Occupation of Independence

Something important was happening on yesterday's ride. Can you spot it? It looks like planet Earth again, instead of Arizona. How nice it is to have soil on the ground instead of rubble! But New Mexico is about as dry as Arizona, so why is there soil and grass here? It is probably the higher altitude.  Most people probably wouldn't say this photo is breathtakingly beautiful. But tell that to your butt and hands! The trail felt so smooth and fast and safe.  I like the challenge of letting the significance of that soil sink into my mind. It takes discipline to stay focused on something meaningful, after the travel blogosphere and the tourist industry have gotten everybody addicted to mindless postcards. Taking on challenges like this encourage me to think that I'm not just wasting my time as a perpetual tourist. A couple days ago, when I was still back on that alien planet of Arizona, this rock grabbed my attention. It was close to the campsite. The rock seems to be bent like

  I've reread Irving Babbitt's "Rousseau and Romanticism" a couple times. It was a good choice. Sometimes I wonder if books are a waste of time. When you are done with all that eyeball-fatique, and 10,000 words have been scanned into one eyeball and then have flown out the other eyeball just as quickly, you are left wondering what difference it makes to you? What has been retained, what has had an impact on your life? He wasn't writing about the philosophy of travel, but here is quote from the book that certainly pertains to travelers. "...but to take these wanderings seriously is to engage in a sort of endless pilgrimage in the void. The romanticist is constantly yielding to the “spell” of this or the “lure” of that, or the “call” of some other thing. But when the wonder and strangeness that he is chasing are overtaken, they at once cease to be wondrous and strange, while the gleam is already dancing over some other object on the distant horizon. For nothing

There is a place around here that I had never visited before. Think of it as a mini-celebrity of the tourist industry. For whatever reason I rolled in and had my first look. It only took a few minutes for me to leave and camp elsewhere. What is it that scares me off from such places? Is it just snobbishness? Objectively it wasn't that bad. Sure, there would have been a bit of litter, music noise, and loose dogs, and probably quite a bit of door-slamming. But only a small fraction of the campers at a crowded place are terrible neighbors. Nonetheless I surrendered quickly and easily. Camping is supposed to be a soft adventure. But popular boondocking places never have a feeling of adventure to them; they just seem like shabby little hobo camps. Finding uncrowded camping is becoming the most important skill -- so why all the harping about converting vans, on the internet? The rig isn't the problem -- overcrowding is the problem. Visualize an electronic instrument meter with a nee

Campers might differ widely in how tolerant they are of rain and mud, but none of them like it. And yet I actually liked the mud yesterday. When I walked uphill, towards the mountains, the ground was rocky and well-drained enough to be un-muddy. Walking downhill, the land flattened out and became less rocky: sure enough, my feet left muddy prints on the road. Glorious! By the end of the day, the sky cleared up. It too felt glorious. That is what is special about rain in the desert. The land seems to exude health. But it isn't just the land. The human observer is also restored to healthy-mindedness. There is so much difference between dry sunny skies most of the time versus all of the time. That is obvious, but you have to live through it to really appreciate it. I keep re-designing a homemade rain gauge in my head: some sort of wide-mouth funnel, cone, inverted umbrella; with a translucent straw glued into its bottom. I want amplification over 100. The trouble is that it is too b