Michael Shapiro's Blog

I was coming home from a day of cross-country skiing when I got the news that Bob Weir had died. Weir and the Grateful Dead had been a part of my life since I saw my first Dead show, in Oakland on December 26, 1980. A teenager from the sheltered suburbs south of San Francisco, I was astounded by what I saw and heard that night: spontaneous music that had no bounds, enthralled fans who made it clear their love for the band would not fade away.

It wasn’t like I felt that I’d found my people. I was a bit scared by the scene: the ecstatic twirlers who evoked Sufi whirling dervishes, the followers who’d tripped too hard and who the four winds hadn’t blown safely home. Across the street from the Oakland Auditorium, a tent and van camp had sprung up outside where Deadheads from all over North America slept away the day, some emerging like bats at dusk, a couple of hours before showtime.

Still, I sensed the magic and couldn’t wait to come back. Two nights later, I attended my second Dead show. And when I was in a record store called the Wherehouse and heard the Dead had released a few more tickets for New Year’s Eve, I snapped up the maximum (four) at the BASS Ticketron outlet in the store.

On New Year’s Eve, concert impresario Bill Graham, dressed in a flowing blue robe and long white beard, appeared just before midnight as Father Time. He moved toward the stage atop a giant skull and tossed roses into the crowd as he counted down the seconds to the new year. Hundreds of balloons cascaded down from the rafters as the Dead launched into “Sugar Magnolia.”

Rainbow at one of the Dead’s 50th anniversary shows in Santa Clara in 2015. (AP)

Over the years, I began to appreciate how the Dead evoked the natural world in their music, and not just with their lyrics. The story below mentions just some of these songs — there are many more. One friend wrote: “You did miss one of my favorite all-time Dead lyrics. “Come hear Uncle John’s band, Playing to the tide.” I always loved the image of a band playing for the tide—no other audience at all, just the tide, the universe, a greater power.”

As a proud cat owner, I very much wanted to write about songs such as the Dead’s “China Cat Sunflower,” with the line “Comic book colors on a violin river and Garcia’s “Cats Under the Stars.”

The Grateful Dead provided the soundtrack for so many outdoor adventures: roadtrips in the 1980s and ’90s to visit national parks or to reach whitewater rivers for rafting escapades required a briefcase-size carrier full of cassettes of favorite shows. Some called these bootlegs, but members of the Dead often said they were happy to share the music and had sections at their concert for tapers. As lead guitarist Jerry Garcia said of the band’s shows: When we’re done with it, they (the fans) can have it. (This is paraphrasing Lesh quoting Garcia.)

When pitching a story idea to a magazine, it’s best to answer three essential questions: Why now? Why this magazine? And why me? When I pitched my editor at Sierra, I mentioned that a story about the Dead and nature was timely due to Weir’s passing, that it fit the magazine’s mission of appreciating and preserving the natural world, and that I was conversant with the band’s song catalog. The clincher: it wasn’t a story I’d seen anywhere else.

Beyond celebrations of the wonders of nature, the Dead’s music demands we pay attention to what humans are doing to the planet. Yet these songs aren’t dour and don’t lecture. They wake us up to the transcendent beauty of the planet.

Below is an excerpt from my story; click here to read the full story on Sierra magazine’s site.

Songs such as “Weather Report Suite” evoke America’s agricultural heritage during a time when staying in tune with the seasons could mean the difference between hunger and abundance. Part II of the suite, “Let It Grow,” has this verse: “Round and round, the cut of the plow in the furrowed field / Seasons round, the bushels of corn and the barley meal / Broken ground, open and beckoning / to the spring, black dirt live again.”

“Weather Report” goes beyond appreciating Earth’s offerings, said David Dodd, author of The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. “That’s the big song for me,” he said, because it speaks to “the divinity of the planet itself.”

Co-writer Barlow was a biblical scholar, and the line, “Listen to the thunder shouting, ‘I am, I Am, I AM!’” is an invocation of Yahweh, the Hebrew name of God in the Old Testament. “He’s saying that the planet is divine,” Dodd said, and “we don’t have anything except this planet.”

When my wife, Jackie, invited me to join her and four women friends she’d known since college on a ski trip in Yellowstone, I hesitated. I appreciated being included but didn’t want to intrude on their gals’ getaway. I asked Jackie to check with each of her friends, and they all encouraged me to come.

I knew it’d be fun and thought I’d get a good story out of it, but I had no idea what the fates had in store for us. It’s true that sometime reality is more amazing than fiction.

This story was a balancing act. The outfitter didn’t want me to reveal the location of the hot spring pool where we soaked, which seemed a fair request. They also emphasized that we immersed ourselves not in the hot spring, which would have cooked us faster than spinach in hot soup, but in the pool below the spring. I made the clear.

Yet the true tightrope walk of this piece was in how I shared Ashley’s story. Two years before the trip she suffered a terrible loss, and she said that being a writer herself, someday she wanted to share the story herself. We corresponded by email and agreed that I wouldn’t lead with the miraculous event that became the centerpiece of this trip.

Ashley Gaddis with the red balloon that drifted down from the sky and landed at her feet on Feb. 17, 2024.  Photo by Nadia Garbaj

Writing the story, I was sparing in my use of Ashley’s comments to adhere to her wishes. I also use comments from one of our guides to speak to the magic of the transcendent event on Day 3. Yet the story wouldn’t have been complete without Ashley’s voice. I only had a couple of paragraphs of quotations from her; my editor trimmed that to a single sentence. I asked him if we could restore part of what was cut, what I felt was a key phrase feeling connected to loved ones we’ve lost. Like the best editors, he’s thoughtful and open, and agreed to bring back a sentence I felt was essential.

Below is an excerpt. Click here to read the full story on Sierra magazine’s site.

The thermometer had read 8°F just after dawn, and it was still bone-chilling when we’d begun cross-country skiing. Yet here we were, in the dead of winter, near the geographical center of Yellowstone National Park, stripping off our clothes. This wasn’t a crazed reaction to hypothermia—it was a perfectly sane response to arriving at a creek just below a thermal spring, where the water was a perfect 104°.

Sure, we were shivering for a moment as we undressed, but the second we dipped into that creek, with waters warmed from the spring just upstream, we giggled like kids and our hard-working muscles relaxed.

It had been a four-mile ski from our cozy yurt camp through the park’s Hayden Valley to the creek. Every exertion was worth it to soak in that mineral-rich spring. We were among a select few who were overnighting in Yellowstone during a season when far more bison than people inhabit the park.

Our group of six—my wife Jackie, four of her college friends, and I—had skied past a herd of about 40 bison on the way in, their exhalations forming clouds of steam in the frigid air. Trumpeter swans poked their heads into the icy Yellowstone River, seeking bits of food, then honked so sonorously it would have made Louis Armstrong proud.

Skiing was arduous, as this is a natural wilderness without groomed tracks. Our guide broke trail for us. I volunteered to create the grooves for our skis and took the lead but was winded after a few minutes, feeling the elevation (about 8,000 feet) and the effort of compressing the powdery snow.

So the temperate creek was a welcome relief—until we got out. Thankfully, we were warmed to our core. The main challenge was getting dry enough to put on our clothes and pull up our socks. Outfits reassembled and boots in place, we clipped back into our skis and propelled ourselves toward our lodgings, the pastel hues of the distant Absaroka Mountains intensifying in the late-afternoon sun.

Click here to read the full story.

Thursday, July 17th, 2025, 6pm, Book Passage, Corte Madera, free!

For young people it can be easy to be idealistic and devote ourselves to art. Then reality — and responsibilities — set in. As a friend said to me shortly after we graduated from college, “Life costs money.”

Stephanie Elizondo Griest’s new book, Art Above Everything: One Woman’s Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life, explores the sacrifices that artists make to pursue lives devoted to creativity and examines the gifts and challenges of these pursuits.

Her earlier book, Mexican Enough, is a revelation and is a template for what every travel book should be: It’s filled with the voices of local people and their struggles; it’s personal and honest, and it makes us care about the people profiled and the places they inhabit. It’s so much more than a travel book: Elizondo Griest considers her heritage, the nature of belonging, the toll that poverty takes on families when fathers have to go to El Norte to seek work, the risks Mexicans face for being openly gay, and so much more.

When Stephanie asked me to be her partner in conversation, my first thought was, Wouldn’t you rather ask a woman?, but I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to join my longtime friend on the Book Passage stage.

Here’s the copy for the event from the Book Passage site:

Is the all-encompassing quest to become a self-sustaining artist worth the sacrifices it often requires? Throughout her 20s and 30s, Stephanie Elizondo Griest could not help worrying whether constantly prioritizing her writing over everything else—from postponing children to living nomadically to save on rent—was leading her to fulfillment or regret. After a break-up and health crisis in her early 40s, she decided to turn to other women artists for their perspectives on that perennial question: Is art enough?

Art Above Everything introduces us to legendary writers, visual artists, dancers, and musicians across the globe, who talk intimately about their art, what it requires, what it gifts them, and what it costs them. Opening in a classical Indian dance village, Elizondo Griest goes on to meet more than 100 artists in Qatar, Iceland, Mexico, New Zealand, Cuba, and the United States.

She discovers artists such as Rwandan playwright Hope Azeda, who navigated ethnic tensions as she attempted to bring about reconciliation through theater in the aftermath of genocide; and Romanian painter Florica Prevenda, who got assigned to a provincial factory during Ceaușescu’s dictatorship but never relinquished her brushes.

Art is inheritance, dissent, devotion, revenge, celebration, and more. Yet though the artists’ relationships to their craft is different, their need to create in the face of economic hardship, misogyny, sexual violence, and family ostracization is wholly akin. Bold and inspiring, Art Above Everything never pretends that the artist’s path is easy — but it illuminates the infinite ways we can wield creativity as a vitalizing force.

—

Stephanie Elizondo Griest is a globetrotting writer from the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Her books include Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough; and All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands. She has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Believer, BBC, VQR, and Oxford American.

Her work has won a Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting, an International Latino Book Award, a PEN Southwest Book Award, and two Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism prizes. Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, she has performed as both a Moth storyteller and as a literary ambassador for the U.S. State Department. Visit her @SElizondoGriest and www.StephanieElizondoGriest.com.

Event link: https://www.bookpassage.com/event/stephanie-elizondo-griest-michael-shapiro-art-above-everything-corte-madera-store

Tuesday, June 17, 6 pm, Book Passage, Corte Madera, free!

As a fellow longtime whitewater raft guide, I share Bridget’s love for rivers and appreciate how moving water can teach us and heal us. I’m thrilled that Bridget asked me to join her in conversation for her event at Book Passage bookstore in Corte Madera on June 17.

Here’s the description of the book and Bridget’s bio. Please join us!

After Bridget Crocker’s parents’ volatile divorce, she moved with her mother from Southern California to Wyoming. Her life was idyllic, growing up in a trailer park on the banks of the Snake River with a stepfather she loved, a new baby brother, and the river as her companion—until her mother suddenly took up a radical new lifestyle, becoming someone Bridget barely recognized. The one constant in her life—the place Bridget felt whole and fully herself—was the river. When she discovered the world of whitewater rafting, she knew she’d found her calling.

On the river, Bridget learned to read the natural world around her and came to know the language of rivers. One of the few female guides on the Snake River, she then traveled to the Zambezi River in Africa, some of the most dangerous whitewater in the world, where she faced death and learned to conquer her fears—both on the water and off. The river taught her how to overcome years of betrayals and abuse, to trust herself, and, finally, how to help heal her family from generational cycles of trauma and poverty.

A beautifully rendered memoir of a woman coming into her own, The River’s Daughter opens us to the possibilities of transformation through nature.

Bridget Crocker is a trailblazer in women’s empowerment within the outdoor industry. A leading whitewater rafting guide, she has led remote river expeditions down many of the world’s greatest river canyons. She is a contributing author to Lonely Planet guidebooks and The Best Women’s Travel Writing series. Her work has been featured in magazines including Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Trail Runner and Outside, as well as Patagonia’s blog, The Cleanest Line. She lives in Malibu, California.

Event page link: https://www.bookpassage.com/event/bridget-crocker-rivers-daughter-corte-madera-store

We all feel it, whether we’re 30 or 60 or 90: time feels like it’s speeding up each years. As the Grateful Dead sing in “The Music Never Stopped” … “Lord the band kept us so busy. We forgot about the time.”

Yes, time flies when we’re having fun. Perhaps ironically, the fun times in hindsight can feel like they lasted forever because the days — and nights — were so full. Alan Burdick, author of Why Time Flies, said the sense that time is accelerating isn’t limited to older people. “Everybody at all ages says time is speeding up. You would think that more older people would say it than younger people, but actually everybody at every age says it in just about the same proportion,” he said. “Two-thirds to 80 percent of people say that time is speeding up, whatever age they are. So we’re all experiencing something.”

When I travel, the first two days feel like two weeks. Yet after two weeks, it seems the trip has flown by. But it recollection a week of travel feels like a month, whereas an ordinary month can feel like a week. “This is often referred to as the vacation paradox,” said Dean Buonomano, author of Your Brain Is a Time Machine. “When you’re on vacation, prospectively, as it’s happening, it seems to fly by. But once you’re back home, if the vacation was filled with a lot of new events, then you have a lot of items in memory, and that will give it the subjective feeling of being a long time.”

Author and academic Steve Taylor recalled moving to eastern Germany a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when he was in his early 20s. “Everything seemed exhilaratingly different and strange,” he wrote in Time Expansion Experiences. “My life changed radically. Besides the hyper-reality of a new environment, I was living with a partner for the first time. I joined a new band and started to give English lessons to augment my income. … After eight months, I came back to the U.K. on holiday and felt like I had been away for more like eight years. … I was genuinely shocked that the same people were working in the same shops, and that my friends were doing the same jobs. I felt that I had been away for so long that major changes should have occurred in people’s lives.”

To read the full story, click here.

Half Dome photo by Kirk Keeler, 2012.

I met Kirk Keeler in the mid-90s through friends and though we’ve only seen one another occasionally over the years I’ve been impressed by his spirit and commitment to his goals. He’s a dedicated cyclist (we share that) and a talented singer-songwriter who made a heartfelt album of his music 20 years ago. In late 2021, less than 8 months after he and Anna married, he was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer at age 52, yet he’s set an athletic goal that would be tough for a highly fit person half his age.

He’s getting ready to climb Yosemite’s Half Dome with climbing legend Kevin Jorgeson to raise awareness about the importance of colon cancer screening. I wrote about his quest for The Press Democrat. Here’s an excerpt.

To read the full story, click here. There a sidebar on how they plan to climb Half Dome, for the sidebar click here.

Excerpt: “I’ve been lengthening my life with all the chemo treatments, but I’m at the point where it’s just so hard,” Kirk Keeler said, noting he had an allergic reaction during one infusion. “I can only take so much of that poison.” So he quit chemo and worked to get back in shape. “I just want to have quality,” he said. “I want to be at my best.”

And he wants to climb Yosemite’s most seductive rock wall, Half Dome. Not the cable route that about 300 people climb daily, which would be impressive enough. No, Keeler will rope up with renowned climber Kevin Jorgeson, famed for his first ascent of El Capitan’s Dawn Wall, and climb the Snake Dike route on the edge of Half Dome’s face.

The idea of climbing Half Dome, elevation 8,842 feet, hatched two years ago during one of Keeler’s few good days between chemo treatments. “I was feeling good (and thought), wouldn’t it be cool to do Half Dome,” Keeler recalled during a late June conversation at Session climbing gym in Santa Rosa, which was built by Jorgeson.

“You know how you get ideas, good ideas, and then they go away? Well, this one just wouldn’t go away. It just kind of kept nagging at me,” he said. Around this time, Keeler connected with a Davis-based support group called Cancer Champions and met Jen Miramontes, the group’s founder.

Miramontes felt “an immediate connection.” Keeler’s “honesty and willingness to share his true feelings” made a deep impression. Keeler told Miramontes he wanted “to show what a guy with Stage 4 cancer can accomplish,” he said, but he had a “bigger message” to share: If you’re 45 or older, get screened for colon cancer, “because it’s showing up in younger people now.”

When Keeler was so sick from the chemo that he believed he couldn’t get off the couch, Miramontes would encourage him: “Just walk around the house – go outside – go to the end of the street. Do something!”

Even when walking a block felt impossible, Keeler dreamed of scaling Half Dome to raise awareness for cancer screening. One day he shared that dream with Miramontes. When he brought up the Half Dome idea, Miramontes said to him: “You know, you just put that out into the universe, right?”

Keeler said, “Yeah, I did.”

In that moment Miramontes became confident about Kirk’s aspirations: “He’s going to do this,” she thought. “This is going to happen.”

Kevin Jorgeson and Kirk Keeler (right) at Session climbing gym in Santa Rosa

What makes Keeler’s story even more remarkable is that he’s not a big-wall climber. Snake Dike, though not the toughest route up Half Dome — it’s eight pitches (roped segments) and rated or 5.7 — will be the most imposing and challenging climb he’s ever attempted.

Keeler is doing the climb at age 54 while living with colon cancer, with a body that’s endured more hell than most people could imagine. “I was parked on the couch for many, many months,” he said. “I lost so much fitness” and “chemo ravages the body.”

Now he’s “surprisingly feeling really good about where I’m at. I feel on track,” he said on July 26, a week before the climb. “It’s just like eight pitches of low-angle stuff. The crux is the first pitch,” he said. “After that, it’s apparently this incredibly beautiful granite dike that just goes vertically up the dome. All the holds are there. I’m feeling ready for this.”

To read the full story, click here.

There a sidebar on how they plan to climb Half Dome, for the sidebar click here.

In 2018, my wife Jackie and I had the privilege and pleasure of trekking with Jamling Tenzing to Nepal’s Mustang region near Tibet. In 2023, Jamling invited us to share in the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the 1953 ascent of Everest. His father Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary were the first humans to reach the summit of the world’s highest mountain. I’ll never reach that summit. My Everest summit was making it to base camp.

A dear friend, Jan Morris, had been the only journalist on that 1953 expedition and had rushed the news down the mountain to ensure word reach London ahead of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth which led to a glorious celebration in Britain just eight years after WW2.

My story is a day-by-day account of the trek to base camp. Here’s Day 1; to read the full story please click here.

Jamling Tenzing in Namche Bazar, Nepal in 2023. A famous photo of Tenzing Norgay raising his ice axe on the summit of Everest on May 29, 1953.

Kathmandu to Lukla to Monjo (9,200 feet)

Reading Jan Morris’s Coronation Everest — the exclusive account of the 1953 British expedition that was the first to reach Everest’s summit — I learn that back then Nepal had no roads outside of its capital; the only way to get to Everest Base Camp was to walk 200 miles from Kathmandu. After arduous days of hiking, the climbers crawled into tiny tents, so low they could barely sit up.

Our journey begins quite differently. After three days at the luxurious (by Nepal standards) Hotel Yak & Yeti, where we enjoyed sumptuous buffet breakfasts and sipped gin and tonics at dusk, we fly from Kathmandu to Tenzing Hillary Airport in the vertiginous village of Lukla.

The plane flies lower than nearby mountaintops, zipping between peaks. Then we seem to drop straight down to Lukla’s impossibly short runway, so short that planes can only stop in time thanks to the 12-degree upward slope — the landing is the most frightening of my life. We shoulder our packs and begin our trek.

Six Sherpas hike with us, showing us the way whenever the trail splits and offering to carry our days packs on steep climbs. “If you need to give a bag to a Sherpa, give it to him,” Jamling says. “We want you to get to your destination, with a smile.”

Arriving at Everest base camp after eight days of trekking, with my wife, Jackie Yau.

We share the trail with dzos (rhymes with nose), pack animals that are half yak, half cow whose bells form a ­euphonic soundtrack to the cinematic views of the snowcapped Himalayan peaks.

The animals, despite being heavily laden, walk faster than we do, and our instructions are clear: When animals pass, always stay to the uphill side of the trail. Dzos and yaks have a nasty habit of knocking tourists off trails and down into the valleys below. We keep our distance and scramble a couple of feet above the trail whenever we see a caravan coming.

Most stories about Lukas Nelson start with referencing his popular pop, Willie. So when I interviewed Lukas in advance of his Santa Rosa appearance in early 2024, I made a point to ask a series of questions about his own work, then later in the interview I asked a question about Willie. Big mistake.

“I don’t want to make the interview all about growing up with dad. That’s probably not where we want to go with this. Maybe that’s what the readers want to hear. If that’s the case, then that’s fine, we can just part ways here, but you know, it should be I think about what we’re doing here as a band.”

I quickly pivoted to the rest of my questions about Lukas, his band, and his new album. And in the story, I don’t even name Willie Nelson until the final paragraph. Below are a few excerpts from the story. To read the full story, click here.

Lukas Nelson photo by Shervin Lainez

“I have a knack for putting myself in others’ shoes when I write,” he said. “I like to … put myself in the mind and the heart and spirit of someone else and try and write from a different perspective sometimes.” …

In 2014, Neil Young invited Nelson and Promise of the Real to be his band, filling the shoes of the incomparable Crazy Horse. They were on Bottle Rock’s main stage with Young in Napa in 2019, ripping through the blistering encore, “Rockin’ in the Free World,” when, to adhere to the curfew, Bottle Rock cut the sound at precisely 10pm. Young appeared momentarily stunned. Then he kept playing without amplification, shouting lyrics through a dead mic.

The crowd of thousands could barely hear Young and the band, but their message was loud and clear. They would not be silenced. “I thought that was pretty rock and roll, the epitome of why you want to play with a guy like Neil,” Nelson said. “Neil wanted to play, and we were backing him up, so we kept going.” …

Nelson believes that music should be “beyond politics and bring people together with more of a focus on the heart, and finding heart, and living in heart and empathy.” Authentic music can “go straight to the heart and the soul. I think that people who aren’t so much in touch with their hearts and souls can have that awakened in them if exposed to a good concert or a good song,” he said.

“I’ve got good friends on both sides of the aisle, and I find it to be really important that my music can reach both of them. I think it’s more effective to try and reach people’s hearts than it is to tell them how to think or what to say or do.”

Nelson spent some of his formative years with his parents and brother living on Maui not far from spiritual leader Ram Dass. “I was trying to get into the art of what being alive was,” he told the Austin American-Statesman. When he was 13, he was reading Hermann Hesse and “already trying to figure out was life was all about.”

Sierra, the country’s leading environmental magazine, has a front-of-the-book section called Notes from Here and There that’s akin to the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town. It’s an ideal venue for spotlighting personal views on the environment, not my views but those of the most affected people, such as a Karuk tribal elder who told me: “So we’re going through a disaster with all these dead fish—hundreds, thousands of fish floating down the Klamath River—and then the farmers turn around and take half the Shasta River,” Hockaday said. “That was like kicking me in the teeth. It was heartless.”

This is what happened when farmers in upper Northern California began diverting the Shasta River, which feed the Klamath, after a devastating fire in summer 2022. To read the full story in Sierra magazine, click this link: River Rights Gone Wrong.

Ron Reed dipnet fishing at Ishi Pishi Falls. Photo courtesy of Karuk Tribe

Sierra, the country’s leading environmental magazine, has a front-of-the-book section called Notes from Here and There that’s akin to the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town. It’s an ideal venue for spotlighting personal views on the environment, not my views but those of the most affected people, such as a Karuk tribal elder who told me: “So we’re going through a disaster with all these dead fish—hundreds, thousands of fish floating down the Klamath River—and then the farmers turn around and take half the Shasta River,” Hockaday said. “That was like kicking me in the teeth. It was heartless.”

This is what happened when farmers in upper Northern California began diverting the Shasta River, which feed the Klamath, after a devastating fire in summer 2022. To read the full story in Sierra magazine, click this link: River Rights Gone Wrong.

Ron Reed dipnet fishing at Ishi Pishi Falls. Photo courtesy of Karuk Tribe