Here’s something that will surprise you. It’s from our German photographer friend Leopold Kanzler at fotopirsch. Now I know you don’t watch every single video I post, it takes time to load, you have to feed the cat etc. But take time to watch this. Seriously. I truly never appreciated what a slow, laborious process this was before.
Our water bill arrived yesterday, which I wouldn’t mention except for what was inside! We were able to add a festival insert into 10,000 water bills delivered in June and July. Isn’t that wonderful?
Heh heh, I had to submit the artwork before Amelia made the design, so I used an old one of her designs. I think the was the first one she painted. Way back for our 4th festival,
I know Sunday is supposed to be all full of good news, but this week there is truly crappy news that I am so very sorry to report. I found out yesterday that the cheerful and hardworking Ted Guzzi, of the Sierra Wildlife Coalition, died after a too-short battle with cancer. Ted was the one who installed the flow devices at Taylor Creek, and other locations. He was able to die in the Sierras, in the magnificent home his wife Sherry the architect had designed, and surrounded by friends and family. Ted had just been diagnosed the year that Sherry drove me to the State of the Beaver Conference (2013). There was lots to talk about. At that time everyone was hopeful he was so young and strong they would wipe it out easily. I was especially attentive because it happened to be the same kind of cancer with which my father had just been diagnosed.
This week I’m thinking that all the WRONG people get cancer.
Louis T. Guzzi (Ted)
On June 18, Louis T. Guzzi, known to all but officialdom as Ted, died peacefully at his home in Carnelian Bay, surrounded by friends and family, after a long, hard fight with cancer—the last act of an exemplary life. He was 70 years old.
In 1965, the day after he graduated from Mira Loma High, he headed straight for Yosemite to begin what would be the first of nine seasons of work for the National Park Service in Tuolumne Meadows as a garbage man—considered, by those in the know at the time, to be the dream job.
In the off-season, he would travel around the state in his VW van, constantly adding to his knowledge about the flora, fauna, geography, and geology of his adopted state, creating a map in his head of all the best places where nobody went.
Ted had spent winters in the early 70’s working for his brother-in-law in the construction trade in Lake Tahoe, and in 1981 he returned to pick up where he left off. As fate would have it, and Tahoe being Tahoe, an old friend from Yosemite days, an architect, happened to be living there. She had a house, a job, and VW van. “Why not?” as Sherry puts it. They were married in 1983, and by 1984 they were finishing each other’s sentences.
Soon they partnered up with a friend, Kevin Homan, in an enterprise called Timber Design, building custom, hand-crafted, artistically refined log homes, not only in and around Tahoe, but in Montana as well.
For the next 25 years, this is how they spent their time between adventures, which involved not only plenty of backpacking trips with friends into the high country but extensive travels to the far corners of the earth. On the side, they volunteered with the BEAR League and the Sierra Wildlife Coalition, educating Tahoe residents and visitors about their wild neighbors—bears, beavers, coyotes, and all the rest.
Over the course of his full life, Ted Guzzi became a master of the art of living, turning everything he touched into art, and every other person he met into a lifelong friend. Fatherless from the age of five, and childless by choice, he was famous for treating his friends’ children, and miscellaneous strays, as lovingly as if they were his own. He didn’t have to work at being generous, it was just his nature. As one friend said, “I have never known a better human being.”
Let’s leave it at that.
