Occupation of Independence

  I'll bet the reader has their favorite examples of important things that are best pursued indirectly.  For me, scenery is one of those.  The Cascade Mountains are off to my west.  I let them play peek-a-boo with me.  They pop out when I don't expect them to. Perhaps it will take a long time for me to lose a sense of wonder at seeing water actually flowing in a river!  Spending too long in the American Southwest will do that to a person. The water level on the Crooked River near Prineville OR was up to the thighs or waists of the fly fishermen, so it was not a good river for my little dog. Small streams of water can be interesting, too.  We did short dog walks away from one campsite when I finally noticed a small spring and trickle of water alongside the road.   How could I have ignored it, three or four times! There is an underground world of water that a person seldom thinks about.  It is vitally important in dry states.  We igno...

 A traveler sees a lot of mountains and forests, canyons and cliffs.  They are enjoyable at the time, and yet, they usually don't make for a distinct long-term memory.  They blend into an anonymous pool.   Conversely, other little things make for vivid memories that last for years.  These little things might not mean much to other people.   Think of all the times I have gone a bicycle ride on dirt/gravel roads on scenic land with great weather, with one of my dogs.  I almost always enjoy myself.  But afterwards, little memory of it lives.  One of the things that does stand out is the curious behavior of butterflies, "La Mariposa", alongside the bike.  I have distinct and clear memories of La Mariposa deliberately following the bike, just a few feet away.  And not for just a couple random seconds.  It's as if this mere insect has suddenly become a sentient being, like my dog.  Does she want to join the bike club?...

A recent campsite featured a lot of something that I have never seen so much of, in one place.  Obsidian rock.  Every two steps on the ground, there was another piece of it, usually fist-sized.  It is quite pretty.  Fresh surfaces of it are shiny black. And speaking of fresh surfaces, isn't that how Stone Age men supposedly made tools?  But how do you strike two rocks together so that a useful tool would fracture off?  Most rocks have crystallographic axes, making them weaker in some directions than others.  But obsidian is a glass so it has no weak and strong axes.   What was the point of over-thinking this?  I grabbed two baseball-sized pieces of obsidian and gave them a glancing blow towards each other, like a musician might give to a pair of cymbals.  And I'll be damned if a large flake didn't come off.  It was quite sharp on the edge.  You could call it a stone blade since it could cut things in the kitchen.   Bu...

 It has surprised me to hear all the worrying about escalation of the war with Russia.  Even the alt-media is joining in this hysteria.  It is easier to explain why the regime-media is talking about the scary story of nuclear confrontation with Russian. Americans are shocked at prices in the grocery store and at the gas pump.  The Biden administration doesn't want those issues on the "front page" of the news.  Nor does it want people talking about how Washington DC is losing an unnecessary war with Russia brought on by the stupid foreign policy of Obama and Biden.  If the Ukrainian military collapses this summer, that won't be 'good optics' for Biden.  Or what if Zelensky -- the new "Winston Churchill," the defender of Freedom and Democracy, according to the regime media of two years ago -- falls in a coup d'état? Scary stories about bigger war with Russia steal the oxygen from these stories.  But nothing lasts for long in political show busines...