Occupation of Independence

Full time RVers occasionally house-sit for friends or relatives who live in the normal world, the world of sticks and bricks, lawns and driveways. It's been so many years since I've spent a few days in such a structure that the experience seemed exotic and adventurous. This isn't as whimsical as it might at first seem. For one thing the typical suburban house is dangerous. I've never had a close call when hiking near 1000-foot-high cliffs, but I've come quite close to slipping in those bath tubs found in most houses. That never happens in my travel trailer's shower stall, where heat, pressure, and vibration have solidified desert dust into gritty, metamorphic layers. We have fewer pieces of seldom-used junk than the house-bound, but we can actually find the useful stuff. I was looking for a simple spoon the other night during my house-sitting gig. My arm actually wearied opening drawer after drawer in the kitchen, while I stared at every kitchen gadge

The world is so full of praise for Beauty that it drowns itself out. The Uses of Ugliness is a theme that seems under-rated to me. And speaking of Ugliness, we have another election season coming. There should be an alternative to the usual choices of watching Media coverage with sour disdain or with numb toleration. There is a point when Ugliness attacks an irreducible center of human dignity. We simply must defend ourselves in order to live. Here is something that works for me: there have been a few books written over the centuries that say something worthwhile about politics. We have all heard these classics praised, and we say that we probably should read that book someday... That is the beauty and use of Ugliness. Ugliness can be a sharp sensation felt right now, not just someday . It impels us to action; quite an accomplishment for a "negative" thing. So instead of following the electoral horse-race on the boob toob I will be rereading Alexis de Tocqueville's &

  For a so-called cattle dog Coffee Girl has quite a hankering for flying birds. It's a bit like watching a roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote episode. She "tree-ed" a red-tailed hawk on one of the power poles. The hawk stared down at her, with a look of bemused astonishment, while Coffee Girl had her forepaws on the pole, and howled back, as if she was a hound who had just tree-ed a raccoon. The hawk flew off and then took a dive at the dog; not enough to be scary, just enough to piss her off. At the next pole, the hawk's mate was waiting. The harried hawk would be over there in three seconds or so, so I had to move fast. Bingo!

One of my favorite things about downtown in the Little Pueblo is the funky, hand-crafted motor vehicles. In order for something like this to be practical you need to live in the hippie district downtown. In the 'burbs they drive the usual monster-trucks to the grocery store to pick up one small bag of groceries.

With elections coming up, it is fun to step back from the hackneyed slogans of day-to-day vote-buying and think about the big picture. Ancient Greece was supposed to be a laboratory of political science, with democracies, oligarchies, and tyrannies just a few miles away from each other. Like a modern Aristotle cataloging the various constitutions, we can observe and compare many little societies, such as churches, lodges, civic organizations, etc. In my case it was bicycle clubs. Bicycle clubs do indeed span the political spectrum. One such club was helpful and considerate almost to a fault: they would always wait at the top of a hill for the slowpokes to catch up. If anybody had a flat tire, the whole group would stop and assist. They shared meals together. Great folks, it seemed. But over a summer the starting time would slip because they simply lacked the guts to leave anyone. Many of the flat tires were caused by people running on old rubber. Their obsession with safety became

Do you think I'm just looking at this sexy little beast through a romantic haze? At long last, a cargo van built on a car platform, rather than a heavy truck platform, so that it gets good mileage. Perhaps a version of the Ford TransitConnect is available without those useless windows. A cargo van should possess a rugged and manly minimalism. There are sliding doors on both sides. A six-footer can walk through, if he bends over a little. If only the tires or wheel wells were bigger, for higher clearance! These vans have only been available in the US for a year or two, so it'll be awhile before many exist on the used marketplace. (Ford makes them in Turkey, primarily for non-US customers.) Neglecting the wimpy ground clearance, these guys have a lot of potential as the ultimate camping machines for the short term boondocker.

...you're turned on by old junk like this. I added a spur to one of my coffee shop-anchored bicycle routes in order to visit an old mining area. There is nothing spectacular, but there are twenty old wrecks that make me feel satisfied. Satisfaction: it doesn't sound very exciting, does it? When I converted from a full time, traveling RVer to a townie I had to relearn certain habits of adulthood: satisfaction is more reliable and sustainable than the titillation of novelty. (Channel surfing with gasoline.)

A newbie in town and I had lunch together the other day. Perhaps it could be called a "date," but I'm so far out of it that I don't even know the technical, legal definition of a date anymore. She was from a college town in Oregon, so I was suspicious, but tried to keep an open mind. Several times she introduced key buzzwords into the conversation: organic, Asia, yoga class, and whether there might be trace amounts of meat in the chili; then she appeared to wait for me to take the topic up. With each succeeding blow, my shoulders slumped a little further. Finally she mentioned "vibrations." I'm happy to report that I did not audibly groan, nor did my face fall into the plate as a sign of final surrender. Maybe I sighed a little. Well who ya gonna blame? I moved to a town full of aged hippie-dippies and New Agers, and then complain when they act like it. Actually they are only 10% of the town, and are concentrated in the hippie district. Oddly enough,

The bird was caught alighting from the dead cholla stalk. Its head is to the right, I think. The angle of the wing is more downward than I would have expected.

The Arkansas River Valley, Colorado, a couple years ago. Most people yearn for a long, lingering autumn, full of crisp mornings and warm afternoons, of apple festivals and glorious colors. A season without snow, rain, humidity or bugs. Many autumns don't quite live up to this dream, because it gets rainy and blowy just when the colors get going. Down go those beautiful leaves, down into the first of the winter mud. Living on wheels would seem to be the perfect solution. Just imagine a gradual migration, surfing the wave-crest of colors southward! That is what I expected out of my first fall migration, many equinoxes ago. Much to my surprise, when the October weather collapse happened up north, it quickly went south. There was no six-week-long autumn like I had fantasized, even when migrating from northern Michigan to the Texas Hill Country. The moral of the story is that latitude is over-rated. Moving to the western states, latitude proved to be even more over-rate