Occupation of Independence

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...

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 ...