Occupation of Independence

 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...