9/25/11

So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine

And the moon rose over an open field

“Kathy, I’m lost.” I said though I knew she was sleeping

I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.

Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike

They’ve all gone to look for America

--Simon and Garfunkel

Way back in ’79 I straddled my brand new motorcycle, fired up the engine, and headed off to look for America. I didn’t call the trip that name at the time, but I ended up singing this song over and over again as I motored across the waist of Nevada on Route 50, according to Life Magazine the “Loneliest Road In America”. My bike had no radio, and such novelties as MP3 players wouldn’t come along for another several years, so if I wanted tunes to go with my scenery, I had to supply them myself. And so it became the Look For America trip.

At first I didn’t realize I was looking for America. I’d always thought I had long ago found America. I figured I had spent my entire life in America. But I was wrong.

No, I had spent my time in the greater Chicagoland area, and then in California. These places call themselves America, but in many important characteristics, they are not. It was only later that I discovered the real America. And of course I realized that I like the real thing much better than the imposter.

I recommend Route 50 across Nevada to you. It traverses a land of stark lonely beauty. Very lonely, and very stark. Whilst driving it you will pass only the occasional car. You will pass through only the rare tiny town. You will lack much of anything you could call “services”. And you might see a raven or perhaps if lucky a pronghorn, but you had best be comfortable inside your own head for you likely will be your own company for most of this trip.

I had passed on the opportunity to top off the fuel tank in the quaint burg of Austin. Eureka didn’t look that far off on the map. I could make that easily….

Route 50 is even lonelier when you are parked on the shoulder for a bit, lamenting the local shortage of fossil fuel. Eureka was down the road somewhere, out of sight. No idea how far. Might be a long walk. But hark! A vehicle cometh! A motorhome, with California plates. Drove right on by in a cloud of dust and indifference. Apparently, these folks from California could not be bothered to help a stranger stranded out in the middle of less than nothing.

California corrupts human behavior, because we have compressed together far too many people, mashed into inhuman conditions, and to keep them happy in that unhappy and unhealthy environment, we tell them that all the wrong stuff, the unimportant stuff, is really the important stuff. So folks obsess on the bad and let the good in them dissipate.

The old pickup truck that did stop, piloted by a local man, not only carried me into Eureka, but back to my bike with a can of gas. Not insincerely friendly, the man driving was however helpful when needed, and polite, and decent. You know, like an American.

He didn’t act like a Californian. I’ve found many other Americans in the less traveled, rural places that fill that bit of the continent the coastal urban denizens call “fly over country”. Such folk lead perhaps simpler lives that we have here in California. Might even call them boring. But you can spot em right away because they are lacking in the scowls that daily fill your rearview mirrors, and they don’t wave to you with only that one finger as you interact in traffic. And they are not always in such a danged hurry.

Such people are so unaccustomed to fearing for their very lives if they so much as make eye contact with the wrong stranger that they will actually help you if ya need it. You know, like an American.

When I wander out into America, I can feel the oppression of living in pseudo-America peel off in layers. The relief is palpable. It feels so good that I look forward to repeating the pleasure whenever possible. So when the time came to deliver ourselves to New England for a wedding, and we contemplated the airline flight from one crowded oppressive coast to yet another, we decided to drive through America instead. We plan upon enjoying the trip.

Some have questioned this project. The last thing they would wish to do would be to drive across what they feel is interminable boring landscape. They see things a mite differently than we do. Such folks really should stay on the coasts, and just fly over the middle when needed. They’d hate our trip. For me, I expect to find much less “empty and aching and I don’t know why” out in the middle of nowhere important, than I find here in California.

I Believe The Last Unpublished Column

I still have a couple of pairs of my old hiking socks. I pull them out only during hunting season, because they fit between my feet and the old heavy boots better than my newer socks. In my backpacking days, they were just the trick for coping with the rubbing and pounding of those long miles spent lugging a 45 pound load along rocky mountain trails. They are thick gray wool, with a bright, one-inch wide band of red at the top. That bright red band attracted the hummingbird.

We were taking a breather after we had crested a shallow saddle at about 12,000 feet, rounded the ridge, and then wandered up a wide valley to about 500 feet higher. Our backpacks rested on sandy soil off to one side while we leaned back against the softest rocks we could find, munching down granola bars. Brilliant high altitude sunshine bombarded us from an unnaturally deep blue high altitude sky. The valley dropped away to the west, past Big Brewer Lake and down Brewer Creek. If memory serves, that was the route taken by William Brewer when he first climbed Mt. Brewer, way back in 1864.

A flash of emerald green caught my eye. The hummingbird hovered next to the red band of my right sock. We froze and watched. A hummingbird was about the last thing we expected to see up there. He perched ever so softly on my ankle before flitting off. Hummingbirds don’t weigh very much at all.

We thought that was pretty neat. The last trees were nearly a thousand feet lower on the slope beyond our feet, as timberline was about 11,200 feet. Except for a few columbine and monkey flowers near the rare watercourse, we had seen no flowers to attract the little bird. I suppose he was just passing through, and that red band on my sock caught his eye. There was no nectar in my hiking sock (no kidding!), so he didn’t stay long. And then he flashed away.

The open slope upon which we sat ended above us in a jumble of rocks between Mt. Brewer and a peak called North Guard, both of which we planned to climb. Spectacular as it was, the place was a bit of a moonscape, with no significant landmarks close by. So although I carried the topographical map, knowing my correct altitude involved some guesswork.

Sure, I wore a digital watch that doubled as a thermometer and an altimeter. The altimeter ran off a pressure sensor on the side of the watch. The higher we climbed, the less pressure the column of air above us, rising to the edge of space, would bear on our heads. The watch’s altimeter simply measured the pressure and then calculated our altitude. So as long as the weather didn’t present a rise or drop in pressure, we could read an accurate altitude off that digital watch.

Brewer and his party had a similar problem when they climbed the peak. They had two of those big heavy wood and glass barometers that were all the rage in 1864. Sealed within each was a colored liquid that changed height within a glass tube in response to air pressure changes, so as they climbed, the liquid level also changed, and the marks on the glass told the men their altitude. Except…when the weather changed.

This was a survey expedition, and these were scientists as well as adventurers, so they wanted to measure the height of the mountain, and do this accurately. Since their climb took several days, they were assured that the weather would change and thus introduce inaccuracy to their measurements. So they used two barometers, one that they carried along on their climb, and a second that stayed behind at a base camp at a known altitude. Measurements were taken with both at the same times each day, and as the weather changed the readings of the barometer at the base camp, the readings taken with the climbing one could later be adjusted to the same degree, so its altitude readings would be more accurate.

Obviously, they couldn’t get a mountain’s measurements down to the inch this way, but looking back, they didn’t do badly. Standing atop each mountain, they could look out at dozens of peaks of nearly the same height, and since they were hoping to find the tallest of the bunch, and then climb it, and there were so many, they came up with another shortcut to judge height. An unpatched lead ball left in a musket will roll out of the barrel if the front of the barrel is lowered. So they would aim their musket at the peak of each nearby mountain, and if the ball stayed in their barrel, they knew that mountain was higher, and worthy of a climb.

These men didn’t have any of the things that made our climb so much easier than theirs. We had a map of the area, guide books telling us where to turn, trails going to known places, digital watches with altimeters, nylon backpacks full of freeze dried food, and nice socks with red stripes around the top. We didn’t feel like wimps, but I sure do admire the guys who did this long before we did.

9/18/11

One of the fun things about writing these little essays is the simple reality that although I often know in the beginning exactly what I want to say by the time I get to the end of each piece, I almost never end up there once the thing is done. And this is not just the fault of the bourbon. No really, it’s not. I’ll see something, or read something, or hear something, and my little mind goes, “that’s interesting”, and then I chew on it for five minutes, or five days, or five whatevers, and then I’ll know what I want to say about it, and I set out to do just that. Like I’m doing here. And then that thing I call my random access mind starts grinding, and the fingers tap the keys, and like James Taylor once said, “nobody knows how we got to the top of the hill, but we might as well enjoy the ride.” And off we go…

I’m trying to write the great American novel. That’s not the same as saying I’ve finished it. I have put down three chapters, give or take, which is far from a novel. And yeah, I have some idea of where it is supposed to go, and how it might end, but I guess you might say I’m waiting for the mind to grab the thing and take me for a ride. This might take a while. Don’t hold your breath.

I have no idea how to write a novel. But I figure you start with some premise that just seems too cool to not craft into a story, and you get a good start, and some idea where ya want to finish, and then you turn the fingers loose. So I wrote three chapters that I kinda like. And then I stopped to wait for more.

In the mean time, I signed up for this magazine on my Kindle, a thing called “One Story” which is a magazine that for the last decade has been publishing one short story each month. And I thought, “These folks do a great job, and they win all these awards and stuff, and I’m gonna send them my best and see what happens, knowing full well that I am an intruder in their world and untrained and unequipped for such a gesture.

 So I took the first two chapters of my novel and broke them apart and lubed em up and then sewed them together again, and I’m gonna play with this for a bit and maybe send it in. And then wait to be rejected.

What I’ve learned already from this exercise is that what seems like a story with chapters is not necessarily how things turn out. Cause sometimes you can make something better out of tearing apart what you planned, and that’s ok.

Now, this time next week, we will be somewhere in Montana or North Dakota. We have the unmitigated pleasure of attending the wedding of one of our springoffs with a very fine lady on the second of October, and since they will be in Massachusetts for this celebration, we thought we’d best be there too. And we thought this would be a good excuse for a road trip. And for some reason, this felt, to my silly brain, kinda like writin’ a novel.

I figure each day of the road trip is another chapter. And I have the first two chapters pretty well figured out, onnacount of we have done this part so many times before. On Friday night we will be in Battle Mountain, and on Saturday we’ll be in West Yellowstone. And after this, it may get interesting. I’ve some idea what should happen next, but if I can simply let go of the notion that I know what needs to happen next, tear the plan apart and just let it happen, the results should be far better. We shall pick our way across a nation, the northern part this time, and the gods willing and the creeks don’t rise, we will see some fall color, some headwaters of the Mississippi River, some slice of Canada, and then some Vermont and Massachusetts in time for a wedding party. And then, one way or another, we’ll find our way back home. 

If anything neat happens, or if my mind takes the opportunity presented when not being enslaved at work and it comes up with something interesting, I’ll throw it out here and on the blog. Might be fun. And yeah, I’m real curious about how things might end up.

Old Column Redux

Everybody has to make a living. Even after the mighty have fallen, they still have to get out to turn a buck. Consider Erik Estrada...

You may not remember Erik as the Tostido Bandito, where he shilled for corn chips, but this humble beginning evidently suited his talent for corn, which paid off handsomely when he landed the co-starring role as Frank Poncherello in the long running TV series, CHiPs. As one of two dedicated, hard working and hard playing motorcycle officers in the wonderland of Southern California, Estrada garnered fame and fortune in this role. Flashing that sparkling smile and unrelenting attitude, Ponch chased bad guys and badder girls through most of six seasons, and then over and over and over again as the show ran in syndication.

I watched the show. I didn't care if you could see the ramps they used to toss cars into the air for those staged freeway accidents. I laughed when I was supposed to, and a few times when I probably wasn't. It was not a show to be taken seriously. I enjoyed the attempt at character development, as Ponch and Jon, in what we nicknamed “Cops are people too”, took their toys out to play on their days off in sunny, wonderful So Cal. They were likeable guys. It was fantasy, and it could have gone on much longer.

I could tell that Erik took himself a bit too seriously. He wasn't that good an actor. Actually, he was kinda lousy, but I'll bet no one could have told him that. After that show closed, he kept to the craft, with little visible success. Same smile. Same attitude. Same lack of talent.

Bit parts. Some commercials. Personal appearances and grand marshal for a few parades. Erik has been popping up ever since, looking chubby and just a bit desperate.  At three in the morning, you'd find him selling swampland in an infomercial. Just the other day he smiled on a Toyota commercial. “I'm buying a car!” Big smile. I wonder if he has tried the ultimate desperation move, to get on Dancing With The Stars, only to get beat out by Bristol Palin or some other, uh, talent. But ya know, gotta make a buck.

During CHiPs, Erik was on top of the world. He was famous and he was making a small fortune. And I'll bet if you asked him now, he would admit that he should had ridden that horse for as long as possible, and kept on endorsing those big checks. But no, he had to kill that gilded goose. Cause he thought he deserved more.

Erik walked off the show after demanding more money. He was replaced by Bruce Jenner, who was imitating a living person. It wasn't the same. That did it for me. I moved on to other shows. Erik eventually came back to the show, but then Jon (Larry Wilcox) left, cause he had trouble with Erik elbowing him aside so he could smile on every shot. It was an ugly divorce and it killed the show.

Erik had everything he had ever wanted, and he messed it up cause he thought he was entitled to more. And life has been a pathetic scramble for him ever since.

I have been searching inside myself for a suggestion of sympathy for those exploited and abused athletes who have been disciplined for breaking the rules designed to keep some of the corruption out of college athletics.

One guy from USC had to return his Heisman Trophy simply because somebody let him use that big shiny SUV to cruise for girls while he was on campus, and his parents got a nice new house and flew to all the away games to watch him strut his stuff, for free or something that looked a lot like payoff for choosing to play for that school, or throw some games or whatever.

And those five guys at Ohio State who got caught selling memorabilia for cash, in violation of a set of rules designed to stop the bribes and incentives that highly motivated alumni and bookies would love to pass out to those exceptional athletes who will give their all for THE ohio state university.

The rules are very clear, and every athlete gets the lecture, so they know and understand those rules. They chose not to obey them, and they got caught, and they will pay a price. Which is how things were intended.

Now, the apologists don't much like this, and they would suggest that these young men are entitled to some compensation for playing football at these universities. That's cause the universities make some serious money onacounta these athletes and those football programs. And just because these young men come from disadvantage, they deserve some compensation even more. So of course they should be excused from breaking the rules.

I'm going to make the leap here, that if these athletes come from disadvantage, then all the rest of the students at these universities come from advantage. That's how it works, right?

So I guess I came from advantage. I was a pretty typical college student once, who came from advantage and all, cause I had two parents and they insisted that I work hard at my studies and go to college to improve my lot in life, and who sacrificed to help me do just that.  Advantage is a good thing, and I recommend it to you.

I was so advantaged that I managed to get enough good grades in high school that I qualified for a scholarship that paid my tuition for four years at the state university. This was a while ago, when a dollar was almost a dollar, and that scholarship netted me the princely sum of $178.00 a semester for the first four years of my college education. I didn't do near that well in athletics, so nobody wanted me to play football in college. Those disadvantaged students did their hard work, and they got to college with an athletic scholarship, via their bodies. Good for them.

Now, I did have some hard working self-sacrificing parents, and they helped out a lot on the other expenses that college exacts. But I also worked every summer and then during my out of class hours while at school. I worked the dishwashing room when I lived in the dorm, and then later, while the athletes were sweating in the weight room, I cleaned rat cages and cat boxes for the biochem department.

Coming from advantage, I lived pretty high off the hog. I lived in that drafty apartment in the ancient building that leaned a bit to the left, and I could afford the better cans of spaghetti, and all the hot dogs I wanted. Velveeta cheese rounded out my bounteous larder. And when the money didn't last as long as the month, there were always those soda bottles I could turn in for the two cent bounty, so another meal was funded. A can of Chef boy Ardi was only 29 cents in those days.

These disadvantaged athletes of course have their own dorm, and they eat steak at their own table, but otherwise I had it way easier than them. Thanks to advantage. So yeah, I agree that they should get some compensation for playing football.

I went on line and checked, and low and behold, at USC the annual cost for an undergrad student to attend runs about $53,000. THE ohio state university is real cheap, cause it only costs about $33,000 a year. So these athletes are offered a free education that costs the advantaged students these many thousands of dollars, just so they would play football at these schools. And I am so proud of the disadvantaged students who actually take advantage of this to get their degrees.

Many of these disadvantaged athletes are not very successful students, so the school provides counselors and private tutors to make certain they progress toward their degree. Many of the advantaged students miss out on this, but that may be because they have less value to the university so it doesn't try very hard to keep them around, and if they lose their eligibility, they go home. Yet despite this opportunity, many of these elite athletes fail to complete their education. They don't much care about this if they land that pro contract, for it will be worth millions. They expect to land that contract, cause they are entitled.

The ones who don't make the cut likely disappear back from whence they came. Everybody has to turn a buck, and they likely will flounder through the rest of their lives without the advantage of an education. Ya know, the one they didn't bother to pursue even when it was provided to them for free. 

And for those apologists who suggest that those cheating athletes who got caught taking bribes and selling stuff in violation of reasonable rules, because they felt entitled, and because they are denied any compensation for their football skills, cause of course that expensive education is meaningless to them, well...oh never mind.

I valued my education, and these guys who may make millions for being entertainers do not. But they feel entitled to cheat, for a few extra bucks. And I'm still looking for that sympathy.

Running Our Of Columns Since I Got Fired

A hint of winter scented the air. That got my attention.  The dogs and I were outside the clinic, taking care of matters. The dogs probably noticed it before me, but I don't know what it meant to them, cause they just carried on. It meant a lot to me.

Each year the experts try to convince me that winter has something to do with the circuit of the sun around the earth (or was that the other way around?) or some date on a calendar.  But they must be looking at things in a different way. For me...well I go out and sniff the air. That generally tells me when winter is at hand.

A day earlier, those cirrus clouds we call mare's tails went scudding by. That would portend a change in the weather, usually rain if you must know. And in California, rain almost always means winter. Standing there, waiting for dog requirements to finish, I noted the gunmetal ceiling overhead, and I smelled the cool damp. Definitely, rain coming. And I took my change of clothing out of the car and stashed them in the clinic, so I would not have to go outside to do it after the precipitation began. Clever me.

I don't usually need a change of clothing after work, but we were leaving for Wyoming when the day elapsed, and we both dressed for cold. The Weather Channel suggested it would be snowing on Donner Summit when we were planning on passing through, and I've tried that before on a Friday night, so I also packed emergency rations, sleeping bags, and the other survival necessities, just in case the short drive turned into an ordeal.

California doesn't cope well with weather. When things get hairy, parts of it tend to fall off. Californians do worse. Three quarters of an inch of snow on the interstate leading up to Donner sends Californians into panic. Any more than that, and you'd think the world had come to its end. The game of bumper cars soon follows. Cal-Trans puts on the chain restrictions to slow folks down for those crashes, but tire chains do not make people smarter, and neither does buying a four wheel drive SUV.

So after wasting too much awhile at the first chain control station, and then fidgeting for an hour at the second, we parked in our lanes in the middle of nowhere-in-particular, waiting while the wreckers and ambulance passed us on the shoulder and disappeared ahead. Another hour. And then they let us go forward.

We proceeded cautiously, trying to anticipate which Californians would do something fundamentally wrong on the slippery snow, and thus put their rides sideways in front of us. I managed to miss those who did. Meanwhile we enjoyed the snowfall, and the flocked trees, and the scent of winter.

Our boots crunched on snow and ice in the motel parking lot in Idaho on Sunday morning. The locks on the cover that hides the bed of the truck were frozen into obstinacy, and the windshield defroster faced a daunting task. Those new deerskin gloves I bought just for driving came in handy, and they smelled real good. When you need four wheel drive just to get out of a parking lot, that is also a hint of winter.

My nose finally convinced me that winter was truly at hand as we stood atop that snowy ridge late Monday afternoon, binoculars dancing over the surrounding mountainsides seeking the elusive elk. The fire blazed away beside me, turning the wood we pruned from a dead snag into welcome warmth, and sending sweet smoke up to me. Campfire in the snow. Yep...winter has arrived.

The thermometer read minus 23 at Wednesday dawn, and the intense blue of the sky bewildered my senses. Ground fog hovered by the base of the mountains, and half a foot of fresh snow as fine as volcanic ash cloaked my truck. But it was the light that captured me. I remembered the light from those below zero days when I was young. It was so intense and so pure that even as a naive waif I recognized the wonder of it. And it was so good to experience it again.

Another Column Review

I confess that I am a visual kinda guy. I have written of how I have enjoyed the sounds of train horns in the dark and bird song in the trees, and of the scent of a carpet of lupine in the mountain meadow well above timberline that reeked of Welches grape juice as I walked through. But the sense that brings me the greatest pleasure has always been my vision.

I have stepped out of the trailer and wandered aimlessly about a coastal campground in the mist of dawn, steaming coffee in hand and wool sweater snug around my neck, as the dogs scurried about sniffing and peeing and doing dog stuff, and I could smell the ocean and hear the surf crashing past the dunes, and I enjoyed the music of the white crowned sparrows in the trees. But then the fog swirled around the hills to the east, rapidly turning pink to red before the sun surmounted the ridge, and I quietly stared, not wanting to miss a moment, and that was the best part of the morning. That time it was the color that captured me.

Another time it was a black and gray world shortly following the sunset, on a hillside somewhere near Point Reyes, and there were no other colors to be enjoyed as the fog filtered through the large conifers, lichens hanging down from the branches to make the tree silhouettes more intriguing, if not a bit sinister. No sound followed the great horned owl as it sailed past, no doubt intent on a dinner of rodent or rabbit. I could not hear the bats, but they were easy to spot against the dim bright of the sky. The rocks in the trail weren't to be seen at all, but merely sensed by sole and toe as I walked slowly and silently, alone in the gloaming.

Much earlier, on another weekend on the coast, the camera was brand new and I hoped to do great things with it, capturing instants in time when the correct elements lined up so exquisitely that even my humble eyes would see the magic and my index finger could press a button, and I would own it forever. I was still too silly then to realize that I could not own any time forever. So I went off through the dunes, up the narrow path of smooth sand and mouse tracks, between the lupine and ice plant to that last gasp of land where it met the sea, and where you could see where the sea met the sky and then went away. And there I waited for the sun to go around the planet yet again, and finally leave for the day. As before, the sun tried to set the sea on fire, and the sky filled with conflagration, and the little clumps of seeds on the ends of the waving grass centered in the camera’s viewfinder with the unbearable red of the sun and the rest of the red behind them, and they became black silhouette and the photo was born and it was perfect. And I cannot find where I put it away to keep safe.

Visual candy.

I have two carousels of Kodacrome slides sitting in boxes next to the projector in a cabinet in a house. Captured within is a tiny fraction of the visual candy that hiking for twenty days will present to those willing to do the time above tree line, along the John Muir Trail in the highest and best parts of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. I guess you could say that I have preserved that wonder forever. For me, forever will last as long as my mind can recall. The slides will last for a while, and a while longer when I finally convert them to pixels and plant them on some silicon somewhere. Someday someone may look at them and they will still be pretty, and they may even mean something, but they will never mean the same to someone as they mean to me. Such is the experience that is life. 

An Oldie But Goodie From Earlier This Year

Laws are like sausages. You should never see them made.

Otto von Bismark

Lately I’ve been adding fake chorizo made from soy to some of my recipes. Just like the real thing, it spices things up. So soybean squeezings now make an appearance in some of my chili-like concoctions. But not in the real chili. Nope…that would be blasphemous, and punishable by death by dismemberment. But I cook up a variety of dishes that are chili-like, and there is no law, either of man or the chili gods, that prohibits the introduction of fake chorizo into those one-pot experiments.

I’d much rather use the real thing. Real chorizo, beef or pork…don’t matter. It is much tastier, but too much of that stuff will kill you. Chokes off your arteries while you are looking the other way, enjoying yourself.

Chorizo is one of those sausages that falls into the category of “you should never see them made”. It is made mostly from parts, and it doesn’t much matter if they are pork or beef parts. Those of us who have studied the intimate anatomy of animals know of these parts, but the average man on the street would not. These parts do not come from the filet. They don’t come from even close to the places most would consider edible. Heck, most wouldn’t use these parts as catfish bait.

But when these parts are properly chopped up and then reassembled with appropriate seasonings, a dollop or six of fat, and that red color not found in nature, the end result tastes good. It’s not good for you, and you wouldn’t want to watch it being made, but it tastes so good.

Along with advising us that we don’t want to watch the making of sausage, most will combine that statement with a similar warning about how our laws are made. This dark process also involves some of the less prime parts, of the population this time. And it is an ugly thing, and even when finished, it doesn’t “tastes so good”.

And for those who so enjoy their cocaine, heroin, or fine imported marijuana after a tasty dinner with family, I guess it might dismay to see how so many evil parts must come together to make these pleasant diversions so readily available. Specifically, the shenanigans of the middlemen of the drug pipeline, the cartels of northern Mexico, come to mind. Over the last few years these innocent victims of the American lust for pharmacological entertainment have lowered the standard for inhuman behavior to record levels in the course of their day to day, ah, workday. And it’s hard to watch.

Bribes and graft, strong-arm tactics and kidnapping, torture and murder, these folks know all the games. Best guess puts the murder number around 34,000 as the two main players, the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels have at each other for the advantage in this merchandizing endeavor. And apparently these folks are beginning to annoy the neighbors, for they say that some 230,000 people have moved out of the neighborhood seeking a little peace and quiet. Some towns now feel like ghost homes only.

All this effort expended over a Fistful of Dollars….

The stranger wore a dirty serape and his hat hung low over his eyes. His long legs nearly reached the ground as he slowly rode his burrow down the dusty, deserted path that passed for a street in the little town. As he soon discovered, the lonely hamlet had suffered from years of competition between the Baxters and the Rojos, this border town’s 19^th century version of today’s drug cartels. Those few homes still occupied housed mostly widows and orphans, and a pall of death hung over the place.

It must have felt much like the border today. The government had a presence, but it was ineffective and corrupt, as is the standard for that country. The innocent people of the land were of the decent sort, as they are today. The criminals were greedy and heartless, and very, very dangerous. And the tall man was imperfect, but very effective.

This was only a movie, and so not at all like real life, but in the end the tall man killed each and every one of those bad men, and the innocent people went back to their simple happy lives. Perhaps there is a message here, but no one who would dismiss the need to kill every one of the bad men today will listen.

Old Column From Last April

The foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains are special during an average April. This year, with all that weather we've enjoyed, they are even better. We passed through on the way to Yosemite last weekend, and we were enthralled.

Our time away from work generally involves going somewhere. Places worth going to are always over there somewhere, and we have to wade through those other parts of California we don't much enjoy to get to those parts we do. The fun starts when the congealed masses are left behind, and the pretty and pretty empty places replace them.

A trip to the north coast becomes enjoyable when Marin County and Santa Rosa are left behind. The road to Wyoming opens up once we are past the quagmire that is greater Reno. And the path to Yosemite becomes a delight once east of Stockton, an appalling city that makes Reno look pleasant. We climbed slowly as narrow Hwy 4 threaded through farm field and pasture, past turkey houses and beef ranches, until it blended into the oak scrub and rock formations of Copperopolis, and O'Brynes Ferry Road.

This year, the color green has been reinvented, and improved. They tell me that Ireland is green, the beneficiary of sitting downwind of the North Atlantic all the time, but I would put our Sierra foothills version of green up against it without hesitation this year. The grasses were green. The trees were green. The rocks wore a clothing of green, the moss and lichens of a soggy spring. Under a happy California sun, all this green startled our eyes.

The wild flowers were just hitting their stride, and should soon reach the intoxicating stage. Life's cares, frustrations, failures peeled away a bit with each luxurious mile. The beauty drove them away, and left room to savor those few victories life allows.

Scrub oak and rock gave way to Ponderosa pine as we climbed deeper into the mountains. Leaden clouds hung low in front, and we soon ascended into them. A few drops of water splashed against the windscreen, and then bits of sleet. A few miles shy of the Yosemite entrance gate, snow fell in earnest.

I bought my senior pass from a smiling lady ranger at the entrance kiosk, and Joie took the photo to memorialize this moment. The truck thermometer said it had dropped into the high thirties, and I pulled to the roadside to throw on a long sleeve shirt and my I'm not working hat. And we rejoined the road as it climbed to Crane Flat.

Large snowflakes plummeted toward earth as the clouds descended to become a fog that transformed snow covered pines into ghosts. Six foot piles of white stuff lined the road. I pulled the lever into four wheel drive, just because. And we reveled in a winter wonderland that somehow found itself misplaced into April.

Yosemite Valley was being coy, hiding its beauty behind shifting clouds. It did the dance of the seven veils, showing this and then hiding that. The valley in its entirety is wonderful, but it can overwhelm if you aren't accustomed to such grandeur. We were presented with small pieces of the wonder which could be studied on their own, as holes appeared in the clouds, and that is a fine way to get to know the place. We drove up to the viewpoint at the mouth of the Wawona Tunnel and broke out my camera right as the clouds lifted. Serious photographers set large cameras on sturdy tripods around me, pulled out long lenses and filters, and tried for magic. I hoped to freeze the moment to help my ancient brain remember, and if I caught some magic, so much the better.

The Merced River in the Valley was full and roaring happy. The famous waterfalls, Bridalveil and Upper and Lower Yosemite blasted off their cliffs, and the more ephemeral cataracts, Ribbon and Horsetail, and many without names, celebrated gravity and air. Water was roaring down all over the valley.

And as we retreated down the Merced Canyon below the park on the way to our motel, driving into the sunset we saw a dozen or more tiny falls and cascades, some only inches wide but thousands of feet long, as they spewed down the canyon walls.

We stayed at the Cedar Lodge again, with few other tourists but all the carved wooden bears littering the place, and the Teddy Bears in the gift shop. Ground fog veiled the valley at dawn, but it cleared by breakfast, and nary a cloud sullied the sky the rest of the day. My camera came out again as we tagged the valley before heading for home.

A short weekend trip, but so very worth it.

9/11/11

I thought it a bit early in the month for this. If you know how to play the game, and so many know how to play the game, you usually don’t run out of money this early in the month. If you know how to play the game, you collect the food stamps and the various other government food coupons, the disability and welfare checks, and whatever other free money that our society so graciously lays on the folks who ask. So this lady should not have gone bust by the 10th. The old folks on Social Security often run out of money before they run out of month, for Social Security really doesn’t land ya into the lap of luxury, and those stuck with only that one resource rarely know how to scam the system to get more.  But this lady was young enough to have a few generations of career welfare scamming wisdom to draw upon, and the collective wisdom from this should allow her to make a better life for herself, at our expense. So she shouldn’t have been hitting folks up for money in the parking lot of the grocery store.

Now, I didn’t see this lady myself, so I couldn’t tell you if she was one of the regular panhandlers that infest this area. There’s one gal who works the traffic backed up on Railroad and probably visits that parking lot. Her boyfriend hangs back, just out of sight, for she no doubt collects more if people don’t see that he is taking the pimp’s cut. But I don’t think that gal is pregnant. This lady was. My wife was waiting in the truck while I fetched our lunch, and the lady hit her up. The pregnant part might have worked in her favor, but the fact that she was eating while she was hitting on folks for money for food might have seemed just a bit disingenuous. In fact, it kinda makes ya wonder if she was feeding some habit other than hunger, or maybe just saving up for a third cell phone or a newer flat screen.

The lady was clearly not homeless, or crazy. She had a snarky sorta entitled attitude, like we’ve come to expect. So I figured her for someone who simply was expanding her welfare income with some free money from the private sector.

I suppose you could make the argument that this lady was demonstrating self-reliance here. Panhandling does take some initiative. You do have to get out of bed during the daylight. And unless you have a good spot next to the left turn lane, you will get some exercise. If you can come up with a better line than “will work for food, but would prefer free malt liquor” that should be a good thing, so I guess this lady gets props for originality. But as we drove away with the food we paid for, I had to wonder if this is one lady who could have gotten out of New Orleans when the evacuation order went down, or if she would have been as paralyzed as all the others who cannot do anything unless the government does it for them.

I’ll probably catch some heat for my attitude here, cause I had all the breaks in life and have lived on easy street onacounta that. But I figure this lady also learned at her momma’s knee. There are tricks to getting welfare and disability payments from the taxpayers, and learning about all those food coupons that you can sell to score drugs, and (poor thing) just think of all those hours you have to wile away working your way through the line down to the welfare to qualify for payments for each of your aliases.  

I had to wonder how well this lady did in that grocery store parking lot, since most of the people shopping there are probably in this country illegally, and they are working their asses off to stay here. Don’t know what they think of panhandlers who make a career out of not.

At home, we are learning how to can our own food. This year it is only home canned pickles and some frozen pole beans. But for only year two in her garden, the wife has made tremendous progress. She has learned much, and we’ve been eating every night from the garden for weeks, and we have weeks more to look forward to. Next year I will armor the garden so we don’t feed the gophers and squirrels, and she will have more to put into the larder. And with only a little industry on my part, hopefully I will add a year’s worth of bison meat to the freezer this winter. Healthy food, grown by my wife or harvested from traditional grassland, all with very little reliance on the government. So Mr. Obama…don’t promise to take care of me, cause I’m not needing it. Heck, rather than needing your “help”, in reality you are getting in my way.

Another Oldie From Earlier This Year

Keep your head down. Rule number one. Doesn’t even matter which sport you choose. Keep your head down. Working on your slap shot in ice hockey? Best way to mess it up, lift your head. Baseball. Same story when you’re swinging a bat. Heck, even bowling. Pick up your head too soon to see where you tossed that ball and it screws up your delivery, and the ball heads over there somewhere. Soccer, yep.

But nowhere does it wreck your day faster than when you don’t keep your head down while playing golf. Keep your head down and the clubface strikes the ball squarely, and it sails out there so nice, right down the middle of the fairway, and well over that pretty little pond of water they put RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE TEE, just to mess with your brain. Lift your head too soon, to make sure you cleared the water, and the club head rises up just enough to tap the ball on its top, which pops the ball into the ground, then straight into the air, and then plop into the water about forty feet in front of you. Again.

I hated that part. It’s one of the reasons I gave up golf. One of several reasons. We always kept an old cut up ball in our bag for that hole with the pond, because when, not if, it went into the drink, it didn’t hurt as much. I never hit the ball off the tee properly on that water hole. Cause water messes with a golfer’s mind, and often wins. It forced me to not kept my head down, and never hit the shot right.

Did you see the Players Championship last weekend? I did. It’s one of those golf tournaments I actually watch, as opposed to sleeping through, because of the beauty of the place, and the vicious challenge it presents to some very good golfers. Ya win this one, and you have beaten not only a field of the very best, but also your own mind. Cause every single hole on this course has a water hazard. In fact, the 17^th hole doesn’t even have a fairway. It’s a lake, with a tee area over here, and the green over there, and the green is an island.

Give me an unlimited number of days, and an unlimited number of old cut up balls, and I might hit the 17^th green once. The odds would be similar to winning the lottery, or a bunch of monkeys typing Shakespeare. They’d be hauling me off to the loony bin long before it actually happened.

Now, most pro golfers can consistently hit a green from 145 yards. Even a tiny green like the 17^th. That’s why they are pro golfers and I spay cats. But the crowd gathers at this hole and stays there all day, kinda like folks go to NASCAR races. They won’t admit it, but they want to see folks crash. And they will. The 17^th is a dream crusher.

On Sunday, the course picked off one leader after another as the afternoon passed. Many in the field found water at 17, just as the finish of the course beckoned, as that is the plan of this place. You could see the strain on the players’ faces. So when the tournament ended in a tie, with the old warrior David Toms and the apparently emotion free K.J. Choi headed into a playoff, of course they started at the 17^th. The heartbreak hole.

Toms sank a long birdie putt on 18 that brought him even with Choi, and when Choi sank his par putt, sealing the tie, they met on the green, shook hands, smiled, and wished each other luck in the sudden death playoff. Pretty decent of them considering there was about a zillion dollars riding on the outcome. They drew straws for the honor of teeing off first at 17, smiling and cordial. Both hit safe shots to the center of the green. Both putted to near the pin. Then Toms missed his par putt, and Choi sank his. The tournament was over, and Choi had won.

So of course, Choi danced around and strutted in front of Tomes, shouting, sneering and gloating, and slamming his fist into his chest. And Toms ran up on him and sucker punched him, then stripped off his shirt as he walked off the green, posturing for the crowd cause he was so proud of himself for winning the only game that counted to him….the game of show-up-manship. Typical end to a tournament.

No wait, I’ve gotten that one wrong. This was a golf tournament, not the NBA. I guess I just got confused between this ending and the finish of the Lakers/ Mavericks game the other day. Sorry. Anybody could make that mistake.

Actually, the golfers were gracious, in victory and defeat. It was good to watch.

Those NBA folks on the other hand, were an embarrassment to civilized folks. Two of the Lakers were thrown off the court for the cheap shots they took at their opponents once it became clear that they were gonna get beaten. The second one, a thug named Bynum, should have gone to jail, gone straight to jail, do not collect $200. Instead, they banned him for 5 games next season, and a few thousand bucks for taking off his shirt on the court, and then storming off the court. This is not even a slap on the wrist, but more like a little tickle.

But then this is the NBA. It features arguably the finest athletes in the world, who also happen to be some of the worst whiney ill behaved prima donnas on earth. What other sport would glorify the “dunk”, a version of scoring that these tall dudes have been doing since they were in 8^th grade. The “dunk” is the simplest move in the game, ridiculously easy for tall folks with these skills, yet it is promoted at the signature event of these games. Announcers go nuts, wannabes in the crowd scream and cheer, and all for a move that is really intended to do nothing more than insult the defender, and undeservedly glorify the scorer.

Now, the offender and the offendee are both making multimillions of dollars to play this game, and they get paid win or lose, so there isn’t much in it for them other than the joy of insulting each other, or assaulting each other, if they don’t take the insult well. I went to a fight the other night, and an NBA game broke out. And with thugs like Bynum standing tall under the basket ready to commit felony assault, if you want to play these games you sure want to keep your head down, lest it roll further than the ball.

This Ran In June of This Year

I’ve been talking with, which mostly means I’ve been listening to, my invisible friend a lot lately. She is a charter member of the blame America first school, and we have been discussing what she calls the sordid history of America, and she has been feeling pretty darn guilty about the whole thing, and she thinks I should be, too. I don’t have time to get into her whole argument, but to sum it up, America has been behaving very badly, and we should be ashamed. Well, you know me and my penchant for answering emotional questions with my version of a logical answer. I just had to open my big mouth.

It might be a slight exaggeration, but I suggested that human history is mostly the summation of the competition between people, groups of people, and most significantly, between those largest groups of people known as nations and civilizations. The history of the competition between nations and civilizations is the story of war, and this pretty much sums up most of human history. And as the old saying goes, the winners get to write this history.

This means that we should not take everything we learn about history as the truth, the whole truth, and nuttin’ but the truth, so help me.  Because sometimes one side colors the story just a bit differently from the tale you might get from the other. And we don’t always get to hear both sides, particularly if the losers aren’t around anymore to tell their version. 

We are supposed to learn from history, for not to learn from it leads to repetition. And it follows that lots of history really shouldn’t be repeated. So getting the whole story, the right story, is important

One of the reasons that I bought my Kindle, that convenient electronic holder of an infinite number of books, was the discovery that I could inexpensively pack it with the collected works of many of the authors I should have, but haven’t yet, read. For instance, I loaded in twenty-some Zane Gray novels, all for the princely sum of a buck and 99 cents, and I intend to read them all in sequence.  I’m well into the first as we speak.

Now, “western” novels are not scholarly texts of history, but they may be the closest to this that a lot of folks have read. These, and the various movies and TV shows color the history of those European immigrants who “settled” America. They tended to gloss over the reality of the conflicts between them white folks and the previous owners of the land, them redskins. Let’s just say that most of these stories call the guys in the cowboy hats the “good guys”, and the native inhabitants were the nasty ones. 

A character in this first book, a white guy, spends much of his time perniciously hunting down and killing those nasty natives, driven mostly by some anger left over from when the natives massacred his family. I haven’t nearly finished this book, but from how it’s going so far, he seems to be righteously portrayed, and I fully expect by the end of the book the white guys are gonna win and those nasty natives will be put into their proper place, ie dead.

I grew up with cowboys and Indian stories, so I knew all about how the West was settled. I didn’t feel the least bit guilty about the process. Of course, I found out later about some of the more regrettable aspects of this settling, all that stuff that makes some people call the process genocide, and thus sorta refutes the notion that those European immigrants were the good guys after all.

If you listen to my invisible friend, which thankfully most of you probably don’t have to, you will learn that the natives portrayed as nasty in the history written by us victors, really were universally nice and productive folks and they should have been left alone in their utopian lives. Oh, and those European immigrants, and their descendants, us, should feel really guilty over how we behaved. My invisible friend has this all figured out. It’s just SO typical of how America has behaved in the world.

She wasn’t at all interested in listening when I mentioned that the Native Americans, her good guys, weren’t actually a homogenous group of nice people, but in reality were many groups of pretty typical people, most of whom didn’t get along with their neighboring groups of people, and their history included wars, with the winners taking the wealth and ladies from the losers, and enslaving and killing off the rest of the conquered, pretty much how those nasty European immigrants did to them.

My invisible friend got a little squirmy over this notion, so I tried to make her feel better by suggesting that during the entire lifetime of the human race, this has pretty much been how we humans did things. So don’t feel so bad about finding out that the Native Americans were just as nasty as the European immigrants who defeated them. That’s just life on this rock.

So see, we Americans aren’t really as bad as all that.

“Oh Yeah??!!!?”

Well what about Hiroshima and Dresden and Iraq and Afghanistan and all that other? How do I justify that nastiness? And all this solely so Americans can sit around with smug satisfaction eating our Big Macs.

I had to point out that it was the Brits who fire bombed Dresden, so my invisible friend’s daughter could smugly drive her new Mini.

Duck

My invisible friend was with us when we visited Frankfurt, Germany last week. We walked through the busy, upscale shopping mall that is now thriving in the old city center. The gothic cathedral that dates back centuries towered nearby, as we walked along the cobbled square, looking up at the lovely reconstructed buildings. It was an idyllic setting. 

I pointed out to my invisible friend that the entire area, block after city block, a massive expanse of real estate, was cobbled in old bricks. And those old bricks came from the buildings that once stood at this site, but were reduced to rubble during World War Two. You can purchase a photo of the area from a vender in the square, taken from the air in 1945, and it recalls the devastation from which this place was reborn. Frankfurt is, and was then, a banking center, and hub for transportation and shipping. This made it a target during that war. The place was flattened by aerial bombing in 1944.

My invisible friend was appalled at what the Americans did, and she stood silent for a moment and then grew angry. Damned Americans!

It didn’t help much when I pointed to the Cathedral and mentioned the complicated history of that whole area, the chaos and destruction dating back to before the Roman Empire, which this area had enjoyed. Roman legions conquered the Germanic tribes way back then, taking the wealth and ladies and killing or enslaving the losers. Religious wars came and went, some named simply after their length (they lasted a long time!). 

Napoleon visited the area in a bad mood once. This was one of the many places on earth whose history is the history of war. And the taking of wealth and ladies, and killing and enslaving was how things went.

“Oh Yeah??!!?”

Well, America still shouldn’t have done this.

OK, fine.

On my Kindle, In addition to the fun reading, sits a book entitled, “Bloodlands”. It is not for the squeamish. To make a very long story short, it concerns the lands caught between Hitler and his Nazis on one side, and Stalin and his communists on the other, and the havoc they wrought there between 1933 and the end of the war in 1945. It’s all about stealing wealth and ladies, and killing and enslavement wrought big time. It brought my invisible friend to tears.

A significant part of that war raged in this “Bloodlands” area, with the usual death and destruction we have come to expect from war. But the book is not about this aspect of war, but instead it chronicles the toll taken by two versions of nasty people as they systematically and without remorse, deliberately set out, and accomplished, the murder of some 14,000,000 totally defenseless people. Stalin’s crew can claim about 4 million of these, and the Nazis the rest.

Read this book at your own peril, for if you still harbor any notion that there is good in all men, this just might change your mind.

My invisible friend was staggered, so I went in for the coup de grace. Nah, I didn’t kill her, but I did suggest that maybe, just maybe, the things that Americans did in that war that eventually stopped Hitler and his Nazis, and then later in the Cold War, that eventually stopped Stalin and his communists, just might have been worth it.

This argument is just that, an argument. In the end there are no good guys and bad guys. There is competition. Always has been. No reason to expect this will ever change. This is not about the average American or German or Russian. We enjoy our lives, or not. We are impacted by what others do. We are all very much alike.

Who can say if the world might not have ended up a better place if Hitler or Stalin, or our friends in Japan had won out over us. With this outcome, them losing and us winning, we will never know. I do think an argument can be made that we, us Americans, are better off for winning, and those folks losing. Some think this is a bad outcome. But that is competition, and the history of the world is about competition. And the winners get to write the history. 

Are the German people better off because of this war’s outcome? Again, I cannot answer. For a while there they certainly weren’t.  Surely, based upon walking the streets of Frankfurt now, they seem fine. Perhaps had Hitler won they would have been ever so much better. 

I cannot ask any of those 14 million dead how they feel about all this. They don’t get to write the history.

My invisible friend still wonders if the how of winning a war could not have been gentler. This is a luxury she can afford. The competition continues in this world. The wars continue, for the same reasons they always have. Religion, wealth, power over another. Good for the winners and bad for the losers. Hasn’t changed. Will the world rejoice when the Americans are replaced at the top by say, China or those nice folks who claim to follow the Koran? I guess we will see.

Those nasty Americans won’t always come out ahead. Heck, we are fading fast. My invisible friend thinks maybe we should stop competing, and just take our chances. Certainly we should be more gentle about it, more polite. And I keep mentioning, that as horrible as fighting a war might be, the losing of a war tends to be worse. For the losers. So that first of all we should see to that. And as usual, she and I don’t see eye to eye.