Occupation of Independence

Readers should never trust a blogger who might be on a drug trip. I'm afraid that I was. Normally a really steep mountain bike ride reaches a point where your traction fails before your aerobic capability does. This ride (Saguache, CO) was peculiar in offering such good traction that I could keep going until 'the snot comes out your eyeballs,' as a cycling friend once put it. Hence the psychotropic endorphin drug trip. Believe it or not, the whole way up (to a radio tower of course) I was rhapsodizing how 'metal detectors are the perfect outdoor sport.' This is not facetious, but it seems like it would be. Metal detectors -- those things that geezers buy from television commercials scheduled at the low-rent-district of the programming day. These are the times when only retirees are watching television. You know, handy-dandy kitchen gadgets and cubic zirconia jewelry. It's really 'Mildred' who was in favor of buying the metal detector. She thought it wo

Saguache, CO. What was that noise? Was somebody going through childbirth? Or calf-birth? My herding dog, Coffee Girl, was all excited by the commotion, and rightly so. A cattle drive makes an enormous amount of noise. Whoa baby, here they come now. About a hundred of them. They missed my dispersed campsite by 50 yards. But that's closer than it's ever been before. At first I thought it was a ranch family doing an old-fashioned Western cattle drive. But the "boy voices" that I thought I'd "herd", turned out to be adult cowgirls. Recently I had overheard a conversation between a local and a metropolitan tourist, in a coffee shop. When the tourist left, the local rolled his eyes and said to the other local, "You can always tell a tourist from the shorts." Feeling self-conscious about my tourist status, and not wanting to ruin the authenticity of the experience to the cattlemen, I hid behind rocks and bushes when photographing them. As

Now that I had overcome the urge to panic and make things worse, it was time for the positive agenda to start: what action should I take to get my RV unstuck off that mountain? But not quite. There was still one more useless act to perform, but at least it did no harm . I started walking toward the half dozen ranchettes at the top of the mountain, known to me from a recent mountain bike ride.  It turned out to be too far on foot. So why wasn't I riding the mountain bike? Probably because, in a panicky mood, I thought it would take "too long" to put on my bicycle shorts, and I had to "do something" immediately! Then I walked off to the ranchettes without bothering to put an explanatory note on the van's windshield. (That would have taken "too long", you know.) This act of stupidity just made me more ashamed of blocking the road to any motorist coming up the mountain, behind me. Once again this other person, personifying Experience, said, "

It was unchivalrous of the reader to leave poor Ol' Boonie on that mountain, in dire need of succor and rescue. Let's see if we can improve on the situation. It's easy to look back on any emergency with a humorous perspective, and even to imagine yourself heroic; nevertheless, at the time, the situation seemed serious and scary, and you probably acted in a bumbling manner. Spinning out on a dirt/gravel road near the top of a mountain isn't a true emergency in the sense of rolling backwards, jack-knifing, and demolishing your rig. But at first it felt like it. I had never experienced this before. It's so easy for the mind to run away with fearful possibilities and scenarios. To make matters worse, my van and trailer were blocking anybody else from going by. Oh how hateful these fat-ass rigs are! I decided right there and then that my next trailer will be a 6 foot wide cargo trailer, and the next tow vehicle will have the width of a Nissan Frontier or Xterra. It

We interrupt this story of embarrassing foolishness, and will leave the reader hanging in suspense about whether Ol' Boonie gets off the mountain in one piece. But we'll get back to it next time. Newbies to the RV blogosphere might be unaware how much silly nonsense they are about to encounter. Most of it is harmless as long as they take it with a grain of salt. Much of it is due to "boondockers", since RV park "campers" are so middle class/suburban/boring that they seldom blog. The blarniest of the blarney-ers are probably van campers, or worse yet, stealth van campers. The last thing the RV blogosphere needs is one more smelly fool bragging about how he hasn't paid to camp for years because he camps for free (next to railroad tracks) in cities or on public land. Or how he sleeps in the trunk of his Toyota Corolla, together with a week's supply of his own poopies in double garbage bags, and washes himself with Baby-Wipes by "rubbing a littl

Most of us have had an automobile accident or two. I'll bet you've launched into a retelling of the accident, only to notice that your audience has started fidgeting, has lost eye contact with you, and then changed the subject. Why is that? Lack of empathy on their part? Poor listening skills, short attention spans? Or was the story teller too animated and self-absorbed? ____________________________________________________ In either case, I haven't had an accident; but I did manage to spin out and lose traction near the top of a mountain in the Gunnison CO area; it was the first time in 16 years, and with two wheel drive, that's not a bad record. Now the question is, can I write about it with more efficacy than is typical in "horror stories." This wasn't a reckless stunt. I had probed the slope the day before on my mountain bike, and had let out half the air in the rear (drive) tires of the tow vehicle. And there was good motivation: the most sceni

As you follow the operations of the Media, the Congress, and the Imperial Presidency, it is easy to get disgusted and ruin your day feeling sour about the future of what's left of the American Republic. Do yourself a favor and resist the doom and gloom. The faster the hateful amerikan Empire breaks down, the sooner something better might replace it. It took over 400 years for somebody to sack imperial Rome, starting the clock from the time of Augustus. For the sake of argument, let's say that the British Empire collapsed when Indian and Pakistan gained their independence. We could date the end of the French Empire in the early 1960s, when Algeria gained independence. In either case, it took these two empires 200 years to collapse. The amerikan Empire didn't start until the end of World War II, so it isn't even 70 years old. The good news is that it is making great progress in destroying itself. We should all wish It continued success. But it is easy to forget the

The word 'flow' in the title of the last post and a comment by uber -commenter, George, reminded me of something. Gee, if only the search box in blogger worked right. After some brute-force-searching I finally found that other post.  This blog isn't a travelogue of Breaking News of the day. There is too much of that approach on the internet. The more minute-by-minute writing becomes, the more trivial it gets. So I rewrote this other experience, hoping that a couple "moments of truth" will come across more clearly to the reader. _____________________________________ The Little Poodle and I "paddled" upstream -- on the mountain bike -- along the popular Arkansas River, near "Byoona" Vista, CO. We saw one river rafting company after another. As luck would have it, we made it in time for their mass "descension" of the Arkansas River. (If balloonists at the Albuquerque festival can have a mass ascension, then rafters in Colo

Gunnison, CO. Why try to restrain myself? I am in my favorite land in Colorado. Good luck to those who enjoy static shapes and colors in the landscape. But I'll never understand them, for better or for worse.  For me, the outdoor experience is primarily about motion, be it transportation, cyclical processes and strife in the environment, or my own motion as an observer.  Even an activity as pokey as hiking can provide enjoyment if I vicariously experience the frantic running of a doggie hunter companion.  I don't care how the motion is achieved; be it horse, bicycle, a raven playing with ridge-lift, human hang gliders, or kayakers. (As long as it doesn't require a yukkie engine.) Perhaps I should add a You Tube gadget to this blog and let you click on the opening-credits scene of William Wyler's "The Big Country" (1957). And indeed it is a big country in the upper valley of the Gunnison River. It's a land that has a healthy balance of horizontal and v

I think I had honored my guest, Glenn of toSimplify.net , a week before he showed up in Gunnison, CO. The bolts that hold the travel trailer to its frame were loosening -- and credit that vital discovery to my friend Mark (Box Canyon Blog). Since one of those bolts was under the shower stall, it was necessary to remove the shower stall. But hell, why not just get rid of it! You can see I was already under the influence of Glenn's philosophical penumbra, despite him still being a couple hundred miles away. What horrors would be revealed by removing the shower stall? Tools, money, or cellphones, that were lost years ago? A rodent nest and one pissed-off mama rodent baring her teeth at me? How about ghastly water damage and mildew? Oddly enough I found nothing except the bolt that needed to be replaced. It was no small miracle that a plastic tub of just the right size was found at a well-known big box retail store. Then I rigged up a cloth shower curtain that hangs into the plast

Why are they doing this to me right now? It's just going to get me going. They are building a Tractor Supply store in Gunnison, CO. I'm appalled. Tractor Supply. I'm old enough to remember going to "town" with my farmer-grandfather to buy something at a Tractor Supply store in the Cornbelt of the Midwest, 50 years ago! And the store actually was a part of the agricultural sector of the economy back then. An old fogey's memory being as selective as it is, I remember that he needed to buy a new water pump for his tractor. Today I will occasionally walk into a Tractor Supply just to wallow in disgust. They are nothing but boutiques that project a "fine country home" image for the benefit of ex-metropolitanites who have moved out to a hobby farm or ranch. Fancy western-style clothes, cute-sie decorations, and gimmicks galore. OK, to be fair, there are still some serious and useful things in the store. My grandfather drove me there in his pickup tru