism spectrum deserved a shot at a college education and experience. He graduated teetering on the brink of the Dean’s List with a GPA of 3.46 (final grades are not yet in). It wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns, as he is surely on another Dean’s List for the number of write-ups received, all related to autistic behaviors.

Harrison at Huntsville (third from left). Photo: Hal Walter

As an athlete he left CMC with the school record for the track 10K, and runner-up best times for the 5K and 3K. In cross-country he holds CMC’s third-best cross-country 5K and fifth-fastest 8K, which he ran at the NJCAA National Championships in Huntsville, Ala. He also won the 5K Colorado Cup Snowshoe Race, hosted annually by CMC.

He received the running team’s Most Valuable Runner Award, as well as an award for his GPA and a letter.

And when he wasn’t studying or running he worked part time at Community Threads in Leadville.

There are too many people to thank in this space, but we owe a world of gratitude to his teammates and fellow students, coach and professors, faculty, staff and administration for the patience, support and compassion over these two years. There is a book in the works.

Perhaps rather than a month of Sundays it was an era of Sundays. The future, as Tom Petty sang, is wide open.

Harrison Walter, come on down!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
Harrison Walter, en route to graduating from Colorado Mountain College.

Congratulations and a tip of the Mad Dog mortarboard to Harrison Walter, who yesterday collected his Associate of General Studies degree from Colorado Mountain College in Leadville.

The big day kicked off with the traditional “Ski Down” of Dutch Henry Hill. Harrison — a letterman named Most Valuable Runner of the 2023-24 CMC Eagles’ men’s team — chose to leg it down on snowshoes.

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) delivered the commencement address, after which Harrison, his family and friends adjourned to the City on a Hill coffee shop for what his father, Hal, described as “a gala soiree.”

En route to his degree, Harrison also collected certificates of proficiency in basic welding and cutting and welding design and fabrication, and earned yet another certificate from the Eagles for maintaining a 3.0+ GPA as a student athlete. So it was a busy couple of years for the young fella.

Today the freshly minted graduate was reported to be resting comfortably at the family compound outside Weirdcliffe while his father examined the upshot of clearing out his dorm room.

“My truck, which looked like The Beverly Hillbillies’ … has been emptied into the living room,” he confided via Messages. “What a mess.”

Go run. Or not.

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
Run? On a day like this? I think not.

The weather was supposed to be taking a turn for the worse after a short stretch of sunny skies, and so I had planned to go for a short trail run this first day of February.

Instead, the sun leapt out from behind the clouds, the temp shot upward into the mid-50’s, and I called an audible: “Ride today, run tomorrow.”

I’ve had the old Steelman Eurocross out twice this week, and it was leaning against the Subaru just waiting to have another go, so I grabbed it and did a quick 90 minutes on the foothills trails, which have finally firmed up a bit since last week’s rain and snow.

It was just the ticket, especially since I was feeling unkindly toward running after reading about the Outside Hyperactive Currency Furnace’s latest scheme — to transform the ridiculously simple act of putting one foot in front of another into a mighty revenue stream through the miracle of MarketSpeak®.

Running is one of the most basic acts imaginable, and humans have been doing it since we first came down from the trees, which is starting to seem like a really bad idea. As soon as we hit the deck we were running toward things we wanted to kill, eat, and/or fuck, and away from things that wanted to do likewise to us.

Like I said, basic.

No longer. According to a press release whose author(s) should have “The Elements of Style” tattooed on their foreheads with a jackhammer, we runners have been blessed with a new “Running Media Platform” intended to meet us on our running journey and elevate, empower, build community, and disrupt through a one-stop shop of iconic brands delivering gender-equitable and inclusive best-in-class, world-class content.

Or something very much like that. I don’t know for sure. I blacked out somewhere in the middle of it and when I came to I was butt-ass nekkid with blue paint on my face and a big knife in one hand, shrieking and dancing around a fire built of old running shoes.

I showed the press release to my buddy Hal Walter, who has been running for something like 45 years, everything from 5Ks to marathons to the World Championship Pack-Burro Race in Fairplay — he guesses maybe some 65,000 miles all told — and he was immediately unimpressed.

“Jesus,” he said. “Go run for fuck’s sake.”