Ever watched snowboarders in the Olympics and wanted to pull some of the same tricks they make look so simple? Did you think you could read a book to learn how? If so, Mastering Snowboarding may be the book for you.

I grabbed a promotional copy of the book from LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer’s program. My snowboarding skills have greatly diminished since having kids and spending less time on the slopes. But, The Boy is a budding snowboarder, so maybe we could share the resources in the book.

It’s hard to argue with snowboard lessons from Hannah Teter, a two time Olympic medalist and winner of a multitude of elite snowboarding competitions. Of course being a champion does not mean you can write well, so Teter teamed up with veteran snowboard writer Tawnya Schultz to compile the lessons in the book.

They try to tackle it all: history of snowboarding, equipment, clothing, first-time riding, big mountain riding, and tricks. That’s a lot to pack into one book.

I agree with many of their seven truths of snowboarding:

1. You are going to fall. Everyone falls.
2. You are going to feel uncoordinated. Everyone feels uncoordinated when learning something new.
3. Feeling embarrassed is optional and will not improve your performance.
4. Visualizing helps. So does trusting your body.
5. You may love or hate snowboarding right away. Either way, you’ll get better with practice.
6. If you are optimistic and focus on having fun, you will enjoy the ride.
7. You are going to be sore by the end of the day

I started out snowboarding in 1995 and left the mountain very sore, but wanting more. My first mistake was trying to learn without a lesson. I had just missed the morning lesson time and had two hours to kill until the next lesson. My second mistake was trying to get up the bunny slope before that lesson on a tow rope, a difficult uphill transport for a snowboard.

Reading this book would have helped avoid those mistakes. It my have even given me a better starting point. Attempting to cover the breadth of snowboarding subjects is inherently going to mean that most topics are not covered in depth. The only subject covered in depth are tricks which take up 60 of 189 pages in the book.

We put in at Forest Road in Millis. Literally at Forest Road. The parking lot and launch area was underwater and we launched the big red kayak from the side of Forest Road. We already had our first taste of the floodwaters and had not even started paddling.

For those of you who are only familiar with the Charles River Basin between Cambridge and Boston, this upper stretch of the Charles River is nothing like the Basin.

This section of the Charles is part of the Natural Valley Storage Project. In 1974 Congress authorized the “Charles River Natural Valley Storage Area,” allowing for the acquisition and permanent protection of 17 scattered wetlands in the middle and upper watershed. The final acquisition totaled 8,103 acres, with 3,221 acres of land acquired in fee and 4,882 acres in flood easement.

These wetlands form a natural reservoir. They soak up the floodwaters and allow the water level to spread over a wide area. Otherwise the heavy flow of water would rush downstream and flood the developed areas along the river, including Boston itself.

Area F is the largest area of the Natural Valley Storage Area and lies in Millis, Medfield, Norfolk and Sherborn.

With all of the rain, Area F would be put to it’s test of holding flood waters.

Only boats would be parking here today.

The Charles River meanders quite a bit in this section, swishing back and forth through the marshy wetlands. With the high water, we were able to cut across some of the meanderings as the water flowed right over some of the marsh.

On one bank was Millis, on the other Medfield. This area attracted the first settlers of Medfield. The natural hay from these meadows along the river was valuable fodder for their livestock.

At one stretch, the left-hand bank in Millis is owned by a hunting club. We could hear some shotgun blasts echoing across the valley.

Route 109 Bridge

I had a bit of concern about our ability to fit under the Route 109 bridge. It’s smallish opening helps hold back some of the water in Area F, pushing it out into the meadows. But we were able to make it under with reasonable clearance.

The next obstacle was the railroad bridge just downstream of the West Street Bridge between Medfield and Millis. Originally, this section of Millis was part of Medfield. Since the town’s Puritans lived on both sides of the river, they needed a bridge to get back and forth to the weekly meeting. The original bridge was constructed in 1653.  During King Philip’s War, the Native Americans burned the original bridge in 1676.

The trestle offered narrow openings and the bloated river was flowing quickly through. A few quick, sharp strokes got the kayak in position, through, and out the other side.

Railroad bridge at West Street

As we paddled further downstream, the floodwaters spread far across the marshy valley. I was hoping to be able to paddle up Bogastow Brook. This is the largest tributary of the Charles River. With the wide expanse of the floodwaters it was often hard to find the path of the river as it flowed over marshes, bushes and trees that normally cut a path for the flow. This is Area G of the Natural Valley Storage Area.

I thought I might not be able to find the brook. Eventually I saw a bigger opening and an obvious flow of additional water. It was a short, twisted path upstream to South End Pond. I assume this stretch is normally a bit scratchy, but the floodwaters made it easy to get upstream.

After making it to the pond, we headed back to the Charles, downstream to the Route 27 bridge and the takeout.

Striking a pose at the put in.

View Paddling Trips in a larger map

Route 27 provides a small parking area for a half dozen cars and a pebbled path down to the river next to the bridge. Rain came down heavily in the previous 48 hours so there was some obvious flow to the river.

The Route 27 bridge is a standard steel and concrete bridge, leaving a rather ugly overhead to start the trip. Just downstream is a railroad bridge. Although it looks abandoned, Conrail uses it occasionally. I have been surprised by a locomotive on the tracks while mountain biking in the area.

We had the treat of watching a model airplane fly overhead. The kids were fascinated by the replica and had no concept of the plane’s size. It could have been 6 inches or 6 feet. There is a popular landing strip next Rocky Narrows. I usually see a great replica or stunt model on a nice weekend day.

Towering up to the left is King Philip’s Lookout in Sherborn Town Forest. This is a 100 feet of bedrock that pushes the river to the right into a marsh. A bit further downstream, the river passes though the twin towers of Rocky Narrows. The granite on the left and right squeezes the river together and adds a quickening, although still gentle, pace to the downstream flow.

Off to the right we saw construction fencing that cut off the backside of Medfield State Hospital from the river. I know there is a great bike trail over there. I’ll have to go back and see what construction is happening over there.

Off to the left is the Rocky Narrows Reservation owned by the Trustees of the Reservation. It’s 227 acres bracket the Sherborn Town Forest resulting in almost 400 acres of protected land on the riverfront. There is a good landing spot marked with a Rocky Narrows sign. It’s a great place to pull out for a picnic and go for a hike. Since we had just started the day, we kept paddling.

The right bank of the river in Dover has a few houses but they are well set back from the river. The Farm Road bridge is another great landing spot, but we keep paddling.

Peters Reservation is on the right bank of the river. Peters Reservation is named for the family who originally purchased the property as a family retreat. The trails and understory plantings were laid out by the landscape architect Fletcher Steele. The property is currently owned by The Trustees of Reservations. The reservation is located across Farm Street from the Chase Woodlands, another Trustees managed property.

After a few more turns, the river leaves Dover and Sherborn and enters Natick. The Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary owns the left bank and a large stretch of the right bank. Indian Brook flows through the sanctuary, floods into a marsh, and eventually leaks into the Charles River. Unlike the Trustees’s properties upstream, Broadmoor has no landing spots.

The river takes a sharp left hand turn after passing the Sanctuary. This stretch is rocky and there are a few outcroppings to avoid. For us, the water level was still high from the recent rain so we floated over most of the obstacles.

Then houses appear on the left bank of the river, with noisy Route 16 behind them. The idyllic section of the river has ended and suburbia has sprung up.

On a rocky outcropping on the right hand bank appears a statute of the Virgin Mary. It was placed there by Daniel Sargent who purchased both sides of the river in this spot in 1921. The words at her feet state: “Apparverunt in terra nostra flores”. The flowers shall appear on our earth.

Sargent also built the delightful footbridge just downstream from the statute.

From there it is a short distance to the South Natick Dam. There is parkland on both sides of the dam. However, the left hand side is steep and walled. The right side offers a few spots to softly land and exit the river.

View Paddling Trips in a larger map

I launched the new red double kayak from Nahanton Park in Newton. The Boy was in the front seat and The Girl was in a jump seat plopped between my feet.

Nahanton Park is one of the newer locations of Charles River Canoe and Kayak. It is a less visible location than it’s main location next to the Marriott, but it’s a much nicer stretch of the river. There is plenty of parking and a dock at the park which makes the launch very easy.

The Needham radio and television towers are visible in the distance once you enter this section of the river. There are significant industrial buildings along the river. If you remember your history of the industrial revolution in the northeast, this means there are dams along the river. There are three portages ahead, sure to be a challenge in the big new kayak.

There is a modern railroad bridge abutting older stone abutments which mark the location of an older bridge.  This bridge was for the Charles River branch of the Boston and Worcester Railroad. Built in 1850, this rail line was built to bring stone and gravel from Needham to fill Boston’s Back Bay. During its peak, forty car trains of fill ran every 45 minutes.

The Elliot Street Bridge is made of three stone arches and appears just before the Silk Mill Dam. There are new signs warning of the approaching dam. You can see the river disappear and hear an increasing roar as you pass under the bridge.

There is a good spot to take the kayak out of the river and start the portage. It was fairly long walk of about 300 yards through Hemlock Gorge Reservation, leading down into Hemlock Gorge between Newton’s Upper Falls and the Echo Bridge. With the weight of the new kayak on my back, I realized I needed to get some wheels for the portages.

Halfway down the portage, there is a great spot atop the rock of the gorge. The old mill building is across the river and you can feel the force of the water poring over the dam.

The fall of water at Hemlock Gorge was an attractive power supply for industry. In 1688 John Clark built a sawmill. His sons expanded by adding a fulling mill and a grist mill. In 1788 Simon Elliot bought part of the site and put in a snuff mill.  In 1824 a cotton mill was added, which was later converted to a silk mill. The dam is often called the Silk Mill Dam because of this long running use of the dam.

Silk Mill Dam in Hemlock Gorge

Just downstream of the Silk Mill Dam is Echo Bridge. It is famous for the wonderful echoes that can resonate back and forth between the arches. Yes, we all hollered out as we went under. The echo was very impressive.

Echo Bridge

Echo Bridge carries the Sudbury Aqueduct. In 1878, the mainstream of the Sudbury River was diverted via the Sudbury Aqueduct to the Chestnut Hill Reservoir to supply water for the City of Boston. The bridge was built in 1876, spanning 130 feet across the Charles River.

Horseshoe Dam

Next on the river was the Circular Dam or Horseshoe Dam. The dam was not marked and it was harder to hear because it was right next to the overpass for Route 9.

This is also the site of a portage under Route 9 on the Ellis Street underpass, down to Turtle Island. A millrace was put in place here in 1782 for a sawmill. In 1792 Newton Iron Works took over and rolled iron bars for 50 years. The millrace is to the right of the dam and is the landing spot for the portage. There is a new spillway put in place that makes the bank a bit more steep and the exit a bit harder.

128 Road Signs in the Distance

The Charles then follows Route 128/ Interstate 95 for a few miles. The road signs on Route 128 are visible from the river. The right bank of the river in this section follows Quinobequin Road in Newton. The left bank has relatively new sound barriers along 128 that greatly reduce the traffic noise. Vegetation has grown along the walls, but they still look massive and tower above the river.

After passing under Route 128, we passed under the Cochituate Aqueduct crossing the river and under 128 on a three-arched bridge. The Cochituate Aqueduct was built in 1848 to carry water from Lake Cochituate in Framingham to the Chestnut Hill Reservoir. It serves a similar purpose to the Sudbury Aqueduct that runs through Echo Bridge.

Cordingly Dam

Just below Water Street in Wellesley is the Cordingly Dam. The last time I was here I entered the river to early and floated through the rapids unsuccessfully, leaving me flapping in the river like one of the herring in the dam’s fish ladder. Since I had the kids I was not going to risk tipping the kayak, so we took a much longer portage downstream.

We ended this stretch of the river at Washington Street / Route 16 in Wellesley at the top of Newton Lower Falls.

Newton Lower Falls and the Route 16 Bridge

You can the rest of my paddling trips laid out on a map: Paddling Trips.

View Paddling Trips in a larger map

If you remember 15 years of losing to the Dolphins in the Orange Bowl, you will love this book. If you enjoy reading about the history of the National Football League, you will enjoy this book. If you think the Patriots begin and end with Tom Brady, you may be disappointed. If you hate the Patriots, you will want to burn this book.

Jim Baker, a regular contributor to ESPN.com’s “Page 2″ and Bernard M. Corbett, author of The Only Game That Matters: The Harvard/Yale Rivalry compile the history of the New England Patriots franchise by using 10 key games as the tentpoles. Besides the game descriptions, the book is full of player recollections, trivia, and stats.

The Patriots started off as one of the top teams in the American Football League. Then the team’s success ebbed and flowed with an ownership that usually lacked the capital to compete. After a few years of turmoil in the front office, Robert Kraft positioned the team for its current run of success.

The authors interviewed dozens of players, including Raymond Berry, Troy Brown, Steve Grogan, John Hannah, Steve Nelson, Dante Scarnecchia, Patrick Sullivan, and the late Mosi Tatupu. Those interviews are added to add great color to the stories about the franchise and the individual games.

The team’s current success can be attributed to a strong owner, a great coach and a great quarterback. You will not find any meaningful quotes from those three in the book. Besides Bill Belichick, Tom Brady, and Robert Kraft, Drew Bledsoe is also missing from the list of interviewees.

What are the ten games? Of course the three Super Bowl wins are in there. There is the win over the Giants in 2007 to go 18-0 in the regular season. You should buy the book and discover the six others.

The publisher was kind enough to send me a copy of this book for review.

One Heart Boston

All proceeds beyond the direct material costs, postage and applicable taxes from the sale of One Heart Boston merchandise will benefit The One Fund Boston, created to raise money to help those families most affected by the tragic events that unfolded during this year’s Boston Marathon.

It’s dated but I enjoyed the apocalyptic Lucifer’s Hammer. As the Hamner-Brown comet approaches Earth, politicians, criminals, journalists, and scientists deal with the anticipation of its passing and possible impact. That uncertainty is main stumbling point that dates the book 30 years after its publication.

It’s disconcerting to have part of the plot be reliant on the uncertainty of a big, bright comet hitting Earth. Today we enough space observation and computing power to calculate an object’s orbit. We are even tracking the orbit of near-miss asteroids for decades in the future to determine whether they will hit or miss. Then, while reading the book, a massive meteor hits Russia. So maybe…

One science aspect that does resonate is the perspective of the astronauts. They are trapped in the period between the end of the Apollo program and the start of the space shuttle program. They don’t have a ride into space, much like the astronauts of 2013.

Where the book succeeds in overcoming its 1980s roots is the sage of the survivors in Southern California. Everyone is clawing for survival and a few are thinking about how to rebuild civilization.

Living in the Northeast, I’ve been inundated with pictures from the blizzard. It may not have met the technical definition of a blizzard, but it was still one of the ten biggest winter storms to hit Boston in decades.

The central pressure of the storm fell to 971 millibars at 7 a.m. on February 9, a level usually recorded in category one hurricanes. Hurricane-force gusts were recorded in 12 locations, including 83 miles per hour at Cuttyhunk Island in Massachusetts and 82 mph in Westport, Connecticut.

The movie below shows the development of the storm over as captured by the GOES-13 (or GOES-East) geostationary weather satellite.  The time-lapse animation is made up of images taken every 15 minutes from 12:01 p.m. EST on February 7 to 11:15 a.m. on February 10. You can watch the weather front near the Great Lakes merge with a weather front moving up from the southeastern United States, colliding into one massive storm with the counter-clockwise rotation characteristic of a nor’easter.

The Goal

One of my recurring annual goals is to finish reading at least 26 books for the year. In 2012, I managed to finish 36. Although, 6 of those were lighter reads. So maybe I should discount those and bring it down to 30. In any event, I exceeded my goal. The full list is below.

Reviews

Some of the titles will look familiar since I gave them a longer write up here. I also mentioned a few on Wired.com’s GeekDad and on Compliance Building. There are links that will take you to my reviews.

GoodReads versus LibraryThing

I’m still tracking my books in two parallel systems. Library Thing has a superior platform for cataloging books. GoodReads has a better platform for interacting with other readers, sharing reviews, and sharing booklists. Each has their strengths and weaknesses. I’d like to jettison one of them to quit duplicating efforts. So far, neither one has made a compelling move to improve and elbow the other out of the way.

2012 Reading List

Title		Author	Rating
How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything		Dov Seidman	Review
Defending Jacob: A Novel		William Landay	Review
The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways		Earl Swift	Review
Ten Tea Parties: Patriotic Protests That History Forgot		Joseph Cummins
A Dance with Dragons: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book Five		George R.R. Martin
Why the Law Is So Perverse		Leo Katz	Review
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business		Charles Duhigg	Review
A Visit from the Goon Squad		Jennifer Egan
The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love and Family		Liza Mundy	Review
Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston		Michael Rawson	Review
The Walking Dead, Book 7		Robert Kirkman
Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War		Megan Kate Nelson
Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, Book 2)		Suzanne Collins
Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, Book 3)		Suzanne Collins
Show Time		Phil Harvey	Review
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt		T.J. Stiles	Review
Cutting-Edge Cycling		Hunter Allen
Gone Girl		Gillian Flynn
Pines		Blake Crouch
Amazing Gracie: A Dog’s Tale		Dan Dye
The Age of Miracles		Karen Thompson Walker
Sharp Objects		Gillian Flynn
Already Gone		John Rector
Nine Steps to Sara		Lisa Olsen
The Walking Dead, Book 8		Robert Kirkman
The American Alpine Journal 2012		John III Harlin
Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author,Who Went in Search of Them		Donovan Hohn
Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End		Manel Loureiro
The Dead Room		Robert Ellis
Make Magic! Do Good!		Dallas Clayton	Review
xkcd: volume 0		Randall Munroe
Save Yourself, Mammal!: A Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Collection		Zach Weinersmith
The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable		James Owen Weatherall	Review
The Most Dangerous Game: A Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Collection		Zach Weinersmith
The Remaining		D.J. Molles
No-Man’s Lands: One Man’s Odyssey Through The Odyssey		Scott Huler	Review

How meta: an odyssey exploring Homer’s The Odyssey. Scott Huler has a baby on the way and one last adventure in his soul. Picking up a copy of the epic poem, he connects with it in a way that he didn’t when he first read it decades earlier.

He sets off, travelling lightly and cheaply, to visit each of the main stops on Odysseus’s troubled journey home. Or at least the places that most closely resemble the mythological places.

In No Man’s Lands Huler sums up the lessons of The Odyssey: the perils of ambition, the emptiness of glory, the value of love, the failure of self-glory, and the importance of family. He learns to fully appreciate the central theme: the greatest adventures of all are the ones that bring us home to those we love.

The book is part travelogue and part critical reading of The Odyssey, with a mix of personal self-realization thrown. To me, the key signal of my enjoyment of this book is that it made we want to blow the dust off the edition of The Odyssey from my college days and really read it this time.

• Huler’s own photos of his journey
• What Scott brought back
• An illustrated map of his journey
• NPR commentary that started it all where Scott Huler officially gives up on Ulysses.