Reply to "Remembering John Denver"

I love the videos that John Denver made up in Alaska with his friend with the plane and the remote living situation. PBS plays it from time to time. The music is well recorded and the imagery works wonderfully with the message of his lyrics. I've not been to Alaska

I am Ayurvedically a "hot" person.

My favorite computer "game" is Austin Meyers X-Plane which has Glasairs and numerous other small aircraft that you can simulate in flight and that work realistically. My understanding is that John Denver had the misfortune of being at a low altitude when he had trouble priming the fuel feed from his second tank. The first tank hit empty doubtless leaving his fuel intake gasping stalling the engine.

He was probably enjoying the scenery too much to notice that he was running low, and you'd need adequate altitude to get out of the stall. It's one of those deals where it's too late to get it to kick in - but you'd have enough time to think about how you could have avoided it - and then poof! He would have not been conscious past the second of impact and than off to the Elysian Fields.

It's a shame but we'll all get there. I lost Kitty yesterday in the wee a.m. hours after two months of suffering through prolonging her life with radical measures like a drip that gave us time to say good bye and a few days of rallying, but it was hard. Her death was not fast like John Denver's. She went out with a howl of protest at the end, as you figure John Denver must have before he hit the water.

Kitty fell into a sleep before she checked out.

One way or another we will all meet our maker.

As Maxim Gorky wrote "death is like a mother to us all."

The sweet memory of the ones we love, especially the ones who become part of our souls will remain living among the living.

I planted a little tree where I put Kitty's beautiful little furry remains. It's a little pine tree from Debby Burke's place in Point Reyes. Her grandfather
Grafton Burke of New Hampshire was the first doctor in Alaska. When her father Grafton Burk Jr. I believe, was a seven year old his grandfather asked him if he would be willing to give up a slice of flesh to save the life of a young Indian child in their village.

The child had been attacked and badly bitten by dogs and would have died without a skin graft to her scalp.

It does seem to be a Jungian sort of compulsion of the name thing (like having the name of the mile high city) for Dr. Grafton Burke.

Burke Jr. against the protestations of his mother who didn't think that a christian child should give up flesh for an Indian - insisted that his grandfather try to save the other child, and submitted to the knife. Presumably with ether or chloroform.

I'll have to ask Chris Burke, Debby's brother (who Teo met at David's D.'s place on Cragmont not so long ago) what part of my generation of Burke's father got sliced to patch the child's missing portion of scalp.

The child lived. Hooray!

Kitty's little pine tree is not from alaska. I'm not even positive it's a pine and not a cedar, but there seems to be an Alaskan connection to this part of the orogenic belts that extend below where the High of the Sierras and Cascades joins with the long expanse of the Rockies.

Those "whaddya do about the evil in the world?" - Burkes. Chris refused a $350,000 bribe from Exxon and shut down the Alaska pipeline for six months which won him a citation from Jimmy Carter for whistle blowing.

John Denver's beautiful films of the Alaskan Rockies accompanied by his memorable musical commentary make me see why Burke would have refused the bribe. (Oil dribbling on the permafrost - shhhhhh)!

John Denver fought for the Wilderness and cooperating with not resisting the Gaia principle. It's a shame we lose our best spirits. It can't undo who they were.

I'm in my own little mourning period. You don't just step out and find another kitty. There won't be another Kitty (spefically aka Pussy Willow).

Like John Denver she was also one of a kind (and cuddly too).

You like to think this world in all its beauty and our presence here as passing fancy (I'm told the latter is a contraction of the word "fantasy") has a transcendental meaning.

John Denver once had me make a small investment in land in Tyler West Virginia. I never saw the property and the friends who sold it never gave me a cent in remuneration.

Death may be a mother to us all but the mountain Momma thing does get to me. I have been to West Virginia, near spencer where my friend Ed Mandl used to live. There's no finer place for the night sky with no city lights this side of Hawaii (or I'd guess Alaska). Take me home, country roads.

It's pretty beautiful around Big Sur and Monterey Bay and there are about three airports for emergency landings.

There's a song about Amelia Earhardt.

Happy Landings John Denver. Take good care of Kitty.

Signed.

The great-grand-nephew of an Egyptologist from the British Museum who likes cats and the Book of the dead.

De Mortuis nil nisi bonum.