Occupation of Independence

A couple times during the night I heard a funny sound on the metal roof of my camper trailer. It must be a very light rain or mist, I thought. Not so. In the morning the campground woke up to an inch or two of snow. It was not crowded here last night, but we had a half dozen campers.  Some people's reaction to this photo might be, "Can't they find something better to do?" It was dead calm for the first time in days. And it was calm in another sense of the word: snow in the trees seems to make it seem quieter, a lovely feeling that is almost the ultimate luxury in a noisy, overcrowded world. One young man was camping by himself. He had his kit arranged neatly on his picnic table. Steam was rising out of his coffee pot. I asked why his tent fly had no snow on it; he said the support-poles were collapsing a little, so when he got up for breakfast, he just shook the snow off. What an attitude this guy had! He took what other people would consider a setback, and made it a

Long-suffering readers of this blog probably think I am such a snob about scenery-tourism that I wouldn't be caught dead in a tourist area. (And a cynical reader probably just thinks I am doing this just to give myself something to complain about...) But here I am, campground-hosting four miles outside a national park. We essentially function as an overflow bin for the national park. And here I was, walking up a trail to a waterfall that a hundred thousand (?) other people do every year. How was I supposed to think about this?  Was I supposed to be excited about the mere act of gawking at a waterfall? What for? -- I have already seen a photo of it. (Essentially that is my argument for the fundamental uselessness of scenery-tourism.) But it was early in the day, so the tidal wave of tourism hadn't yet hit. Nor did I get hot, as usual on a hike. It was strange how many softball-sized rocks were on the trail. Why were the tourists so lazy? They should have kicked some of these sem

We were driving up the steep road, up and into the Sangre de Cristo mountains. It was BLM land so you could still see between the smallish trees. Off to the south I saw something I had never seen before in person: a wall of dust coming north. It was almost unnatural looking because the wall was a straight line, lined up east-to-west, and advancing northward through Colorado's San Luis valley. (Technically it is Colorado, but in reality it is the northern end of New Mexico.)  My camp was 1500 feet above the valley floor, so perhaps it would be above the oncoming wall of wind and dust? Nope. The rush of wind and dust happened in a couple minutes. Visibility fell to a couple hundred yards. But in five minutes it was over and the sun came out again. So the experience was mild compared to the Great Mother of All Haboobs which hit Arizona a couple years ago. Still, it was a 'personal best.' The famous Arizona haboob of 2018 Most people don't go through that many freakish nat

If you aren't careful, you can get discouraged by thinking about the state of the world. One way around this is to ignore news programs and pundits' articles and essays. This has worked well for me. Another technique is to think about what you can do today during your "off" hours, compared to your recent ancestors. They could spend their evenings watching sitcoms and commercials on television, or listening to pop music on the radio. There was no way for them to watch classic movies. They had books, you say. Did they? How many books did they have access to in small towns? Compare that to the books and music available online to anybody anywhere today! I thought about this when I was watching the Criterion Edition of the Russian movie "War and Peace" made in the 1960s. I am indeed fortunate. Ironically this movie does tie in with world events. Consider the reckless saber-rattling and trouble-making by NATO and the USA's Deep State in Ukraine. I doubt that t

If you shop around for 'sleep, relaxation, ambient, white noise' music, they try to sell on their relaxing sounds of nature. Since when are the sounds of nature necessarily sleep-inducing? Last night I was on another cliff-line in southwestern New Mexico. The wind was howling, although most of the fury seemed to be in the tree tops. The forest floor was semi-calm, comparatively. But it sounded like a storm at sea. Think of the courage that sailors had until the last couple generations. It is hard for we moderns to imagine it. Here is a photo from the archive of myself and the Little Mariner, "clambering off a lee shore" near the tip of the Baja peninsula. When you have been camping in the desert for awhile, it seems dangerous to be where ponderosa trees weighing tons could possibly fall on you. It happens. Remember that this area has volcanic rocks near the surface so the trees' root systems are not well-developed. I felt under attack. But at sunset the wind fell