If a town like Coyote NM lacks up-scale glamor to a tourist, then this forest just made it worse:
Believe it or not, I sort of liked it. The altitude was over 8000 feet, so it was cool. It was flat enough to use more than one gear on my mountain bike. And there wasn't one Jeep Wrangler after another, as there soon will be in Colorado.
Getting all the damned trees out of the way just helps you admire the sky. It is the time of year when the sky gets more interesting every day, thanks to the swelling humidity. Although the onset of the summer monsoons is routine in some sense, nature is never totally predictable. So a peasant living close to nature always feels a certain amount of nervousness. The drama of the sky becomes interesting, once again.
Besides, the trees' loss is the understory's gain. Think of it as as a French Revolution for the forest. But what were the humble verdancies that were bustin' out all over? Good eatin' for somebody?
It didn't take long to find out. We ran into the herd of young elk cows, again. This time they were agglomerated into one herd, between 50 and 100. We spooked them into the bowl beneath our trail. They raised holy hell with their bugling/squawking.
Then they ran uphill and crossed the trail 100 feet in front of us. My dog was as astonished as I was. She wouldn't even chase them! (Just to make sure, I snapped her back on the leash.) There were times when all those hooves in motion sounded like a cattle stampede in a Hollywood western.
The austerity and harshness of a burned forest adds to a sense of forlornness and loneliness. This used to bother me more at the beginning of my career as a full-time RVer: my favorite sport was the least popular activity of "fellow" RVers. But I responded by getting a dog and taking it on every outing.
There has been another way to adapt. At the moment I am reading Owen Wister's "The Virginian," acknowledged to be the progenitor of the cowboy myth in America. The lone rider of the plains. Of course, America is not the "exceptional" nation that it thinks it is; South American countries have the gaucho mythology. And all Europe had the romance of the knight errant before that.
It may at first seem ego-centric or narcissistic to glamorize one's own sport as a re-invention of a myth. Actually though, I think it is the opposite of egocentricism to see yourself as just one more manifestation of a long-lasting or recurring archetype.
A mountain biker's claim to be today's "lone rider of the plains" is even better if he blogs anonymously and reinvents the "man with no name" of Wister's novel. When the forest service smacks him with more travel or camping restrictions, it pains him in a manner similar to the mythological cowboy who saw barbed wire fences going up.
There was a wisfulness in Wister's novel for a West that had disappeared in his time, 1902. But perhaps poignant nostalgia for a dead way of life is not the right attitude. Wister could not have predicted the invention of the mountain bike in the 1980s.
More generally, the importance of a myth may depend less on its oldness or popularity than on its ability to survive obsolescence in an ever-changing world, by somehow reinventing itself in a newer world. Like the forest after a fire.
Believe it or not, I sort of liked it. The altitude was over 8000 feet, so it was cool. It was flat enough to use more than one gear on my mountain bike. And there wasn't one Jeep Wrangler after another, as there soon will be in Colorado.
Getting all the damned trees out of the way just helps you admire the sky. It is the time of year when the sky gets more interesting every day, thanks to the swelling humidity. Although the onset of the summer monsoons is routine in some sense, nature is never totally predictable. So a peasant living close to nature always feels a certain amount of nervousness. The drama of the sky becomes interesting, once again.
Besides, the trees' loss is the understory's gain. Think of it as as a French Revolution for the forest. But what were the humble verdancies that were bustin' out all over? Good eatin' for somebody?
It didn't take long to find out. We ran into the herd of young elk cows, again. This time they were agglomerated into one herd, between 50 and 100. We spooked them into the bowl beneath our trail. They raised holy hell with their bugling/squawking.
Then they ran uphill and crossed the trail 100 feet in front of us. My dog was as astonished as I was. She wouldn't even chase them! (Just to make sure, I snapped her back on the leash.) There were times when all those hooves in motion sounded like a cattle stampede in a Hollywood western.
The austerity and harshness of a burned forest adds to a sense of forlornness and loneliness. This used to bother me more at the beginning of my career as a full-time RVer: my favorite sport was the least popular activity of "fellow" RVers. But I responded by getting a dog and taking it on every outing.
There has been another way to adapt. At the moment I am reading Owen Wister's "The Virginian," acknowledged to be the progenitor of the cowboy myth in America. The lone rider of the plains. Of course, America is not the "exceptional" nation that it thinks it is; South American countries have the gaucho mythology. And all Europe had the romance of the knight errant before that.
It may at first seem ego-centric or narcissistic to glamorize one's own sport as a re-invention of a myth. Actually though, I think it is the opposite of egocentricism to see yourself as just one more manifestation of a long-lasting or recurring archetype.
A mountain biker's claim to be today's "lone rider of the plains" is even better if he blogs anonymously and reinvents the "man with no name" of Wister's novel. When the forest service smacks him with more travel or camping restrictions, it pains him in a manner similar to the mythological cowboy who saw barbed wire fences going up.
There was a wisfulness in Wister's novel for a West that had disappeared in his time, 1902. But perhaps poignant nostalgia for a dead way of life is not the right attitude. Wister could not have predicted the invention of the mountain bike in the 1980s.
More generally, the importance of a myth may depend less on its oldness or popularity than on its ability to survive obsolescence in an ever-changing world, by somehow reinventing itself in a newer world. Like the forest after a fire.
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