Occupation of Independence

  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.