Occupation of Independence

It was an odd and pleasant experience to walk into the "breaks" near Socorro, NM; and of course that means I have to try to explain it. After all, if I don't think about and write about odd and powerful experiences, what should I write about? I don't know if most readers caught it, but d uring the discussion of my last post on this topic, history was quietly made: one of the outdoors-blogosphere's most notorious and incorrigible optical-sybarites (grin) admitted that a breathtakingly beautiful, 1200-foot-high, sheer vertical, redrock cliff is not necessarily 1.3333 times as breathtakingly beautiful as an identical cliff that is only 900 feet high. It is time to be a good sport and move on. I will nobly resist the tendency to be greedy by also trying to get him to admit that: We should stop calling things beautiful when they are just freakishly large, and therefore have been made into a national park. The freakishly large is certainly entertaining, but only

Yuma, AZ. You don't have to be in a snowbird town more than a couple hours before somebody pops the question. Yep, that question. I've tried everything: boycotting the question in a obviously jocular manner;  ignoring the question, and immediately changing the subject to, say, the weather or the condition of the roads; groaning out loud;  pausing for a noticeable period of time, then sighing, before finally giving a desultory and halting answer. (This is aimed at making them feel guilty.) I've tried 'em all. I've even tried just answering the question in a brief and neutral way. Nothing works. What question am I talking about? Aw come on, in a snowbird capital like Yuma? There's something about the body language that usually gives the culprit away, but sometimes they blindside you. "Soooooooo, where 'ya from?" My entire body locks up in a wince. The worst culprits are those who insist on taking a deadpan answer as a challenge. You ca

An internet dieter does not have the advantage that food dieters do when they finally step on the scale. Perhaps there is an app out there that keeps track of the hours you are on the internet. Nevertheless, at the risk of fooling myself, I claim to be making progress with my internet diet. When wireless internet access got better around 2005, I really thought I was done with book-reading, and that the internet would be my main venue for reading in the future. But experience has shown that most blogs are too trivial and repetitive to waste much time with. Of course the internet is still good for many things other than reading blogs. Ever m indful that one can't cut b ack on a vice without replacing it with something else, I've gone back to reading books , which thankfully has become much easier the last few years. For one thing , reading is no w easier on the eyes.  Th is is crucial to older eyes on winter evenings, e s pecially when they are camping in an RV without el

Earlier I posted about learning that I lacked the 'right set of balls' for exploring some BLM land near Socorro, NM. Something else happened that day. It was an area called the "breaks," which I take to mean interesting topographies carved out by side st r eams of the Rio Grande. It w as a fascinating area . It ma de me regre t not seeing the Missouri Breaks in Montana before I gave up on going north in the summer , after the cost o f transportation got so high.  As always, I doted over the vertical sidew alls of the arroyos: Although only 12 feet tall, this sidewall was as vertical and re d a s any cli ff in XYZ National Park that is gawked at by 4.6 million visitors per year when doing the obligatory "auto loop tour." (Wasn't it Edw ard Abbey in "Desert Solitaire" who griped about a new loop being added to the park where he was a seaso nal ranger ?) Conglomerate is a su rprisingly durable material: Further upstream I

Yuma, AZ. Didn't Aristotle say that the aim of a good tragedy was to give the audience a katharsis, a violent expurgation of the soul? But who needs a tragedy? Wouldn't a rousing folk dance do the job? Before the television era, many people would have answered 'yes'. There are still sporting events in large stadiums that can provide a catharsis to the audience. There are even more examples of how to purge the soul, and I just got back from one. After being a mountain biker/hiker for the last couple years, I got back on the road bicycle and did a club ride, my first in 5 years. If more people just understood what they are missing... Many of the people in the club are 70-ish. They are fast! They used to hike on Wednesday, for variety's sake; but that tradition has been eliminated, perhaps because too many people were complaining of sore this and that when hiking, although they can pedal a "metric century" on any given day. They are few moments sweete