Occupation of Independence

Wallowing in Repetitive Perfection

2012-03-04T07:26:00.001-07:00

At first it felt silly to include this photograph since it is similar to recent ones. But wait a minute -- why must a blogger try to be brilliantly original? Why can't he just wallow in something he loves, even at the expense of being repetitive? The sky around here takes on a strange yellow color when the wind is only moderately strong. Perhaps it is due to the large open-pit copper mine nearby. (The photo is not sauced up by any editing-software.)

Something that is somewhat new is the seasonal adjustment to my camping style. There are plenty of reasons to stay out of RV parks, but one reason that can get overlooked is how much a camper gains by facing the screen door towards the right direction, depending on the season. In mid-winter the screen door needs to face south, in order to glory in that warm Arizona sun.

In summer, the door must face north or you couldn't stand to open it all day; you develop an obsessive lust for the shade; and as summer wanes in late August you watch the shadows lengthen, and feel triumphant.

In spring I like to face the door to the east to allow it to bask, not only in morning sunlight, but in the calm lee of the west wind. What a marvelous time of year: no flying insects, cold mornings, and warm afternoons. I pop the door completely open; I sit at the desk in a winter parka and boots. Despite that, my feet don't really warm up until I rotate the office chair and stick those cold puppies into that incoming shaft of sunlight. It feels almost solid, like negative ice.

Back in the Big City

2012-03-02T06:26:00.000-07:00

It probably helps your fuel economy some to blow into town riding a 30 mph tailwind. Thus it was the day I showed up in Arizona's megabarriopolis #2, Tucson. After camping in the desert for several weeks, will the big city be different than I remember? More entertaining or just more noisy and annoying?

With the strong west wind, the big city had remarkably clear air -- almost as if a big city weren't even there. It's challenging and fun to imagine the geographical setting of a big city before the big city came to be. Imagine how pleasant the land around the Old Pueblo was: a large mountain range just to the north that provided escape from the summer heat; the lushest examples of Sonoran desert vegetation, on opposite sides of town; grasslands and chaparral in the higher elevations to the southeast.

There are probably a few people still alive who remember the Old Pueblo when it was small. I wonder what decade it was when Tucson started undergoing cancerous growth -- the Fifties?

I have personally experienced the same destruction at other places in the Southwest, such as St. George, UT. A decade before that, it was Prescott's (AZ) turn. And so on, and so forth, until everything is ruined.

Actually a person feels remarkably clear-headed when arriving back in the big city. You tell yourself that you're not going to get sucked up into that insane culture; that you aren't going to drive around in an automobile all day, hacking your way through stop and go traffic; that you just don't need all those damn stores and strip malls. After all, in a small town you got by pretty well on a grocery store, a Dollar Store, and a laundromat. (And the internet.)

But the big city operates under a miasma of mindless busyness and phoney pragmatism. The human central nervous system has a remarkable ability to adjust to, and then become addicted to, constant stimulation, even if most of it is just annoying. The reductio ad absurdum of this is the casino, which can be seen as the holy temple of modern metropolitan culture. Without even realizing what has happened, each of the scurrying ants sees his own self-esteem and moral self-worth as being tied up in the endless busyness. Beyond self-importance, busyness implies a purpose in life.

Navigation Before GPS

2012-03-01T06:54:00.000-07:00

It seemed prudent to drive to the nearest Department of Motor Vehicles in New Mexico to update my mail forwarding address, lest there be complications with a speeding ticket from the Tucson reconnaissance-camera reich. After several nights of noisy, parking-lot boondocking my nerves were pretty frayed. Anybody who thinks that that style of camping is a quixotic, dreamy, escapist, full of holy Simplicity, Socrates and Thoreau-approved way of life has been sold a false bill of goods.

Thankfully I'm back on public lands near the Santa Rita mountains, south of Tucson. It's always a little surprising to see certain topographic features stand out so clearly, clear enough to serve as a navigational tool. In the Tucson area Baboquivari Peak serves that purpose. I like to call it "Babo".

Update on Surprise Speeding Tickets in the Mailbox

2012-02-25T06:21:00.000-07:00

When I got together with a Tucson friend yesterday my first question was about the photo-surveillance cameras used here; then a ticket is mailed to the citizen-criminal. I was concerned about tardy payment penalties being added to the speeding tickets of travelers who only get snail-mail forwarded every month or two.

My Tucson friend has indeed gotten a camera-based ticket the past year, and his wife got three. Each was over $200. Hers were at the same intersection, but on different days, which helped her think that they were repeated notices of the same "crime". (She didn't read the dates or times apparently.) She didn't pay all three tickets and got her driver's license suspended.

The good news is that the Tucson reich sends somebody to your house before raising the stakes. At another time they called on the telephone. What a relief that was. It keeps the citizen-criminal from being completely at the mercy of snail mail delivery, which alarmed me the most.

How will they handle an out-of-stater?

So far, I've tried to relate the facts with a minimum of spin. Obviously I can't keep this up or I'll bust! Let's back up to the big picture: in a democracy politicians get reelected (for an entire lifetime, typically) by promising key voters (in organized constituencies) benefits, freebies, and goodies at somebody else's expense. Democracy was pretty satisfied with this arrangement for a century or so.

But then this arrangement became passe. Democracy took the next step up in its evolutionary progress: it started promising even more goodies at nobody's expense; that is, it learned to just borrow money for whatever goodies it takes to get reelected.

Ever since the financial turmoil started in 2008, states needed to become more innovative. They couldn't just raise taxes; the voters were too accustomed to free lollipops. So the states had to step up penalties and fines as a stealth tax increase. Imagine the "revenue enhancement" that just one of those surveillance cameras produces. It probably pays for itself on the first day. And it will never get sick or need a pension. If I were a donut shop owner, I'd start looking for a new line of work.

Owl in a Cactus

2012-02-24T07:11:00.000-07:00

I've only gotten close to an owl once before today, and that was when mountain biking in a ponderosa forest. They are larger and more powerful than I expected. They seem more exotic and menacing than other raptors. So I grinned from ear to ear when a friend walked us over to an owl nest on the southwest side of Tucson. (Gee, maybe I should provide GPS coordinates so readers will have the ultimate in convenience in finding the owl. Isn't that how "RV blogs" are supposed to work?)

An impudent Malevolence in the shadows...

A Surprise Speeding Ticket in Your Mail Box

2012-02-22T07:24:00.000-07:00

In Tucson yesterday I noticed a sign alerting drivers of photo-enforcement of the rules of the road. As a bicyclist I should probably approve, but I don't have the guts or the foolishness to ride my bicycle on these busy highways anyway, despite all their efforts at putting in shoulders for bicyclists.

What happens to a traveler who is caught by one of the surveillance cameras going ten miles per hour over the speed limit? Is a $350 ticket mailed to his mail box in South Dakota or Livingston, TX? There must be a time limit for paying the ticket. What if the traveler only requests his junk mail be forwarded every month or two. Has the speeding ticket now become a $1000 ticket? Does he need to appear in court because the ticket is unpaid? Will he need to hire an attorney?

At the end of the year, I wonder how the traveler would categorize that expense? I would put it in the "transportation" category or whatever you call the cost of being mobile.

Now please don't tell me that this wouldn't happen to a traveler because it's "unfair" or shows no "common sense". You aren't living in Mayberry anymore, and the post-9/11 police state is not Sheriff Andy. You should have realized that much when you saw the surveillance cameras going up in the first place.

If you got the ticket the old-fashioned way -- with a police officer stopping you-- you'd have an easy time paying it off punctually. (You'd would make sure the police officer used your mail-forwarding address; then you'd ask how long it takes to mail out the ticket; finally you'd call your mail forwarding service to see when it arrives.)

But with photo-enforcement, a ticket could show up any time with no warning. The penalties about late payment assume that you're a normal person who gets mail every day. No allowance will be made for someone with a "weird" lifestyle. The post-9/11 neocon reich is hostile to the very idea of mail box addresses. This is just speculation. If somebody knows different, I'd like to hear it.

Pit Bull Attack, and Arizona Dog Leash Law

2012-02-19T04:25:00.000-07:00

No good deed goes unpunished. I thought I was being a good doggie parent and a non-polluting exerciser, by mountain biking to Ajo with my dog leashed to my waist. Of course we had to run the noisy gauntlet of neighborhood dogs, howling away behind chain link fences. (I'd previously noticed walkers in town carrying "walking sticks" that looked like clubs. Despite being a reputed cynic, I didn't quite connect the dots.)

On the usual ride to the library today, a pit-bull-mix climbed over the top and came after us, even though we were 50 yards away by then. We've had problems with this dog before. I didn't have my pepper spray along today. The dog did bite my dog, Coffee Girl, a couple times, but I couldn't see any blood. The dog didn't attack me. But I couldn't control my bike, my dog, and kick at the pit bull very well, all at the same time, which added to the anger and fear of the situation.

Eventually the elderly owner came out and retrieved his dog, who was still going after Coffee Girl, as I tried to kick at the pit bull and pull Coffee Girl in the right direction. I chewed his ass out really good, threatening to call the police or hire a lawyer. I didn't mean any of it, but being a nice-ee-poo mousy guy wasn't working with this guy -- his dog has done this before.

A few minutes later a 30 year old man came to the library and told me to come outside the library. He said he was with the US Marshall's office. He flashed an ID.

First he told me that having my dog "tied or leashed" (to my bike outside the library) was illegal and punishable by a $600 fine. Then he said that I had verbally assaulted the old man and was guilty of a felony. Then he reached for his cellphone to call the police. Apparently he had trouble getting through; he ordered me to stay right there. Then he walked off somewhere.

Ten minutes later, no cop showed up, despite the fact that 1/3 of the employment in this town is law enforcement. I was tempted to leave but I started worrying that I'd be guilty of "resisting arrest" or something like that, to add to my rap sheet.

But something didn't smell right. Did Ajo really have a U.S. Marshall's office? Wasn't there supposed to be some kind of badge in his ID? He really didn't seem very professional or informed. A couple weeks ago a friend had been told by somebody about this "tied up dog" law; he looked it up on the internet and learned that it was a misunderstanding of the law. If this "marshall" had been a fraud, he certainly would be having a good laugh at home at the expense of the fearful gringo (me) who sat there all day at the library, patiently waiting to be arrested for various felonies and misdemeanors.

In a couple minutes, I waved down a passing sheriff's officer. I thought she was coming to bust me, but she wasn't. She explained: first of all, "verbal assault" pertains to a verbal threat of violence or an intimidating movement of some kind. It doesn't mean "loud, scared, and pissed off."

But the Arizona (or Pima county) law about tying a dog is a misunderstanding by much of the general public: it pertains to tying a dog outside in the heat, where it can't get shade or water, and is in physical danger because of it. (Arizona summers.) Obviously that didn't apply to a shaded winter parking spot for a dog. End of the misadventure.

What is the moral of this story? Relying on a metaphor is sometimes the fastest way to see through a situation. Recall the beginning of the Wizard of Oz, when one of the farm hands -- who would turn out to be the "brainless" scarecrow -- told Dorothy that the best way to handle the mean old lady (Wicked Witch) was just to use a different route when she had Toto along.

Of course you can't do that here, because every third house in a typical neighborhood in los Estados Unidos de Norte America has intimidating dogs running around in the yard, behind a 3 foot high chain link fence. It's unfair, but I simply must stop taking Coffee Girl to the town with me. I might even stop riding into town myself.

And next time I will keep my mouth shut and try to maintain the presence of mind to snap photographs, look for witnesses, and then call the police. Oh yea, I'll also have my pepper spray or baseball bat along, and use it. On the dog, not the owner.

Down with Dog Shows!

2012-02-18T07:14:00.000-07:00

There are readers of a mild and sanguine disposition who probably think the opinions on this blog are excessively cynical and critical of contemporary American culture. Oh very well, live in your rose-colored dream world, if you must. But let's put your happy-spin to an empirical test: consider this year's winner of the Westminster Dog Show, and tell me that our society hasn't already gone past the tipping point.

Photo by Seth Wenig.

Of all the weird looking dogs to choose from, did they have to pick one that looks like a rap star?

Deadly Skies in the Sonoran Desert

2012-02-17T08:20:00.004-07:00

The skies have been weird around here lately. Blame most of it on stormy skies, especially in the mornings.

Later in the day the Fly Boys strafe my trailer. They go over at 12 o'clock high, maybe 500 feet above my roof. (It's hard to judge heights like that.) Maybe I should complain that such low flights interfere with my Fox News TV reception. (satiric grin.) You'd think they would have an adequate playground over the Goldwater Bombing Range, which is bigger than some states in the northeast. But no, they need to fly over an American citizen legally camped on public land. Why don't they at least fly over and intimidate illegal immigrants in the desert?

I wonder how many (borrowed) dollar bills per hour squirt out the ass-end of these Air Force Warthogs. Wikipedia says the rotating 30 mm cannon (visible in my photo, taken looking up from my RV) fires 4000 rounds per minute -- what a fine addition this is to the Killing Machine that our country has become.

Three Flavors of RV Blogs

2012-02-16T05:34:00.001-07:00

Soon after most people become acquainted with the RV travel blogosphere, they start to see patterns, enough so that they might classify them like this:

RV 101 blogs. How to. Chock full of useful information for newbies. They work pretty hard for their nickels and dimes of Google ad income. Too bad there are so many minute details, which are intended to be practical but really aren't, since the reader's circumstances are different than the blogger's. Readers can feel insulted when such blogs appear to offer friendly advice to a "fellow" RVer, but then the reader learns he is just a chump being hit with a thinly-disguised ad. (The Linkbait Syndrome; it gets 'em every time.) Ah dear, the sordid topic of coin...
RV travelogues. Where are Fred and Mildred today? Aimed at armchair travelers and RV wannabees, these blogs offer pleasant entertainment as long as you live life purely through your eyeballs; mentally you will leave the blog completely starved. Finally escaping to their RV Dream (!!!), they offer scenic postcard after postcard, as well as updates on the world's cutest grandkids. And did I mention the scenery!!! Mildred just knows there is a God because the sunsets are so breathtakingly beautiful. Rhapsodies about sunsets are usually mixed with news about the latest shopping trip to Walmart or the Dollar Store for paper towels or RV toilet paper.
Latter-day Howard Beals-on-wheels, emphasizing the philosophical underpinnings of unconventional, un-bourgeois lifestyles. Imbued with visions of higher forms of truth, these prophets of the desert are sententious and preachy, abstemious, celibate, impoverished, and a bit mad. Secluded in a gravelly dry wash for over three years, he is finishing his 643 page eBook, "The One and Only Truth for Achieving Ultimate Simplicity." It includes a Google Earth app that locates all the county landfills that allow free overnight parking.

OK, so I lean towards category #3, with just a bit of #2, and none of #1. (By the way I was astonished to see the DVD of Howard Beal's "Network" available for $6 at the Family Dollar store.)

Valentine's Day: Pulling Down the Goddess's Statue

2012-02-14T07:42:00.000-07:00

Once again it's time for the annual Valentine's Day peroration. Hopefully this version won't make me as unpopular as the last one. It would be nice to have the advantage of my boondocking neighbor: she nonchalantly dismisses RV wives as "all needing mansions on wheels" or being afraid to dry camp and preferring to stay in RV parks with hookups. Nobody is offended when she says it. I should be so lucky.

I probably wouldn't be writing any of this if an ad during the Super Bowl hadn't outraged me. Yes, outraged -- somebody who isn't a part of TV culture can retain the ability to be outraged at cultural depravity. The ad featured a half-nude "ho" giving a pitch for some kind of Valentine's Day goodie that men were supposed to remember to buy for their honeys. Her punchline went something like, "It's simple, guys. Give and ye shall receive. (wink, wink.)"

Try to imagine the male analogue of that trashy ad. I can't come up with a thing that is remotely comparable. When the "double standard" is to their detriment, it will earn you a scolding for being politically incorrect; or it might land you in jail. But if it's to their advantage, the double standard is not only permitted, but it is mandatory; and any man who refuses to pay obeisance to these spoiled overgrown schoolgirls is seen as a misogynist who hated his mother.

I'm still waiting for new spouse-abuse laws to be passed that punish a spouse for shrewish nagging, crying (to get his/her way), and withholding sex.

But I let all this go. Next time I want to discuss how Venus and Aphrodite get in the way of choosing lifestyle alternatives.

The True Colors of a Flower

2012-02-13T06:50:00.001-07:00

Small flowers are popping up everywhere right now in the Sonoran Desert, courtesy of the rain last November and December, presumably. Nothing seemed extreme when I took this photograph, but now I have to wonder whether the camera was malfunctioning, perhaps because I was aiming too close to the sun. No, the camera seems OK. The backlighting is bringing out the yellow in the desertflower that ordinarily is not noticeable.

It's strange that our notion about "color" in nature is usually aimed at reflective colors rather than transmitted colors. We hardly ever think about it. This suggests some idea of wider applicability. But what is it?

Fred Reed Rocks!

2012-02-12T07:55:00.000-07:00

Fred Reed is one of my favorite writers. I don't know how many venues he uses; LewRockwell dotcom is the one I'm used to using to read him. Yesterday he really outdid himself. It seemed worthy of a long quote:

I wonder whether something else is not involved. Today most of us live in profound isolation from the natural world. People in large cities can go for decades without seeing the stars. Should they drive through the countryside, it will be in a closed automobile with the air-conditioning running. On a trip to the beach, the sand will be overrun by hordes of people, half of them on whining jet skis.

We exist utterly in a manmade cocoon, as much as desert termites in their mud towers. This, I think, profoundly alters our inner landscapes. Live in the rolling hills around Austin, say, as they were before they were turned into suburbs, with the wind soughing through the empty expanse and low vegetation stretching into the distance, the stars hanging low and close in the night, and you get a sense of man’s smallness in the scheme of nature, of the transitoriness of life, a suspicion that there may perhaps be more things in heaven and earth. It makes for reflection of a sort that throughout history has turned toward the religious.

People no longer live in large wild settings, but amid malls and freeways. The ancients believed that the earth was the center of the cosmos. We believe that we are. There is little to suggest otherwise in manicured suburbs and cities where the sirens will be howling at all hours. It is an empty world that begets philosophically empty thinking.

Without the sense of being small in a large universe, and perhaps not even very important, the question arises, “Is this all there is?” and the answer appears to be “Yes.” Without the awe and wonder and mystery of a larger cosmos, existence reduces to blowing smog, competitive acquisition of consumer goods, and vapid television with laugh tracks. We focus on efficiency, production, and the material because they are all we have. It is not particularly satisfying, and so we are not particularly satisfied.

I suspect that the decline of religion stems less from the advance of scientific knowledge than from the difficulty of discerning the transcendent in a parking lot.

Why People Don't Like Political Essays

2012-02-10T06:44:00.000-07:00

It's so much easier to find political opinions on the internet these days, compared to the dead tree era. Remember how you could travel from one end of the country to the other and buy newspapers that featured the same six pundits on the editorial page? But even though there are more choices today, dualism gets in the way of enjoying political essays. You're either on my side or the other side, Good versus Evil, left versus right, big government versus small, blue versus red states, etc.

That's why the ideal political essay should try to stay away from this trap. It should reach out to opinions and values that aren't necessarily "political" in the normal sense of the word.

Besides avoiding simplistic and divisive dualisms, we should also avoid excessive consistency and predictability. For instance Eric Peters writes about automobile regulations from a libertarian point of view. At times I agree with him; at other times, he irritates me with his gearhead culture. Libertarian purists don't believe in speed limits, for instance. But what matters is the inconsistency in my reactions to him; it's what makes reading his essays beneficial to me.

Consider the surprising accord between pols on both sides of the pond in hitting Iran with sanctions. What a contrast that is with the disaccord during the buildup to the Iraq War in the early Aughts. Regardless of where you fit on the dualistic spectrum you might look at this surprising accord and think, "Something's fishy. They're probably both up to No Good."

And they probably are. It's not surprising that the USA-Israel Axis is bucking for a new war that will extend or protect Axis domination of the Mideast. What else is new?! But why would Europe ally itself with the Axis this time around?

The likely answer is that this is the price of an insurance policy: a bailout of Europe by the American taxpayers, ministered by their great public servant, Ben Bernanke. It astonishes me to find this explanation so overlooked in the media.

If this speculation is incorrect it is at least the right kind of effort. We need to laugh off official stories. Instead of rehashing the issue du jour we need to back up a step and ask what the assumptions are. Political discussions are likely to be useful only if they try to pull the curtain back from the little man who is operating the controls over the big phony projection of the Wizard of Oz.

Capturing the Perfect Cactus Photo Cliche

2012-02-09T07:42:00.001-07:00

Somewhere and somehow I got a photo cliche into my head: a Gila woodpecker or a cactus wren or a curved bill thrasher sticking its head out of a cactus lacuna. These rascals are always interrupting my bike rides by tempting me with the expectation of capturing this photo cliche. But as I approach, they skedaddle.

Phainopeplas are not rare around here. What I liked about this next guy is the geometry of the ocotillo stalks that he chose to frame his portrait with:

And then there is the bird with the sexiest curves of all, the curved bill thrasher:

The Music of the Night, II

2012-02-06T14:14:00.000-07:00

Based on a comment on the last post, perhaps I overemphasized how much noise an RVer has to put up with. It's hard to fairly partition the blame (for poor sleeping) between old age, the Early Bedtime Syndrome, the RV lifestyle, or boondocking, since all of these factors overlap. But for today it doesn't matter which factor is more important; it only matters that poor sleeping -- whatever the cause -- can be mitigated with the right music.

Most people struggling to sleep learn that the worst approach is to lie there concentrating on trying to sleep. Totally self defeating. The mind needs to be kept busy, relaxed, and ultimately tired of it all.

The other day I was watching the audition tape of the female lead for a recent movie version of Madame Butterfly. My gosh, how does a human being learn to do something like that? Emoting, bleeding, and practically dying in front of the camera, followed by instantly relaxing when the audition was over. This was proof -- not that any was really needed -- that listening to Puccini heroines swell and flourish in their death-swoons is not the best music for relaxing at night.

Isn't it also a good bet that the female voice, regardless of the musical genre, is too affective to be effective as a sleeping pill? There might be exceptions. In olden times many of us heard our mothers hum lullabies to us in the cradle. (Do they still do things like that?) I have found that Enya and her music make a good sleeping pill.

Long ago I expostulated on the superiority of the female voice to the male, and was surprised by the opposition in the readership. In either case, if a person does find the male voice unaffective and uninteresting, why not try to use this to advantage? For me, Willie Nelson is easy to sleep to. More generally, shouldn't we see this as a chance to turn lemons into lemonade?

The world is full of music that we pay little attention to because we find it lackluster. In fact that's the usual case. Only a bit of the world's music can cause chills to go up and down our spine, and most of it was written by Puccini, Bernard Herrmann, Ennio Morricone, John Barry, and a few others. If we find the tiny fraction of that mountain of lackluster music that is somniferous and soporific, then we have scored a huge victory at little cost.

After writing off opera as a soporific, let's consider instrumental classical music. Instantly we hit roadblocks: Mozart is too sprightly, and Beethoven is too earnest and intense. In fact symphonic music in general is terrible as a soporific: one moment three woodwinds are quietly chirping; a couple seconds later a fumarole of 130 instruments erupts. Not what we want.

In fact, we have arrived at the unpleasant truth that, for sleeptime, musical quality counts less than the music's qualities as sound. During the day a music lover might pine for lush melodies; but overnight, melodies need not be affective. A certain neutrality is better. What you need is evenness of sound volume.

You'd think that New Age music would be the ultimate musical sleeping pill, but not if that means dreamy, musical Valium. Slow moving music doesn't relax me at all. To make things worse this genre sometimes contains "sound recordings of nature". How can I go to sleep if I'm annoyed with myself for having wasted good money on the maritime mooing of whales or the squawks of seagulls shitting on a beach?

On top of that they sometimes put heavy bass tracks on top of that dreamy New Age drivel. It makes no sense musically, but a great deal of cents, marketing-wise. "See here, Mr. Arkenstone," says the marketing chief at Narada, "Sales are good with white, menopausal women taking yoga lessons after work. But we need to reach a wider audience."

Consider jazz. It's an amorphous category. Let's define it as what you get when real music is subjected to hydraulic frakking, thereby producing a moving slurry of musical pebbles, unconnected by melody. During the day I don't care for jazz but since melody is not so important at night, and perhaps even a negative, maybe jazz is worth a second look.

The jazz that might work best could be described as "easy listening" jazz; yes, I know that conjures up the image of moony-and-swoony, low bandwidth versions of easy-to-recognize lounge standards. But recognizability must be avoided.

Enough of these polemics! Time to discuss what works splendidly. Solo piano music, a la George Winston. It has the all-important property of evenness of sound volume. It isn't recognizable as a ditty or tune, but it isn't cacophonous noise either. Comparing it to sound instead of to music, solo piano music tends to sound like a mountain stream. The relatively fast tempo is most helpful, unless the pianist gets carried away with rubato. The nocturnal and somnolent brain is a funny thing: it hears the nimble tempo and becomes tired just imagining keeping up with it. Ironically, that same brain would be able to keep up with slower music, and thus be kept awake.

Recently I became familiar with mp3.com, Amazon's bargain basement. It has quite a bit of free music to download, from lesser known artists usually. Sometimes the freebies are from well known artists, but why does that matter? There are several reasons why any artist would want to hand out free candy as a loss leader. Between these freebies and CDs at the public library, my Eine Kleine uberNachtMusic playlist is now four hours long.

If a peaceful night weren't precious enough, consider that the speakers, fed from your mp3 player, are only draining a half an amp from the RV battery (plus the parasitic draw of the inverter). If you follow a commenter's advice about noise-cancelling earbuds, you drain zero amps from your RV battery since you can turn off the inverter.

The Music of the Night

2012-02-04T07:41:00.000-07:00

Or, Eine Kleine (uber)NachtMusik for Kampers.

Most of what you can read about RV travel is just promotionalism, even when it's a blogger who is not being paid to sell anything. Why this is so is the subject of another essay. Today I merely want talk about a challenging reality of RV life. (Wannabees will want to push the "channel" button now; this is not the "RV Dream" channel.)

It's a brutal truth -- and most truths are brutal -- that sleeping on top of noise is something that an RVer has to get good at. This is probably more difficult for an urban boondocker, all in all, than for an urban RV park camper, and it's worse the older you get.

I've been advised to use silicone ear plugs -- not those useless yellow foam things that won't even stay in the ears. I bought some, but haven't tried them yet. In the summer it helps to run a vent fan, and not just for ventilation of course! I used to generate "semi-white noise" by running my satellite radio at night, but didn't like any of the music stations, and the news programs had as many commercials as television.

Then I switched over to DVD movies as my white noise generator of choice. Movies do put you to sleep, but since televisions get larger every year you can hardly avoid sucking down 4 amps (DC) or more, which is more battery drain than most dry campers want at night.

The biggest problem with movies is that the eyes shut easily, long before the ears and brain do. Movies have scary sound effects, suspenseful "something is about to happen" music, and sudden changes in sound volume. Something more relaxing and less disruptive is desirable.

For some reason I had not been fully utilizing an mp3 player. It would be nice if you could pair it with anti-noise headphones, but wouldn't that limit you to sleeping on your back? It's easy to send the mp3 signal to small "computer" speakers or a docking station that uses only a half amp DC.

Next time I'll discuss the success I've had with this experiment, and the pro-s and con-s of different musical genres.

Home Improvement, Gila Woodpecker-style

2012-02-03T11:17:00.001-07:00

Sometimes you can hear his "hammer" frantically working on his "house". But I've never caught the little rascal in the act. Here is as close as I've gotten to seeing him crawl into his residence.

Sunset Without Sadness

2012-02-01T19:53:00.000-07:00

You needn't have too scary of a misadventure outdoors to develop a sudden interest in the "wilderness survival" genre. It's an interesting sub-cult. These books emphasize how deceptively dangerous it is to go out for a sunset walk in the desert, alone. "But it's just a nice stroll," the victim says, "to take some pretty sunset pictures." What happens to somebody who twists an ankle or runs out of light and gets lost when the sun goes down in the winter desert and the temperature plummets?

In contrast, the morning misadventurer has all day to get rescued by a motorized or foot-powered passer-by. We should all be as lucky as some people, who have a trail-chewing spouse to share their outings with. Those who go adventuring with dogs should not be so naive as to think that Lassie will really run back to get help when that blockhead Timmy (once again) falls into a well.

In reality the dog will just be one more worry, as I found out the only time I really got into danger on a mountain bike ride, on a slope above St. George, UT. Suffice it to say that the biggest causes of that near-fiasco were starting atypically late in the day and attempting an unfamiliar loop route instead of my typical out-and-back. After that I banned serious outings late in the day.

And that is why something really clicked when I read that evil post (grin), praising sunset outings at the expense of morning outings: the only way to really defeat the Early Bedtime Syndrome was to rescind the ban on outings at sunset. More than anything else, this cursed Syndrome stands in the way of making the RV boondocking lifestyle better than it already is. Of course a person must be flexible with other things such as showering time, house cleaning, evening meals, etc.

How can you have it both ways? How can you get the psychological and physiological boost that keeps you happy in the evenings, rather than grouchy or already in bed, without paying an inordinate price in personal safety?

The trick is to distinguish a routine from an adventure, at sunset. Exercise and observe, but don't explore or discover. Use a familiar route; let it be along a dirt road that has an occasional passerby; and avoid loop routes, new routes, or solitary trails away from the cellphone signal. (My gosh, I never noticed until I edited this post that "routine" and "route" have the same etymology.)

This is an important new phase in my lifestyle and I'm so glad my little poodle is still around to be a part of it. And wouldn't you know it, sunset is his favorite time of the day to be active. He helps in practical terms too, since his trailer is a good place for emergency supplies:

Maybe this solution seems obvious to the reader. It's easy to start off in the right frame of mind, but complacency and overconfidence grow as endorphins flow. Also a liberated lifestyle resists the degradation of routines. Fresh adventure has become an integral part of its self-identity. But in this particular case of sunset outings, routines should be tolerated for the sake of safety, in order to reap significant benefits.

Battling the Early Bedtime Syndrome

2012-01-31T16:26:00.000-07:00

Going to bed too early can destroy the quality of a night's sleep for some of us. Sleep is a big part of life, so this problem can't be laughed off as a small annoyance. It probably afflicts RV boondockers worse than other lifestyles, since using fewer lights and gadgets tends to shut a person down at night. The Early Bedtime Syndrome is a nexus for several lifestyle issues.

An RV friend, 15 years older than me, once said that he went to bed at 8 pm, and "why not?; it was perfectly natural with the early sunsets in winter". The trouble with that argument is that it's also natural to wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning.

Going to bed too early when camping in town is a dreadful mess, since stores and traffic are still roaring late into the evening, and since you hear everything in an RV.

How did this problem get started in the first place? Blame success. Traffic, wind, dry heat, monsoonal thunderstorms, and wildlife viewing are all good reasons why mornings are drastically better than afternoons for outdoor excursions. As an outdoorsy RVer I learned to make an art out of enjoying morning, years ago. And it worked beautifully, too many days to count. In fact it gradually became an integral part of my lifestyle and self-identity.

That's where the good news ends. After waking up from a brief semi-conscious siesta, my day went downhill all afternoon. By 8 pm I was frustrated, bored, and grouchy. When going to bed early I was already looking forward to starting the next day early in the morning, and as an optimist.

Since I'd showered by noon the dogs never got the serious romp near sunset that most crepuscular animals want. But something clicked when I read a post by one of the blogosphere's most notorious teachers of False Doctrines: bibliophilia, campground sybaritism, iShackle iDolatry, and if that's not bad enough, inappropriate wardrobes.

But there was another reason for not being outdoorsy at sunset: I didn't want to have an emergency as darkness came on! It matters. More next time.

BREAKING NEWS! After staying up to motorhome midnight, or even beyond, for five consecutive nights, I awoke this morning at 0700. It was light out and I was still asleep. It's been years...

Mining Engineer Qualifying Exam

2012-01-30T08:06:00.000-07:00

For 10 points answer the following question on today's pop quiz. Theses photo were taken in southern Arizona, somewhere near Ajo.

If you were going to open up a mine here, what kind of mine would it be?:

Anthracite coal.
Gold.
Athabascan tar sand petroleum.
Cobre, copper.
Garlic.

The Garrulous Grackle?

2012-01-29T08:57:00.000-07:00

During one of our quotidian rides to the bakery and coffee shop, these noisy birds caught my attention. So did their silhouette. Subscription prices and advertising income are a bit low for this blog, so I can't keep a paid birder on staff. If anybody has a guesses about what kind of birds they are, please speak up.

The garrulity of birds is always fun to capture "on film". It makes them look more sentient and intelligent. It's also satisfying to use the camera to invoke the feel of other senses, such as sound in this case.

A Tale of Two Lifestyles

2012-01-28T07:19:00.001-07:00

Recently I had visitors from Arizona's Ant Hill #2, Tucson, who I was supposed to coach on the RV lifestyle. (They had a rental RV and were considering buying one.) I did a poor job of it despite being well qualified for the job.

Their main concern was in assessing the comfort and practicality of their mid-sized Class C motorhome. How can an experienced camper be useful when the other person's basic philosophical orientation is wrong? (I'm still searching for that wonderful quote from Aristotle about the tiniest mistake at the beginning of a project having the largest consequences.)

For instance, they thought that living in an RV was supposed to be just like living in a little house. The tiniest adjustments to their daily habits were purely negative aspects of RVing to them: partial proof their experiment had failed.

Certainly RV living is similar to house living, in ways. But not identical. The difference is subtle but important. They just don't get it: RVing has pretty much the same comforts as a house, but only after you work at it; and that has the effect of making you consciously enjoy those comforts. Eight units of consciously-enjoyed comfort add more pleasure to your life than eighty units of comfort taken for granted.

There is so much phoniness in the conventional middle-class notion of pragmatism. Their worship of comfort leads to hollow victories. Competitive status-seeking poisons everything they do. But a general sermon on this topic is best left to a book. My style is the short essay, the philosophical vignette.

Coffee Girl and I were coming back to camp from a long walk in the Sonoran Desert when I saw an unusual white object on the rocks just behind my campsite.

Since a pickup was parked nearby, I thought the white object was somebody's tee-shirt or windbreaker. But it wasn't. It was the white breast of a raptor that was just too big to be real. My gawd I just had to get a photo of this magnificent beast, whatever it was. I tried to be as stealthy as possible in photographing it. In the next photo I was "hiding" between two saguaro cacti. Raptors usually show an amused look on their face at this point in the "hunt", as if to say, "What sort of nonsense is this? Who does this impudent wingless two-legger think he's fooling!"

As it turned out, the mystery bird was just a red-tailed hawk of the type I've seen before.

After some amateurish imitations of ravens or owls I finally annoyed him enough to fly off.

I got so nervous trying to get that photo that I moved the camera too much and it's a little blurry. Well, my bubble was now burst. But with enough endorphins in the bloodstream it was easy to be a good sport about it. It was still delightful to see that big, white, raptor chest, warming itself in the morning sun. How bold and brazen he was!

But how could I explain to my friends from the ant hill the value of this experience? So I saw a hawk; big deal. Back in Ant Hill #2 they could drive (through 35 traffic lights) to a famous desert wildlife museum and see dozens of interesting animals (looking bored in their cages). There's an admission price and a busy parking lot at the museum -- proof that it has value. So what (!) if my encounter with the hawk was serendipitous and right outside my bedroom? Its specialness was important only to me. There was no money changing hands. From their point of view value and money-price are the same thing.

Or they could smash and bash their way through late rush-hour traffic to an evening lecture about raptors, by a famous wildlife expert at the university. Even if the value of that lecture didn't come from a monetary charge, the gravitas and dignity of the occasion would be established by the wine and brie served before the lecture, and by the sheer size of its well-educated audience.

The weekend with my visitors from the ant hill really brought out something that I barely notice most of the time: that a camper derives value from subjective experiences. He cares for it -- whatever 'it' is -- and consciously notices it, suffers its absence, and revels in its presence. He puts 'it' to use. He creates value just by effort and conscious caring, rather than by rushing around town to buy crap or using a crowd of people to establish value. The camper is simultaneously radically-subjective and radically-objective with the idea of value.

The cynical reader might say, "Well, Boonie, it's all well and good that you are enjoying your own little mental playground out there in the desert. But don't most insane people function that way?" In order to "prove" their anthill is more sane than me, they need only say that more people agree with their point of view. Naturally King Number determines all.

One of the modern classics is the book by Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences. From chapter 2:

The average man of the present age has a metaphysic in the form of a conception known as "progress"...
But since his metaphysic calls only for magnitude and number, since it is becoming without a goal, it is not a source of distinctions of value. It is a system of quantitative comparison.

The Moral Equivalent of Quartzsite

2012-01-25T11:47:00.000-07:00

A recent commenter was profoundly correct when he praised camaraderie as the best reason for going to that gawd-awful mess at Quartzsite in January. Recently I had a chance to go for a short, pleasant walk in the desert with three bloggers and their dogs, "somewhere in the Ajo" area. The Bayfield Bunch, Ed Frey, and I weren't doing anything difficult; it could be done almost any day. But that's just the thing. I can't remember doing anything like this before with other RVers!

But why? Let's avoid my standard whine about RV culture and stick to the subject of what gets in the way of boondockers socializing with each other more. One possibility is the stereotypical image of RV boondockers as solitude-seekers: latter day Henry David Thoreaus or St. Simeon Stylites. I remember reading Walden, carefully, and was a bit scandalized to learn that Thoreau had to put up with a railroad track nearby. He also had neighbors and visited with them occasionally. There is a popular misconception that Thoreau was a dedicated hermit. But he didn't go to Walden for the sake of solitude per se; he went, as he said, to "live deliberately," which is quite a different thing.

The other part of the boondocker stereotype is that they are impoverished, socially maladjusted, and sour. They hate other people and want to be left alone. Granted, there are half-cracked old guys boondocking in the winter desert and summer forests that you should avoid. They usually habitate in a rusted-out van, wear camouflage clothing, listen to talk radio all day, and have a vicious cur that snarls at anyone who gets within a quarter mile of their hovel. But when another boondocker looks lucid and un-cracked, it is a shame to be estranged from them. It's not as if every unit of human conversation comes at the expense of a unit of holy communing with "nature." Human beings are part of nature too.

Perhaps if boondockers were more sociable, a pent-up demand for human contact wouldn't slowly develop over the course of a year until it finally gets so bad they must do something desperate to overcome it, like go to Quartzsite.

The Churchill and "Good War" Cults

2012-01-23T08:02:00.000-07:00

The favorite war of most Americans is World War II. In fact it is part of their mental furniture that World War II was the Good War fought by the Greatest Generation; that it was Churchill's finest hour and that He was the man of the century; that Hitler was the Devil incarnate; and that Stalin... well we won't talk about Stalin.

I just finished reading an excellent book by Patrick Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. Some people wouldn't consider reading the book because Buchanan was a speech writer for Nixon. That's too bad, because the book doesn't concern itself with partisan politics. Also, Buchanan writes clearly.

What a relief it was to find that the first 100 pages of this 400 page book were dedicated to the Great War, World War I. Any discussion of World War II that ignores WWI is seriously flawed. To a large extent they were the same war, interrupted by a 20 year armistice.

Let's take just one example from our standard World War II myth and morality fable: Hitler's grab of Czechoslovakia and Poland was proof positive that he intended to take over the world. If land grabs are so awful, what does that say of the USA and czarist Russia in the 1800s? What does it say of the British Empire? And what does it say of most Americans' favorite foreign country, Israel?

Any German or Austrian of Hitler's generation was used to the idea of "Czech-Slovakia" being part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Poland had been dominated by Prussia or Russia for centuries. Most historians acknowledge that Hitler didn't want war with Great Britain.

I won't comment on the validity of Buchanan's argument about how unnecessary the Western Front war was. What interests me is how mindlessly accepted the Good War morality tale is in the USA. Where is the healthy skepticism and free discussion? Why has there been so little mention of Churchill continuing the starvation blockade of Germany during the negotiation of the Versailles Treaty? We look at the war with no more balance and perspicuity than children in Baptist Sunday School learn about God and the Devil.

In case all of this sounds like water-under-the-bridge, keep in mind that every time there is an expansion in America's War on Terror, metaphors and the "lessons of history" are dragged up about Churchill, Hitler, the Holocaust, appeasement, etc. Every time the usual suspects are salivating over a new war, they need only show a television clip of Chamberlain waving his paper, after returning from the Munich conference about Czechoslovakia. Each new disaster starts with the leader of some Muslim country (that most Americans can't locate on a globe) being compared to Hitler.

Every American president of either party would see a good crisis going to waste unless he assumes mock-Churchillian poses in front of the television cameras. Regardless of which party you vote for, doesn't it seem healthy to have foreign policy discussions that are open and real, instead of on auto-pilot? It is time Americans stopped being slaves of the Good War morality fable.

To Motorhome Midnight...and Beyond

2012-01-20T06:34:00.001-07:00

Anybody who really expects to reach one of his Resolutions for a new year would probably be wise to choose something halfway achievable. Otherwise he will laugh it off by the middle of January. I was beginning to feel that way about my #1 goal for 2012: pushing the Sandman of the BLM desert back to 9 pm. Amongst RV boondockers 9 pm is the witching hour known as "motorhome midnight."

Legends have grown up around the winter campfires of desert tribesmen on Arizona BLM land about what lies on the other side; 901 pm has always been an 'undiscovered country from which none returns.' Doctrines of the post-9 pm world have never been universally agreed upon, but they usually offer the vague threat of a shadowy netherworld.

You can probably guess why this goal was chosen, not least of which is that it made me feel like I belonged in a nursing home. Old folks have a hard enough time sleeping through the night without sabotaging it by going to bed too early.

The first couple weeks saw no progress. At 745 pm I would start checking the time, while almost groaning with weariness. Then I would watch what seemed like a third of the movie, and check the time again: 752 pm. It was hopeless. When the sun goes down in the winter, I really would just as soon cave in.

The whole thing was like the beginning of the movie, The Right Stuff; there was a mystique about breaking the sound barrier in a jet plane. Some engineers said it couldn't be done; the plane would destabilize and crash. Even the most fearless pilots were intimidated; a few died trying to break it. And then Chuck Yeager walked into the movie...

The truth is that I had given up on this noble quest and was inventing excuses for defeat. Then a lucky break came from an unlikely source. The public library at Ajo renewed my Pima County (Tucson) library card, despite being a non-resident. A little thing like that can add a lot to the camping experience. It had a movie I hadn't seen in a long time: Billy Wilder's The Apartment, starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, and Fred MacMurray. Hollywood has had very few directors who produced "talky" movies -- that is, movies with interesting dialogue between intelligent adults. Virtually all directors are camera worshipers; a lot of good that does me when my eyes are closed.

With Wilder's help I achieved the impossible dream: I blasted through 9 pm and was still going strong at 930, when prudence dictated that I avoid hubris and consolidate my gains.

A Quartzsite Refuse-nik

2012-01-19T12:45:00.000-07:00

Near Quartzsite AZ a couple winters ago. A cynic might say that the big RV gathering in Quartzsite every January is a testament to herd-like behavior in human beings more than anything else. Still, it probably makes sense for any RVer to go there once, at least for a reason that might sound snide or facetious at first: the experience of Quartzsite will enhance your appreciation of camping somewhere -- anywhere -- else, in January.

After all aren't you always making a comparison of some kind when you appreciate the goodness or badness of any place? The comparison might be silent or implicit, but it's still there and it colors the whole situation. Your appreciation of anywhere-but-Quartzsite can be quite intense after experiencing that dreadful mess once.

The dogs and I had an especially good example of that a couple years ago. We boondocked a few dozen miles east of Quartzsite, with world-class hiking and scenery, a good wireless internet signal, and complete privacy. We were tucked in pretty close to a small "sky island", one of those small mountain ranges that rises abruptly from the flat desert plain. There is something personal and intimate about having your own little mountain range. It was small enough to mountain bike around in one day.

Compared to the noise and congestion over at Quartzsite a few miles to the west, this place makes you feel like a don of the Spanish West or a gringo cattle baron of the late 1800s.

A large, stand-alone Rock, about 500 feet tall, stands in our front yard. It had a noble look.

Naturally our first long hike was clockwise 'round the rock. Every few minutes the rock's shape morphed into something unrecognizable. You begin to doubt if you will ever be able to get completely around some "thing" if the thing keeps changing.

Coming around the back I kept choosing the main dry wash as we climbed to a saddle. Then we could drop into the watershed of yesterday's hike and walk a dry wash right back to the trailer. Although the watershed of each dry wash was only a few acres, they were deep, with dry waterfalls and eroded banks. The dry waterfalls were worn as smooth as children's playground equipment.

Saddles are great fun to reach. In just a few steps you realize you've come to a new watershed, a new viewscape, and in a humble way a new chapter in your life. But that didn't happen here. The dry washes of the two, oppositely-draining watersheds mingled in an interdigitated fashion. At times it all seemed topologically impossible. I probably walked for a minute on the far side of the saddle before realizing it.

Songbird of the Sonoran Desert

2012-01-18T08:25:00.000-07:00

It's been a couple years since I've had a chance to enjoy the musical talent of the curved bill thrasher. And if that's not enough, it's quite the looker too, with that bill and orange eyes. What luck it was to maneuver a shadow into the background: the primal satisfaction of a successful hunt and kill.

Down with the Ship?

2012-01-16T10:50:00.000-07:00

Are we supposed to be shocked or are we supposed to giggle about the "charges" that the Italian captain of the wrecked cruise ship was unmanly enough to get into a lifeboat with other passengers instead of going down with the ship? From one point of view this storyline is charming and nostalgic. It conjures up chivalrous images of an era long-gone, when a gentleman was expected to give up his life preserver and place on the lifeboat to a lady and her two small children.

It's hard to believe that modern culture still believes in romantic atavisms like a captain being the last off his ship. Perhaps the Media is just desperate for a story: disasters have a way of becoming yesterday's news so quickly; but scandals and controversies can be milked for weeks or months.

Imagine you were on that ship as it began listing. Shouldn't your behavior mirror the norms of society in general? For decades the Federal government has been running a Ponzi scheme regarding housing, diplomas, and senior medical care. Since 2008, trillions of dollars of debt has been taken on. Nobody asks if it is fundamentally immoral to dump these obligations on the younger generation. Therefore, it is perfectly sensible for an aging baby-boomer, who has already lived most of his life, to shove a child out of the way so that the boomer can get the last seat on the lifeboat.

And if a male boomer considers giving up his seat to a young mother, well, what could be more sexist and politically incorrect than that! He should be more up-to-date: just shove her out of the way.

This Italian sea captain on the cruise liner simply did literally what central bankers, megabankers, and politicians have done metaphorically to their countries' economies. But none of them will lose their jobs, their government pensions, or their million dollar bonuses. We are told that's the way it must be, in order for large complex organizations not to lose Top Talent.

Well, the cruise liner corporation needs to hold on to its Top Talent, too. And yet everybody is out to lynch the Italian sea captain. I'm actually starting to feel sorry for the guy.

Gila Woodpecker?

2012-01-14T12:36:00.002-07:00

Perhaps I'll have a chance to enjoy one of the bird preserves in Arizona before I take flight in April. Until then there will be only occasional opportunities. In my current campsite in the Sonoran desert I can hear a pretty good symphony in the morning. How nice that is compared to the 7 and 24 noise pollution of camping in a city. It's more fun to hear than see them. (Some campers couldn't be bothered by any of this; they'd have to wake up in the morning-- grin.)

I've warned readers that -- unlike my opinions on sex, politics, and religion -- my bird identifications are prone to error. But I think this little devil is a Gila woodpecker:

Morning Glory

2012-01-11T07:03:00.000-07:00

There are some oddities in life that I'm happy not to explain: for instance, a perfect morning. How impoverished life would be without mornings! And yet there are people who sleep through them. I'm experiencing day after day of morning perfection while camping in the Sonoran desert outside Ajo. It's a miracle that six toy-haulers don't move in next to me, so I'd better enjoy this while I can.

There is nothing better in this old world of ours than a mountain bike ride to town for a good cup of joe and a muffin at a high-quality bakery, especially when the dirt road is virtually noise-mobile free. When I leave at just the right time, the air is still chilly, especially in the dips at arroyo crossings. Also, the sun hasn't yet cleared the small mountains. I need gloves but I deliberately leave them off to feel the contrast of cold fingers and sunlight that will explode any minute now.

Coffee Girl is leashed to my waist belt. Her attitude is different than when she frolics off-leash, chasing rabbits; here she acts like she has a serious job to do. How could a dog run in a straight line and keep away from the wheels? (It helps to adjust the leash to the right length; she must not get out in front of the bike because she needs to see the front wheel in her peripheral vision.)

Ahh goodie, there are Morning Glory muffins available today. I always eat outside, which is kind of a shame because I can't talk to the customers inside. But there is no air in there. Every third customer stops by outside and plays with Coffee Girl and gushes about how pretty and friendly she is. Here is where we hang out:

Mocking Religion on the Football Field

2012-01-09T11:38:00.000-07:00

One needn't be religious to appreciate the importance of the religious imagination to history and to an individual's mental ecology. We have a capability and tendency to construct an internal mental world which is more congenial than the objective world. This also explains the importance of poetry, comedy, sentimentalism, romanticism, or art in general. Wishful thinking is a big part of what we are. It can be a constructive thing if managed carefully.

So regardless of your religious or atheistic views, how do you feel about Tebow and other athletes pointing towards heaven or publicly praying at sporting events? I find it distasteful. How could a so-called religious person trivialize his own Faith like that?

Imagine some parents praying and carrying on like fools before their son's pee-wee hockey team hits the ice. Did it ever occur to them that somebody on the opposite team has the same faith as they do? If so, whose team is the Deity, the Author of the Universe, the Architect of the Cosmos, supposed to wave his pom-poms for?

As degrading as this type of behavior is to people's professed Faith, it is easy to explain: God and Country. God is behind our Army. The Devil sticks for the Enemy. Despite building a political-economic structure based on Permanent War, some Americans still need the outlet of Mock War, sports, to give them an adequate chance to make idiots of themselves.

Managing Comfort

2012-01-08T05:13:00.000-07:00

Ajo, AZ. This has been a remarkable autumn and early winter. The weather didn't become nice and snowbird-friendly until late December. Since then it has been postcard-perfect. It was fun to enjoy calm, sunny, and warm days. Of course a yellow light starts blinking in the back of my head when I start to feel comfortable. You can't help but feel that you are becoming soft.

This morning a cold wind is blowing. How are the nearby tent campers liking this? Seeing them reminds me how much I disliked tent camping way back when, and how valuable it is to have a hard-walled box to hide from cold wind. Talking to these tent campers yesterday, and visiting with my house-bound friends a couple days ago, I am reminded how carefully comfort-and-discomfort must be managed in order to make life both sensible and tasty.

To the human animal, comfort is delightful prey that becomes a boring meal. The trick with comfort is learning how to consciously experience it. The best way I know of is to stay on the contested boundary of discomfort and comfort. The right sort of camping can help a person experience that.

It's best to be frugal enough to avoid getting suckered into automatic comfort, gotten by high fixed costs and wasteful overhead. In a house, you just throw a switch, dial in the thermostat, and pay outrageous sums of money for it all, and then you feel nothing (about the comfort per se). Working all through your healthy adulthood in some frustrating or disappointing job to gain the "good things of life" and then feeling nothing when you get them -- that's a real definition of progress for you.

A Lost Love in Mining Town Funkiness

2012-01-06T11:46:00.000-07:00

I hope to never outgrow an eyelash-fluttering susceptibility to dilapidated or funky buildings as seen in mining and desert rat towns. One of the best was a decaying stucco dump next to the bakery in Ajo. The friendly baker told me that it had been razed because it was 'ugly, dilapidated, and unsafe'. Yea well, So What, lady.

Who wouldn't love ocotillo-reinforced adobe? Ugly indeed! (But say one word in criticism of the bourgeois mindset that wants to destroy beauty, and readers will dismiss the blogger as a "cynical curmudgeon.")

Fortunately I've been finding some new dumps to replace this lost love. This one is certainly unique:

I didn't even know that corrugated tubes for under-road culverts came that big. Hopefully they've got some insulation in there! Perhaps the local building codes and ordinances limit culvert-housing to flat lots.

Discontented Canadians near the Border

2012-01-05T10:10:00.000-07:00

In Ajo the other day I noticed a nice-sized fifth-wheel (small but practical) and I complimented the owners on it. As it turned out, they were from British Columbia. One thing that you notice on the Snowbird Trail is a type of prejudice that could be called "longitudinalism". People migrate as efficiently south-ish as possible, with little veering to the east or west. Some of this is to save fuel, but much of it is geographical and cultural affinity. There are cultural differences between the Left Coast and the so-called Hinterlands or Fly-over states. From the point of view of the former, the Great Lakes and the Texas coast are still isolated in the hinterlands, despite being accessible to ocean-going vessels.

But the prejudice works in both directions. For instance, "BC" is not my favorite province. Too many trees. In the winter most of the Canadian ex-pats in Mexico are from BC. They are stereotypical left-wingers, whose praise of Mexican culture really comes down to the fact that Mexicans aren't Americans.

But the BC couple in Ajo was headed into the hinterlands of Mexico, the high plateau in the center, away from the warm air and palm trees on the coast. The husband loved getting away from the over-regulation and micro-management of Canada. (I used to think of Canada as being 20% worse than the USA in this regard, but 9-11 might have made the USA worse.)

After he vented on this topic awhile I confessed to him that I had RVed in Canada only once, and had always felt on the edge of getting in trouble with common things, such as parking, camping, driving, throwing a little bag of trash away, or walking my dog. Imagine a sign telling you that dogs must be on a leash no longer than 1.82 meters, but my non-metric dog leash turned out to be 0.008804 meters too long, since it's a 6 foot leash intended to comply with the latest California nanny-state regulations. It wouldn't have surprised me to see Sergeant Preston jump out from behind a spruce or birch tree, whip out a laser-based measuring tape, and give me a stiff fine.

I never went back to that country, and always felt bad about that. Had I practiced "confirmation bias" in Canada? That is, had I carried a prejudice into the country and then consciously noticed only those things that confirmed my already-formed opinion? Perhaps. But my recent conversation with the fellow from BC shows that some people in Canada feel the same way.

Mystery Truck

2012-01-03T05:45:00.000-07:00

Life has become a social whirl for the dogs and me here in Ajo, AZ. We had a reunion with Ed Frey and the new gal in his life, Patches. I was a bit nervous about my Coffee Girl (kelpie) meeting a muscular American Staffordshire bull terrier, but it went OK after the first couple minutes. Soon we were walking off leash on a small patch of BLM land near town. It is a rare treat for me to become acquainted with an RVer who likes long walks, especially with a dog. I predict great success between Ed and Patches.

Ed has an interesting and practical RV lifestyle. He travels full-time in a moderate-sized Class C motorhome, with no small-towed-car behind it. He'll live in an RV park for one month, pay a reasonable monthly rate, and then move on. For entertainment and exercise, he is a walker, not a hiker; he simply begins walking from his own front door. A dog along will make his walks much more fun.

Then I went on a couple hikes with an old RV friend who dropped out to become a townie in Tucson. He met a gal (the two-legged kind) in the huge hiking club there. In the summer they like to volunteer at national parks or monuments, but it was always hard to find housing since the park service has such an easy time getting volunteers who have their own RVs. After fighting the system for a couple years, they are considering getting a Class C motorhome, so they were renting one for this weekend to get a feel for it.

It might amuse the reader to imagine ol' Boonie hosting a couple RV newbies, and answering all their questions. I tried to be helpful rather than impatient, but I'm sure they heard a lot of "No, that's not the way to think about it" from my mouth.

On our hike around Ajo Peak we encountered this weird old truck.

It was on a private patch of land. The oddest thing was that the tires were pumped up. Surely this ol' thing couldn't still be used?

One thing for sure is that the warm sunny weather wore Coffee Girl out. But she was happy about it:

2012 Resolution: Radical Consumerism

2012-01-01T14:29:00.000-07:00

Recently I got my mountain bike serviced in Phoenix. When picking it up I walked into the wrenching end of the shop and spoke to the young mechanic. He seemed proud of improvising on the bracket, thus relieving me of staying in the Phoenix area for a long time while waiting for a special order to come in. I was happy to stand there and be his appreciative audience.

He also installed a new chain. They don't last as long as they used to, in part because they are narrower and thinner and cocked at weird angles to accommodate the 10 (!) gears in the back; with the 3 in the front, it makes for a 30 speed bike. We commiserated about faster wear and tear, and more finicky adjustments.

No sooner did 30-speed bicycles become obligatory for any serious cyclist than a hot new trend arose: single speed bikes with no derailleurs whatsoever. Only really tough, cool guys bought these, and it was for practical reasons, if you were to listen to them. How and why did consumers allow themselves to get sucked into extraneous expenses and hassles, all for the sake of some phony progress?!

Later I was at a Walmart. Both their stores and their website are starting to lower the number of regular DVD movies available. They are trying to railroad the saps (aka, the customers) into buying more expensive blu-ray players and disks. I hope they fail; maybe we'll know by the end of 2012.

These are only two examples of the same process that eats up a human life. We are just members of an anonymous tribe/horde of mindless consumers who are swept along by whatever trend is supposed to be hot. Why don't we get angry about it and resist? Whose money is it, anyway?!

As we look forward to 2012, peering into the future a little bit, let's be hopeful that the consumers (and voters) will start to rebel.

Dark Shadows in the Desert

2011-12-29T13:52:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I try to imagine the world of the Positive Thinker, as the term is typically used in popular culture as defined by squishy, trendy social science and by boob toob commercials. How bland and sugary it must be!

Although I mock dualistic religions and political philosophies on this blog, the truth is that I love dualisms aesthetically. Nature, like a movie, is no better than its villain. This winter I've been having fun imagining Malevolences looming over and threatening the landscape:

Unfortunately this buzz only lasted until I could glance at the cause:

The most exciting time to hike is early in the morning, when gaps in the sky island threaten you with Plutonian and diabolic cold and uncertainty.

The Moral Equivalent of Football

2011-12-26T06:14:00.000-07:00

Watching the glorious Green Bay Packers last night, I had some questions about how football should be interpreted. How far can we carry the analogy between football and war? How literally we can see it as mock war? The football team is an army, dominated by its commander-in-chief, its American Caesar, the quarterback. It has kicking (artillery), running backs (mobile armored divisions, or cavalry in the old days), and passing (an air force). No navy, though. The cheerleaders' job is to quicken the animal spirits in the fans, a job for which they are admirably, uhh, suited; their equivalents in the political and military arenas are the talking-heads in the media, whose job it is to promote the popularity of the war with the public.

There is a well-defined front in gridiron battle. It is symmetrical warfare. The team moves the ball into enemy territory. Getting through the goal posts of the enemy is like seizing a national capital. When fans pull the goal posts down after a victory, it is the equivalent of burning, raping, and pillaging the conquered enemy.

The team scores points by success at offense. It doesn't literally score any points for itself by success at defense. Of course you could say that preventing the enemy from getting points is the algebraic equivalent of scoring positive points for your own team, but somehow that's just not the same as literally and visibly scoring points in defense. I wonder if you can score positive points at defense in any sport?

Besides the absence of a navy, unless you count floats in the parade at half-time, the analogy breaks down in other ways. For one thing, the NFL season is laughably short: early September to the end of January. Why shouldn't it go on and on like a presidential campaign or a war in the Mid-East?

Football has an offensive team and a defensive team. In the political and military spheres we have a Department of Defense and a Department of Homeland Defense. Two departments of defense. Aren't we a bit naive and overconfident to try to get by in this dangerous world with no offensive military capabilities?

A breakdown in the analogy like that is bad enough, but football's greatest failing is that it asks fans to pay for it, whether they're at the stadium or at home on the couch. I don't know how patriotic Fox News viewers can tolerate this, but at least Fox network does its duty in rectifying this situation by carrying free broadcast NFL games every Sunday. The government should finance NFL football to make it free to the fans. (It does at the high school and collegiate levels.) Every American who takes God and Country and Football seriously should work to rectify this dreadful situation. Until then we must conclude that NFL football is un-American.

Better Than a Stick in the Eye

2011-12-25T06:48:00.002-07:00

It was so cold in Silver City NM that we only had one good birding year. Sensible birds go to Arizona in the winter, but not to dry lunar settings like where I am now. The best refuges are along creeks in southeastern Arizona. I miss photographing these rascals. Of course to do it right you need a five pound camera, a one-foot-long telephoto lens, and a tripod. You must also be willing to go where the birds are, rather than the other way around. So I'll never be a real birder. Still, it's fun to get what I can. It's remarkable how much variation there is in the color of red-tailed hawks.

Doubts about the Human Race in Phoenix

2011-12-24T08:58:00.007-07:00

People who aren't completely accustomed to airline travel sometimes feel affected by the big picture when they take off and leave the trivial earth-bound details behind, or rather, below. A calm perspicuity can set in at 35,000 feet. But at times perspicuity is troubling rather than calming.

In a famous scene in the classic film noir, The Third Man: Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles ride alone to the top of a Ferris Wheel type ride at an amusement park in post-World-War-II Vienna. The cynical and ego-centric Welles character stops the ride at its apogee where they can look down at small objects, people, crawling around on the surface of the earth a hundred feet below. He asks the Joseph Cotton character, 'Would he really mind if one of those ants stopped scurrying, because it died from the watered-down penicillin that Welles was smuggling in Vienna?'

It is thought-provoking, and yet troubling, to come in from a solitary camp in the desert and hit the outskirts of a monstrosity like Phoenix.

I choose a route that stays at the periphery where growth is most noticeable, as it is for trees. What a shame to see all that valuable agricultural land being turned into traffic-ensnarled highways, big box retailers and their even bigger parking lots, and lackluster housing subdivisions. The sense of loss was intensified since I had followed the Gila (HEE-lah) River down from its headlands in southwestern New Mexico, down to this remarkable floodplain called the Valley of the Sun.

At times like this I want to renounce my more-or-less libertarian political view and support a mandatory one-child policy, as in China. But such thoughts are soon pushed aside as being too ugly, as if the absence of such a program produces anything other than ugliness.

If you were to pull any of those frantic Christmas shoppers aside, and ask them why they are going through this madness, most individuals would smirk in agreement with you that the whole thing makes no sense. So then, why do they do it? The answer is of course 'because Everybody Else is and I must be like everybody else or I will be missing something'. Such is the control that the media has over the demos. And such is the folly of treating human individuals like they really are individuals, rather than as undifferentiated biological modules in an ant colony. If we renounce the idea that human Individuality has significance, then how do we justify Democracy?

A Cliff-Hanging Tail

2011-12-22T14:42:00.008-07:00

The sky islands of southern Arizona are great places to camp, hike, and mountain bike; thus we've returned to them, after three years off the road. We had a strange experience here, four winters ago. In fact I am looking out the window at the exact spot on the mountain, as I type.

It was just a couple months after the little poodle had been rescued above Book Cliffs near Grand Junction, CO. I've edited this oldie-but-goodie. Tonopah AZ...

Walking right from the RV's front door of our solitary boondocking site, we headed for the nearest mountain. These small mountain ranges can be quite photogenic; even better, they are finite: you can look at them from a variety of angles on one day. It was topped off with a cliff and caprock that almost made it look like a mesa. A large hole in that cliff had attracted my eye for days.

It got steeper as we approached the cliff, so much so that I had to scramble on all fours. At the foot of the cliff the little poodle froze in place, perhaps because he thought it was too steep or because his hiking boots were curtailing him a bit. Since I didn't want to baby him, Coffee Girl (the younger and larger dog) and I kept going to the hole in the cliff to see what it actually was. The walk was cold and dark in the shadow of the cliff.

But where was the little poodle? He was only a hundred yards away, so I wasn't too worried. But maybe I should find an easier way down for him. As we descended there was still no sign of him, despite my calling. Then I started blowing the whistle, which also failed.

By now I was getting worried. I shifted horizontally, back to his last location at the foot of cliff. Anxiety boiled into anger and panic by now. He was so close -- why didn't he just bark to help out! (And everybody thinks that a quiet dog is the ideal dog!) At least he could only go in one direction, since the cliff was vertical.

Something caught my peripheral view. It was on a small saddle of a rocky ridge: oh no, ghastly teddy bear chollas!

Then I saw a half dozen...what? Coffee Girl saw them at the same time. Off she ran, downhill at full speed, right through those horrible teddy bear cholla. She reached a saddle about 100 feet lower where five desert bighorn sheep huddled in a dense pack, apparently paralyzed as to what to do.

You seldom get a chance to see Ovis Canadensis nelsoni this close, so I fumbled with the camera while she did her puppyish best to harry them. They were not frightened by my voice since they were focused entirely on her. Apparently they were practiced in the art of defense against coyotes. Then they walked towards me with a close-packed, military precision. I couldn't believe they didn't see me!

Coffee Girl was so interested in the sheep that she forgot about the teddy bear cholla. Finally her luck ran out. Then she dutifully limped up the ridge to me, like a brave warrior, wounded in action. She had segments on all legs, which were easy to flick off with a comb. Her mouth was in pretty good shape, showing once again what a few minutes of dog saliva can do to cholla spines.

At any other time this would have been an interesting experience, but I wasn't in the mood. Where is that damned little fool of a poodle!? The worst thing about losing a dog is not knowing how to proceed. I decided to try to return to the exact spot where I last saw him. And there he was, at the foot of the cliff. He was motionless, except for the shivering. Had he even moved for the last thirty minutes? Once he got going he actually enjoyed glissading down the volcanic talus with me and Coffee Girl, who was enjoying the romp of her young life today.

I was furious with him for not barking to help me locate him long ago; but then we would have missed the desert bighorn sheep.

A Condensed View of a Rainy Desert

2011-12-19T19:08:00.012-07:00

As the modern Brownie camera keeps getting better, will the electronic camera industry be a victim of its own success? Customers could become jaded enough to expect a technological marvel for $99, and then just shrug at it, almost with indifference. In fact that day is already upon us: the camera I use for this blog is the Canon SX110, purchased three years ago. Its successor, the SX130 was on sale at Walmart and Target for $99, as a loss leader presumably.

Camera technology is good enough; it's only the photographer that needs improvement. (Oh sure, there are utilitarians and mindless rat-racers who can't get enough megapixels, but they are just kidding themselves.)

It's sad enough to see the marvelous results of the camera industry taken for granted, but what about the nuanced skills of photographers, themselves? Will their viewers learn to shrug with indifference at superb photographs since everybody has an excellent camera these days, and if that isn't good enough, then photoshop it to death with software. Can't anybody do that? How much fun would the sternly virtuous art of girl-watching be if every woman went in to the cosmetologist, plastic surgeon, and high-end clothing store and spend unconscionable amounts of time and money on her appearance? Yawn.

Perhaps that's why I was admiring the Nikon 1 camera the other day. Although digital bits and bytes have an inexorable tendency to become uninteresting commodities, other things such as polished metal, glass, and interchangeable lenses maintain a certain mystique.

The solution to this commoditization and devaluing of photography is to develop a different sensitivity to beauty; a wider appreciation of the little things that are out there everywhere, under foot. Basically I'm preaching the Granny J Principle. I miss her.

I walked to downtown Wickenburg the other day after a couple days of rains in the Sonoran desert. I'd underestimated how interesting little things can be after a rain; for instance, rain drops hang on palo verde twigs like water balloons clinging to a barbed wire fence. And I forgot my camera!

The next day Coffee Girl and I were out walking early in the morning. I saw bright, tiny glints of reflected sunlight hanging from a finely textured plant. It was delightful; they were like low-density Christmas tree lights despite a bright Arizona sky! But how could it be photographed?

And then another night of rain in the desert, followed by another morning walk. The smell of a rainy desert is so distinctive. The twigs are oddly black from the rain. Astonishingly, a carpet of high density grass is popping up from the decomposed granite "soil".

What a violent contrast there is between pendulous drops of rain and the gnarly spiked twigs that they hang from and yet shouldn't. Looking through the drop lets the hiker do what Lewis Carroll did with his Looking Glass. What would the Sonoran Desert look like if we could crawl into one of those drops, and pop out on the other side. What marvels might be found: centipedes and snakes, gila monsters and killer spiders. With enough imagination we could write it all up, and make it into a classic of children's books, except that nobody would believe it.

Potentially there was a whole new Sonoran Desert to imagine and then photograph. What kind of background would be best? Should the background be in focus or deliberately fuzzy; or should I just pretend that an out-of-focus background was my intention? (Would they buy that?) By now I was running around shaking with the camera. Let's see now, how do I adjust the aperture stop? Oh crap, maybe I should just put it in Auto mode and hope for the best!

O Woe, wouldn't Lewis Carroll have put an iconic saguaro cactus in the rain drop! Maybe next time.

Dancing on Christopher Hitchens's Grave

2011-12-18T07:23:00.003-07:00

Several years ago I skimmed Hitchens's God is Not Great. Disappointment, rather than disagreement, was the book's main effect on me. It is sophomoric for a modern intellectual to pose as Voltaire or Thomas Paine and rail against traditional religions. Why don't they show some real guts by taking on the conventional belief systems of the intelligentsia itself? These are well known, but seldom acknowledged and never criticized, by conventional intellectuals who want to stay popular within their own coteries. (They have to make a living after all, so they don't want to be on the receiving end of the subtle blacklisting that a Marxist or Green apostate would receive from an editor in the publishing industry or a reviewer at the New York Times.)

None of the obituaries that I've read about Hitchens really inspires me to read any of his books. But the threshold is far lower for magazine-length articles. A fair number of them are free and accessible at Salon.com. Indeed, it was refreshing to read him railing against the Liberal-Left's darling, Michael Moore, of whom he says: "It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery."

So far I've only scratched the surface. Hitchens might be the kind of writer that does me a bit of good as long as I agree to disagree with him 80% of the time.

The Next Life of Certain RV Bloggers

2011-12-15T16:26:00.011-07:00

It is very satisfying to rise to the challenge of walking in generic (non-national-park) deserts and finding things that interest you. You have to use every angle that you can think of. You can't just be passive and expect the sheer optical pop-titude [*] of the place to wow you into a state of entertainment. (This is one of the False Doctrines of the Desert that some blogs preach. grin.) In the Wickenburg AZ area Coffee Girl and I went to work on the generic Sonoran desert landscape.

Imagining the topography as time lapse, accelerated photography is one of the great advantages of arid land, since geologic layers are exposed. Except for crumples in the earth and lava expulsions, much of the topography is formed subtractively -- that is, erosively -- from layers upon layers that have different erosion rates.

This caprock is only four inches thick; it overhangs about one foot. The mesa is only 20 feet over the lower lands adjacent to it. And yet this numerically humble caprock illustrates the process of topographic development as well as a bigger or prettier mesa would. "Process of development", rather than the supposed static perfection and holiness of the "cathedral of nature", is what nature is all about.

Soon a female kestrel flew overhead but I didn't have time to photograph her. Later, Coffee Girl responded to some bovines; she is a cattle dog after all. It's not difficult to distinguish her beef-bark from her more-serious coyote alarm and growl. She also is learning to leave cattle alone, at my command. But I let her take to the hills when she saw a deer buck.

What's this white-breasted bird, facing the warming morning sun? It let me walk up almost to the foot of the saguaro cactus, one of the tallest in the area, perhaps 30 feet high! This reminds me of something.

Perhaps in this raptor's earlier life it was one of the prophets of the Syrian or Egyptian desert; one of those ostentatious self-flagellants who was eventually canonized, men such as St. Anthony or St. Simeon Stylite (as in 'stylus'.) They were said to stand in their towers for years without ever coming down.

(from this Wikipedia article.)

At this time of the year there are many such wandering prophets of the desert in places such as Quartzsite or the Slabs. The original saints sometimes put their respective towers within talking distance of each other so they could argue theology. The modern desert saints are more likely to thrash through the polemics of Simplicity, frugality, mobility, generators versus solar panels, glass mat batteries versus flooded, etc.

The original Stylite, St. Simeon, is said to have held his ground -- or rather, his air -- for 39 years. Perhaps the modern desert saints are lucky that the BLM imposes a 14 day limit, when they must then...

[*] from David Seltzer, screenwriter of Punchline, starring Tom Hanks and Sally Fields.

iDrones on Sale at Walmart?

2011-12-14T04:43:00.010-07:00

Zero Hedge is a financial blog that I sometimes scold myself for reading: it is doom-and-gloomy, hot-headed, and sensationalist. But perhaps a person has to tolerate a certain amount of kookiness from a blog or a person in order to get something other than predictable, Establishment cheerleading and conventional thinking.

At any rate Zero Hedge outdid themselves recently with some comments about President Obama asking for the errant drone back from Iran:

"We've asked for it back. We'll see how the Iranians respond," Obama said at a news conference. Obama said he wouldn't comment further "on intelligence matters that are classified." Great, the only problem is Iran will never return it, as they have already indicated, for the simple reason that it has already been reverse engineered 5 ways from Sunday somewhere deep in the bowels of one of China's unpopulated cities, which just doubles as a very populated military intelligence base. The only good news is that within 6-9 months every American will be able to buy a personal stealth drone for an [Every Day Low Price] at their friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart. Our only concern is whether FoxConn [who manufactures the iPad, etc., for Apple] will be able to handle the supply of both iPads and straight for re-export drones: it would be ironic if this massive military embarrassment ends up as being a catalyst to short Apple. [changes were made by Boonie]

Indeed, what consumer wouldn't be able to put his own personal iDrone to constructive use in his daily life, commuting to work, or at the office? Recall the lyrics of Gilbert & Sullivan's Mikado, "I've got them on the list, I've got them on the list, and none of them'd be missed..."

Well OK, now that we've had our fun: how geopolitically significant will it be now that the Sabre-Rattlers of the West are driving Iran into closer and closer relations with China? I wish I knew more about the military and geopolitical situation at the Strait of Hormuz and at the Chinese-built oil port in southwestern Pakistan.

Off-Target at Walmart

2011-12-12T07:26:00.017-07:00

The other day I was migrating through the monstrosity of Phoenix when I stopped in at a Target store. Since nobody knew me in town I wouldn't lose face by being seen in such an unmanly store. And besides, I had recently bought my newly beloved netbook from them, and at a loss-leader price too. Seriously, as long as Target offers a 45-day return policy on electronics, compared to 15 days at Walmart and other places, it is worth giving them the benefit of the doubt.

There was a time when I wasn't so kind to Target. Financial analysts used to heap praise on Target because it 'knew how to distinguish itself from Walmart'. Maybe they were right: Target was useless and Walmart was my favorite place to shop; and that is quite a distinction. What did Target offer that Walmart didn't, besides wide aisles? And who goes into a store to buy aisles? Target offered the same cheap Chinese crap that Walmart did, except at slightly higher prices since it selected things that were a little prettier and more stylish to pull in their silly female customers. Target offered no hard goods for guys.

But today Walmart is on the down slope of its history. Imperial over-reach, I guess. And here I was, ogling the Nikon 1 cameras in the Target store. Metal and glass; now that's sexy. Back in the van in their parking lot, I paused and watched Target's customers arrive.

After seeing a statistically meaningful number of such customers, it is completely sane to want to come back as a woman, in my next life. An attractive woman. I have sometimes bemoaned the decline of girl-watching as a healthy, virtuous, and Catonic sport in this decaying country: there's simply no material to work with. But the women walking into the Target were pleasant-looking, respectable, and believable. They weren't 17-year-old girls, either; they were 30-40 year old mothers and wives. It feels so good to walk away from a store and think that our species really does have a future.

Contrast the look of the average Target shopper with the anthropoids over at Walmart: sociology, history, and evolution have yet to offer a satisfactory explanation for the appearance of the average Walmart shopper, who is just a huge, waddling bundle of ugliness and human deformity. The only guess that I will offer is that they are the result of some kind of miscegenation -- partly biological and partly cultural -- that occurs from a toxic brew of too much fast food, diesel fumes from their pickup trucks, meth labs, radon outgassing from revival tent walls, welfare state policies, public schools, tattoo parlors, rap music in elevators, and ghetto or barrio values promulgated by endless television bottom-feeding.

And so I'm going to go a little easier on those nice-looking Target shoppers. When you look at the cars most of those well-appointed women are driving, only the most politically-correct would deny that there is a noticeable correlation between female appearance and affluence. Oh dear, what an awful thing to say, 40 years after the modern women's movement began around 1970! Well then you sit in that parking lot for 15 minutes and do some statistics with your own eyes, and tell me what your explanation is.

But who can blame them for wanting to go into a store and not feel ashamed of themselves or not gag at the mere sight of the other customers? Years ago, I might have been bothered by this correlation of female attractiveness and affluence. Getting older isn't all bad; I mellow. This is just one more example of Samuel Johnson's experience: "As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly." And in this case, let's cross out 'man' and put 'person'.

Marc Faber's Prediction of War

2011-12-10T03:35:00.014-07:00

I haven't said too much on politics lately, perhaps because the financial recklessness and lies of our leaders and central bankers leave me speechless. Also, all that really needs to be said about politics, has already been said by Mencken:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. (Gutenberg.org)

That would seem to cover the big news story these days, the saber-rattling with Iran. It's unusual to see so much agreement between Europe and America on an issue, and that alone should make one suspicious. In America the saber-rattling with Iran will be a mainstay of the seemingly-interminable presidential campaign.

It's an old idea actually: the Republicans think that the populace sees the Democrats as foreign policy sissies and that this should win votes for the GOP. In order for this to really work there needs to be an official bad guy, a Bogeyman, who hopefully can be compared to Hitler. All the usual suspects are behind this campaign for war. The war drums are being beaten loudest by the Yahwist wing of the Republican party, that is, neo-cons, Rapture Christians, and AIPAC. Such groups are proud of being super-patriots; but to which country?

Of course the Democratic president could fight back by out-sabre-rattling the GOP. But that could cause oil prices to climb, which is recessionary of course. Then the GOP would blame the Democrats for high unemployment and energy costs.

But what if saber-rattling's Nielsen ratings go down, with repetition, and the grand poobahs on both sides of the pond keep threatening the Iranians a little more each month until the world finally stumbles into war, as it so often has? This might be bad news for the sheep and peasants of each country, but it could be wonderful for the bankers and politicians. Financial chaos, high gasoline costs, and recessions would offer the grand poobahs the cover to do more of what they want to do, the only thing they know how to do, print money. The worse the news is, the more the American sheep will rally around their mighty Sword, the President, and the GOP will have been outfoxed. (No pun intended.)

What interests me is seeing if three years of deficit explosions have sobered Americans up. Do they still see trillion-dollar-wars as something that can be thrown easily onto the national credit card? Or have they come to fear reckless and endless wars in the Mideast more than the Islamic bogeyman du jour?

In the case of Europe, the politicians and un-elected bureaucratic elites need to distract the peasants from their crimes and assaults on the democratic principles of modern Western civilization. Like their American co-criminals, they could sense opportunity in major war: 'let no crisis go to waste.'

A year ago Marc Faber, a popular commentator on business channels and websites, predicted that the outcome of the financial crisis would be war. He meant big War, presumably, not just the smaller operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, etc. These other conflicts were rather modest after all, taking a decade to run the credit card up by a trillion dollars. At the time I thought that he was going over the top with that, and that he was just trying to be controversial and entertaining, which is what these news channels are all about, after all. It now seems as though he should take a bow. But he hasn't been as visible lately in the usual places.

Crossing the Kindle Threshold

2011-12-08T07:57:00.003-07:00

No, I didn't go out and buy one, the gadget that is. But I did follow through on a commenter's suggestion of downloading Kindle ebooks from Amazon onto my netbook. I chose a freebie of course. Buying books is a "bridge too far".

I firmly rejected the option of reading the eBook in the over-hyped "cloud" since that requires an internet connection, the very thing I want to liberate myself from. Instead, I opted to download the Kindle eReader onto my (Windows PC) netbook and to do the same with the eBooks themselves, since an internet connection is only needed during the downloading process, itself. Soon I was using it on a free classic, Samuel Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare. By his own admission he could write a preface to anything, even a cookbook, and the preface would be more popular than the book, proper.

There is no "Edit" tool at the top of the screen; to copy a juicy quote you must highlight it first and then right-button for copy and search capabilities. Thank goodness for that; otherwise I would have pronounced the Kindle eReader worthless. I smiled with satisfaction to recognize certain quotes from this famous preface, such as:

Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life.

Johnson, Samuel (2004-04-01). Preface to Shakespeare (Kindle Locations 37-38). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.

The copy function automatically dragged over the acknowledgement to Kindle. I'm not sure why this is necessary since this Preface is in the public domain. But to quibble over this would be an example of another famous quote from Johnson's Preface, "the petty cavils of petty minds."

This same classic Preface is available from Gutenberg.org, and downloadable in various formats that make for pleasant reading, including the Kindle format. But I prefer to download books from Gutenberg as plain text files so that I can fully edit them, that is, expurgate them. Such files aren't as easy on the eyes as the Kindle format, however.

In posts past I have argued that expurgation -- or as the reader, Samuel Johnson, was accused of: "ripping the book's heart out" -- is a fundamental qualitative improvement in the process of reading. This notion was unpopular with my readers, who apparently are too comfortable being apologists for the publishing industry and venerating the traditions of reading. Apparently the vaunted Progress that we worship today must be restricted to mere quantitative improvements, to matters of convenience, megabytes, and gigahertz. Nor will all the gadgets in the world bring any qualitative improvement to the content of books.

The Kindle eReader shows up as a shortcut-icon on my desktop; it's a fellow sitting under a tree, reading. If only that were true. This time of year many snowbirds sit out in a chair, outside their RVs in places like Quartzsite or Yuma, reading books. I've never had any luck reading outdoors; there are too many distractions.

Nor can I imagine reading in bed with old eyes. In fact my sleepy eyes can't even watch a DVD movie; the eyes close while the ears rock the baby to sleep.

But perhaps it is more comfortable to hold a tablet in the hand while eReading. A clamshell display might hold the words at a distance not quite perfect; and you must sit erect in an office chair to look at it.

Does 4G Wireless Matter to Travelers?

2011-12-06T07:21:00.004-07:00

At the moment I am in the Valley of the Sun, the Phoenix megalopolis. (If only it would run out of water and start shrinking. It would be a better place.) Its only real significance to me is that it is still on the Gila River migration route. But I can't help wondering about Verizon's 4G wireless service, available only in big cities like this. My mi-fi gadget is only a 3G model, so I can't actually sample the 4G service.

It seems like I should be as excited about this improvement as I was when Verizon upgraded from 2G (1xRTT) to 3G (EVDO) a few years back. But back then there was no 5 Gigabyte per month limit. It makes sense that there should be a limit like that, despite the howls of gamers and video-addicts on the tech forums.

So I have no real complaint against Verizon. But it does make a customer wonder what is so great or important about 4G wireless service: the only thing it's good for is watching videos, but if you give in to that temptation, you'll smack up against your 5 Gigabyte per month limit that much sooner. So what good is 4G service to me?

If the telecom company only charges $10 for each Gigabyte past the 5 Gigabyte ceiling (always rounding up, of course), perhaps that's not such a big deal to some people. But this blog is aimed at early retirees or other people who take "alternative lifestyles" seriously; and for most of us, $53 per month for the first 5 Gigabytes is quite enough to spend on the internet.

Why not just buy the couple dozen classic movies that are worth watching for $5 to $10 per DVD disk, and be able to enjoy them without an internet connection? DVD movies, books, MP3 music, and digital photography are all activities a traveler can enjoy without an internet connection. This is too much of an advantage to let go of.

The same argument could debunk the vaunted and over-hyped "cloud". How is it advantageous to a wireless customer to edit photos or do word processing by increasing his data traffic, which he will end up paying for? It's virtually free and significantly faster to use software that is installed on your hard drive. The best of both worlds is probably exemplified by the Kindle, since you only need occasional internet connectivity to put it to use, and lightning speed is not really necessary.

Snowbound in the Arizona Palms

2011-12-05T09:19:00.002-07:00

Oh sure, I knew Globe AZ was a bit higher than the Gila River that I was following into the state. But a casino is a good place to wait out a winter storm while watching NFL football. The sun wouldn't come out long enough for a good morning shot of palmas y sierra nevada.

At least the photo proves out the title of this blog. I thought the weather would recover on Monday. I don't mind the cold, but a dog-owning RVer hates precipitation.

So I took off this morning only to find that the small climb to Globe was enough to create a heavy snowstorm. The road didn't actually feel slippery but after my clay debacle of last week I am feeling cautious. So I pulled off into a big box parking lot. There sat a nice-looking pickup and camper, who probably had the same idea. I snickered when I saw the Florida license plates. After all, what sort of moron would drive all that way to Arizona in December and then get stuck in snow? (grin)

The Public Wi-Fi Experience

2011-12-03T07:24:00.011-07:00

It wasn't so long ago that "AT&T" charged $20 per month for wi-fi at Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, McDonalds, and various hotel chains. Now all the wireless telecoms are delighted to give you free wi-fi at such places. Off-loading data to wi-fi hotspots to lessen the data traffic jam at cell towers is a huge trend these days. In theory this should be a nice help to travelers.

Having failed to win any looks of envy (or even respect) at Starbucks with my new $200 netbook, it seemed like McDonalds might promise more success: surely some toothless old man would be impressed with my spiffy new machine; you know, the old boys who find section D of yesterday's newspaper and read it in slow motion while drinking bottomless refills of senior coffee.

Old habits die hard: walking into the store my eyes scanned the walls for an electrical outlet. First, they seem to design public wi-fi places without a single electrical outlet. That must be deliberate; they're not running a public library for internet-savvy elderly vagabonds. (Also, just imagine the first multi-million dollar lawsuit against McDonalds when an oldster falls and breaks her hip after tripping on another customer's power cord.) Secondly, my netbook is low power and can actually operate a few hours without juice, unlike the patio-brick-style laptops of old.

Then I scanned the store for another laptop user. In his area there was something emitting a high-pitched scream; maybe it was coming from the soft drink feeding pens. How could he think over that noise? Maybe it's his hearing.

So I abandoned that section of the store and went to the center, where a huge boob toob was playing CNN news. Carrier IQ has probably worked out a system for correlating clicks on the customers' smartphones and laptops with the TV channel and what the customers order at the counter. But at least the volume was turned up so I didn't have to listen to "music" over the ceiling speakers. And I was so hoping to enjoy a black female vocalist doing a screeching and lewd version of Rudolf, followed by a pseudo-rap version of the Little Drummer Boy (which admittedly is a rather good choice for rap-ification).

Soon I gave up on the center area, ruled as it was by the TV hegemon. That left only the back of the McDonalds. After I got the sticky food debris cleaned off the table, it started to seem like I had finally beaten the system. But every time the door opened I could feel Santa Anna-like wind rushing in to fill the vacuum of a flushing toilet. Also, it was distracting to think of the signs (in Spanish) that McDonalds considers necessary to remind customers to put the toilet paper in the toilet instead of the waste basket.

But at least I was finally getting some work done. Then suddenly I practically catapulted off my bench in the booth. A huge fat guy had sat down behind me in the adjacent booth. His bench was mechanically linked to mine so that the whole structure seesawed. Oh well, you don't go into fast food outlets and expect to see willowy supermodels. I tried to not let it bother me, but I could feel every movement of his. Did I say "movement"? Oh dear, what happens when he gets up and walks toward the restroom door! I fled back to my RV and used my Verizon mi-fi.

The News and Novelty Syndrome

2011-12-02T05:48:00.002-07:00

Every Age has not only its own spirit, its zeitgeist, but also its characteristic vices and diseases. The Information Age sucks us into paying attention to too much trivial and trashy "news". For travelers in particular, the same syndrome manifests itself as Novelty idolatry.

I was feeling very pleased with the world on the last day of November when this (un-edited, un-photoShopped) sunset crowned an excellent day.

I was camped on some BLM land, on the western edge of New Mexico, watching my first Arizona sunset in over three and a half years. For some reason it was important to me not to enter Arizona before December 01. As luck would have it, a winter storm was arriving the first day in Arizona.

On this autumn's migration it was satisfying to have connected the Colorado/San Juan river systems with the Rio Grande, and back again to the Colorado/Gila system with a minimum amount of driving. It was sweet revenge to revisit the place near Grand Junction where I almost lost my little poodle four years ago, and to revisit while he was still alive and could share the revenge.

In just a couple months of returning to the road I've had a change to visit, camp with, and hike with Wandrin Lloyd, the Box Canyon-ites (Mark and Bobbie) and a new RV blogger friend Kurumi Ted.

And yet I felt silly putting this photo cliche on my blog. Gee, do you think there are any sunset photos on Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, etc.?! Sometimes novelty just doesn't count. It's especially important for a blogger not to forget that.

Camping with Somebody Else?

2011-11-30T06:17:00.005-07:00

The other day a retired man approached me in a big box parking lot. Initially I tensed up. That's the instinctive response these days, since you expect to be panhandled. But he said that he had noticed bicycling on my tee-shirt. As it turned out, he was a newbie van camper who went on bicycle tours all over the world in previous years. I listened to his stories for an hour or two, as we stood in the lee of my trailer in the cold New Mexican wind. He cycled through third world countries. When he approached a village he was received like an alien from a UFO that had just landed. He never camped in normal campgrounds. (Sigh, I just don't like tent camping or cycling highways enough to do cycle touring like him.)

How strange. No encounter has ever happened like this to me before, as an RV traveler. Of course I gave up trying to socialize with RVers years ago, so it's my own fault in a way. RVers are nice middle-class folks who have worked hard all their lives. They are responsible, law-abiding, and sane about unimportant things. But if you don't overlap with the stereotype, there just isn't much that can be done about it.

I was sad to see that fellow leave the next day. Wouldn't it be nice to travel with somebody like him for awhile? How long has it been since I've done anything like that? But what were the chances that I could travel with a newbie, considering their 300-miles-per-day habits:"whoopie I'm on vacation".

Actually I've had better luck crossing paths with fellow bloggers than anything. This happened again recently, this time with Kurumi Ted. How nice it was to go on daily walks and talks in the desert with another RVer.

Learning New Four-Letter Dirty Words in Geology Class

2011-11-27T07:26:00.004-07:00

It's a world of a different color where I'm camped now compared to Moab, which is just a couple weeks in the rear view mirror. Here in the lower Rio Grande Valley the world is grey, brown, and buff, which is rather bland compared to the red sandstone of Moab.

After a night of hard rain it began to dry up. I needed to go to town to do the usual errands. (Here an RV travel blog should begin spoon-feeding the eager reader with every minute and mundane detail of his errand and shopping trip.) The road was a recently graded county road, with a hard gravel surface. But at one spot the color abruptly changed from buff to "red". Having been in Moab recently, I thought that it was a small area of red sandstone. Still, a slow yellow light began blinking in the back of my head. Then there was a small dip. I was surprised how difficult it was to get back up the hill. Whew! That was close. What the heck kind of sandstone do you call that?

A couple hours later, the errands were over and I looked forward to returning home on a drier road. Once again I was driving through the dip in the red/brown dirt: the slope of the road caused me to slide to the right edge, the lower edge, where water had drained. In seconds the van was up to its axles in plastic gook. You've probably already guessed the dirty four letter word for the day: C-L-A-Y.

Normally I think in terms of geology; but today's "class" was in rheology. Three feet from the right edge of the road, all seemed normal. A few inches closer to the right, and it turned remarkably plastic. My foot would sink in three inches. I made a noble effort with rocking the van and straightening the front wheels, but the combination of slopes doomed me to a shameful surrender, that is, calling my towing service who promised a tow truck in 3 hours.

What was I to do until then? So I walked to the chile farming area about a mile away. Demographic profiling is supposed to be a bad thing, but there are times when you can't avoid it. That works in both directions. If I had had the advantage of being a slightly attractive woman, I would already have been rescued; I could have just leaned against the van, preened and primped a little bit, swished my tail a couple times, and then some silly man would have magically appeared from behind a creosote bush. Actually, it probably would have been a couple of silly men, with each trying to show that he knew more than the other guy.

Let's see now: who should I target? Obviously not somebody with a small or clean car. There was no point in asking a woman. If I'd asked a bourgeois-yuppie-gringo type he would have thought that, if my story were actually true, I should just call my towing service, Platinum Card service, or push the Onstar button on the dashboard; and if I couldn't do any of this, well, I was probably just a recent parolee who didn't even have an automobile and was just cooking up a story to get into his SUV and steal his iPhone.

It seemed like the best bet would be a middle-aged male, blue collar or maybe a farmer: a guy who liked solving problems the old-fashioned way, with his hands and experience and common sense. But was there still anyone like that in America? And could they speak English?

I'm pleased to say that I struck gold on the second try: a middle-aged, male, Mexican employee of the chile company, who was driving an older, non-clean pickup truck. He even grinned when I mentioned the specific road, as if it were well known locally. He had me out of there in a few seconds, and I gave him some gasoline money out of gratitude.

Now, what is the moral of this story? Some gloating readers want to hear me admit that my next tow vehicle should be a four wheel drive machine. But I hardly see how a tow rope and ten seconds of work every five years justifies spending an extra $14,000 on the pickup truck. Or should I change towing services? Nah, none of them provide instantaneous service and if they tried, it wouldn't be affordable. My adventure would never have happened if I had been driving more towards the center of the road, or if I had stopped the van and probed the ground on foot before committing myself.

Forever Un-cool in Gadget Land

2011-11-25T06:57:00.012-07:00

It was a thrill for this chronic late-adopter and used-computer-buyer to finally have his first new computer. I boldly squatted in the parking lot outside the Target where I bought my new 11.6" Acer netbook at the loss-leader price of $200 and brazenly challenged a security guard or parking lot Zamboni to even try to kick me out. Nobody dared.

I stayed up until midnight -- real midnight, as in media noche, as in mitternacht, not motorhome midnight of 9 p.m. -- transitioning to the new netbook. I had always feared doing this but it ended up being fun watching functionality and the software breath-of-life appear on a soul-less machine, step-by-step.

At 530 in the morning I practically leaped out of bed, wondering if Starbucks would waken at 6 am. I didn't have to drive far in New Mexico's megalopolis, Albuquerque, to find one. Soon I was ensconced in a chair next to a personable floor lamp, with a scone and a (disappointing-tasting and over-priced) espresso, and pretended to be a hip urban technorati.

Then my bubble burst. This experience was supposed to be a ceremonial ritual to honor the new netbook; I'd imagined urban sophisticates, with their $5 double foo-foo lattes or whatever and their white iPads, casting furtive glances of envy and lust over towards my new machine. But it was not to be. Apparently a bargain netbook from Target educes the same respect from jaded gadget-sophisticates that an entry-level Toyota Corolla would pull out of a NASCAR gearhead.

Why is the tech media so anti-netbook? They look down on them and give all the glory to tablets. Most tablets do have beautiful, high-resolution displays. Great, so you sit in a coffee shop trying to look enviable, blobbing and gooing your wonderful touch-screen with buttery fingers as you eat your toasted onion bagel. Of course you could squander some money on a protective plastic screen; but what does that do to the crispness of the display? And how long does that plastic cover last? (Gee you don't think that's the whole point, do you?)

I recently played with an iPad for the first time in a coffee shop in the boutique mountain hamlet of Ouray CO. My friend, a former IT professional man, surprised me by confessing that he didn't know how to do real, ten-fingered typing. That explains a lot about corporate IT departments as well as the hype and hysteria about touch screens. Although it was fun to play with it for a couple minutes I will remain a clamshell and keyboard man. Something about touchscreens suggests a regression from a second grader to a pre-literate day schooler who expresses himself by finger-painting.

Buying a new gadget has a way of pulling a sucker into a concatenation of expenses the same way that buying a puppy does. ("Honey, just imagine how cyoooot Fi-Fi would look in this darling angora sweater; and it's on sale for only $90!") In fact despite my boast of being a bang-for-the-buck, no nonsense type of consumer, even I went into the big-box gadget pushers the next day and fawned over "accessories." (But I wouldn't have done that if my pride hadn't been wounded at Starbucks.)

There were $80 "genuine leather" protective covers for the iPad at Walmart for gawd's sake! A cynic might have expected that this entire aisle (!) of iPad ecosystem junk was made in China for 50 cents a pop. But apparently it was being made by hand by old world craftsmen of the kind who used to make shoes in Italy or watches in Switzerland. (Youngsters are probably unaware of the panoply of cutesy, expensive add-ons and gotchas that were sold with the Palm Pilot back around year 2000. Isn't it ironic that tablet mania gets so much credit for being "new".)

Still stinging from that morning Starbucks rebuke I turned up my nose at all those over-priced cases, bags, keyboards, ad infinitum, which were supposed to turn your iPad into something more productive than a vending machine for the iTunes store or protect it from a fall from your cream-cheesey fingers onto Starbucks' granite floor -- imported from the Dolomite mountains, you know. (This wasn't too hard; the netbook has an 11.6 inch display, while the iPad accoutrements are made for a 10 inch machine. I measured them just to make sure. Blush.)

Finally I got my rightful revenge: an 11.6 inch netbook is the same size as a standard piece of paper, which is 8.5 by 11 inches; therefore many standard office supplies, even from the kiddie school supply aisle, can be used to store and protect my netbook. I ended up buying a padded mail envelope for a dollar. But it was made of genuine paper and plastic bubbles.

Naked Hiking Follow-up

2011-11-23T10:40:00.001-07:00

The geology and plant life of my current boondocking location makes for some uncomfortable walking, at least in places. The other day I howled because of something jabbing me in the foot; I had just stepped on a rock with a sharp, pyramidal point. But the pain occurred a couple more times over the next day, and always in the same spot of the same shoe.

Why was I being so stupid? Something was embedded in the sole of that shoe. I just wasn't used to getting punchadas (or pinchazos) all the way through a sole. It's a mesquite thorn, if I'm not mistaken. Lots of them are growing nearby. This is what you get for hiking in trail sneakers instead of real hiking boots with a nylon or steel plate in the sole.

And yet I have a friend who has lived in the Southwest for 15 years and hikes everywhere in sandals.

UFO Abducts RV Camper: Authorities REFUSE to Negotiate!!!

2011-11-22T12:58:00.004-07:00

(Yahoo News: Unnamed location, lower Rio Grande valley, New Mexico, North American continent.)

Either something has changed on the internet, or I have just gotten around to noticing it: there is a race to the bottom with news headlines. They are becoming pure tabloid, especially the "What's New" tab on yahoo mail. But I've noticed the same trend in more serious news sources.

But who am I to fight progress? After all, we live in the modern Information Age, and therefore, all change represents progress.

OK seriously, I was taking the dogs out for their sunset walk when I looked to the east and saw this shadow. I guess it was a shadow of the hilly ridge in front of it, but the angles didn't seem right. It was unusual enough that I stopped and gawked. When I realized that it was towards Roswell NM, I had a good laugh. (As usual, click to enlarge.)

Should I Go to an OWS Rally?

2011-11-21T05:46:00.011-07:00

No matter how much a person might like their mobile lifestyle, there must be times when it seems frivolous and vacuous: when it degenerates into "channel surfing with gasoline". In the back of his mind, the traveler might yearn for experiences more substantial and challenging than mere sightseeing. But it would still be nice if mobility enabled these deeper and richer experiences.

For instance, during the Arab Spring, I was in the habit of reading bicycle touring blogs. Most of them were pretty boring: "...yesterday I was there, today I'm here. This morning I had instant oatmeal instead of corn flakes for breakfast." Then they photographed the oatmeal.

In contrast, one of these cycle tourers was staying in a Bed and Breakfast in downtown Cairo, right next to Tahrir Square where all the demonstrations took place. What an experience he had!

Driving to an "Occupy Wall Street" rally could be one of those experiences, and one that an RV is uniquely advantageous for. The famous ones are a long way from where most RVers are, at this time of year. But there are smaller rallies, closer.

Does this imply that I support the "OWS" movement? I'm not sure because of the wide variety of grass-roots opinion in it, and because of its overall vagueness. There is something about it that reminds me of "Howard Beale's" famous rant in the classic movie, Network.

But no matter what your politics you should be relieved that there is enough grass-roots guts left in this declining country and the para-militarized police force is still restrained enough, that peaceful protests are still feasible, although just barely. (You are probably aware of the famous You Tube video of pepper spraying peaceful protesters at the University of California, Davis, who were sitting down.) What a marvelous article Glenn Greenwald wrote recently on this topic.

Challenge for an Old Engine

2011-11-20T06:06:00.002-07:00

The previous day I had climbed a steep hill in first gear, and wondered if my old engine was going to make it. What would I do if it stalled? Could I back the van and trailer down the hill just by using brakes, and without jack-knifing the whole thing? This could be a personal best for my 1995 Ford V-8 engine. Near Deming NM.

Back in the Bosque

2011-11-19T04:42:00.003-07:00

Early settlers, be they from northeastern Asia or the Iberian peninsula or northwestern Europe, must have had an easy choice with river valleys like the Rio Grande. The soil is so rich and deep. And there are huge cottonwoods for shade. What a remarkable strip micro-climate it is! Sometimes the Chihuahuan desert starts only a stone's throw away. It is almost as bleak as the Mojave. (It's really only the Sonoran desert that can be rightfully accused of being pretty. But I do like the smell of sagebrush in the Great Basin desert.)

The cottonwoods get giddy in the bosque, the Spanish word that gets used a lot along the Rio Grande. (I need to buy a real dictionary with accurate etymologies. The online freebie I'm using says that the English word, bosk, which means the same thing as bosque in Spanish, comes from an Old Norse word that gave us the word, bush. I don't believe it. Bosk, bosque, and the French bois are too much alike.)

It is fun to visit the lower Gila or Rio Grande valleys and then read Toynbee's chapters on the civilization of the lower Nile or of Mesopotamia.

Naked Hiking Still Legal in American Southwest

2011-11-17T17:32:00.002-07:00

It must have been a slow news day today. The BBC featured a story that really was more Yahoo style: the Swiss court has upheld a canton's law against naked hiking.

The BBC's Imogen Foulkes in Geneva says naked hiking is an increasingly popular pastime in Switzerland.

However, Appenzell is a deeply devout and conservative canton - it only granted women the right to vote in 1990 - and the influx of naked hikers has offended many local people, she adds.

The new ruling applies to the entire country.

Naked hikers may now have to look for another country which offers them a warmer welcome, our correspondent says.

Come to the American Southwest, I say, to all the oppressed perambulating naturalists. We offer you the freedom to live in harmony with nature as well as the opportunity to develop deep tans.

Appreciating Ugly Desert Arroyos

2011-11-16T05:04:00.005-07:00

Surely there are some famous scenes from movies in which a statue becomes a living, moving human being. The idea is simply too cinematic to have been overlooked. But for some reason, a classic example of that doesn't come to mind.

When you walk through a desert arroyo (dry wash) you have the rare opportunity to see the normally slow process of erosion work on a human time scale. In that sense the landscape becomes alive for you.

The topography of the Southwest is dominated by differential erosion, but it is too slow to watch "live". In an arroyo you can see how foot-deep water has undercut a bank, probably during a flash flood in the late summer. This can produce an undercut several feet deep. Eventually the overhanging bank above the undercut collapses, producing a rather vertical wall.

Back on the job walking arroyos, near Socorro NM, it was fun to see the best examples of freshly fractured overhangs that I've ever seen.

Now imagine no more flash floods occurring. The normal evolution of the bank of the arroyo would be to become V-shaped, wider at the top than at the bottom.

"But these are just simple shapes," you say, "and they're not pretty enough." But development of the natural world is the issue here, not prettiness. Keep in mind that the microelectronic chips in your digital camera (and elsewhere) are based on processes analogous to what you are seeing in the arroyo:

A complex pattern is put on a glass photo-plate. This pattern -- which would make a Google Earth map of the desert Southwest look simple -- will eventually define all the zillions of transistors and connecting lines that are etched into or added onto the silicon wafer.
Ultraviolet light is shined through the photoplate, and leaves a latent image of the pattern in a thin layer of photo-sensitive polymers that have been spun onto the naked silicon wafer.
That photographic pattern is developed and etched away in places, but not in other places, according to the desired pattern.
The silicon wafer/photo-polymer combination is dunked in acid; the unprotected areas of the pattern are etched away preferentially. Thus the pattern has now been transferred to the "topography" of the silicon wafer.
Pattern after pattern on layer after layer is performed similarly until the microelectronic chip is finished.

Then the customer expects the whole miracle for virtually free, except the protective leather case that has the customer's initials on it; and off he goes to a national park, the 4,939,385th visitor for 2011, and looks for a purty picher that is essentially free.

At any rate I will continue to get some enjoyment looking for analogies between erosion in the arroyos, Southwestern topography, and microelectronic chips. It gives me something to think about while I saunter along on the loose gravel, while my dog blasts along like a flash flood turned into flesh, and while I look for an interesting bird or plant or a hateful coyote.

Crony Capitalism at Its Best

2011-11-14T16:49:00.006-07:00

...meaning its worst. It's always a little surprising to read about the "visual pollution" of windmills or solar panel installations and the locals' objections to them. I think they look "cool". But maybe the novelty would wear off soon and I would want to go back to looking at the landscape proper. (Then again, nobody uses that argument for getting rid of highways, suburban sprawl, or power lines.)

This installation is near Deming in southern New Mexico. The first thought was, "Oh how pretty." The second thought was, "Aren't they supposed to move or something?" Apparently a 10 or 15 mph breeze just doesn't do it.

There was a wry irony to it. Here they were -- the great Green dream machines -- producing diddly squat in one of the windiest states in the USA. Wouldn't it have been delicious and naughty if a Prius had been parked at the nearby store, with all the canonical and stereotypical bumper stickers, and I had engaged them in a discussion of these stationary windmills. My guess is that what they literally saw would be less important to them than what it represents symbolically.

Or would that have been too snotty? RV travel offers a good chance to observe first-hand the Two Culture Gap, and I'm not talking about the one that CP Snow made famous a couple decades ago. I'm referring to the Red State/Blue State divide in modern America.

Personally I've noticed more snotty behavior on the part of Blue Staters than the other way around. Possibly the worst thing that he/she sees in the lowly Red Stater is their addiction to out-dated and traditional superstitions. The Blue Staters have outgrown all that, you know.

Imagine what fun Sir James George Frazer (The Golden Bough) would have with these modern tridentate Deities, sitting there uselessly except for the promise of Global Salvation and a Higher Moral Calling that they offer to liberals.

Impressions on Mind and Mudstone

2011-11-13T08:04:00.007-07:00

Lower Rio Grande valley, New Mexico. Why is it that we know so little about how the vaunted gadgets and machines of our Age work? Perhaps that says something of our educational system; or maybe it is just inherently difficult to approach science and technology in layman's terms. Some people probably think technical subjects are uninteresting since there is nothing personal or emotional about them.

But there must be some explanation for stopping dead in my tracks when I saw this shadow on a shale rock on some BLM land recently.

My goodness, it looked identical to the fossilized leaves on a shale rock that belonged to an impressive rock-collection that my father "inherited" from a retired school teacher, back when I was a kid. One of my siblings turned out to be the real rockhound, but I was interested in them too.

At first the sheer size and color of the quartz crystals and geodes made the biggest impression. (Think of the razzle-dazzle that you find on the tables at Quartzsite AZ in the winter.) But the purely visual buzz wore off soon. I thought the fossils were more interesting and significant in the long term.

When I said "looked identical", above, it brings to mind the word 'reminiscent.' The dictionary says the Latin root is 'mens', the mind. Why are fossils interesting to people? Is it the connection between past and present or is it the challenge of trying to visualize a radical, but unbelievably slow, process of transformation?

But today I was only looking at an ephemeral shadow of waning November light; back then, as a kid, there was something about fossils and their transformation that was reminiscent of the old retired teacher, who once had a job similar to what my father had now -- I mean, then. Would my father really get old like that and retire? Would I?

The transformation of boy to old man is not as radical as that from living leaf to an intaglio on a fossil, but it's big enough. And it was the transformation to light and shadow, on today's hike, that formed the link.

This is drifting a bit from the starting point of this post. I'll get back to the theme next time.

Reunion with Desert Arroyos

2011-11-11T14:41:00.002-07:00

BLM land near Soccoro, NM. It's hard to believe that I was hiking at San Juan mountain altitudes less than a month ago, near Ouray CO.

How could an outing along the Rio Grande possibly stack up well compared to hiking several thousand feet above a boutique mountain town that is visited by people from all over the world? Fortunately outdoor pleasure is not influenced all that much by sheer size. Also, this blog is dedicated to promoting a tacto-centric hedonic ethos of the outdoors versus the opto-centric obsessions of the mass tourist.

Here it is chilly most of the time, but I liked it except for the first day, when the cold wind was a bit unpleasant. (But hey, it's winter in New Mexico.) Besides, the unpleasantness just made our reunion with the arroyos of the desert more delicious.

I really appreciated one reader's comments about the under-rated outdoor pleasure of experiencing warm sun and cold air against the skin, simultaneously. That was even more the case on our first arroyo walk; we were camped on a windy ridgeline (to have line-of-sight to a cell tower)...

...and were relieved to jump into the first arroyo (dry wash, dry gully). Immediately I noticed the wind dying down and my black pants and shirt heating up.

I was flash-flooded with pleasant reminiscences now that Coffee Girl and I were back in arroyo-mode. The ridgelines have a sharp and harsh texture, which you might not notice walking; but put your hand down on the ground, with some pressure on it. A poor dog has to run on that dreadful stuff. This used to cause problems for my little poodle in the old days. (He decided to rest today.)

But we were foot-loose on the alluvium now and, oh, how dogs love that stuff! They have pads, you know, not hooves. As always, having a dog along enhances the pleasure because it functions as an extension of your own central nervous system; it makes you more sensitive to everything.

Frozen Tumbleweeds at the Four Corners

2011-11-10T06:45:00.008-07:00

When winter really hits, there's nothing subtle about it, and I was running for my life now. As feared I hit snow near 7000 foot altitude around Monticello UT; in fact the Utah state highway snowplows were already working the road there. Let's face it: pulling a trailer in the snow is a fool's mission. I was relieved to get out of the snow by the time I was down to 6500 feet.

At Bluff UT, on the San Juan river, I was at the fork in the road: migrate from southwestern UT, using the Virgin and Colorado rivers, or use the Rio Grande in New Mexico. I chose the latter because I hadn't done it for years and I wanted to postpone going to the usual, hackneyed, warm spots in Arizona for as long as possible.

As always I looked forward to seeing ShipRock. It's a rival of Monument Valley, but not as popular. Monument Valley has been a photo cliche since John Ford's westerns of the 1940's. Why do people even go there and photograph it? But ShipRock has no park built around it, nor is there a campground or gift shop at its base. It has maintained its dignity, while everything else has sold out to the tourism industry. Besides, the geology is completely different.

But where was it? The sky was still stormy and visibility was poor. The temperature (in degrees F) and the wind (in mph) were both between 30 and 40. Frozen tawny tumbleweeds rolled across the deserted highway. Just then:

I had to smile. The Four Corners of the Southwest was far away. I was in the Atlantic, off the coast of Brazil on a wooden Man-of-War in the year 1804 or so. That is where the remarkable movie, Master and Commander, starts. The officer-of-the-watch thought he saw a ship in the fog bank. They beat to quarters, just in case. The captain, played by Russell Crowe, came to the bow and searched the fog with his brass telescope. Indeed, a deadly ship was espied, which the men named the Phantom.

Given the Keys to the City

2011-11-09T06:51:00.002-07:00

When I was visiting Mark and Bobbie, of Box Canyon Blog fame, in Moab UT, I was surprised to learn how far back their familiarity with the region went. They were here when Edward Abbey was. They liked the area better than I did, so I tried to let their attitude rub off on me. But it wasn't easy. I had to pass through the town of Moab on my way south, hoping to beat the snow in Monticello UT; maybe I should stop in Moab to do laundry?

In tourist towns it's always wise to get one block off the main drag. A traveler always goes into a laundromat with some trepidation; it really is my least favorite part of traveling. But this place seemed good for some reason. Management was new, the machines were in good repair, and -- most astonishingly -- they weren't charging tourist prices.

A bicycle touring blog expressed it this way after visiting Yellowstone or Grand Teton national parks and the towns that service them: he felt like a chicken going through a modern poultry processing plant. That is just what I expected from Moab UT.

The owner of the store had been outside and saw my rig. On his own initiative he mentioned that he and his wife had an RV and sometimes desired a free and safe place to park when traveling. He told me that I could stay in their parking lot for the night if I wished. In all my years of traveling, that is the first time I received generosity like that. And in Moab of all places!

Great Laptop/Netbook Deal for a Traveler

2011-11-07T21:14:00.012-07:00

Act fast if any of this pertains to you. November 12 is the last day!

How nice it was to be shopping for a new laptop when the old one isn't quite dead. What an energy hog the old laptop was, consuming 4 amps DC during normal operation. And I use it many hours per day! It's hard to find power consumption data on the internet or on the boxes at the stores since nobody really cares except a traveler who is running down his coach batteries. Fortunately I got some good numbers from tdhoch of RV Sabbatical, who has a Kill a Watt device for measuring power consumption in watts. (I use a resistor-based DC current sensor in the line between RV frame ground and the negative post of the battery.)

Going through a Target recently (blush) I noticed a superb deal on an 11.6 inch netbook by Acer, model Aspire One AO722-0473. You can't get it online at Target since they are using it as a loss-leader to drive the consuming masses wild and bring them into the store. It would have been an excellent deal at $300, the regular price, but it is only $200 until 12 November 2011. Unlike the shabby 15 day return policy offered by Walmart and others, Target offers a 45 day return policy. When it comes to electronics, the return policy is quite important.

I have transitioned over to it and love it. Obviously it is not meant for power users. I just need it for web browsing, typing this blog, light photo editing (Picasa), and word processing (Windows Notepad). I don't play computer games or stream videos, although it is supposed to be quite good at the latter. (By definition, a netbook lacks an optical drive.) The internet connection will usually be the weak link in the chain -- not the computer itself. Above all else, I want it to use little power.

And it does! It uses 1.1 amps DC (just under 13 watts) for standard web browsing. Just think how reducing your power consumption by this much reduces your needs for solar panels, generators, and batteries. As an added goodie, it was nice to finally get an electronic gadget that doesn't come with a 5 pound power brick.

It is small enough to easily carry to a wi-fi hotspot, but still has a full-size keyboard. I was led to worry for nothing about a lot of things by the tech reviews on netbooks. Those reviews were probably written by the digital equivalent of gearheads.

More About Moab

2011-11-06T04:24:00.003-07:00

It's hard to predict what a mesa is like when you see it from only one angle, say, from your campsite, or when you blast by it in a car. So the second day at our Moab campsite, we headed off to circum-ambulate the neighborhood mesa. It did not disappoint.

I hope I never outgrow the discomfort that comes from slot canyons, mine shafts, caves, and canyons, since it was this very discomfort that gets most of the credit for the effect that this canyon had on me, besides the usual credit that goes to the very act of walking.

There are far more famous photo icons of Moab (Monument Valley, etc.) than what was here, but it's always more fun to personally discover an un-famous area.

It surprised me how smooth the sandstone cliff faces were. They were 200-300 feet tall and quite vertical; but looked at from above, the cliff formed a circular reflector that made it easy to hear each car pass on a highway about a mile away.

When Coffee Girl and I retreated from the mouth of the canyon, the usual canyon-creepy feeling started to decline and I became relaxed. Although we've all heard echoes from cliffs I had to try out the acoustics here. The echo was the clearest and loudest that I've ever heard, enough so that it made me giggle.

Recall that famous scene, towards the beginning of Lawrence of Arabia, when Lawrence sings at the cliffs (Wadi Rum in Jordan). It was only the fact that I was male that kept me from ululating like the Arab women in the movie do.

Lay's Potato Chips of Sandstone

2011-11-04T08:08:00.003-06:00

A big part of the art of camping is stepping away from the 'looked over', and wandering amongst the 'overlooked'. The best way to do this is to camp where the scenery is subtle or mediocre in the immediate foreground, but more promising in the distance. Naturally that provides the incentive to go for a walk, right from the RV's door.

But you still go with low expectations. You have to try to be interested in what there is to see, and you have to look for ways to experience it beyond mere 'looking'. Usually, the surprises are on the positive side.

In that spirit Coffee Girl and I took off on a day that was supposed to be dreadful, but in fact, was delicious: what a luxury it is to leave the wide-brimmed sombrero at home, and welcome the sun's warmth onto my face, while enjoying the bracing chill.

We encountered the thinnest lamellas of sandstone that I've ever seen. They were fragile and nearly exfoliated.

Vexed by the Snowbird VolkerWanderung

2011-11-02T18:37:00.010-06:00

As my travel-blog friends took off this morning I had plenty to exult over. If they hadn't been here in Moab, which they had a lot of experience with, I might have blown through town without even stopping. The area is best for tourists and vacationers, not full time travelers. A camper would have to love crowds, fees, and restrictions to feel comfortable here. It is also over-rated as a mountain biking mecca. There is too much loose sand in much of Utah.

So I deferred to Mark and Bobbie, resulting in superb locations and hikes. OK, I admit it: the scenery was 'breathtakingly beautiful,' but more for the topography than the "red" color. It isn't "red"; it's red-brown, terra-cotta, the same color as a cheap clay pot. Why do people make such a big deal of the color?

Off they went to southwestern Utah to warm up, while leaving me here, wondering about how to dignify my autumn migration by heading downriver, some river, any river. It's not as easy as it sounds.

Why not just grab a Rand-McNally and choose the most direct interstate highway? Folks, that's not how it's done, especially after rereading the first part of volume 1 of the abridged version of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History. He gives a lot of emphasis to the clash between civilizations and the volkerWanderung of famous tribes through history. (Umlaut on the o.) My head filled up with romantic mush about the volkerWanderung of the snowbirds.

But it's not complete mush. A full-time traveler, who thinks of his lifestyle as a serious profession, needs to see a drama in his seasonal migration. That's a completely different mindset than a vacationer who is aiming for standardized, tourist-industry entertainment. How then can I do the best possible job at this, this autumn?

The cause of most of the vexation is that there are only three large rivers that head south in the Southwest; there is a lot of high altitude land between these rivers. Going to the Virgin River (near Zion and St. George UT) and then following the Colorado River south used to be my standard route. But it's hard to find something new.

Thus it was so pleasing this morning when Coffee Girl and I got into arroyo wanderung, something you just can't do in Colorado, since the streams there have water in them! We left right from the RV door and stumbled onto an interesting area. The best part of the hike was walking an arroyo up to its "source".

Boneyards in the Badlands

2011-10-31T07:30:00.002-06:00

The Uncompahgre River valley, southwestern Colorado, a couple Halloweens ago. In answer to my question, the boys at the public lands office said, "Mancos shale." What a cool name. It was Eastwood's name in his second Spaghetti Western. It was this rock that made the western Colorado Badlands bad.

Mancos shale results from silt. It suffocates the roots of plants; thus few plants grow out here, and hardly any critters. Not even crypto-biotic soil. Only an occasional prairie dog or scavenger would try to make a living here.

It's not like I'm complaining. Instead of standard tourist scenery, I prefer scenery that has a strong flavor of any kind, even the horrific. There is more drama in it. It is more evocative of life and death struggles. Maybe I've bought too many postcards from Nietzsche, over the years.

Well this is the place for it -- the Badlands between Montrose, CO, and the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. The complexion of the ground was that of a corpse. Pallid hills rumpled up about 200 feet high. Imagine a woman with the comeliest curves, and the shabbiest skin complexion--say, Morticia, of the Addams Family.

A glutton for punishment, I pulled into the main staging area of the motor-crazed yahoos, intending to boondock for the night. (It was virtually in the shadow of a cell tower.) The BLM's sign named the trails: Dump Ridge (overlooking the town landfill), Skull X Bones, Monster Ditch, Moonlight Mesa, and Nighthorse Trail.

What really attracted the gasoline-besotted yahoos was the "open" status of the Badlands: they didn't have to ride on trails. They could commit wanton destruction to their heart's content, except that there wasn't anything left to destroy. The sterile ground was tensile-cracked and salt-encrusted. The landscape was harsh and lunar.

Here in the Badlands I saw a type of beauty to the otherwise hideous sport of motor-crazed yahoo-ism. Thomas Hardy, the author of "Tess of the D'Urbervilles", would have called it "a negative beauty of tragic tones."

The only animal life visible were the crows that patrolled the town dump by toying with the ridge-lift from the hills. (Aren't Badlands always windy?) They were all that was alive, yet they cared only for morsels of fresh Death. This was all becoming a little weird, like I was stuck in a BLM version of an Edgar Allen Poe story. Just then a pickup truck approached. Alongside it, a large Chocolate Lab ran his heart out. What a creature, so healthy and joyous! He came up to inspect my little dog, and then spirited off.

There could not have been a creature more out of harmony with its environment than this lab; and what a relief it was to see! But there was another contrast with the grisly environment: at the foot of these hideous badlands, rich fields begin:

It was getting close to dusk when I winced at the approach of six motorcyclists, about a half mile away, who were silhouetted on a sinuous ridgeline. When one of the two-cycle engines would scream, an adjacent ghoul would roar in response, and moved to catch up with the other. It was as if they were holding hands and doing le Danse Macabre on that darkling ridge, like the classic finale in Bergman's "The Seventh Seal", when black-shrouded Death finally wins the chess game and leads his victims off:

And Happy Halloween to my readers!

EmmyLou on a Windy Night

2011-10-29T08:34:00.003-06:00

An RVing friend surprised me recently when he confessed that he and his wife just hate camping in wind. It is strange how some flavors of hardship discourage you, while others bring out the best in you. For whatever reason, I rather like rocking and rolling in my trailer in the wind. All RVs, even a cheap cracker box like mine, come with some sort of stabilizing jacks; but years ago I got rid of mine.

Cliffs are certainly good places to experience wind. Wind results from a difference in air pressure, which is connected with sudden altitude changes, or one cliff-face facing the sun while another is in the shadow.

One night I went to sleep listening to EmmyLou Harris singing some of her classics. Ahh dear, a female singer is always at her best when she is wailing about her wounds, be they real or imagined. Can you imagine anything more boring than a country-western diva, a Puccini heroine, or a Celtic lass singing about how reasonably content she was with the universe?

I woke up at just the right moment, when she was weeping into my ears with that tremulous vibrato and falsetto of hers. How it evokes frailty and injury! Outside, the wind was screaming down through the notch in the cliffs, where, four years ago, I imagined my lost little poodle being attacked and disemboweled by coyotes. My trailer rocked annoyingly, and yet, I like being annoyed by it.

The trailer-twitch and her vocal uncertainties and frailties were alike somehow; maybe it was their vulnerability. It's nice being reminded of my rig's vulnerability, like a helpless little sailboat bobbing in the ocean. After all, this is supposed to be camping.

Nearing the Top

2011-10-28T07:03:00.000-06:00

Most hikers are probably fond of that moment in a hike when you're starting to wonder if you're ever going to get to the top. But of course the experience would be boring without the voluntary suffering of it all. Then you see some blue sky peaking through, so you must be getting ready to crest. Recently Coffee Girl and I finally made it over the top of Book Cliffs, which my little poodle valiantly surmounted four years ago. I can't be sure that he used this trail, but it's the only one. It was 1600 feet of altitude gain.

It's counter-intuitive how the high-altitude side of a cliff ramps up the edge, and then falls precipitously. The Mogollon Rim (in Arizona) does this as well. The top of Book Cliffs was fun to explore; it was crossed by more ravines than I thought; it wasn't just a flat mesa-top.

Urban (Parking Lot) Boondocking

2011-10-27T08:38:00.004-06:00

You have to admire the constitution of campers who can actually sleep in a noisy parking lot in town. Do engines ever get shut off? You get to enjoy trains, boom cars, loudspeakers on the pole lights, semi-trucks pulling up in the middle of the night, and perhaps worst of all, predatory strafing of your RV by the parking lot Zamboni.

So why do it? There are practical advantages such as minimizing driving while accomplishing shopping errands. And there are plenty of $30 per night RV parks that are half as loud as a free parking lot.

There are tricks in parking lots that will get you a few hours of sleep:

1) It is surprising how quiet a semi-truck can be if you are parked aft of its trailer, rather than sideways-adjacent to the engine and Thermo-King refrigerator.

2) It's also surprising how restful it can be to sleep next to a busy freeway, since the sound is so steady.

3) White noise helps quite a bit too. You can use music, a DVD movie, or whatever.

4) Stay up late at night and get up late in the morning. Of course it's pretty hard to make this adjustment when you're used to going to bed at 8 pm. In the summer, a late riser in the morning would miss the time of the day that's worth living for.

Tricks like this help, but it works better to find a dead-end street.

But my mission was accomplished: I have a fear and dread of the unbelievable rheology of wet Mancos Shale. My BLM campsite was at the end of five miles of the stuff, so I wanted out of there while the first winter storm blew through.

Shopping at Cabela's

2011-10-24T05:15:00.001-06:00

Several times now, somebody expressed surprise at learning that I was an NFL football fan. They usually say something like,"You don't seem the type," whatever that means.

The same people would probably be surprised that I was excited to learn that Grand Junction CO had a Cabela's store. Soon I was there, poring over the latest and greatest multi-tools and LED flashlights. It's odd that, with so many items in such a gigantic store, it's only these two items that interest me. Besides, I already have a high-end Leatherman multi-tool and never bring it along, because of its weight.

Imagine how easy it would be to criticize female shoppers fawning and coo-ing over some expensive and useless trinket just because it was kyooooooot! The sidewalks of Ouray CO are full of such shoppers.

But one Sunday morning Coffee Girl and I went on a nice hike on that remarkable network of trails than emanates from the town of Ouray. Afterwards I finally found a restaurant that offered good televisions to watch the Sunday afternoon NFL games. What bliss! Sitting there, utterly pleased with the universe, it occurred to me that perhaps I had been too harsh on the bourgeois shopping mavens. After all, they have the DNA of thousands of generations of successful Gatherers in their bodies, just as I had the DNA of Hunters and Warriors in mine.

What is a hike but an exercise in mock hunting? After it, my "hunt" had continued on to a restaurant that would actually let me watch the football game. And what are sports but mock war? Perhaps I was feeling happy because I was acting in a way consistent with the evolution of the human animal. Why then doesn't the female Gatherer/shopper have the same right?

Which brings us back to shopping at Cabela's. Hunting and fishing are dying sports in an increasingly urbanized, uni-sex, environmentalist America. I can only imagine how expensive and restrictive it is to hunt these days, with the Wildlife agencies full of environmental science graduates. Hunting and fishing are sports that boys learn from their fathers, which goes against the entire ethos of feminized, politically-correct America.

Why then should there be huge mega-stores built around a hunting and fishing theme? Perhaps Cabela's thinks that the 'best defense is a good offense?' Or it could be something more anthropologically significant.

Now that fathers don't even live in the same household as their sons, and work in climate-controlled cubicles instead of ranches, farms, or factories, maybe they have a need for things like big powerful pickup trucks to drive to the cubicle. Perhaps they need even more consolation for their lost masculinity, and Cabela's offers it: the uni-sex role of being a Gatherer (i.e., a shopper), all under the facade of a traditional male image.

If this explanation is correct, there is a sort of poetic justice in it. Now that women are poaching on the traditional male role of raping, burning, and pillaging in the Imperial legions, it's only fair that men should become Gatherer/shoppers.

Heroes, Emergencies, and Second Chances

2011-10-21T07:55:00.010-06:00

It's hard to believe we were returning to the scene of the crime, to the foot of Book Cliffs north of Grand Junction CO, where, four years ago, my little poodle ran away in panic from noisy target-practice shooters, and disappeared for fourteen days before he trotted up to an elk hunter's pickup truck. The full story is on the tab, Sad Story at Book Cliffs, at the top of the blog.

His extended life has been a good one. Would he remember this awful place? He seems to remember people and places from one year back, but not four. And besides, he's mostly deaf and blind now.

I stopped the rig about a quarter mile short of the camping turnaround that I remembered all too well, since I wallowed in angst and guilt there for a week, hoping for his return four years ago. At the end of the week I accepted defeat, went to the Grand Junction animal shelter, and adopted Coffee Girl.

We walked the rest of the way in order to inspect the road condition. As we approached Book Cliffs, the little poodle assumed the position and took a nice big poop. Gee, maybe he did remember.

The next morning we started hiking the trail that I remembered from four years ago. The little poodle was acting frisky for an old boy who's almost sixteen and a half years old, so I decided to take him for a ways, until he tired. The trail through the canyon and up Book Cliffs was still dark and cold when Grand Valley and the Colorado Monument, in the background, were bright and sunny.

Sad and desperate memories came back when we reached the overlook where I abandoned the search four years ago: would he stay on this trail in the first place? Why would he keep climbing unless the gun noise was dying down, and I didn't think it was? Surely he wouldn't choose a direct frontal assault on the vertical sections of the cliff? Coffee Girl posed there today, with the rig looking like a small white speck in front of her chest.

But the little poodle didn't tire today. In his youth he would always charge ahead, keeping the leash as tight as a violin string. But in old age he likes to follow behind my feet, since he can't see the trail that well.

I was tempted to let him pose on some of the scenic overlook spots, but a little voice in the back of my head whispered warnings against hubris. It's strange how emergencies usually come about only after a sequence of several misjudgments. It's the last mistake that finally causes the situation to tip into disaster.

Both dogs and I were pumping out the endorphins by now. (And the little voice was telling me that endorphins can be dangerous.) Should we keep going until we reached the top of Book Cliffs? We were getting into the vertical stuff now, about two-thirds of the way up. But would the little poodle have the stamina to return? I had never carried him in my new day-pack, and didn't know how well it would work.

No more chances. We've done enough for today. The Little Hero looks as happy as a pup. It's a good place to declare victory and return.

Another Under-rated Pleasure of Camping

2011-10-20T08:08:00.002-06:00

Having just gotten camped in a new location, it was time to do something that I hadn't done in a long time: pop the outer door open, while letting the screen door face right at the southern sun. At this time of the year, the sun is getting quite a bit lower; we're only two months from the winter solstice. I'd forgotten how glorious it is feel the Southwest's sun through solar screen. (Years ago, I'd replaced regular RV industry screen with 85% blocking solar screen.)

It's easy to under-estimate how pleasant it is to feel, simultaneously, cool autumn air and warm, moderated sunlight through that solar screen. This might seem like a trivial experience to people who are not familiar with the Southwestern sun, or who spend all summer in air-conditioned domiciles or cars. It might also seem like nothing is accomplished by suffering heat in the summer, without an air-conditioner, only to get the pleasure back in autumn; you could argue that it averages out, over a full year, to a big fat zero. But something is gained by the sheer intensity of this pleasure: life becomes more interesting and dramatic, instead of neutral, boring, and comfortable.

The sun charged up the batteries through the solar panels, while also thermally "charging up" the inside of the RV. But everything was almost too perfect, so instinctively I started to worry about topography robbing me of lawful daylight at the end of day. But it didn't.

Time to Head Down River

2011-10-19T18:28:00.003-06:00

Oops. In considering where to go when, I overlooked that I would be camping higher and cooler than the cities in the valley. So it was time to leave the upper Uncompahgre River, "conflow" with the Gunnison River -- isn't conflow what you do at the confluence of two rivers? -- and then "float" down to the Grand River.

What a marvelous experience I owe to the Johnsons over at Box Canyon Blog!

Wrinkles of the Western Slope

2011-10-18T06:40:00.001-06:00

Contrast is probably the quality that most people value highest in a landscape, since prettiness per se is insipid. Badlands, eroded from Mancos shale, are quite a contrast from the volcanic extrusions in the San Juan mountains. I get to admire both from my campsite on a mesa outside Montrose CO. Sigh, I really don't look forward to flowing downriver this Friday.

Squished by Mountain Weather

2011-10-17T09:40:00.001-06:00

Somebody needs to come up with an old saying analogous to 'you can't see the forest for the trees' about mountains. It's hard to appreciate what is happening to a mountain range if you are right in the middle of one and your view is blocked by a mountain. On my little mesa near Montrose CO, I am 25 miles from the edge of the San Juan mountains, so I can appreciate the big picture. During storms the entire mountain range disappears in minutes.

The tiny bright speck in the center is the morning sun reflecting off a building.

Natural Migration Paths in Autumn

2011-10-16T07:06:00.012-06:00

How many times have you smiled at a school bus? But I did yesterday. It was labelled as "Gunnison Watershed Something-or-Other". It's rare to see something labelled as XYZ Watershed, but in a state like Colorado it should be common. To finally see "justice" done was a delightful surprise. I smiled myself into a nostalgic fit over it.

So many American rivers start here, although the Colorado River, ironically, isn't one of them. But we needn't rehash the sorry history of that bit of political chicanery, perpetrated in 1922; you can read on it at Wikipedia.

When RVing in Colorado for the first time, many years ago, it was difficult to memorize the names and locations of individual mountain peaks; there are too many of them and the names are not always interesting. So the brain aims at unifying this clutter of details: it groups them into mountain ranges, or studies up on the geology and orogeny of the area, seeking order from the chaos of individual facts. That helped, but only a little.

Seeing the mountains is the main reason why visitors come to Colorado, isn't it? Aha, that's the trap. A single inversion of this type of thinking makes the breakthrough for the frustrated geography nerd: don't visualize the mountains, the high spots; rather, visualize the low spots, the river courses. Stop thinking like a motorist and start thinking like a:

You can carry a simplified sketch around in your head that resembles something you might have drawn in grade school. Halfway between adjacent rivers you can draw in upside-down "V"s, just like a grade-schooler might. Color in the top of the upside-down V with the white crayon. (Funny, I can't remember having white crayons back then. I wonder if little kids have crayons at all these days. Maybe they draw with their damn iPads instead of a box of crayons.)

At any rate, this simplified sketch in your own mind is more mobile than anything GPS or Google Earth can give you, and it doesn't require you to take your eyes off the road when driving in order to access the data. No batteries, either.

Until I saw that school bus with its fine label, I wasn't really sure how to migrate this autumn. But now it would be dishonorable and unnatural to pay attention to random and meaningless highways rather than river courses. Now we will, to paraphrase Lincoln after the Union won the battle of Vicksburg, follow the great Southwestern Father of Waters as it rolls unvexed to the sea.

Very well then, it's time for a quiz, to see if the reader has been paying attention. Let's start in the central western part of the state, near the city of Grand Junction, where the Grand River flows down to Moab, UT; let's circle around the state, going clockwise. Let's see how many you can visualize and if you know what they drain to: the Yampa, North Platte, South Platte, Arkansas, the mighty Rio Grande (Rio Bravo del Norte, actually), San Juan, and Dolores.

How did you do? Ahh, did you catch my omission? Here's a hint: it starts near Colorado's southern border and has a northern name.

A Morning Cup of Joe for the Batteries

2011-10-14T07:03:00.009-06:00

When a person starts off on round two of their traveling life, they need to stay open-minded and flexible so they can do a better job than in round one, not that round one really needed much improvement. But without improvement and progress, what are we to do with ourselves?

It's easy to become bored and jaded with the progress in gadgets: thinner, lighter, more gigabytes, etc. How about some progress in some other field?

In the traveling biz there has been remarkable progress, back around 2000, when Honda brought out that remarkable line of alternator/ inverter-based generators. Quiet and fuel-sipping.

Of course a chain is no stronger than its weakest link: I'm not sure whether the RV industry has modernized their converter/chargers; they used to just put out 13.6 volts, which can not fully or quickly charge a battery. But there has been remarkable progress in bringing the cost down of real, three stage, battery chargers that put out 14.X volts DC, and twiddle the "X" based on temperature. You can buy one for $60 at Walmart. I bought a Xantrex 40 Amp charger of this kind from DonRowe.com several years ago. Completely pleased.

Now if only there were a little progress in batteries!

Still, I had to smile this morning when I was sucking down the morning cup of joe. I had my little generator running, giving the batteries their dawn cup of joe, starting with 40 amp espresso, no creme. Perhaps I shouldn't even be running the generator at dawn; if I had neighbors I would become unpopular. But I have little patience for solar charging in the winter; it doesn't really get going until 10 a.m.

If only RV bloggers would stop over-praising solar panels! They're useful and worth having, but they're not divine. It's easy to expect too much from them.

In summary: they should encourage the newbies to first buy one of those quiet Honda 1000 watt generators, and then pair it to a modern, three stage charger that puts out 14.1--14.3 volts DC for quick and complete charging. Then over time, a person can add solar panels to complete and maintain the charge during the day, and keep the generator usage to a sensible minimum, perhaps one hour per day.

Another Chilly Dawn

2011-10-13T06:50:00.001-06:00

I step out of the rig before dawn to let my little poodle do his old-man duties. I stand close, guarding him. Off in the distance the sagebrush stands out slightly from the surrounding grass; under the full moon, it looks like a patient, lurking, coyote-sized predator. A full moon does a fine job on a high, lonesome, and wind-less mesa. But all of this had little effect on me. It was the temperature that mattered.

It was chilly of course, but to just the right intensity. It's funny how certain "hardships" stimulate a person. The hardship must be of the right kind and adjusted to the proper intensity. For the first time in several days, the chilliness left me feeling confident as I braced against it.

Perhaps I should celebrate the occasion by rereading Toynbee's chapters on "Challenge and Response." What he described about several societies in different eras -- he was gloriously time-agnostic -- applies just as well to an individual's life. It is the issue that separates an early retiree from a conventional retiree.

Now, there is enough voltage in dawn to see the indigo serrations of the San Juan mountains. What a pageant of eye and skin pleasure each dawn is! Late risers miss so much. They'd better live in town.

South So Soon?

2011-10-12T10:26:00.003-06:00

It might just be a fluke of a small data set, but it seems that RV travelers are already too far south this October. "There he goes again, running down people who have different tastes than himself," say a few readers. But actually, I'm not talking about tastes at all; I'm talking about geography.

North America is 10-20 times smaller in winter than in summer, after taking into account what most travelers desire. This causes two problems: 1) a noticeable population compression in the places that are desirable in winter, and 2) you run out of places to go in the winter. You get tired of the same old places.

Population compression (#1) does not enhance the camping experience unless you enjoy lines, crowds, generators, or higher prices and reservations at RV parks.

Problem #2 is real, but not severe. I like the places that I've gone to, in winters past. Still, there is a limit to how long I can stay interested in places like the Mojave Desert or windy southern New Mexico or West Texas. Southern Arizona is always overcrowded.

The obvious solution is to stay in cooler locations during the shoulder seasons, so that the warm places don't get worn out. Why do so many RVers have such a negative and cynical attitude about cool air? I've spent 20 years of my life downwind of the Great Lakes, so I know how disgusting cold and wet weather can be. But it's the clouds, cold precipitation, and slop that really get to you -- not the thermometer itself. There is a secondary rainy season in the Southwest in mid-winter, but the shoulder seasons are dry and sunny, usually.

Chilly air under sunny skies is one of the great pleasures of the outdoors. You miss that by heading south too soon.

You can also sleep better in cool air, with the windows of the RV shut and blocking a little bit of outside traffic noise.

But no reasoned argument will have any effect on some RVers, who have this cliche image built into their retirement dream: they are stretched out in a lounge chair outdoors; in the background there is a palapa roof and palm trees; a warm tropical breeze blows in from la baia; they have a margarita or a Corona beer in hand; everything is warm, easy, care-free.

And for escapist cliches like this they are willing to put up with the downside.

Escaping from Blog Prison

2011-10-11T08:10:00.003-06:00

The challenge for me as a blogger has always been to gradually migrate my readership away from the pure travel genre and towards the topics that I'm interested in enough to write about, as given in the subtitle at the top of the blog. Somehow I have to do this without knowing much about my readers or where they come from; most readers probably still come from RV travel blogs.

A cross-category blog is inherently difficult to match with readers. Perhaps that's why most blogs are "pure-breeds", such as news, politics, financial, vacation-like travel, sports, friends and family, etc.

Imagine the disappointment of a the standard armchair traveler/RV wannabee who stumbles onto my blog. He wants escapist dreams and pretty pictures to help numb the pain of having four more years to go, in his cubicle prison; there's nothing wrong with that, but it's not what I do here. Offering anything but sugary fantasies will come off as being overly-earnest at best, or negative and cynical at worst.

I take independent, non-stereotypical, living and thinking seriously, but I doubt that the average armchair traveler does. But how do I find the right readers? "Alternative lifestyle" is a keyword that matches various wacko stereotypes. "Independence" matches people looking to stay out of nursing homes for another year.

Travel-based experiences are important to me, but that does not mean routine sightseeing, not that there's anything evil with it; but it's too easy and predictable. A real travel experience doesn't take place at arm's length from the windshield; it comes from pushing your envelope both physically and mentally.

There is an old saying in the movie biz that a movie can not be any better than its villain. Similarly, a book-novel has a protagonist and an antagonist; there is a conflict, and resolving that conflict is what the story is all about. An independent and alternative lifestyle should also be a drama about the conflicts between the protagonist (the individualist) and the antagonist (mainstream society and its shackles). A drama is a lot different from an escapist fantasy.

Trying to escape the travel blog pigeonhole has been frustrating, which then causes me to lash out at the mainstream RV traveler, whose supposed "alternative lifestyle" turns out to be false advertising. Recall that 'a cynic is just an idealist who has been disappointed once too often'.

Back Home on BLM Land

2011-10-10T09:33:00.004-06:00

I was given fair warning when I started the driveway-guarding gig in Ouray that the late sunrises and early sunsets would take their toll on me. But it's beneficial to experience voluntary, short-term suffering when traveling. It just whips up your appetite for the next thing, and it adds drama. Even Mark, of Box Canyon Blog, had to buy a new and more mobile rig just so he can escape to Arizona in the winter and receive self-administered emergency "heliotherapy treatments". Near the end of the gig, the dogs were becoming despondent.

In fact the sun was perverse on the last day. After a day or two of clouds and rain, the sky finally cracked open. Here's how things looked from Mark's driveway:

Impressive indeed. That was at 2:30 p.m. By 2:38 the sun went behind the western cliff. That did it! I'm outa' here.

I love being back on spacious BLM land. I'd forgotten how much pleasure you can get from small aspects of boondocking, such as orienting your rig so the door faces the morning sun and the "den" window faces sunset. And up here on the mesa, surrounded by nothing more than grass and sagebrush, I get to experience each lawful minute of daylight.

Camping on BLM must be similar to blue-water sailing. It offers the freedom to move and to live without bumping into neighbors, cops, and cars. The visual manifestation of this freedom is horizontal-ness. You see it everywhere.

Just a Bit of Elevation and Light

2011-10-09T06:59:00.010-06:00

It's Dawn now. From this cold and lonely mesa in western Colorado I see the city lights, below. I'm surprised how gorgeous they look from this vantage point of only a couple hundred feet above the valley floor. How could so much be gained by so little?

I shouldn't avert my eyes from the ugliness of Montrose, a rather standard sprawling noisy American city, completely dependent on automobiles for transportation. Much of the beauty of those lights comes, not from their color or faint flickering, but from the contrast with the unpleasantness of city life, and from my own detachment from it on this mesa.

There's just enough light to judge the type and extent of the clouds. Day seems real again and full of promise.

Foraging Versus Sightseeing

2011-10-08T08:32:00.011-06:00

It hardly seems intuitive to begin an autumn migration by going north, but that is what we did yesterday. Latitude does matter, at least 400 mile chunks of it, and especially at this time of year, but altitude still matters more. The Uncompahgre River drains to the north.

A cynic might argue that half the appeal of a reverse migration is just the feeling that one isn't supposed to do it. Actually, one of the sweetest pleasures can be gotten by noble and voluntary suffering in the Cold before finally relenting and moving towards the Warm. (We all know certain Sybarites of the Road who would never believe this.)

When the dogs and I got out of the van in Montrose CO, the sun felt delicious; but it was the rareness of this pleasure that was most appreciated. How many times does the driver of an un-air-conditioned cargo van actually enjoy warm sun coming through that big windshield? Normally I loathe it, and worry about the heat harming my dogs.

I can't imagine bathers in famous hot springs pools in glamorous overseas spas ever getting more pleasure than I got yesterday from that weak evanescence of heat from the dashboard, vanishing into that wide cold valley, and then vanishing 'like breath into the wind' into the cold blue Colorado sky. So too would it vanish into late afternoon chill when I drove the rig up onto a nearby mesa, for a night of cold, lonely camping. In the longer term this precious heat would vanish when the bittersweet months of autumn congeal into the rigidity of winter.

In Montrose I began a shakedown of the town, while accompanying the dogs on chores of theirs. The satisfaction of the dogs was so noticeable, despite the routineness of their chores. Each sniff of a bush was vitally important to them.

And here I was, getting back into the old traveler's routine of shaking down a new town. I slipped back into it so naturally it was as if I had never left it for three years. But why the surprise? We are animals after all, and are entitled to experience genuine satisfaction in doing our daily chores, just as dogs are. As I walked along I stepped outside myself, and saw an animal doing what he was intended to do. He was foraging for the necessities of life.

Foraging is under-rated as one of the satisfactions of a traveler and camper. It is more common to believe that sight-seeing is a traveler's daily occupation; primarily this idea comes from the tourism industry that wants us to see traveling as visual entertainment for which they sell the tickets.

Colorado Tourism Promotional Postcard

2011-10-06T11:30:00.011-06:00

The San Juan Mountains still have plenty of tourists here for the fall color season. I wonder if this is what they had in mind.

Wasn't it Arthur Koestler's Act of Creation that discussed the usefulness of inversion in creativity? Maybe he was on to something. For instance, every windshield tourist is running around the mountains trying to take "breathtakingly beautiful" postcards of autumn colors. Since digital cameras are so good, most of these postcards look pretty much the same, and the world's supply of pixels is depleted for nothing. A yellow leaf is just a yellow leaf.

What if, instead of joining the leaf-peeping hordes, we asked, "What is the ugliest thing we could photograph at this time of year?" Or is that negative thinking? Well at least it is thinking, and a difficult type of thinking it truly is.

For instance I thought wet, disgusting snow coming down in early October might be a suitably perverse subject. But being anti-beautiful is just as difficult as the other side of the coin; perhaps more so, since we can't just imitate somebody else.

The biggest snowflakes fall just above freezing and then instantly melt. It is necessary to find a dark background for them to show up. I tried to play around in "shutter time" control mode on my camera, which is a mode I seldom use, and am not good at.

In fact, the question of "what should I choose to deliberately come up with ugliness" causes the brain to freeze up, even for an ol' cynic and curmudgeon. You can't just take your notions of beauty and multiply them by an algebraically-simple negative one, although there's probably some aesthetician or metaphysician who would argue that you could.

It still seems as though something good might eventually come from this project. Let us try to keep an open mind; after all, ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.

Tolstoy as a Traveler?

2011-10-04T16:03:00.014-06:00

I got on this "What is Art" kick because it seemed that I might find something in the general subject of art that I could apply advantageously to the Art of Travel, which is part of my job. Remember that this blog is not aimed at sight-seeing vacationers or RV newbies.

I used to feel a bit disappointed that art, that is, beauty, had so little effect on me. But rereading Tolstoy's essay puts my mind at rest. Perhaps beauty is over-rated. If Tolstoy was correct there is a completely different way to approach the subject of art.

Finally in Chapter 5 Tolstoy's What is Art? (Google books) gets to the affirmative side of the question.

What is art, if we put aside the conception of beauty, which confuses the whole matter?

But first, one last exclusion:

A man may express his emotions by lines, colors, sounds, or words, and yet may not act on others by such expression; and then the manifestation of his emotions is not art.

The peculiarity of [art], distinguishing it from intercourse by means of words, consists in this, that whereas by words a man transmits his thoughts to another, by means of art he transmits his feelings.

In order correctly to define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure, and to consider as one of the conditions of human life.

The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man's expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it.

Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of external signs, hands on to others feelings that he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.

The infective transfer of feelings from one person to another is what Tolstoy calls art, whether it be a joke, a painting, or a tune. It surprises me that the stern old beard would admit that telling a joke was art, since his writings were hardly ever humorous except possibly when he was ridiculing German intellectuals.

Perhaps his favorite movie would be Punchline, with Tom Hanks, Sally Fields, and John Goodman. It was a marvelous drama about the serious side of being a stand-up comedian. In one scene, the most promising comic of a certain nightclub, played by Tom Hanks, was practicing during the day at a hospital. In his audience were doctors, nurses, and patients. His humor was such powerful medicine to the patients that you couldn't tell whether they were laughing or crying. "Infective" transfer of feelings, indeed.

The other day I finally got it straight why I've been enraptured by ridgelines for so many years, despite other forms like mountains, beaches, or red rock arches being the standard objects of adoration. The experience of traversing ridgelines is the best for appreciating -- that is, being affected by -- the rest of the world, and this is more significant than the visual beauty of the ridgelines themselves.

Perhaps this captures the essence of the art of travel: of pursuing those activities and getting into a mindset that raise our sensitivities and infectabilities from what is around us when we travel; not just pretty scenery, but conversations with other people, experiences with animals, food and fitness, mental exercise, lifestyle experimentation and control of our daily habits, and the complete drama of the outdoor world.

Bambi Unbothered

2011-10-01T15:33:00.003-06:00

Several times my little poodle has made a bad situation worse by not barking when he was in danger, so when I heard him bark outside my trailer today, I was both relieved and alarmed. Sure enough, it was the deer that likes to munch on the suckers of a dead stump on the Johnsons' driveway. She has two half-grown offspring who travel with her.

Since the little poodle can barely see, his interaction with mama Bambi was probably accidental. I charged out of the trailer and saw Mama "facing off" with the little poodle. She wasn't particularly afraid of me.

Actually, I think it's in the interests of any wildlife to stay frightened of Man; otherwise, they will hang around too much and eventually get run over by a car. So I thought I was doing the deer a favor by sending my 40 pound Australian kelpie, Coffee Girl, to chase the threesome out of the yard.

But mama deer was completely fearless. She faced Coffee Girl head on, and wouldn't yield an inch. Coffee Girl actually got underneath mama deer, where she could have been kicked and injured. You could tell that Coffee Girl was confused, if not positively insulted, by this impudent cervine's unwillingness to act, uhh, subservient.

But the dogs and the deer ended the encounter with no injuries. Now please, let no Bambi-lovers tell me that I was being cruel. Coffee Girl is not the threat that a car is.

San Juan Postcard with an Excuse

2011-09-30T11:19:00.002-06:00

Ouray, CO. So why would a reputed curmudgeon, who typically belittles postcard scenery, bother with this postcard, taken today on a hike with both of my dogs? The key word is 'both'. My little poodle is acting older now that he is almost 16 and a half years old. That's like a person in their eighties. So I haven't been taking him on hikes with my younger dog, Coffee Girl.

Today we actually drove (blush) the van up to a trailhead. The little poodle was so frisky that he wouldn't stay in the van and sleep like I expected. He insisted on going on the hike. I had to improvise a leash, since his collar wasn't even installed. Instead of tiring in five minutes, he charged the leash, and acted like he could go for hours.

This isn't the first time that I've underestimated him. By the time we crossed the creek and got back in the van, I was getting pretty misty-eyed just thinking about the wonderful life we've had together and how, miraculously, there's still some left.

Back at the van, he didn't want to get in. He was on an endorphin high.

As usual it seems that dogs are necessary for a hike or outing to make a strong impression on me. The scenery, fall colors and all, just doesn't cut it, by itself.

Tablet philia or phobia?

2011-09-27T14:27:00.012-06:00

It's rare for me to experience gadget lust. Normally all the sex appeal has gone flat for the boring ol' gadget by the time this late adopter gets one. But recently I've gone crazy reading about Tablets; not the iShackle line of products made by Apple, of course. Their gadgets are for aspirational consumers, whereas I am a maximum bang-for-the-buck, no-nonsense type of customer.

This is about the Toshiba Thrive tablet, 10 inches, with the Android 3.1 (Honeycomb) operating system. The Thrive is distinguished from all the other Android tablets by its user-removable battery and its ports: it has a full-sized USB port, a slot for a full-sized SD card, and a full-sized HDMI port. Thus, the Toshiba Thrive tablet is the one most suitable for functioning as a substitute for a mini-notebook computer.

So you can see why I got excited. Then I searched for Android versions of the programs that I use now on my Paleozoic laptop: Firefox with AdBlock, Picasa on disk (not in the cloud) for editing photos, and a word-processor for text files. But when somebody mentioned that Adblock can't block the ads in apps, my bubble burst. So that's what this bandwagon of mobile gadgets and apps is all about!

I absolutely insist on blocking ads from my internet experience, not because I'm an NPR/PBS stereotype, and not because I can't see value in ads -- respectable, non-flashing, non-dancing-bimbo ads, that is. I just don't want the internet experience to fall into the same sewer as the boob toob.

I've just begun to read about Firefox and AdBlock for Android, so forgive me if my fears are exaggerated, but it appears that Firefox-with-Adblock hasn't gotten too far on (Honeycomb) Android systems. I wonder if they're even trying that hard. Perhaps they've already surrendered to the eventuality of Google's hegemony over tablets and smartphones through its Chrome and Android browsers and operating systems. Obviously Google is not in favor of ad-blocking features in browsers.

Once again I'm just guessing here, but is it possible that all this hoopla and hype about the latest mobile wunder-gadget really isn't about technology per se. It's about pushing the suckers towards apps just so the industry and its advertisers -- and not the ad-blocking browser -- control what's on the screen. It has been difficult for companies to monetize their websites, since readers expect everything for free on the internet. So the internet world needs to turn the readers of freebie websites into the viewers of apps, which either cost money to buy, or bombard you with noisy, filthy ads. Eventually they'll do both, just like the boob toob.

Advertisers must also be excited about every driver in America paying more attention to their smartphone or tablet than the road. Think how easy it will be to see some provocative ad on their gadget, and then surrender to their most juvenile desires for instant gratification by pulling over to a store or drive-through in the next couple minutes.

Thoreau would be impressed with the great progress we are making. The same ad, aimed at a couch-potato in his easy chair, can't produce any sales until the guy finds his car keys, his shoes and coat, etc. It could easily be 20 minutes between an ad and a purchase at a store, provoked by that ad. A modern economy can't work in slow motion like that!

Count Tolstoy Versus the Colorado Arts Scene

2011-09-26T06:09:00.003-06:00

Artists, artists everywhere! From the northern Rio Grande Valley, Sante Fe, Taos, Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch, and into Colorado, the whole region is infested with artists. I'm even ~~squatting on the driveway~~ providing driveway security services at the home of a couple Colorado artists. You'd think that art was a major part of the economy. Since when did Americans become so arts-oriented?

If a traveler takes travel seriously -- that is, if travel is more than trivial sightseeing and generating digital postcards -- he needs to ask: what is this place good for? What is special about it? Then he needs to do some thinking about a topic that the location brings up.

I reread Tolstoy's What is Art? (*) Before showing some juicy quotes from that book, let's first try to imagine an elderly Tolstoy -- with his beard and earnestness, now an ex-novelist, working to reform Christianity, and totally outside the intellectual mainstream of Europe -- walking through an art festival in summer in Colorado. I'll bet he would be scowling the entire way. You don't have to sympathize with the Prophet Tolstoy's views to believe that his ideas about art are worth listening to. From Chapter 2:

But the ordinary man either does not know, or does not wish to know, all this, and is firmly convinced that all questions about art may be simply and clearly solved by acknowledging beauty to be the subject-matter of art. To him it seems clear and comprehensible that art consists in manifesting beauty, and that a reference to beauty will serve to explain all questions about art.

But what is this beauty which forms the subject-matter of art? How is it defined? What is it?

It is taken for granted that what is meant by the word beauty is known and understood by every one. And yet not only is this not known, but, after whole mountains of books have been written on the subject...the question, What is beauty? remains to this day quite unsolved, and in each new work on aesthetics it is answered in a new way.

From Chapter 4:

Instead of giving a definition of true art, and then deciding what is and what is not good art by judging whether a book does or does not conform to the definition, a certain class of works, which for some reason pleases a certain circle of people, is accepted as being art, and a definition of art is designed to cover all these productions.

No matter what insanities appear in art, when once they find acceptance among the upper classes in society, a theory is quickly invented to explain and sanction them;

So the theory of art, founded on beauty, expounded by aesthetics, and in dim outline professed by the public, is nothing but the setting up as good of that which pleases us, i.e., pleases a certain class of people.

People who consider the aim of art to be pleasure cannot realize its true meaning and purpose, because they attribute to an activity, the meaning of which lies in its connections with other phenomena in life, the false and exceptional aim of pleasure.

Therefore, however strange it may seem, in spite of the mountains of books written about art, no exact definition of art has been constructed. And the reason of this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.

The chapters that I condensed are concerned about What Isn't Art?, rather than what is, which was in later chapters.

(*) I wasn't able to find a text file version of this on the internet, but only the Google books version. The eBook option is over-rated, since they are uneditable, and therefore nothing but "an improved means to an unimproved end."

He Came to the Mountains, in His 57th Year...

2011-09-23T17:03:00.005-06:00

...comin' home, to a place he'd never been before.

Or something like that. Being back on the road I am mindful of doing things better; hence all the preaching about being flexible and avoiding rigid habits when traveling.

There is a fair bit of adaptation necessary here in Ouray, although the deck was stacked in my favor by the generosity of my "clients", Mark and Bobbie Johnson, over at Box Canyon Blog.

When walking the sidewalks in downtown Ouray, it is fun to imagine what various people like best about a scenic mountain town. I almost feel sorry for the bourgeois matrons from a big city; they must be bored to tears with nature and scenery, after a few minutes.

When I watch them it is always with an impish smirk on my face. Think of the classic Disney movie, Homeward Bound (The Incredible Journey), in which a cat, Sassie (voiced over by Sally Fields), and two male dogs try to make a long distance journey over the mountains to get back to their people. At one point Sassie the cat says, "I'm so sick of nature I could puke. After this I intend to live indoors on a velvet cushion, filled with bird feathers."

Restaurants are the other big thing for mainstream tourists. No wonder vacations to Las Vegas or stay-cations at luxury hotels back home have become popular. A lot more people come to a town like Ouray than really should: very few tourists walk the marvelous trail system around town.

But let's ask what people look at most fondly when they do stay away from the shops and restaurants. The mountains is the obvious answer; but it's not that simple. It could be running streams, old mining culture, snow, slot-like canyons, waterfalls, or cliffs. I was surprised when a passerby in town wanted to know about a grassy ridge that sits at the top of the southern face of one mountain. I too have been obsessing over this. Maybe ridgeline fans are more numerous than I thought.

Actually you can just barely see the ridgeline at the top of the photo; it inclines toward the right. (As always, clicking the photo enlarges it.) But I can't keep my eyes off of it. I got closer to it on today's hike:

Recall Oscar Wilde's words in An Ideal Husband: 'To look at a thing is quite different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.' There is no shortage of land-forms to practice that wise saying on, here in Ouray; but in the case of ridgelines, this wise saying is upside-down. Looking at a ridgeline, you must admit it is subtle and unspectacular. It's beauty doesn't come from looking at it, but rather, in appreciating how the rest of the world looks when seen from a ridgeline; better yet, imagine the experience of being on the ridgeline, moving along it, rather than looking at anything.

Rounding the Bend

2011-09-22T07:57:00.002-06:00

On the trail to Upper Cascade Falls, Ouray CO. Unlike my little poodle, who would pose for the camera at the slightest suggestion, Coffee Girl is difficult to photograph. Her mostly black color restricts the photographs to silhouettes. Even worse, the second she hears the camera click on, she obediently runs back to Daddy to see if she can help. Herding dogs are so attentive!

When Night's Candles Burned Out

2011-09-20T12:53:00.005-06:00

It was a rough night. Once again I fell asleep to a DVD movie, Roman Polanski's MacBeth. No director understands cold rain, mud, and peasant agriculture as well as Polanski, perhaps because of his early life in Poland. Watching this movie is a great thing to do when you want to glory in the misery of unpleasant weather.

Around 1 in the morning I awoke to find the electricity off in the RV. I was curious, so I walked out to the edge of the rocky shelf that serves as a driveway here and saw -- not just another hateful night of cold, stygian rain and gloom -- but the entire town of Ouray CO pitch black. Another Colorado summer: Out, out, brief candle. Against this visual emptiness, the noise from the Uncompahgre River stood out alarmingly, enraged as it was by a night's rain.

The movie overwhelms the viewer with oppressive rain, mud, and cold. Remember that special efforts were required in that pre-CGI era to make rain register on a movie screen. Just before MacBeth had his best friend Banquo murdered, there were two remarkable speeches back to back. (The movie screenwriter changed Shakespeare's play to put these speeches back-to-back, and in a different character's voice.)

The two speeches referred to ambiguity and confusion about the sky at sunset in the northern latitudes of Scotland, combined with a little late medieval superstition. The moody cinematography of a northern sunset accentuated the Bard's words, or was it the sad and ominous cadence to the actors' delivery of those words?

The worst thing about this miserable, socked-in weather that we've been having lately is the lighting of the sky in Ouray, because the town is nestled into a hole in the San Juan Mountains; and now suddenly, this disturbing ambiguity of night and day seemed like a thing of great beauty. I remember a great load being lifted from my shoulders when this realization hit me, and broke out into a smile and sigh.

In the Southwest proper, each day starts exhuberantly the second the sun cracks the horizon. You hurry to get out and enjoy a perfect morning before the heat and wind of mid-day. So it was natural for a Southwesterner to be bothered by the pale and extended dawns and dusks of Ouray. But no more. Only in the uncomfortable here and now, high above the enraged, black roar of the Uncompahgre, would these things have combined into an awful beauty.

Last Dance for a Laptop?

2011-09-18T08:51:00.005-06:00

My circa 2004 Toshiba laptop doesn't like to boot up on cold mornings, and I thought that was the problem today. But instead, it gave a message about a hard drive crash being imminent. I wonder if it meant it.

I have mixed feelings about this. It's nice being the Second Chance Store for the surplus gadgets of an RV friend, and this laptop has been a winner. But I've been impatient waiting for the oldie to die so I could get something modern.

Unless somebody knows of a stupendous deal, I will probably go with a 12 inch Asus mini-laptop, with an AMD E350 processor, Windows 7 Home Premium, 2 GB of RAM, $440. I couldn't care less about how big the hard drive is; in fact, I wish it didn't have one. The 12 inch size should be just perfect for easy reading plus portability; after all, I will need to cart it into a wi-fi spot on occasion, and I hate dragging in a larger laptop since they're like a patio flagstone.

I wish that the gadget write-ups mentioned how many watts are used under normal web surfing conditions. How nice it would be to drop from 3.5-4.0 Amps DC to 2-3. I've always wanted to just leave the laptop on most of the day when I'm camping without hookups.

Actually this is great timing, since a recent birthday gift card for Walmart is burning a hole in my pocket. Unfortunately they won't let you order over an 800 phone number anywhere. (See the Decline and Fall of Walmart, posted a couple weeks ago.) So when the old laptop crashes, how do you order a new laptop online? Answer: you spend $40 driving to the nearest Walmart store and use their computer to order a new one. Of course, there's always the pre-emptive approach.