Occupation of Independence

 For a western camper, the ultimate experience in the outdoors only happens a handful of times per year.  So writing about it makes more sense than writing about anything else. It rained a couple times during the night.  In the morning I awoke to a different planet.  Since I was on the top of the mountain near an inland town, the clouds seemed like dense ground fog on the Pacific Coast .  Walking around in 100% relative humidity is not something that happens often.  It isn't just the imagination that sees the air as a thick vaporous, analgesic unguent.  So tangible, gentle, and kind! There were even puddles on the road, if you can believe a 'whopper' like that. She can't believe it! And yet there were brighter spots in the sky.  The amperage in the solar controller confirmed it.  Soon it became sunnier and I was walking around in a state of calm euphoria . If that isn't great enough, maybe the rain had wrung the smoke out of the sky. ...

  This is an interesting time of year, depending on your altitude .  You might have seen your last 90 F day .  You have killed off another summer.  You want to 'dance in the end zone.'  But in fact, it is a bit too early to celebrate.  One or two surprisingly stubborn heat spells are to be expected.  That is what makes it so bittersweet. It was a good summer for me.  I saw no forest fire smoke until the middle of August.  There were even a couple rains in July.  Even better were the big skies of eastern Oregon and Idaho : Central Idaho Early summer in eastern Oregon A summer chiaroscuro for the little one. While cleaning up my cache of summer photos I found a neglected video, showing how nimble bears can be when climbing:

 I found the experience of finding the spring (in the last post) so satisfying that I should try to explain it.  Long-suffering readers know that I like to bring in a historical perspective when camping and traveling.  But is that completely correct? A proper historian uses documents and occasional inscriptions in stone as their inputs.  They can also team up with an archeologist .  These are severe limitations obviously.  Even if there are lots of documents about a certain topic, most documents are official and therefore biased, legal, or commercial, so they are full of people's names, dates, facts, and figures.  That is fine, as far as it goes. But what was it like to experience the historical event for people directly involved?  What were they thinking and feeling?  For some reason, I made a real effort to imagine what it was like to find a spring or find water when digging a well for early settlers in the 1800s . What visual clues were ...

The Salmon River is certainly one of the best in Idaho .  It made me almost wish my miniature poodle was a Labrador retriever so that she would have jumped in the river and swam her heart out.  But she wouldn't even get her feet wet. We ran into a good ol' boy in a pickup truck who told us about a spring, up the road 'a piece.'  The road was fairly smooth, just as he said.  The first clue were the marshy and tall plants that stood out from the surrounding sagebrush . I got off the bike and walked towards the possible spring.  Sure enough, I could finally hear it.  What a marvelous sound!  Could there be any more authentic western experience than jumping on my horse (aka, mountain bike ) and looking for and finding a spring?  Nothing is more precious than water in this gawd-forsaken, barren wasteland . My little dog wanted to celebrate the occasion, a ways downstream: I can't think of anything better to do with my time than looking for a spring....

They certainly have made quite a media circus out of the Putin-Trump summit in Alaska.  Russians are worried about Ukraine pulling off a false flag that makes it look like Russia killed a bunch of civilians in Ukraine.   The Russians seem to be preparing their own attention-getter: they are on the verge of conquering Pokrovsk, one of the last important fortified cities run by Ukraine in the Donetsk oblast.   It would be great to see Trump's nose rubbed in humiliating defeat just when he thinks he is going to be the star of the show in Alaska.  Ditto for the NATO Elites in Europe. How will the complacent sheep in the USA and Europe react to a major defeat?  Will their Elites get run out of office?

 I have wondered whether photo-editing and AI would kill off most of the interest in photography.  The answer is Yes, if 'interest' means trivial prettiness, that is, extreme colors, sheer size, and freakish verticalities.  AI can fake all that, so what does that leave for photography? The good news is that photos are still a great way to express visual metaphors about significant things in life.  Visual metaphors should have been what photographers were aiming at, all along. Does a photographer realize at the time the photo is taken that it will be a good metaphor, or does that realization occur only with hindsight?  For my part, I usually see a photo's value as a metaphor when looking back at photos long ago.  But there are exceptions.  Consider: No rain had been prophesied for the day, and yet here it was.  Look at this photo from the point of view of a camper in a western state where you expect horrible wildfires at this time in the summer. F...

 Micro-climate or micro-calendar?  What do you call it when a mountain blocks sunrise or sunset?  Think of it as a mercifully early September, the fantasy of a mid-summer sufferer.   The late sunrise from one of these mountains fooled me one morning.  I should have started my bike ride even earlier because we had some climbing to do before making it to "[redacted] Summit."  It is funny how specialized an outdoorsman can be.  I was hoping for lots of climbing in middle gears, and I got it.  The irrigated fields had tall green hay.  Grasslands are rare and precious in the western mountain states. Have you ever seen a hatch of "Mormon crickets?"  They are a type of grasshopper, I suppose.  Fat and black.  They cannibalized the smooshed ones.  I tried to avoid smooshing them with my bicycle tires, but it was impossible to avoid them all.  Looking at them more carefully, there also seemed to be a lot of copulation goi...

Once again I have benefitted from developing the right attitude towards discomfort in the Outdoors.  There is nothing you could do on the "positive" end to enhance your appreciation of this little creek in my backyard in central Idaho.  By "positive" I mean such things as a bigger, steeper, or more famous creek. It was fun to wallow in an intense appreciation of this creek.  Doing so almost completely depends on developing a long-suffering attitude to the opposite of this creek.  This of course is a standard stump speech on this blog.   It was really the sound that made everything click for me.

 It is probably shocking to many people how ancient superstitions still affect big events in today's modern world.  I would like to add modern superstitions to the last sentence. The notion of Progress has almost become a Deity the last couple centuries.  I mockingly call that point-of-view the "Whig Interpretation of History."  You'd think that World Wars I and II would have weakened the blind faith in Progress. Onto the World Wars, let's add the current genocide in Gaza.  I wish I knew Israelis a bit better.  But it seems as though they don't really worship Yahweh so much as they worship being Jewish.  But what does it mean to be Jewish?  To wear a cloth disk on your head's bald spot?  To grow curly ringlets on the side of your head?  Certain petty rules about food, unique national holidays, or speaking Hebrew? Such things are interesting and help to put more variety into the world, but they seem too trivial to worship as a pseudo-d...

People like me who aren't 'water people' should envy those who are.    I am not planning on changing, but it is satisfying to appreciate their point of view more and more, over the years. The older a person gets, the less excuse they have for being a blockhead.  For instance, every summer I fight summer instead of just surrendering to it and then adapting to it.  I had a friend once in a bicycle club who got tired of hearing people gripe about the heat.  He told them, "It's summer.  It's supposed to be hot."  He was right, and I knew it at the time. The biggest source of worry in summer is my little dog getting hot in the van, in a parking lot.  I already owned this 'Breeze' fan from Fantastic but didn't use it much.  So I moved it into the van and found a way to mount it.  Then it plugs into the cigarette light.  It helps. Of course if you didn't already own the Breeze fan, you could just buy one of those USB-rechargeable mini-fan...

There really are junkies out there who watch too many dog rescue videos.   You know the routine: weepy, sentimental tear-jerkers, with soft solo piano music playing in the background.  So I can be forgiven for eagerly responding to a brown hound dog who was walking up a 2000' hill that I had just driven down. My first instinct, as a lifelong bicyclist, was to keep him out of traffic.  He didn't have a collar.  I was surprised by how tight his eye contact with me was.  (He was a hunting dog, not a border collie.)  Then he looked right at me and did the lip-smacking trick that my own dog does at home when she thinks it's time for dinner. My instinct was to get a bowl of water down, first.  But he wasn't interested.  Using an extra dog leash I fashioned a loop to go over his head.  I brought him to the back of the van and opened a can of pinto beans -- fortunately they had pop-tops.  He was very thin, but otherwise healthy-acting.  He...

I doubt that anything good can come from expressing my disgust with the foreign policy of my own country, especially in Gaza.  Caitlin Johnstone does a better job than I could. And yet there are hopeful signs that many in the Western world are becoming more critical of Israel.  Hope?  That is what interests me today.  Hope, naivete, delusion, wishful thinking, and escapism overlap and become so confusing.   A person can be well-educated and well-read, but does it really help them understand the overlap between these terms, when applied to a specific slaughter like Gaza?  Perhaps the only thing that seems certain is the notion that it is important for people in a 'free' society to actively and courageously confront mass-slaughter.   We also need to be realistic about our ability and stamina to consider such grim and horrible events without giving up.  We all have our limits.  If we overshoot and then surrender our attention to easy a...

Recently I watched an episode of an old TV western.  I didn't care for the episode, nor did some of the reviewers, who called it a knock-off of (1952) "High Noon", starring Gary Cooper.  I didn't even care for "High Noon" all that much, despite it being considered a classic movie. Of course there is more than one level or angle for appreciating a classic anything, and maybe "High Noon" is worth rewatching.  Think of a classic as a general template, a Platonic Form, that can be reincarnated in different eras and locations.  We shouldn't dismiss the reincarnation as an unoriginal knock-off.  Novelty isn't what matters. It is "mind-expanding" to be concerned with a tangible person or situation today, and then suddenly realize that it fits a timeless template.  You walk out of the small pond of Today, Here, and Now and paddle off to a large and long river nearby, one that represents the general flow of the human condition. "High ...

 Now the hounds -- several of them -- were baying their heads off.  The man in the pickup truck came by.  He explained that the hounds had probably treed something.  His Garmin radio collar system told him that the hounds were only a couple hundred yards away. He suggested that I turn my little dog loose to join in the fun.  I was not tempted.  Then the man moved forward aways, parked, grabbed a walking stick, and slid down the steep slope to the tree where the hounds were howling.  I decided to stay on the road where vegetation wouldn't block my vision. He had five hounds at it.  Three of them had run away to chase something else.  "We oughtta' be able to see it," he said. I have a long way to go before the BBC or National Geographic hires me as photographer for one of their wildlife shows.  But I think this one is better: The bear drooled almost continually and pooped occasionally when he was up the tree.  I guess this black bear ...

It is worthwhile  to write about the interesting things that can be heard in the outdoor world.  But we tend not to.  We tend to give too much attention to things that are visually and trivially pretty. This morning it was easy to escape that syndrome.  As is often true, the birds were chirping at dawn.  But a mile away or so, a pack of hounds were baying their heads off.  What an interesting sound at the 'bird hour.'  I have seen somebody moving a pack of hounds in his pickup truck, in this area.  What are they hunting for, or are they being trained to hunt? As a result of this, I will have to add hounds to my Sounds-Greatest-Hits album, along with a train rumbling about three miles away. Another thing that deserves more praise is interesting, but non-pretty, sights.  The morning sun highlighted the 'extreme woodpecker events' on this tree.  I have hardly even never noticed woodpeckers holes in my life: Everyday there are other examples...

Western Idaho.  It has  been a couple years since I rode at this marvelous place.  I laugh when thinking of a tourist book entitled, "America's Top Ten Ditch Hikes/Rides."  But there should be. By 'ditch' I mean a water diversion canal that moves water from one creek to another, usually for agricultural purposes.  There aren't as many of these diversion canals as you would think in the dry states of the West.  I wish there was an efficient method of finding more of them. What fun it would be to see one of these diversion ditches dug.  The mountainside was steep on the downhill side.  I guess they just push the rocks to the downhill side to form the levee, and count on the sharp-cornered rocks to have a high angle of repose. Earlier I wrote my annual paean to Santa Sombra. (shade in Spanish)  If She is not wonderful enough, she has associates just as divine.  Santa Aqua for instance.  My little honey enjoyed a delicious drink of wat...

 Nothing quite stimulates the imagination like desperation.  Trump 2.0 is committing political suicide right in front of our eyes.  The Epstein files are the straw that broke the camel's back.  Rather than think about his demise I am hoping with all my heart that MAGA is looking past Trump, and is giving serious thought to finding a new leader.   And a real leader, not a showman.  Not a bombastic, flip-flopping buffoon.  They need to rally behind an intelligent and experienced leader who knows a lot about the world, and who is primarily loyal to the Americans who elect them, rather than to Israel, the Pentagon, or the CIA. MAGA needs a leader who says, 'No more wars,' gets inaugurated, and then ends the damn wars.

 The daily news can help a person get interested in books that pertain to the same topic, or somewhat the same.  And we need some help, many times.  The news of Trumpanyahu's attack on Iran got me interested in a book about ancient Iranian religion, "In Search of Zarathustra," by Paul Kriwaczek. It was one of those books that requires a lot of skipping, although I admit to doing a lot of skipping with any book, these days.  Sometimes, when a certain section of the book did not interest me, my eyes drifted over to a couple movies: the first was "Winged Migration," one you might remember from years ago.  I found it at a local thrift shop.    The second one was Hitchcock's "The Birds." When finishing the second movie, I suddenly laughed at what an odd pair these two made.  They were Manichean opposites, in fact.  Manichean?  That is what the book was about.   What a joke my own mind had played on me.  If I had deli...

  Over the last year, everything on the internet has been slapped with a monthly charge.  They top that off with hammering your email every day with unwanted junk that leads to even more expenses.  Believe it or not I am happy about that. Many people (including me) have probably been sucked into too much "screen time" in their lives.  Willpower can go a certain way to reducing any bad habit.  But willpower needs to be combined with other things. Think of how weak an individual fiber of cotton is, yet how strong a woven cotton fabric is.  It is beneficial to get angry at these monthly charges on the internet and start weaning yourself from the screen.  Frugality can be seen as personal self-defense. It is easy to resent these small monthly charges.  Think of a guy in a rowboat who allows tiny holes to be drilled in the bottom of his boat.  He will not be comforted with the argument that it was only a small drill bit. I had the pleasure of u...

The best place to be on Independence Day, now mis-labeled 'The Fourth', is in a small city or big town.  There, they celebrate the holiday in traditional ways that I and many people consider nostalgic and pleasant. The holiday would be even better if it were a real celebration of independence, not the independence from British king George III, 250 years ago.  Independence should be concerned about the present, not the past.  Today we need our independence from the idea of an American Empire, from a foreign policy subservient to Israel, and from the industry of China.  The list is longer than that, actually. Perhaps independence is not something that the average peasant yearns for in most countries, most of the time.  I wonder what causes the yearning to arise here and there, now and then?

A couple summer agos I got serious at trying to like summer camping.  'Water people' must wonder how somebody could be so dense.  But of course there is no water in the western states and where there is,  the camping comes with noise, crowds, fees, reservations, restrictions, and flying insects. But the water people are right.  Washing up before going to bed, with lukewarm water and soap on a washcloth, helps quite a bit. I haven't pursued the water bladder method of cooling my head or feet while sleeping.  It would have been effective, but it proved more convenient to buy one of those mini-fans that have their own lithium battery: mounted near my neck and head, the cooling is adequate at low fan speed and noise. The need to stay cooler forced me to renounce a long held prejudice about northern forests versus the ponderosa forests of the Southwest.  Yes, ponderosa forests are easy to camp in.  And they are visually appealing since you can see between t...

You can't expect spring-time breezes to last all summer, but the other day I was relieved to feel such a breeze on a day that was expected to be hot.  My camping spot is on what you could call a peninsular knob that sticks out from the side of a mountain, and seems to hang out over steep slopes.  Thus it is exposed to wind as well as a good view. A cool breeze at the same time as warm, dry, sunny air.  It is quite a pleasure to feel pain and pleasure at the same time , just as you do in winter with simultaneous chilly, calm air and a warming, early morning sun. Ahh how fine this is, I thought at the time, and slowed down on our dog walk to take it all in.  This is one of the best things you could experience in the outdoors.  But it was troubling to experience it in a too sedate way.   There are temperaments that are content to put bland, sugary, Heinz ketchup on their hash browns at breakfast.  Other people want tabasco sauce.   It seeme...

It is a rare pleasure, listening to the hooting of an owl at night, while camped in a ponderosa forest in Idaho.  You'd think it would happen more often.  A quicker thinker would have grabbed his smartphone and recorded the sound.   Apparently owls are not that numerous.  You'd think they would be, with their size and capabilities.  In my next life I am going to learn some biology. Speaking of biology, I was impressed by the 'marauding' done by a hungry butterfly today, alongside a mountain bike ride.  You usually think of butterflies with cyootsie-wootsie and pretty-poo behavior, but this mariposa was like a terrier with wings. The next morning, these flowers were closed up like a street vendor at night.  Why so?  If I was a flower I would close shop during the heat of the day to preserve water.  Once again, learning some biology is desperately needed.  

  I continue to be both amazed and satisfied by un-flashy things I see in the natural world around me.  For instance, it has only gradually crept up on me over the last few years that the feminine characteristics of nature are wonderful. Recently my little sweetie and I were biking on a forest road.  I stopped at an unflashy cluster of yellow flowers of a type I never noticed before.  It seemed important to stop pedaling and let it all soak in for a couple minutes: My little sweetie obviously agreed. Looking around my environment, there are 'girls gone wild' everywhere.  Sometime it is in the curves of the topography: The male mind -- being what it is -- can't look at curves on hills without running off in a direction that is all too easy to guess. But most of the time, the feminine characteristics of nature are subtle.  Even water has become feminine in my imagination because it allows life to flourish everywhere: Maybe you need to spend half the year in t...

This is a real challenge.  Try to think of something to say about the state of the world that is not divisive and partisan; not childish name-calling; not religious, tribal, and cruel. ...but is rational, adult, and halfway realistic. My best offering for something most Americans could agree to is that we have serious institutional problems that need our attention, and that the world doesn't need America running around the world preaching about 'freedom and democracy' merely as a sales-pitch for a militaristic empire. How could a country that has elected Trump 1.0, Biden 0.0, and Trump 2.0 have the arrogance to think that it should practice regime-change in one country after another, and thereby 'fix' those countries?!  This arrogance started after World War II when most countries were rubble, and America was prosperous because it had the Pacific Ocean on one side, and the Atlantic on the other.

Have you seen the speed of some of those missiles hitting Tel Aviv?  Amazing.  It is so easy to think that modern war is about bombs, drones, and missiles hitting valuable targets on the surface of the earth. But a big part of war is putting valuable targets underground -- 100 feet, or is it 200?  I have trouble visualizing that.  I always thought they used t unneling equipment, similar to building underground coal mines.  After  getting down 200 feet, they would have to create a big "cave" to hold a large building.  Building that seems so slow and expensive since you need to remove all the loose stuff via tunnels, and then bring in the construction materials through those tunnels. I don't think they dig out a giant open-pit, and then build structures at the bottom of the hole in the usual way, and finally fill in the hole with "loose fill." It seems like loose fill would be less protective than a similar depth of solid rock, b ut solidity itself is no...

Here we go again.  These times are certainly exciting for armchair generals, like me.    Charlie Chaplin in "The Great Dictator" I read an interesting article by Larry Johnson (sonar21.com) talking about the difficulty of Trump/Israel sustaining an air war against Iran by using aircraft.  Iran will fight back with (repaired) air defense, missiles, and drones. American aircraft are maintenance-intensive.  Missiles and drones aren't.  Aircraft needs pilots who receive years of training.  Missiles and drones only need electronics and computers. Of course the Zionist axis has missiles and drones, too.  But they have depleted much of their supply with a losing war in Ukraine.  How fast can they manufacture new missiles and drones? Consider China's role in the war against Iran.  Iran is an important energy supplier to China.  Wouldn't it be a great opportunity for China to test its missiles and drones in combat?  China's manufacturi...

You gotta' give Alberta credit for having a nice motto on their license plates: Wild Rose Country.  But actually, wild roses are all over the place in the northern Rockies.  (Perhaps they even take in a wider territory than that.)   June is the month for them.  Don't wait too long -- they fade pretty quickly.  Their colors are most vivid when the blooms first open up.  I like how this photo shows blooms of different 'newnesses': Sometimes the wild roses clump into 'flocks' of one hundred.  At some point you can stand away from them and smell them.  Is there any fragrance more delightful?! But why are overpowering good or bad odors so rare for human beings?  It seems like most animals are drastically superior to homo sapiens in their ability to detect odors.  If you argued that olfactory ability is an essential tool for being a successful hunter, that doesn't really answer the question, because humans lived by hunting and gathering u...

I never thought I would praise or admire Greta Thunberg.  But there was some risk to the humanitarian stunt she and her companions were trying.  The publicity that goes along with her probably saved the sailboat from being sunk by Israel. But what if Israel had sunk the sailboat with Greta and her companions?  Would any government in Europe or America have  done anything about it?  Would it have been mentioned in the mainstream media?  And if you objected to their slaughter, would you have been accused of anti-Semitism? Is it even theoretically possible for Israel to commit any crime that would weaken the Zionism of the American congress, Lindsay Graham, AIPAC, or Trump?  It is strange how something so monstrous can be happening, how my own country can be largely responsible for it, and how you really can't talk about it.  That's 'freedom and democracy' for you. I need to find that quote from de Tocqueville about 'religious insanity is everywhe...

So much of the art of travel comes down to being able to appreciate things -- and not just freakish scenery. Recently I camped out as far as I could go before reaching the orange signs about road work.   I wasn't that close to the road but huge, belly-dumper trucks came by, one after the other, and blasted me with noise and dust.  It doesn't sound like the greatest camping situation, but I actually enjoyed the entertainment show. Later, I even told the road engineer that I enjoyed watching the show.  He smiled. And why shouldn't I?  Gravel roads are superior to unimproved, dirt roads by a wider margin than paved roads are to gravel roads.  There is something about a gravel road that charms.  It pulls your imagination back to a not-so-distant past, a past that belonged to ancestors that you might remember from your childhood. I didn't see the belly-dumpers disgorge the gravel, but presumably it was laid down about a foot deep.  Then the grader pull...

I spent half the day  yesterday at a city park, enjoying some pleasures that are rare for me.  When a city park has a dog park I actually get a chance to have quality conversations with local people.  Just imagine how rare that is, for a traveler! All of the trees were leafed out.  The variety is almost unbelievable.  There was even a sweetgum tree, here in northeastern Oregon.  Normally it grows in the southeastern states.  It is strange to think that there are many people who take trees like this for granted. from istockphoto.com The leaves of the maple trees look like giant, juicy green, water balloons.  Again, you have to contrast that with the uninteresting trees in national forests.  One can tire of trees that are nothing but bark and needles. A traveler is wise to take advantage of cool weather to come down from the mountains and enjoy town-pleasures like this before the low-altitude town becomes a furnace.