Occupation of Independence

There are a lot of good things you can say about Mother Nature in western North America.  But she ain't perfect.  In spring, the thing that complicates the life of a traveler and camper is the mismatch between altitude and latitude. In an ideal world, one would take off in spring and gradually gain altitude and latitude.  Thanks to the great Southwestern Father of Waters, the Colorado River, altitude and latitude go hand in hand up to Lake Mead.  Then it gets crazy.  There is a huge hump of high altitude land at middling latitudes.  Call it the Colorado Plateau if you wish. To the west of that, Nevada has pretty high altitudes and is cold in spring.  It is huge. When you finally do get to the inland Northwest, the northern latitude is less important than the low altitudes found there.  Therefore you need to blast through the hump in middling latitudes as quickly as possible.  You feel like a fool.  "It is freezing here.  Why should ...

One of the difficulties of RVing with a dog is that the silly beast becomes spoiled.  They see their owner all the time.  Perhaps the owner should deliberately spend some time away from the dog, now and then. When I came back from town the other day, here is the welcome that was waiting for me:   Well, it certainly is a dog-friendly town, here in southeastern Arizona.  Perhaps too friendly. from pinterest.com But actually it works pretty well to allow dogs into the public library.  I didn't bring mine in.  But one of the librarians asked me if the white van was mine, and she said that the little dog inside had half-crawled out of the window, and should come inside the library.  Then the librarian went out and retrieved my dog. My little dog put on quite the performance for three lady librarians.  Soon they had her on the rug where they take photos of dogs for what I call the Readers Club. It is so rare to find small towns in America that are disti...

Yesterday was the most perfect day in a long time.  Oddly, it took very little to make it so good.  All it took was the old trick of going for a bike ride with my little dog, early in the morning, and on the right terrain, the right road, and away from motorsports noise and the misinformation of the RV blogosphere and tourism industry. Better yet, I was away from the desert.  Snowbirds rhapsodize over the "beauty" of the desert, but do they really mean beauty in a positive sense?  Or do they really just mean that they are away from clouds, snow, sleet, thawing snow, mud, and half-frozen slop? But they are connecting with "nature," you say.  Nature should mean more than rubble and cholla, and postcards of  saguaro cacti in front of a red sunset, and the like.  We are animals who need food and water.  There should be some goodies of that type in a "beautiful, natural" environment.    Some balance.      Here, away from the ...

The end of a war certainly is a poignant time.  Think of all those men dying for nothing!  As a war drags out to its bitter end, politicians show how little regard they have their own people.  The politicians only care about holding onto power -- to hell with how many peasants are dying needlessly. It seemed like a good idea to read about the end of other wars.  Since I had never really paid much attention to the Battle of the Bulge at the end of World War II, and had run into the movie at a local library, I bought a book on this battle by a well-known writer. It sounded like a good idea, but it didn't work.  And that is a real shame.  So many details, names, organizational units of the armies, locations.  All it added up to was a meaningless blur.  So I jumped to the Conclusion.   Even that didn't help. 'AI' might improve military history books -- by a lot!  We have certainly heard a lot of hype about its great promise.  Making mil...