Occupation of Independence

It was easy to get started early that morning.  I was motivated.  I had some errands in town, about 2000' lower than the stony ridge I was camped on.  In town it was expected to be triple digits in the afternoon, again.   (Hardly any towns in the Inland Northwest are high altitude and comfortable.) When I drove by a large lake I was surprised that nobody was there.  But really, who goes out to play in the water at 7 a.m.?  By 11 a.m. some people would surely be out there, enjoying it. Thinking about that brought on a powerful wave of nostalgia, despite "going to the lake to cool off" not being a big part of my childhood.  But most people at least remember running through lawn sprinklers as a child.  There are other pleasant memories, such as the anticipation of grandmother or mother making ice-cold lemonade.  Or getting a little bit of relief from a porch swing or riding a bicycle. This is time for my annual advertisement for the chapter, "Quincy", in the "

I was looking at the movies available on tubitv.com,   and found "Elmer Gantry", made around 1960, and featuring a powerful performance by Burt Lancaster.  (I watched it with the Brave browser and Adblock, which worked great.)  The movie is more worthwhile if you take it allegorically.  The story is about Christian revivalists in the Bible Belt, but many of its points apply just as well to other popular delusions, such as democratic politics. Elmer Gantry seems a lot like Donald Trump.  I wonder if the legacy of the Trump era will be that presidential candidates will always arise through the entertainment industry, and that their on-camera personality is the only thing that will matter.

 Ponderosa forests have a large fan club in the camping community, and I am a member.  But in mid-summer, the shade in these forests is not quite good enough.  This makes a guy appreciate the thicker shade of spruce forests.  I can't believe I said that. Many campers prefer the panoramic views of more open land to the locked-down viewscape of a thick spruce forest.  Then, when they do come out into the open, it is really fun: All in all, it is a good thing that one month is different from the others, and that one forest isn't just like all the others. It was also fun to come back into Idaho.  I begged for mercy at the local grocery store: could they spare a couple extra grocery bags?  I had used up all my bags in Oregon and I use grocery bags as trash bags!  Why is it environmentally-correct to have to buy larger trash bags to dispose of kitchen waste?  It is also nice to be rid of the 10 cent deposit on bottles and cans.  I want to support the Oregon law, but the recycling ma

  Yesterday,   for the first time in a long time, I was in a real visitor's center.  There were so many glossy brochures bragging up one place or another.  It was almost funny how little any of that mattered to me.  I was trying to learn how a visitor might get a UPS package delivered in this town.  It used to be easy, but the drug store abandoned their partnership with UPS and Amazon, and the UPS customer service center is now closed.  That is happening everywhere it seems. Isn't it strange that towns acknowledge the importance of visitors to their economy but they don't understand that visitors shop online when they are traveling?  Hell, there is nothing to buy in stores anymore, except grocery stores and gas stations. On the bright side, thrift stores seem to be coming up in the world.  Maybe they will take the place of Dollar Stores now that Dollar Stores are charging convenience-store prices.  Considering what a landfill economy we have, it makes sense that thrift stor