First day's "growth." Whether or not April really is the cruelest month, Spring (primavera) is the most difficult season to appreciate on a non-trite level. The timeless cycle of the seasons and the old principle of new growth are hard to find new expressions for, or at least, fresh embodiments of. But if we play defeatist and accept hackneyed celebrations of spring -- such as postcards of desert wildflowers or Hallmark card platitudes about Renewal -- we'll end up with a vague, but troubling, sense of opportunity lost.
The Tucson area, my usual haunt in March, is a fortunate place to be in Spring if you are looking to really work on this project of appreciating Spring. Normally I like to start writing from concrete experiences and then migrate to the Big Picture. Today is an exception.
Is it possible that the typical pattern of writing (and reading) is not helpful in appreciating Spring? The writer fusses and edits until the final result looks polished and presentable. Thus the process of writing is obscured. And it is this very process of development that has more to do with Spring than any end result of the writing.
Modern sentimentalists frequently use stock-phrases such as "in harmony with nature" and "according to nature". Ultimately these expressions trace back to the ancient Romans' use of "natura" as the mis-translation of the Greek work, phusis, which actually means growth, development, or moving Purpose. (Isn't that a great expression? Thank Gilbert Murray, Ch. 3 of Five Stages of Greek Religion.)
"Development" is the very thing that is so noticeable in Spring. What better way is there to write about Spring than to imitate the act of Development in the process of writing, itself?
But how? Perhaps you could exploit some of the advantages of the internet to write in a sequence of unfolding stages, rather than editing the post into a finished product before presenting it to the readers. Ahh, but didn't Baltasar Gracian in his classic, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, warn us to "Never let Things be seen half - finished"? The wise and shrewd old Jesuit's advice probably applies to writing, too. Seeing a half-finished book would lower the reader's estimate of the writer. But we are not talking about a professional writer trying to get ahead in the world.
Perhaps this is just a thought experiment and I won't really give it a try, but imagine a solid line being put across the page. Below the line, the writing is unfinished. Just raw ideas. Sentence fragments. Above the line is the finished product. Furthermore imagine this blog post changing every day: yesterday's raw idea jumps into today's finished product, above the line. Even the title would progress from day to day.
The raw content below the horizontal line would be the "soil", based mainly on quick thoughts of concrete experiences. Below the line lies "the vegetable mould through the action of" memories. The finished writing above the line would be the plant, topped off with the flower of quotes and metaphors from classic books and movies, of course!
_________________________________________________________________________
Second day's growth.
One of the unique features of the Tucson area is the telescope culture. The observatories are easy to spot on top of Kitt Peak and Mt. Hopkins. In fact the latter is practically in my back yard where I am dispersed camping.
The University of Arizona has its telescope mirror lab as well as an international reputation in that field. There are "dark sky" policies here to try to limit the light pollution from this metropolis of a million people.
A cynic might say that terrestrial telescopes no longer serve a serious scientific purpose in these days of radio telescopes and space telescopes. Perhaps the Tucson telescopes are used by the university for education. But of what? How many professional astronomers does the country need? Shooting from the hip, I have to guess that most of this is just science pork barrel spending. Maybe I'm wrong.
Be that as it may, I am here and need to make the best of it, so let's see if the proud old telescope culture can inspire me on some level. A mountain biker and dispersed camper is likely to be a map nerd. Topography and landmarks are daily obsessions. To a motorized outdoorsman, topography serves no real purpose other than visual entertainment. But to a nonmotorized explorer, every wrinkle has some effect on your effort, food and water requirements, ability to camp, damage and risk, etc.
Better yet, it is close to the equinox. Even somebody who thinks that the 'beauty and mystery of the heavens' is over-rated can get interested in the equinox when he pairs it to one of the important landmarks in the area. It is really something how some mountains lord over their surroundings, and seem to be visible everywhere in the area. A dispersed camper and mountain biker eventually becomes almost emotionally attached to these landmarks.
South of Tucson the clear winner is Mt. Baboquivari, or Babo, which, as you can probably guess, 'was sacred to the Native Americans.' (Big deal -- what wasn't?) What matters to me is that I can step out of my RV on a dispersed campsite and watch the setting sun move northward near Babo every day.
Alas I'm camped on an east/west road, rather than a more desirable north/south one, where I could become completely obsessed over nailing it exactly. Just spend a little time on Wikipedia, reading up on Druids, Stonehenge, Babylonian or Egyptian astronomy. And then leave the city and the automobile and the television. Go RV camping, not RV parking. You have the same brain and body that they had back then.
One year, near Silver City NM, I did nail the equinox exactly with respect to a local celebrity rock structure, called the "Kneeling Nun."
Today, you and I can do something that a priest might have done thousands of years ago: hold your hand out at arm's length and count how many finger widths the setting sun moves north every day. Be careful with your vantage point, and using the same finger. Now replace it with a stick with regular tick marks in it.
And ask Why and How? And what does it mean? This might be one of the first steps that Man took in becoming scientific, without which Life would still be nasty, brutish, and short. Think how revolutionary it was to measure something, and then notice regularity and patterns in it!
If any commenter says, "Wow dude, nice pix. Breathtakingly beautiful," I will puke.
_________________________________________
Day 3. Patagonia AZ on the east side of the Santa Rita Mountains. Several times each morning, backpackers walk by the driveway I'm moochdocking on. They are usually headed north on the Arizona Trail. Technically the dirt road at the end of the driveway is a part of that Trail. So it pulls me in and then puts me off, at the same time.
This is a unique camping situation, so I want to cash-in by talking to some of these people. They should be interesting, shouldn't they? Alas, past experience has shown that my curiosity can be a nuisance to long-distance trekkers, be they on foot or on a bicycle. That's a pity. So let them pass undisturbed.
Besides, I am not inspired by these long distance trekkers. There is something sad and solitary about them. And doing the same thing for 10 hours per day sounds like too much of a good thing. Too much trudge and drudge. So why even write about them?
That needn't be answered right now. Let's let thinking flow for awhile and then -- not stop -- but submerge, before re-emerging downstream, as does Patagonia Creek, itself.
______________________________________
Day 4. Water. That's the most important word in the American Southwest. All of life is obsessed with getting this rarest and most necessary of commodities. And most of the Southwestern landscape is drawn by erosion.
But to a modern outdoorsman, water doesn't mean much. Civilization has made it too easy to get water. Quite a bit of water can be toted along on a day trip into arid country, so why give it a thought? For something so precious to mean so little to somebody that it should mean so much to, is a limiting case of opportunity-lost.
But I'm not going to bring water filters and settle for hit-and-miss springs and creeks on my mountain bike rides. Water will still be toted. But imagining the importance of water is at least a way to appreciate long distance trekkers on the Arizona Trail or mountain bikers on the Great Divide Route. Their trek must be organized around watering holes, as routes were in the old days. These intrepid trekkers experience an authenticity that goes far beyond what a day-tripper experiences. Theirs is a more genuine Reality.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Day 5. Even people with wheels under their houses can't escape hot weather completely. In fact roughly 85% of the thermal discomfort that an RVer experiences annually is experienced in summer. In the past I have tended to see each day of hot weather as a setback and an annoyance. I should be seeing it as an opportunity to appreciate water. Only discomfort can create the chance to become violently thirsty, to become obsessed with taking a shower, or to stare in awe at the afternoon thunderstorm buildup during the monsoons.
But we humans
are too good at avoiding the intensity that would make our travel
experiences memorable and delicious. We have such a security blanket
from our economy and technology. Even more debilitating is the idea that
we should always be comfortable.
And that is where a dog owner really cashes in -- but just try to convince the stereotypical dog-hating metropolitan Green hiker of that. Recently I was mountain biking with my dog on the alluvial bajada coming down from the Santa Rita Mountains, south of Tucson. There were the obvious sources of pleasure, but the one that I actually dwelled on was the least obvious: the tactile pleasure that the decomposed granite roads were giving to my dog.
I suppose there are people who get interested in geology for different reasons. But what are those reasons? Because it's fun to memorize the difference between Cenozoic and Cretaceous? I owe my interest to the drama of pain and pleasure that my little poodle went through on different geologies, before we conquered all with his own celebrity-endorsed product line of athletic footwear:
...but back to the present near Madera Canyon, just south of Tucson. My herding dog, Coffee Girl, and I biked right up to a hiking trailhead that started at a small creek. She was hot from the unusually warm spring weather. What a visually uninteresting, humble, little, cow-trickle of a creek it was. But what did it matter?! She waded in and lapped the water up with the lusty noise that dogs usually do. The creek water must have felt wonderfully cool on her feet.
It certainly looked clean. There were no cows upstream. But I couldn't bring myself to drink it. We've all been brainwashed with fear and suspicion. Drinking from a mountain stream is a primal and genuine pleasure that I have never had.
______________________________________________________________________________
Day 6. Spring means the Tucson area to me, probably because the altitude matches the calendar. Camping on the periphery of the metropolitan area causes me to appreciate how much I've detached from metro rat race society. Further away from the ant hill, I might not give it a thought.
Another object of pride in the Tucson area is the famous Desert Museum, and rightly so. Even I sprung for an admission ticket a few years ago. It was worth seeing, but I won't go again. I have few memories from it, except a dim memory of a mountain lion. It seemed like it should have been exciting. Why wasn't it?
They did a good job there. It's not that they were doing something wrong. It's just that any museum has unavoidable limitations. The mission statement on their website states that "The mission of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is to inspire people to live in harmony with the natural world by fostering love, appreciation, and understanding of the Sonoran Desert."
Geesh. Why did they have to use that silly word 'harmony'? Don't they know that that will make me jump onto a standard stump speech that ridicules their pseudo-religion? But there's probably no need to make the long-suffering reader submit to another round of that. Besides, maybe I need to emphasize a constructive alternative to their idolatry of photogenic and glamorous species.
The main limitation of a museum, no matter how good it is, is that the experience comes down to looking at something; and mere gawking can only impact you a little bit. Other experiences have knocked my socks off, so I know that I am capable of being affected by outdoor experiences if the correct approach is used.
The basic flaw in the ideology of the metropolitan nature lover is their metaphysical dualism between homo sapiens and everything else in nature. They simply can not see homo sapiens as one more animal species. Everything that we do is sinful, evil, and unnatural. Everything about every other species is perfect and "in harmony with nature." They stick to this absurd view because they have an emotional need for the simplistic "Good versus Evil" swan song of the Zoroastrian/Judeo/Christian tradition. This is ironic, considering how proud they are about being free of that tradition. But they never bothered to notice that they have only outgrown it intellectually -- not emotionally.
So what's the constructive alternative? To begin with, we need to own up to how overpopulated, over-regulated, henpecked, emasculated, office-bound, and detached from physical reality we've become. There's a quote in a book by the French historian, Hippolyte Taine, that captures the wimpy and henpecked mindset of a "modern." He was writing in the 1880s about the rise of Buonaparte. It was a fascinating simile: Corsica, like Sardinia and Sicily, had the culture in Napoleon's childhood that Italy had had during the Renaissance. It was a world of family vendettas, amoral scheming, condottieri, and latter-day Renaissance princes. Forgive me for using a quote with a context so far afield from the rest of the post, but I love it so.
It wasn't news to me that canine loyalty was over-rated. (And that's a good thing for dogs' survival.) I stopped thinking about my own jealousy and contemplated the grandeur of what was in front of me: violent youthful energy, perfect health, and enthusiasm. The boy and the dog seemed so much alike.
That is the approach that I suggest for metro Greens. No matter how repressed and over-regulated they are, no matter how much modernity has beaten the life out of them, they need to look within and find that half-naked boy-savage of summer. More times than not, empathy with your dog will put you in the right mood.
______________________________________________________________________________
The Tucson area, my usual haunt in March, is a fortunate place to be in Spring if you are looking to really work on this project of appreciating Spring. Normally I like to start writing from concrete experiences and then migrate to the Big Picture. Today is an exception.
 | |
| What a heartbreaker of a result! A reminder to leave your camera default in spot focus instead of center-weighted. Vermilion flycatcher south of Tucson. |
Is it possible that the typical pattern of writing (and reading) is not helpful in appreciating Spring? The writer fusses and edits until the final result looks polished and presentable. Thus the process of writing is obscured. And it is this very process of development that has more to do with Spring than any end result of the writing.
Modern sentimentalists frequently use stock-phrases such as "in harmony with nature" and "according to nature". Ultimately these expressions trace back to the ancient Romans' use of "natura" as the mis-translation of the Greek work, phusis, which actually means growth, development, or moving Purpose. (Isn't that a great expression? Thank Gilbert Murray, Ch. 3 of Five Stages of Greek Religion.)
"Development" is the very thing that is so noticeable in Spring. What better way is there to write about Spring than to imitate the act of Development in the process of writing, itself?
But how? Perhaps you could exploit some of the advantages of the internet to write in a sequence of unfolding stages, rather than editing the post into a finished product before presenting it to the readers. Ahh, but didn't Baltasar Gracian in his classic, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, warn us to "Never let Things be seen half - finished"? The wise and shrewd old Jesuit's advice probably applies to writing, too. Seeing a half-finished book would lower the reader's estimate of the writer. But we are not talking about a professional writer trying to get ahead in the world.
Perhaps this is just a thought experiment and I won't really give it a try, but imagine a solid line being put across the page. Below the line, the writing is unfinished. Just raw ideas. Sentence fragments. Above the line is the finished product. Furthermore imagine this blog post changing every day: yesterday's raw idea jumps into today's finished product, above the line. Even the title would progress from day to day.
The raw content below the horizontal line would be the "soil", based mainly on quick thoughts of concrete experiences. Below the line lies "the vegetable mould through the action of" memories. The finished writing above the line would be the plant, topped off with the flower of quotes and metaphors from classic books and movies, of course!
_________________________________________________________________________
Second day's growth.
One of the unique features of the Tucson area is the telescope culture. The observatories are easy to spot on top of Kitt Peak and Mt. Hopkins. In fact the latter is practically in my back yard where I am dispersed camping.
 | |
| One of the Tucson observatories looking down on my dispersed campsite. You have to look close in the center of the screen. |
 | |
| Close-up of the observatory in the Santa Rita mountains south of Tucson. |
The University of Arizona has its telescope mirror lab as well as an international reputation in that field. There are "dark sky" policies here to try to limit the light pollution from this metropolis of a million people.
A cynic might say that terrestrial telescopes no longer serve a serious scientific purpose in these days of radio telescopes and space telescopes. Perhaps the Tucson telescopes are used by the university for education. But of what? How many professional astronomers does the country need? Shooting from the hip, I have to guess that most of this is just science pork barrel spending. Maybe I'm wrong.
Be that as it may, I am here and need to make the best of it, so let's see if the proud old telescope culture can inspire me on some level. A mountain biker and dispersed camper is likely to be a map nerd. Topography and landmarks are daily obsessions. To a motorized outdoorsman, topography serves no real purpose other than visual entertainment. But to a nonmotorized explorer, every wrinkle has some effect on your effort, food and water requirements, ability to camp, damage and risk, etc.
Better yet, it is close to the equinox. Even somebody who thinks that the 'beauty and mystery of the heavens' is over-rated can get interested in the equinox when he pairs it to one of the important landmarks in the area. It is really something how some mountains lord over their surroundings, and seem to be visible everywhere in the area. A dispersed camper and mountain biker eventually becomes almost emotionally attached to these landmarks.
South of Tucson the clear winner is Mt. Baboquivari, or Babo, which, as you can probably guess, 'was sacred to the Native Americans.' (Big deal -- what wasn't?) What matters to me is that I can step out of my RV on a dispersed campsite and watch the setting sun move northward near Babo every day.
 |
| South of Tucson, as the equinoctial suspense builds. Mt. Baboquivari on the right. And don't try to tell me that places like this aren't begging for a new Sony camera, with sweep landscape mode! |
One year, near Silver City NM, I did nail the equinox exactly with respect to a local celebrity rock structure, called the "Kneeling Nun."
Today, you and I can do something that a priest might have done thousands of years ago: hold your hand out at arm's length and count how many finger widths the setting sun moves north every day. Be careful with your vantage point, and using the same finger. Now replace it with a stick with regular tick marks in it.
And ask Why and How? And what does it mean? This might be one of the first steps that Man took in becoming scientific, without which Life would still be nasty, brutish, and short. Think how revolutionary it was to measure something, and then notice regularity and patterns in it!
If any commenter says, "Wow dude, nice pix. Breathtakingly beautiful," I will puke.
_________________________________________
Day 3. Patagonia AZ on the east side of the Santa Rita Mountains. Several times each morning, backpackers walk by the driveway I'm moochdocking on. They are usually headed north on the Arizona Trail. Technically the dirt road at the end of the driveway is a part of that Trail. So it pulls me in and then puts me off, at the same time.
This is a unique camping situation, so I want to cash-in by talking to some of these people. They should be interesting, shouldn't they? Alas, past experience has shown that my curiosity can be a nuisance to long-distance trekkers, be they on foot or on a bicycle. That's a pity. So let them pass undisturbed.
Besides, I am not inspired by these long distance trekkers. There is something sad and solitary about them. And doing the same thing for 10 hours per day sounds like too much of a good thing. Too much trudge and drudge. So why even write about them?
That needn't be answered right now. Let's let thinking flow for awhile and then -- not stop -- but submerge, before re-emerging downstream, as does Patagonia Creek, itself.
 |
| Now that I've moved over to Patagonia, it was nice to see the same observatory from the east side, on today's mountain bike ride. |
Day 4. Water. That's the most important word in the American Southwest. All of life is obsessed with getting this rarest and most necessary of commodities. And most of the Southwestern landscape is drawn by erosion.
But to a modern outdoorsman, water doesn't mean much. Civilization has made it too easy to get water. Quite a bit of water can be toted along on a day trip into arid country, so why give it a thought? For something so precious to mean so little to somebody that it should mean so much to, is a limiting case of opportunity-lost.
But I'm not going to bring water filters and settle for hit-and-miss springs and creeks on my mountain bike rides. Water will still be toted. But imagining the importance of water is at least a way to appreciate long distance trekkers on the Arizona Trail or mountain bikers on the Great Divide Route. Their trek must be organized around watering holes, as routes were in the old days. These intrepid trekkers experience an authenticity that goes far beyond what a day-tripper experiences. Theirs is a more genuine Reality.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Day 5. Even people with wheels under their houses can't escape hot weather completely. In fact roughly 85% of the thermal discomfort that an RVer experiences annually is experienced in summer. In the past I have tended to see each day of hot weather as a setback and an annoyance. I should be seeing it as an opportunity to appreciate water. Only discomfort can create the chance to become violently thirsty, to become obsessed with taking a shower, or to stare in awe at the afternoon thunderstorm buildup during the monsoons.
 |
| Looking through the roof vent on a monsoonal afternoon. |
And that is where a dog owner really cashes in -- but just try to convince the stereotypical dog-hating metropolitan Green hiker of that. Recently I was mountain biking with my dog on the alluvial bajada coming down from the Santa Rita Mountains, south of Tucson. There were the obvious sources of pleasure, but the one that I actually dwelled on was the least obvious: the tactile pleasure that the decomposed granite roads were giving to my dog.
I suppose there are people who get interested in geology for different reasons. But what are those reasons? Because it's fun to memorize the difference between Cenozoic and Cretaceous? I owe my interest to the drama of pain and pleasure that my little poodle went through on different geologies, before we conquered all with his own celebrity-endorsed product line of athletic footwear:
...but back to the present near Madera Canyon, just south of Tucson. My herding dog, Coffee Girl, and I biked right up to a hiking trailhead that started at a small creek. She was hot from the unusually warm spring weather. What a visually uninteresting, humble, little, cow-trickle of a creek it was. But what did it matter?! She waded in and lapped the water up with the lusty noise that dogs usually do. The creek water must have felt wonderfully cool on her feet.
It certainly looked clean. There were no cows upstream. But I couldn't bring myself to drink it. We've all been brainwashed with fear and suspicion. Drinking from a mountain stream is a primal and genuine pleasure that I have never had.
______________________________________________________________________________
Day 6. Spring means the Tucson area to me, probably because the altitude matches the calendar. Camping on the periphery of the metropolitan area causes me to appreciate how much I've detached from metro rat race society. Further away from the ant hill, I might not give it a thought.
Another object of pride in the Tucson area is the famous Desert Museum, and rightly so. Even I sprung for an admission ticket a few years ago. It was worth seeing, but I won't go again. I have few memories from it, except a dim memory of a mountain lion. It seemed like it should have been exciting. Why wasn't it?
They did a good job there. It's not that they were doing something wrong. It's just that any museum has unavoidable limitations. The mission statement on their website states that "The mission of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is to inspire people to live in harmony with the natural world by fostering love, appreciation, and understanding of the Sonoran Desert."
Geesh. Why did they have to use that silly word 'harmony'? Don't they know that that will make me jump onto a standard stump speech that ridicules their pseudo-religion? But there's probably no need to make the long-suffering reader submit to another round of that. Besides, maybe I need to emphasize a constructive alternative to their idolatry of photogenic and glamorous species.
The main limitation of a museum, no matter how good it is, is that the experience comes down to looking at something; and mere gawking can only impact you a little bit. Other experiences have knocked my socks off, so I know that I am capable of being affected by outdoor experiences if the correct approach is used.
The basic flaw in the ideology of the metropolitan nature lover is their metaphysical dualism between homo sapiens and everything else in nature. They simply can not see homo sapiens as one more animal species. Everything that we do is sinful, evil, and unnatural. Everything about every other species is perfect and "in harmony with nature." They stick to this absurd view because they have an emotional need for the simplistic "Good versus Evil" swan song of the Zoroastrian/Judeo/Christian tradition. This is ironic, considering how proud they are about being free of that tradition. But they never bothered to notice that they have only outgrown it intellectually -- not emotionally.
So what's the constructive alternative? To begin with, we need to own up to how overpopulated, over-regulated, henpecked, emasculated, office-bound, and detached from physical reality we've become. There's a quote in a book by the French historian, Hippolyte Taine, that captures the wimpy and henpecked mindset of a "modern." He was writing in the 1880s about the rise of Buonaparte. It was a fascinating simile: Corsica, like Sardinia and Sicily, had the culture in Napoleon's childhood that Italy had had during the Renaissance. It was a world of family vendettas, amoral scheming, condottieri, and latter-day Renaissance princes. Forgive me for using a quote with a context so far afield from the rest of the post, but I love it so.
On taking a near view of the contemporaries of Dante and Michael Angelo, we find that they differ from us more in character than in intellect. With us, three hundred years of police and of courts of justice, of social discipline and peaceful habits, of hereditary civilization, have diminished the force and violence of the passions natural to Man. In Italy, in the Renaissance epoch, they were still intact; human emotions at that time were keener and more profound than at the present day; the appetites were ardent and more unbridled; man's will was more impetuous and more tenacious; whatever motive inspired, whether pride, ambition, jealousy, hatred, love, envy, or sensuality, the inward spring strained with an energy and relaxed with a violence that has now disappeared. All these energies reappear in this great survivor of the fifteenth century; in him the play of the nervous machine is the same as with his Italian ancestors;This quote explains what happened once in a city park in Wyoming with my little poodle, who was still young and frisky. A young boy ran up from somewhere. He was shoeless and shirtless. My little poodle ran after him, playfully. For the first time in our careers together, I was jealous of another person. That boy was so thirsty! He jumped up to the water fountain and noisily guzzled and slurped at the water, as if he were a dog.
[Hippolyte Taine. The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (Kindle Locations 926-928). Available at Gutenberg.org.]
It wasn't news to me that canine loyalty was over-rated. (And that's a good thing for dogs' survival.) I stopped thinking about my own jealousy and contemplated the grandeur of what was in front of me: violent youthful energy, perfect health, and enthusiasm. The boy and the dog seemed so much alike.
That is the approach that I suggest for metro Greens. No matter how repressed and over-regulated they are, no matter how much modernity has beaten the life out of them, they need to look within and find that half-naked boy-savage of summer. More times than not, empathy with your dog will put you in the right mood.
______________________________________________________________________________
Comments
As for water, well, the entire SW of the USA should not be so inhabited as it is. But humans are now forced to migrate to such places and modern inventions supports it for now. No accident that the SW, discovered first by the Spaniards in the 1500's (and largely abandoned) was the last to be heavily populated, only after the invention of air-conditioning and hydroelectric dams. Ultimately nature will push back on such overpopulation as it is now already. More and more water is becoming hopelessly polluted. We accept as normal now the need to run all water through expensive water-treatment plants. And many of us add additional filters in our homes.