Occupation of Independence

 I would turn myself into a qualified therapist if I knew the right specialty for somebody who has become too easy to please, and too appreciative of humble pleasures.  I have even become too easily amused, by bovine-Americans of all things! The forest was 8000 feet in altitude and had 100 yard wide firebreaks on the side of the dirt roads.  That means no trees, but good grasses and flowers for grazing.  This guy was quite a looker, and he had an appreciative harem:    The cow in front had a cowbell on that made me think of a late RV blogger whose German surname meant cowbell. ( treichel )  Fortunately the cow gave me something more cheerful to think about.  She had such a bossy, busybody-ish attitude.  She kept staring at me and demanding that I get permission from her for everything.  She was amusing. Cows do not always act 'dumber than a bag of rocks.'  Mother cows sometimes act surprisingly protective around their offspring....

Does the hegemony of You Tube in "information space" almost make you think the written word is obsolete?  I have mixed feelings about that.  Maybe I would mourn for the written word if writers weren't so long-winded.  And spelling was phonetic .  Hell, if they even began making it phonetic, starting with the letter c. But what about still photography ?  (What a sad term!)  Everything has to be video these days, even when there are only talking heads in the video.  Even when there is motion, it is usually rather uninteresting.  Think of all the travel videos shot through the windshield of a car.  Is that supposed to be exciting?  Or the hikers plodding and trodding down a trail. The truth is that most videos are just 'chewing gum for the eyes.'  But photographs are something that I will miss.  It is one of my stump speeches on this blog to praise photographs as visual metaphors , while mocking postcards . And yet, stopping to ...

I was looking to cut my drive in half today.  So I found a shaded side road, and was careful not to pull the trailer further into this unknown road, since I wasn't certain about turning around. Surprisingly a sign said this was the official Lewis and Clark Trail.  My maps didn't even say that there was one.  Nearby, a nice (walkable) bridge crossed a tributary stream.  And there was another official sign.   In grade school, everybody heard about the Lewis and Clark Voyage of Discovery.  I don't remember it seeming very interesting.  But it should have been.  Think how little support and infrastructure they had to lean on!  It isn't surprising that a school kid couldn't put himself in Lewis and Clark's shoes. Along the dirt road, there was a cluster of gigantic trees, over 2 feet in diameter, with remarkable bark.  These were the best trees of the summer, for me.  How old is a tree of this diameter?  Was it alive 220 years ago,...

 We haven't seen the last hot day in 2026 but, still, it seems like we've 'broken the back' of this summer.  A camper has a right to celebrate that.  I am even happy about a smoky sky (from the forest fires) because it takes the edge off the hot sun.  Smoke bothers some people but I can even stand bicycling in it.  So off we went, onto a new road and perhaps a scenic view from the continental divide .  The trees were thick and unburned, so the shade was nice.  But the viewscape was pretty closed in.  After a while, it seemed like something was about to change. The dirt road got closer to an almost cliff-like mountain edge, so the view opened up, with each curve seeming to hang further and further out into space; swelling into a type of crescendo. By sheer dumb luck, I had happened to watch this video on You Tube the previous day, and the music was still stuck in my head:  It was the " Love Death " from the climax to Wagner's "Tristan and Iso...