Occupation of Independence

  During my working-stiff years in a major city, I used to watch the masses take off on holiday weekends.  They went to the other end of the state, where the lakes, rivers, and forests were.  Meanwhile I stayed put in the metro area, and did my favorite bicycling of the year.  The traffic was so light! This technique worked so well it makes me wonder if a camper is more likely to find peace and quiet in a Walmart parking lot, on a holiday weekend, rather than heading for the "backcountry."   People can be forgiven for getting discouraged and deciding that  there  is no  such thing as backcountry on a holiday weekend. But in fact, there is.  In summary if you allow yourself to think like everybody else, you will end up camping with everybody else.  (And you know what that means.) You just have to be assertive in breaking certain bad habits, such as going to "free campsite" websites and apps.  Avoid anyplace that can be recognized as a tourist-brand-name: if it has a

There is an app on my phone that is more enjoyable than the others.  It is called Pocket Rain Gauge.  It gives one all-important fact and spares you the uninteresting junk on all the other weather sites.  It tells you how much rain you have gotten over the last 24 hours.  Where I am camped in the Arizona desert, we have gotten 0.26" over the last 24 hours.  Paradise! Can you imagine a better climate than getting slow rain at night?   Every drop soaks in.  I am already looking forward to spring wildflowers. If that isn't enough, slow rain at night makes for good sleeping.  And the world smells so good in the morning.

What celebrities snow and ice have become!  Some of these snow/ice videos are astonishing, or rather the people are, the crashing and sliding cars are. I envy and admire the people on these videos.  That is not facetious.  Nor is it schadenfreude .  People of a certain latitude have a chance to show what they are made of, as they experience Noble Suffering this winter.  Even better, they are learning -- or relearning -- some facts of life that they seem to have forgotten. They are relearning cold, friction, momentum, gravity, wind and other old-fashioned analog variables.  One might even be tempted to call these things facts, as authoritarian as that sounds.  Actually Nature's authoritarian streak tends to get neglected as poets and philosophers celebrate the freedom and spontaneity of living in 'harmony with nature.' Society had been circling the drain in a digital world, the world of what you see on an electronic screen.  It was a world drunk on censored fake news, fake

Camping on a riverbank is something many people like to do, and I am lucky enough to be doing that.  This is Arizona so it is more of a 'bank' than a river.  But I always like arroyos.  This one had a special gift for me.   Miles of nice, navigable gravel. In one spot and one spot only, a 10 foot high waterfall sits across the arroyo.  The rock waterfall is steeper than the photo shows: you couldn't walk up it.  But the Little Cute One surprised me by scampering up the rock waterfall. In the middle of the photo is a hiking pole, to indicate scale.  The gushing water has left two holes that are 3 or 4 feet deep.  How deep would the water have to be above the waterfall in order to dig out such deep holes?  I wonder how fast the water was moving? Notice that the holes are dirt, but there are no plants growing in it.  That would imply that the water event was recent.  The monsoon season this past summer was quite spirited.  But are you willing to believe the holes were dug out