Look carefully at the center of the photo, where you see the latching mechanism of a gate on a forest trail. What's so great about that?, you say.
It is the best gate design I have ever seen, and I've seen a lot of them. Most times they are hard to close, stuck, depend on a broken wire or tangled chain, etc. And if you touch your expensive lycra/spandex shorts to barbed wire, they are destroyed.
This latch only depends on gravity. Nothing can go wrong. It is so elegant! Why didn't they start designing gates like this, years ago?
Ahh, now I see the problem. The latch mechanism has a digitally sexual design to it. So it is politically incorrect. And government agencies like the Forest Service and the BLM must be absolutely PC.
There are several gates like this, locally. Every time I go through one, I have to smirk a little.
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If you make the mistake of getting up in the morning, only to turn on television or internet-clickbait news, you are probably immediately depressed. Sometimes I make that mistake.
But then a local woman shows up at the trailhead with her mountain bike and dog. What a wonderful dog it is, too! It is like medicine to be around dogs, these days. They are oblivious to all the garbage in the news.
There is something precious about the irrepressibility of the smile that the dogs can bring to your face. The true magic is in the irrepressibility rather than in the smile itself. It inspires me to re-quote a passage from "A River Runs Through It," by Norman Maclean, page 43. This is one of those fly fishing-cum-philosophy books I am a sucker for:
Ten or fifteen feet before the fly lights, you can tell whether a cast like this is going to be perfect, and, if necessary, still make slight corrections. The cast is so soft and slow that it can be followed like an ash settling from a fireplace chimney. One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful, even if it is only floating ash.At any rate, I couldn't keep this quote out of my mind when I see the woman fumble with the green gate a little, while the dog nervously fidgets outside the gate. Then she gets it open, and the furry fidgeting gathers its molecules into a black-and-white streak that blurs across the grasslands.
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Just as the woman fumbled with the green gate, the man stared at it and took a picture. Just as her dog fidgets outside the gate, the man's dog watches impatiently for his human to move along so they can both softly become the authors of something beautiful as they both streak like blurs across the grasslands.
George