Occupation of Independence

Like most people in the USA I do not have a good feel for public sentiment in Asia, Africa, and South America.  But I guess that the publics in these non-NATO countries admire the Houthis in Yemen for standing up for the Palestinians and for having the courage to defy American military strength. I wouldn't even be surprised to learn that many people in NATO countries feel the same way.  They probably don't advertise their feelings.  For one thing, they have to fear the police in Trump's, neocon, kiss-Israel's-ass regime. But quite apart from the politics and geopolitics, there is something more fundamental at stake.  I rewatched Mel Gibson's "Braveheart" the other day.  There is a recurring theme there that sits in the background a bit.  Recall the conversation between Robert the Bruce (a Scottish hero of the future) and his cynical father: Father (more or less): "So you admire this William Wallace?" Robert the Bruce:  Nods yes. Father: (He laugh...

  It just isn't obvious to a traveler how important it is to get "north" early in spring.  But that depends on what you call north.  It need not mean snow, ice, and mud. I underestimated how pleasant it is to camp in sagebrush and grass at this time of year.  The weather is chilly, but dry.  The roads are completely dry.  It is windy of course but it is everywhere, in spring.  If it is really chilly and windy my dog and I take great walks, without worrying about rattlesnakes and ticks.  Hungry coyotes are her main danger.   The chilliness ensures the best sleeping of the year.  It is warm enough to resist using propane heating.  Most days it is warm enough to mountain bike.   Off in the distance, the higher peaks are still snow-covered and beautiful.  Tourism is off-season this time of year. And I underestimated how civilized Idaho is.  There is a home-grown version of Tractor Supply called D & B Supply...

What a relief it was to leave the overcrowded camping in the Southwest, and head through Nevada and Idaho.  For proximity to town I stooped to camp at a place likely to be listed on one of those vile free-campsites apps.  For a couple days, my luck held and my little dog and I had a great time walking single track trails, while some bad weather blew over. Then a 'van nomad' showed up.  I became furious and left a couple hours later.  And yet I was laughing at my own rage.  The other camper wasn't doing anything wrong.  It was what he represented that offended me -- let's just leave it like that, rather than go into my standard stump speech. There was a promising gravel road a couple miles away that I had always meant to check out.  There are patterns that one can "smell" off a good atlas.  There is only Hope -- there are no guarantees.  The geography had not really changed from the last location, but mentally and emotionally it was a who...

Southern Idaho.  Many times I have wished to run into more horses and horsepersons in the so-called Western states.  I suppose there is just so much overhead and inconvenience involved that an ATV makes more sense to most people. But I got lucky yesterday.  Something immediately grabbed me about the guy.  He was retirement age and gnarly, weathered, and laconic.  He had an impressive grey handlebar mustache.  His horse was half-draft horse, with huge hooves.  The ol' cowboy had three dogs along. I liked how home-made or at least home-repaired his horse's tack looked, as did the cowboy's clothing.  I have seen people riding horses in the Colorado mountains, but they looked like McMansioners or trust-funders.  And their clothing looked new, clean, and fake.   This guy seemed authentic.  He was not a tourist or recreationalist.  He had a job to do: he was working for the Stockman's Association, and needed to check on the wate...

A traveler can pass many historical markers along the highway.  How many do they stop in to visit?  Probably not that many. When going through Nevada I crossed the old "Californee"   Trail, Pony Express route, and first transcontinental telegraph route.  I did stop in and read the historical sign.  Did the government hire a new prose stylist?  It was interesting to read about.  What grabbed me was their emphasis on the sheer physicality and athleticism of the Pony Express riders. I thought about a friend who did all 800 miles of the Arizona Trail last year and is doing the Pacific Crest Trail this year.  I then drove into the foothills of the nearest mountain range to look for a place to camp overnight.  A hundred feet off the road was a herd of ten antelopes.  Didn't I once read on Wikipedia that they were the second fastest land mammal? Something about that juxtaposition of images made me smile, and it isn't that often that animals ma...

 I've made quite a bit of progress, moving north between the meridian lines of 110 degrees West and 114.  How does the land change, so that you know you are making progress?   There is more snow on the mountain tops, certainly.  But altitude-changes confuse your latitude-changes.   Despite going northish most of the time, time zone changes confuse the heck out of me and my little dog.  So far we have whiplashed between Arizona Time, to Mountain Daylight time, to Pacific Daylight, and now back to Mountain Daylight.  Finally, northern ID will become Pacific Daylight.  Does she eat dinner at 3:00 local time or Tummy Time?   Last year I made the mistake of going through Nevada on the western (CA) side of the state.  The grocery store and gas station prices were shocking.  This year I used the eastern side of the state.   The north/south ranges, with sagebrush/grass basins in between, are very attractive in sprin...

It really helps to have a way to deal with places that you used to love, but have gotten crowded or changed in some other negative way.  An outstanding example of this is southwestern Utah.   I still go through the area in autumn and sometimes in spring, more for practical reasons than for love. The all-important trick is to resist comparing it to how it used to be.  I make a mental game out of pretending I am looking at it for the first time. A second trick is break the experience into several components and imagine one or two of these components still being good.  That should keep you happy for a brief visit.  And that still counts as success. For instance I re-rode a two-track trail that is still my favorite after all these years.  The tourist masses haven't discovered it yet.  Or maybe they just avoid it.  Mountain bikers pretty much read from the same script, as written by the industry.  The industry wants bikers to lust for technical si...

Just a few miles from Nevada.  In this area I am curious about the pecking order of casino towns for show biz has-beens.  Perhaps Las Vegas, Laughlin, Mesquite, Wendover is the trajectory of descent.  Where   does Branson MO fit in that list? A few movies have been made about has-beens.  "Sunset Boulevard" is the classic.  But the whole topic is a bit of a "downer" so you can see why it isn't very popular as a theme. And yet, it is part of the Human Condition.  You can look across the pond to the pitiful posturing of European "powers" and have the same sort of thoughts.  Why can't Britain and France just accept being nice countries that used to be great powers?  What was so great about being a great power, and what is so bad about being a has-been? There doesn't seem to be an accepted career path for former great powers.  If only there were.  The Roman Empire did rather well, considering that the Eastern Empire survived in Constant...

It was finally that time in the spring to plan an escape from Arizona.   Remember that success as an RVer is mostly about minimizing your stay in Arizona.  (No insult is intended.) One way to get started right is to fantasize about heading to Tierra del Fuego.  Somewhere near the Magellan Strait.  Looking at this windmill, with its label about "Made in Argentina" got me on track, mentally. It is so counter-intuitive to get north early in the year, but it is so important.  And how nice it would be to get some real optical zoom from a real camera, instead of settling for the offerings of a smartphone: Still in Arizona but it doesn't feel like it. When I head south in October I am thrilled to find arroyos and red cliffs.  You have some pent-up demand at that time of year.  But in spring, after several months of rubble and stickers, it is easy to look at spectacular red cliffs and say, "Yea well, some more rocks.  Just what I needed." The cholla ...

Should I migrate north by a different route than in past springs?  But if you go looking for trouble, you will probably find it.  Isn't that what our mothers and grandmothers told us? There certainly are practical advantages to using a familiar route.  But travel is supposed to be about adventure.   Didn't I just go through a similar experience of looking for a new route a couple summers ago, and then ran into quite a disaster with a wheel bearing on the travel trailer?  All in all I was quite lucky, and left the experience determined to grease the bearings on a more regular basis. Rationally, the new route had nothing to do with the wheel bearing disaster.  But that wasn't how I felt at the time.  It is not going over the top to see my feelings as old-fashioned "religious" guilt. Recall Gilbert Murray's "The Five Stages of Greek Religion," now available for free on archive.org.   I still carry a few paper books around with me.  But...

They have a support group for everything these days.  How about a support group for people who have become addicted to doggie rescue videos on You Tube?   One of the channels belonged to a woman who rescued puppies by bringing them home and bathing them in an attractive, old-fashioned ceramic bowl.  The little dogs were usually filthy of course.  As warm sudsy water dribbled over the little dog and splashed into the bowl, it made a 'slow rain on a hard roof' type noise; then the gentle and melancholic solo-piano music would start.  That got me every time.  Sometimes the grooming videos have the biggest impact.  When non-shedding dogs go forever without a haircut, they become quite a sight.  The dog can barely move, and its hindquarters are filthy.  A good hair-clipper works miracles in a few minutes and it shows up so well on camera.  Sometimes large sections of hair come off the dog all at once, somewhat like the farmer tries to d...

Ahh, Spring.  But it doesn't really live up to its image.  For one thing I usually leave Arizona before there any flowers to look at. Since Arizona uses 'God's Time,' unlike the silly states in the rest of the country; and since I am still in Arizona, let's gloat by talking about the change of seasons a little bit today.  No matter how many springs a person has seen, there is still a stubborn tendency to expect temperatures to warm up gradually.   Wrong idea!  This notion needs to be renounced once and for all.  It will save you unnecessary frustration. Gradually is the key word.  The only things that happen gradually are higher angles of the sun and longer hours of daylight. But temperatures do not warm up gradually in the normal sense of the word.  Temperatures toggle from winter to summer and back to winter.  They skip intermediate numbers, except in an immaterial mathematical sense of the word. A graph of spring temperatures looks l...

It is fun for a hillbilly to go shopping in the big city.  So many choices!  But I lost track of how many times I told the checkout-human that I was not "in their system" and no, I would not give them my phone number. Harbor Freight has always been obnoxious and aggressive about that.  At least the biological unit who checked me out had a sense of humor about it. Later, something happened as obnoxious as McDonald's replacing their checkout-humans with those damn electronic kiosks, where the customer gets to fumble with a multi-step menu until they finally memorize it.   At one of the big gas station chains, I went in to pay cash as I usually do.  But instead of just giving the human a 20 dollar bill and saying, "Pump #7", he made me go to this iPad-looking thing, and fumble around with an arbitrary and non-intuitive sequence of steps in a multi-layered menu. He had to step around the counter and help me.  It took us 5 minutes to do what used to take 5 ...

The word, nomad, gets bandied about quite a bit these days, and it is not a complete misnomer.  Still, nomadism about looking at scenery or living off an internet job in a van is only convincing to a degree.  The latter don't need to move at all.  They really just need affordable   housing. By luck I ran into a marvelous documentary at the local library, "People of the Wind."   It is about real nomads in Iran.  The whole family gets involved in droving and caring for the many animals in their herds.  Most impressive to me were the scenes of the nomads pushing or carrying animals across a fast mountain stream.  (This tends to be an expensive DVD if you try to buy it, but you can stream it for free at kanopy.com). It feels so good to come across high quality DVDs at a library, especially at unlikely places.  Why shouldn't librarians be more assertive about being curators, rather than just filling the shelves with standard trash movies? It...

There are a lot of good things you can say about Mother Nature in western North America.  But she ain't perfect.  In spring, the thing that complicates the life of a traveler and camper is the mismatch between altitude and latitude. In an ideal world, one would take off in spring and gradually gain altitude and latitude.  Thanks to the great Southwestern Father of Waters, the Colorado River, altitude and latitude go hand in hand up to Lake Mead.  Then it gets crazy.  There is a huge hump of high altitude land at middling latitudes.  Call it the Colorado Plateau if you wish. To the west of that, Nevada has pretty high altitudes and is cold in spring.  It is huge. When you finally do get to the inland Northwest, the northern latitude is less important than the low altitudes found there.  Therefore you need to blast through the hump in middling latitudes as quickly as possible.  You feel like a fool.  "It is freezing here.  Why should ...

One of the difficulties of RVing with a dog is that the silly beast becomes spoiled.  They see their owner all the time.  Perhaps the owner should deliberately spend some time away from the dog, now and then. When I came back from town the other day, here is the welcome that was waiting for me:   Well, it certainly is a dog-friendly town, here in southeastern Arizona.  Perhaps too friendly. from pinterest.com But actually it works pretty well to allow dogs into the public library.  I didn't bring mine in.  But one of the librarians asked me if the white van was mine, and she said that the little dog inside had half-crawled out of the window, and should come inside the library.  Then the librarian went out and retrieved my dog. My little dog put on quite the performance for three lady librarians.  Soon they had her on the rug where they take photos of dogs for what I call the Readers Club. It is so rare to find small towns in America that are disti...

Yesterday was the most perfect day in a long time.  Oddly, it took very little to make it so good.  All it took was the old trick of going for a bike ride with my little dog, early in the morning, and on the right terrain, the right road, and away from motorsports noise and the misinformation of the RV blogosphere and tourism industry. Better yet, I was away from the desert.  Snowbirds rhapsodize over the "beauty" of the desert, but do they really mean beauty in a positive sense?  Or do they really just mean that they are away from clouds, snow, sleet, thawing snow, mud, and half-frozen slop? But they are connecting with "nature," you say.  Nature should mean more than rubble and cholla, and postcards of  saguaro cacti in front of a red sunset, and the like.  We are animals who need food and water.  There should be some goodies of that type in a "beautiful, natural" environment.    Some balance.      Here, away from the ...

The end of a war certainly is a poignant time.  Think of all those men dying for nothing!  As a war drags out to its bitter end, politicians show how little regard they have their own people.  The politicians only care about holding onto power -- to hell with how many peasants are dying needlessly. It seemed like a good idea to read about the end of other wars.  Since I had never really paid much attention to the Battle of the Bulge at the end of World War II, and had run into the movie at a local library, I bought a book on this battle by a well-known writer. It sounded like a good idea, but it didn't work.  And that is a real shame.  So many details, names, organizational units of the armies, locations.  All it added up to was a meaningless blur.  So I jumped to the Conclusion.   Even that didn't help. 'AI' might improve military history books -- by a lot!  We have certainly heard a lot of hype about its great promise.  Making mil...

I am not as 'fer' south as I am going to get this winter, but it is the end of the desert year.  I leave for the grasslands and oaks of southeastern Arizona when the sun comes up this morning.  Sadly, there was no secondary rainy season in the desert this winter.  But we got lucky with light winds.   Once again I will head north 'too' soon this spring, as is necessary if you want to make it to the inland northwest before the triple digit heat starts.  I am even considering hitting central and eastern Montana, in May perhaps? Digital zoom is doing OK, but you can see why I am getting interested in real optical zoom. My praise for a non-windy winter should have been a little louder than it was, above. Another chance to lust for a real camera.

  Tulsi Gabbard getting confirmed.  Wow!  Auditing the money that the US sent to Ukraine.  Shutting down the slush funds of NGOs.  Freezing foreign aid.  Shutting off the funding for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the chief meddler in other countries' elections.  What's next -- getting RFK Jr confirmed?  Things have been happening.   It is scary for me to move from a tightly leashed Hope to actual optimistic expectations.   Perhaps professional cynics like me are cowards who use their cynicism to protect themselves from disappointment.   Regardless of whether a person agrees with Trump or not, Trump 2.0 seems drastically more effective than Trump 1.0.  Does this show that it can be beneficial for presidents to have non-consecutive terms?  It makes sense that a four year hiatus for some deep thinking and reorganizing would have an effect.  Consecutive terms make it too easy for failed advise...

I saw the prominent white breast of an owl or raptor, who was resting on the top of a saguaro and facing the morning sun.   Quick -- grab the smartphone.  Yea, with its mighty 3X optical zoom!  And digital zoom only goes so far. I really wanted it to be an owl.  Sigh!  How I miss having a real camera with a telescoping 20X optical zoom.  I even started looking at You Tube videos on the latest digital cameras of that type.  They still make them, you know. But it is easy to get used to just carrying a smartphone.  I have learned the hard way that a mountain biker should not carry a real and blocky camera on a waistbelt.  Even more, it gets discouraging to see the plastic moving parts of a telescoping camera fail after a couple years, or sooner if you drop it.  Or maybe it was just a grain of sand that got in the gap between those plastic barrels, all those years. But who wants to lug around a bag-full of DLSR camera?   I don...

How many Americans were proud of their president appearing on stage with a genocidal maniac, while he vomited nonsense about America taking over Gaza?  What an opportunity for a political cartoonist!  They could start with one of the famous photographs from the Al Ghraib prison and torture era:   Then the cartoonist could label the American female soldier on the left of the photo "Miriam Adelson."  And redraw her image to look a little more like the billionaire's widow. The naked male Iraqi prisoner on the floor with the leash could be labelled "Trump", and also get redrawn to look more like Trump. I am so tired of the macho loud-mouth behavior of Donald Trump.  In fact he is a runt, a coward.   His behavior around Adelson and Netanyahu proves that. Speaking of runts, when was the last time the Muslim world in the Mideast had a real leader with some stature, like Nasser, Ataturk, or Saladin?  Extraordinary times are said to sometimes give rise to...

Do they still have the Super Bowl these days?  I haven't heard anything about it.  Maybe pro-football ain't what it used to be.   Maybe the internet isn't quite the hype-machine that old-fashioned television was. At any rate I miss the idea of the "office pool" for betting on the score of the Super Bowl.  Perhaps this year we should replace it with an office pool for betting on the fate of Zelensky of Kiev in 2025.  It is quite a challenge because the possible outcomes are so widely separated. 1.  His most obvious career path is the one chosen by Mussolini at the end of World War II. from wikipedia 2.  A quiet retirement in various mansions around the world, paid for by American tax dollars that stuck to Zelensky's fingers. 3.  A professorship at Columbia University in, say, "Peace Studies" or International Relations. 4.  Directorship of a big-name think tank in the Washington DC area.  The think tank will be affiliated with neo-cons, wh...