Occupation of Independence

Arizona's White Mountains, Springerville. Actually it seems less like mountains around here than high lava-based plateaus with occasional volcanic knolls. Some of these were connected by a grassy ridgeline, and you know how I get with ridgelines and saddles. But first... Since there are new readers on this blog lately, some explanation should be offered to them as to why I don't show them scenic postcard after postcard of all the photo cliches of the West: Monument Valley, red arches in Utah, snow-capped peaks in the Rockies, etc.  The short answer is that I see full time RVing as a profession or occupation, not as a short term vacation. If you are looking for scenery-based escapism, you have arrived at the wrong blog. Let's make the case for appreciating these high grassy plateaus, knolls, and ridgelines by looking back to something I wrote earlier when visiting the San Luis Valley in Colorado. Then, after the second horizontal line, I'll return

Glenwood NM. This is the first area I stopped at last August when I got back on the road. I was very mindful of being a better traveler than before. This is harder than it sounds. An experienced traveler learns that some camping situations work better than others; and some places are better than others. As you follow an annual migratory cycle, you polish your technique so that it works better and better. The trouble is that you become a successful specialist, with all the narrowness and lack of variety that that brings on.  For example we usually allow wireless internet and phone service to affect our itinerary, at least implicitly. There is a real downside to giving in to internet addiction. The Glenwood NM area is a Verizon hole. The experienced and specialized traveler might just blow through the area, and barely stop. He has really lost something. Does he even bother to discover that there is DSL in the area! That surprised me -- it means that wi-fi and the "e

Who were the first "bloggers" in the English language? Arguably they lived in the 18th century. They were fellows like Addison & Steele, Samuel Johnson, and Benjamin Franklin. They wrote with a goose quill stylus and paper instead of a laptop of course. But the term, blogger, still seems right since they wrote personal essays on a wide variety of topics. Sometimes they wrote in a hurry, as Johnson admitted to. There are advantages to both slow and fast writing. If the blogger is working on a difficult theme, the slow approach works best. But fast writing can better capture the spirit and mood of the writer. Sometimes that is the better approach, such as when a traveler arrives in town and feels a bit giddy because things are working out better than he expected. Don't let anybody tell you that concerns and worries are terrible and negative things. Without them, how could we have upside surprises? I'm having one right now -- right this minute -- in Glenwood, N

The Continental Divide Trail, north of Silver City NM, was more rugged than the dirt roads that I usually ride. It frequently dipped down into ravines and creek crossings, which eventually took their toll. It wasn’t long before I regretted not bringing food. Why was I resting so much? Something was wrong. I was starting to feel light-headed. It was actually a little scary. Should I turn tail and head back to the van parked at the trailhead, or plod on? Hunger favored plodding onward, since there would be a small town and restaurant in just a few miles. Then I saw the Benedictine monastery peeking through the ponderosas, on the other side of a steep ravine. If only I could drag the bike across this ravine to the monastery, it would make for a huge shortcut back to the van.  The bell tower of the monastery seemed so close! I was half-crazy with hunger by now. Getting to that monastery was my best hope. But the ravine proved to be uncrossable; I had to face the grim reali

Boondocking on raw, unimproved land has a great effect on your notions of value and common sense. What does it really mean to "improve" land, such as they are said to do in national parks, monuments, and other "special" areas? Recently I was in the Tucson area where one such park is called Madera Canyon. It is a special area in the national forest in the Santa Rita mountains south of Tucson. I always go into such a place with a chip on my shoulder. Despite that, it is fair to say that the US Forest Service is doing more things right than wrong there.  I rode the mountain bike up to the summit in the canyon. At the entrance a sign warned the visitor that a list of rules and regulations was coming up soon. I tensed up. But the rules were small in number and full of common sense, of all things. These days a "park" of any kind is expected to be anti-dog, unless it's a dog park. That is the first manifestation of city-slicker culture that makes me

A few miles south of Tucson. A friend had camped here recently and warned me how rough the Madera mountain bike trail is. How typical! I've yet to enjoy any "official" mountain bike trail. If there's a sign calling it an official trail, or if it's listed in some book ("Top Ten Mountain Bike Trails in the XYZ Mountains"), you are almost guaranteed to find a rocky single track that will make you worry about falling, instead of enjoying the ride. But you are guaranteed a nice hiking trail as long as mountain bikers aren't using it at the same time. The "too rough to ride" syndrome is almost universal. So why doesn't the world catch on? Do people believe every brown sign or everything in print? Of course if you had world-class technical riding skills, you might feel differently. But most people don't have such skills. Why not just ride dirt roads? There are many thousands of miles of such roads on public lands. Occasionally the

Some types of outdoor enjoyments are easier than others. Getting a kick out of desert poppies takes little effort. But experiences of that type don't stick with you very long either. Appreciating geology is far more difficult. Geology is huge and fundamental. Despite being able to see it raw and exposed in arid lands, such as the American West, it is difficult to actually enjoy it in the normal sense of the word. For one thing it doesn't move, except in the case of active volcanoes. It is also hard to pronounce all the scientific terminology. The whole thing can be off-putting because it seems cold and technical. Go for a hike or a mountain bike ride through the mountains and you will occasionally see some impressive folds . Sometimes they're just little guys at road cuts. And yet something keeps you from doing backflips about them. How could hard, strong, brittle rocks be permanently deformed? Bent into arcs. When possible, I try to anthropomorphize "uni

It was a record morning for camping this winter: 34 F inside the trailer. (Oh sure, I have a catalytic propane heater, but it would have been unsporting to use it.) As I learned long ago you simply cannot get warm by putting on more clothes; you must move your body some, even if it means flapping your arms. But I had to keep reminding myself how glorious this discomfort was, or would be, once the sun starting cooking the opened trailer. What interested me was that it actually took effort to "suffer" a few minutes of chill in order to glory in the warm sun that I knew was coming momentarily. Was it just my weakness or was it the old idolatry of Comfort sneaking into the mind of an experienced camper who should know better? Long-suffering readers are familiar with my standard stump speech against bourgeois idols such as Comfort , so let's not repeat all that. But since this was the best experience of this type in some time, let's honor the occasion by loo

Fred Reed is one of my favorite writers. I don't know how many venues he uses; LewRockwell dotcom is the one I'm used to using to read him. Yesterday he really outdid himself . It seemed worthy of a long quote: I wonder whether something else is not involved. Today most of us live in profound isolation from the natural world. People in large cities can go for decades without seeing the stars. Should they drive through the countryside, it will be in a closed automobile with the air-conditioning running. On a trip to the beach, the sand will be overrun by hordes of people, half of them on whining jet skis. We exist utterly in a manmade cocoon, as much as desert termites in their mud towers. This, I think, profoundly alters our inner landscapes. Live in the rolling hills around Austin, say, as they were before they were turned

Recently I had visitors from Arizona's Ant Hill #2, Tucson, who I was supposed to coach on the RV lifestyle. (They had a rental RV and were considering buying one.) I did a poor job of it despite being well qualified for the job. Their main concern was in assessing the comfort and practicality of their mid-sized Class C motorhome. How can an experienced camper be useful when the other person's basic philosophical orientation is wrong? (I'm still searching for that wonderful quote from Aristotle about the tiniest mistake at the beginning of a project having the largest consequences.) For instance, they thought that living in an RV was supposed to be just like living in a little house. The tiniest adjustments to their daily habits were purely negative aspects of RVing to them: partial proof  their experiment had failed. Certainly RV living is similar to house living, in ways. But not identical. The difference is subtle but important. They just don't get it: RVing h

Sometimes I try to imagine the world of the Positive Thinker, as the term is typically used in popular culture as defined by squishy, trendy social science and by boob toob commercials. How bland and sugary it must be!  Although I mock dualistic religions and political philosophies on this blog, the truth is that I love dualisms aesthetically. Nature, like a movie, is no better than its villain. This winter I've been having fun imagining Malevolences looming over and threatening the landscape: Unfortunately this buzz only lasted until I could glance at the cause: The most exciting time to hike is early in the morning, when gaps in the sky island threaten you with Plutonian and diabolic cold and uncertainty.

I step out of the rig before dawn to let my little poodle do his old-man duties. I stand close, guarding him. Off in the distance the sagebrush stands out slightly from the surrounding grass; under the full moon, it looks like a patient, lurking, coyote-sized predator. A full moon does a fine job on a high, lonesome, and wind-less mesa. But all of this had little effect on me. It was the temperature that mattered. It was chilly of course, but to just the right intensity. It's funny how certain "hardships" stimulate a person. The hardship must be of the right kind and adjusted to the proper intensity. For the first time in several days, the chilliness left me feeling confident as I braced against it. Perhaps I should celebrate the occasion by rereading Toynbee's chapters on "Challenge and Response." What he described about several societies in different eras -- he was gloriously time-agnostic -- applies just as well to an individual's life. It is the

...comin' home, to a place he'd never been before. Or something like that. Being back on the road I am mindful of doing things better; hence all the preaching about being flexible and avoiding rigid habits when traveling. There is a fair bit of adaptation necessary here in Ouray, although the deck was stacked in my favor by the generosity of my "clients", Mark and Bobbie Johnson, over at Box Canyon Blog . When walking the sidewalks in downtown Ouray, it is fun to imagine what various people like best about a scenic mountain town. I almost feel sorry for the bourgeois matrons from a big city; they must be bored to tears with nature and scenery, after a few minutes. When I watch them it is always with an impish smirk on my face. Think of the classic Disney movie, Homeward Bound (The Incredible Journey) , in which a cat, Sassie (voiced over by Sally Fields), and two male dogs try to make a long distance journey over the mountains to get back to their people. At o

It was a rough night. Once again I fell asleep to a DVD movie, Roman Polanski's MacBeth . No director understands cold rain, mud, and peasant agriculture as well as Polanski, perhaps because of his early life in Poland. Watching this movie is a great thing to do when you want to glory in the misery of unpleasant weather. Around 1 in the morning I awoke to find the electricity off in the RV. I was curious, so I walked out to the edge of the rocky shelf that serves as a driveway here and saw -- not just another hateful night of cold, stygian rain and gloom -- but the entire town of Ouray CO pitch black. Another Colorado summer: Out, out, brief candle. Against this visual emptiness, the noise from the Uncompahgre River stood out alarmingly, enraged as it was by a night's rain. The movie overwhelms the viewer with oppressive rain, mud, and cold. Remember that special efforts were required in that pre-CGI era to make rain register on a movie screen. Just before MacBeth had his

This driveway in Ouray CO is crawling with milkweed tussock caterpillars. Earlier I tried to photograph how "punk" they look. Today I followed it around for a couple minutes and photographed it showing off its technical climbing skills. And this little bugger was fast! He seemed so intelligent: he'd look (?) at one angle of attack, feint towards it, and then change his mind to an alternative route. I won't be here in winter when the ice climbers show off their death-defying skills in the Uncompahgre gorge, so this caterpillar will have to serve as substitute.

It's fun to meet other bloggers and I've been lucky enough to do a lot of it lately. I learned of Ed Frey from the Bayfield Bunch when the latter when through Silver City; but Ed, I missed. He came through Ouray CO recently, where we had breakfast together. Ed walks 4-5 miles early every morning and usually has breakfast along the way. He certainly has a powerful and graceful stride, no doubt because of his methodical walking.

It's hard to discuss four wheel drive fairly. Since the 1980s it has been common and hackneyed to ridicule the owners of four wheel drive SUVs and pickup trucks as being turned on by the image of their machine, while in fact they have little, if any, use for four wheel drive. Indeed, if car loans weren't so easy to get, they would be forced to be more sensible. My own view is the American male is so emasculated by feminism, political correctness, and traditional wife-ish henpecking that a giant truck -- with big ol tars, 2 feet of ground clearance, and a throaty exhaust system -- is the only macho stupidity that society still permits him. But this discussion isn't about aspirational brontosaurus drivers in the suburbs; nor is it about jeeping as a "sport"; it's only about RV camping in the outback, and whether you need four wheel drive to do it.

So the truck (of last episode) belonged to a non-profit corporation, did it? Why was that important enough to stick on the outside of the truck? Environmentalism -- that is, Karl Marx meets Bambi -- is an easy belief system to make fun of, but I'm in statesman mode today. Let's just take their belief system as it is, and try to make it compatible with high quality forests, instead of the overgrown tinder boxes and spruce bark beetle feeding-grounds that most of the national forests are. Besides that, national forests are just plain ugly. Do environmentalists really like these eye sores any more than the rest of us?

The Wallow Fire is still burning over 400,000 acres in northeastern Arizona, making it the second biggest wildfire in that state's history. I was reading some of the comments on this fire, particularly those that criticize bad forest management policies. They can get quite emotional! Unfortunately they break into two hostile camps that scream all the same ol' shibboleths at each other: tree-huggers versus rednecks, etc. There must be a better way. This is what I'm aiming at in this post.

Dog owners know that one of their urchin's favorite tricks is falling behind on a walk, supposedly due to some worthy distraction. Then they suddenly look up and realize they're too far away. This brings on a mad dash back to their owner; their paws sound as loud as the hooves of a galloping horse. Coffee Girl, my Australian kelpie, pulled that trick this morning. But something was a little different this time. There was no wind to disperse her dusty contrail. It stayed intact a few feet off the ground and drifted away, ever so slowly. It seemed too solid for anything airborne, perhaps because the rising sun was illuminating the contrail, but not the field proper. It was cruise missile-like; in an earlier era we would have said that it belonged in a Loonie Toons cartoon. The contrail of dust, el camino del polvo , seemed like it was a part of her streaking body. Sigh, if only it had been possible to film a video of this, backlit by the morning sun. At first I wondered if it