Occupation of Independence

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...