Occupation of Independence

In our day many people feel revulsion towards the Valley of the Sun, metropolitan Phoenix. And yet people are still moving here. If ever there was a proof that 'Reputation is a Lagging Indicator..." I've avoided this smoggy monstrosity for most of my career as a full time RVer. It has been a pleasant surprise this winter to find some areas on the western fringe that are still nice. This was probably the largest, irrigable, agricultural valley in the Colorado River system. Only the Grand Valley near Grand Junction, CO, or the Dome Valley east of Yuma come close. And yet the specialness of this never made much of an impression on me before. Just after sunrise one morning I noticed pendulous bulbs of dew hanging on the side of the van. But just barely. Tap the van, and they collapsed like a monsoon downpour. They were accentuated by the rays of the sun striking them at a glancing angle. Suddenly I was a schoolboy doodling at the blackboard, and why no

Not surprisingly, blog host providers don't make it particularly easy to switch to a new service. Perhaps the problem was on the blogger-blogspot end. In any case, one of my readers, Barney, the Old Fat Man, notified me that photos were showing up as rectangles or X's on the older revised posts which I had cut and pasted to my new blogspot site, which you are now reading. I have found the solution, albeit a labor intensive one. So there shouldn't be any of those funny little placeholders indicating photos, soon. I've already corrected the blog back into late May. Whew, it took a few hours, but I've fixed the photos in the entire blog. Once again, thanks Barney.

White winged dove, with blue eye shadow

Wickenburg AZ, a couple years ago. I learned a new trick for enjoying the land near Vulture Peak. On the leeward side of the peak the teddy bear chollas are manageable, and much better for camping. The windward side is the dangerous side. Nevertheless we had to go to that side to use the trail up to the top of Vulture Peak. It was a challenge to negotiate the minefield of teddy bear chollas on the way up to Vulture Peak. I leashed my dogs until we were near the top, when the chollas disappeared.   Looking at the 360 degree view from the top of Vulture Peak, it was easy to appreciate the strategic location of Wickenburg, AZ. At an altitude of 2000 feet it's only a couple degrees cooler than Phoenix. Off to the northeast the mountains begin their march up to the Mogollon Rim. Vulture Peak itself is not large, but it protrudes photogenically from the desert plain that surrounds it. A hiker would feel quite exposed if he were caught up here during a monsoonal thunderstor

A CNBC headline announces that strip mall bankruptcies are up. Indeed, a video store that I walk by everyday has gone out of business, recently.  All I can say is, It's about time. I'm not wishing harm on the individuals running the businesses of course. But it's a pleasant fantasy to imagine a country with less blight. Surely I can't be the only one who has wondered how there could be so many little stores, selling useless things, all across America. They looked empty most of the time, but they stayed in business somehow. And they were always building another one! Video stores, bridal shops, vitamins, nail parlor, mini-gym, payday loans, etc. As for video stores you'd think that most of them would have closed down years ago. I can't even remember the last time I rented a movie. Netflix rendered them obsolete. Think of how inefficient a bricks-and-mortar store is. What is the customer actually paying for, when he buys his wizzmo? Online shopping is so much b

Wickenburg AZ, a couple years ago. How can dogs run so easily through the desert? For years, my miniature poodle scampered between the cacti while only suffering one mild incident. So it isn't surprising that when we came to Wickenburg AZ we weren't expecting anything but some nice desert hikes and scenery. Indeed, we found a nice wide dry wash behind the RV campsite. I took a shortcut back to the trailer, late one afternoon. The little dog went ahead. When I came out of the dry wash the little dog was bucking violently at something. He had three sticker balls on his forelegs, and more in his lip. He was wildly panicked, and I was just as bad. But at least there wasn't a lot of blood on his mouth even though there were spines inside his mouth. My only thought was to do nothing that made it worse! Panic is something you have to get out of one notch at a time. A dog goes for stickers on his leg with the mouth, so I flicked the remaining ones off of his legs wi

Wickenburg AZ, a couple winters ago. My noble experiment has hit a snag. I was trying to improve the winter RV boondock camping experience by tolerating cooler weather, in order to find prettier land and less crowded camping. But lately the weather has been wet, rather than just cool. I don't know if I could ever readjust to wet weather again. I wasn't the only the person standing on the bridge over the mighty Hassayampa "River", gawking at it. I took some photos but won't show them since there are readers north and east who refuse to be wowed by water flowing through a river.   The dogs and I headed up to Vulture Peak, right from the trailer door, by screaming up Cemetery Wash. It is amazing how you can play with dry washes and the ridges between them. Day after day you can walk the same basic area, but small variations make the loop interesting. There are a lot of horsemen in the Wickenburg area. Normally horseshoes are written intaglio into

I leave it to the reader to decide whether it is a vice to look for images to overcome confusion or disorientation when confronting a new situation. At any rate looking for an image was what I did recently when I volunteered for a committee that tries to develop walking and bicycling trails in my little city. As luck would have it, I soon thereafter ran into an interesting movie: "Ikiru (to Live)" by the famous Japanese director and auteur, Kurosawa. The supposed greatness of his other films has always escaped me; I've never been able to finish them. Fortunately I gave "Ikiru" a chance. The movie is about an older man who was section chief in city government. He had spent the last thirty years sleep-walking through his job of stamping approvals on meaningless paperwork. Then he found out that he had terminal cancer. At first I thought this was going to be a Japanese film version of Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilyich." But there was no Tolstoy-ian gr

While sitting at my desk I saw a coyote saunter by, nonchalantly, and just a few feet from the window. Why had he not smelled my dogs and run off? What insolence! When I stepped out the door and yelled at him he trotted off prudently and cautiously but not fearfully. He was smaller than Coffee Girl, my 40 pound Australian kelpie (similar to blue heelers). How would she would react to a close encounter with canid kin of the feral kind? I know how my miniature poodle feels about coyotes--he hates them and howls at them. How had that miniature poodle survived fourteen days of being lost on a high plateau in Colorado without running into coyotes and being killed? But leaving my concern for my dogs out of it, I've always had a sneaking admiration for old Wile E. Coyote. One spring a couple years ago, near Silver City NM, a friend came over from the Arizona Territory to visit the wolf/dog sanctuary nearby. On the way out to the sanctuary we asked for directions from a neigh

After my flop with volunteering on the Continental Divide Trail I started working on a committee that tries to expand recreational trails in town . Since I've benefited from other people's work on such trails many times in my life, maybe it is high time I contributed something. Yes, that is a bit of a guilt trip, but for some reason it doesn't matter in this case. Everybody likes the old Chinese proverb of 'lighting one candle rather than cursing the darkness.' Can you think of a better application than a recreational trail in an American city? To me, trails are one of the few things that make life in a city worth living. Kunstler refers to the American landscape as "The Geography of Nowhere," due to our noisy automobile-sewers, big-box parking lots, nation-wide uniformity, etc. It was a bizarre experience to attend the first meeting at a county-annex building in a strip mall. These days, county governments are bigger than the Federal Government during

Cottonwood AZ, during a recent autumn. (This is an attempt to eliminate confusion, Rick.) The location and land-form of my new campsite are attractive. What's this? Other RVs boondocking nearby. In fact some are unappetizing Desert Rats. For some reason I pulled in anyway; normally I won't camp near others, for obvious reasons.   A couple of the Desert Rats had a campfire the first night. Seeing them huddled around it, it was easy to imagine them as the male, desert version of the "Weird Sisters" in the opening of "MacBeth." The next morning the dogs and I walked down to the Verde River. Our first pleasant surprise was limestone. Ahh, I had a fit of nostalgia for the limestone caprock of West Texas and the Hill Country, where I spent my first snowbird winter. Limestone might not be much to look at, but it is a marvelous layer for wheels, heels and dog pads. Soon we were along the Verde River, which was flowing with great force thanks to the re