May 2024
Books read:
Trails walked:
Song(s) of the month: Bob Schneider
Scientist Spotlight – Hildegard of Bingen - polymath
May Summary:
This month my son-in-love was able to get free tickets for a baseball game between the Colorado Rockies and the Philadelphia Phillies (his favorite team). So my wife and I, along with our daughter, son-in-love, granddaughter, son, daughter-in-law, and two grandsons all went to the game on a beautiful 70 degree day in Denver...and with a 4 month old, 16 month old, and 4 year old we lasted all 9 innings! Of course baseball's new rules helped to make that possible with the game lasting less than two and a half hours. There were so many kids at the game! In my opinion baseball is the best sport to brings kids to. The fans are generally more chill than either football, basketball or hockey and there is plenty of time between pitches and between innings to talk, read, explain rules, and just relax. Of course we were lucky to get free tickets because taking a family of 7 to a game would have been really expensive. Having a bad local team like the Rockies helps though because you can generally find cheaper tickets and plenty of them. If you go on a weekend, metered parking in downtown Denver is free so you can save money that way also. We were about to pay $30 at a lot when a friendly guy told us about the free parking. Nice people everywhere no matter what you read. It was a fun day.
- North Woods by Daniel Mason
- Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
- Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World by John Vaillant
- The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Trails walked:
- Mount McConnel near Fort Collins (May 2nd)
- Bear Peak loop near Boulder (May 8th)
- North Fork trail near Drake (May 22nd)
- Ouzel Falls Loop near Estes Park (May 29th)
Song(s) of the month: Bob Schneider
- Honeypot
- Tarantula
- Round and Round
- 40 Dogs
Scientist Spotlight – Hildegard of Bingen - polymath
May Summary:
This month my son-in-love was able to get free tickets for a baseball game between the Colorado Rockies and the Philadelphia Phillies (his favorite team). So my wife and I, along with our daughter, son-in-love, granddaughter, son, daughter-in-law, and two grandsons all went to the game on a beautiful 70 degree day in Denver...and with a 4 month old, 16 month old, and 4 year old we lasted all 9 innings! Of course baseball's new rules helped to make that possible with the game lasting less than two and a half hours. There were so many kids at the game! In my opinion baseball is the best sport to brings kids to. The fans are generally more chill than either football, basketball or hockey and there is plenty of time between pitches and between innings to talk, read, explain rules, and just relax. Of course we were lucky to get free tickets because taking a family of 7 to a game would have been really expensive. Having a bad local team like the Rockies helps though because you can generally find cheaper tickets and plenty of them. If you go on a weekend, metered parking in downtown Denver is free so you can save money that way also. We were about to pay $30 at a lot when a friendly guy told us about the free parking. Nice people everywhere no matter what you read. It was a fun day.
I saw a bumper sticker on an F150 that said "Make lying wrong again." Loved it. I wanna get a red baseball cap with that saying on it. There are five months left until the presidential election. As of press time there will be a felon running against an 81-year-old, and also a guy with a brain worm. What is happening? Evidently competent people are too smart to run for president these days. Too much viral hatred on social media. But you know what's really true? Most people aren't hateful. Most people on both sides are kind, and want better choices. My fervent hope (dream) is that both major candidates announce during their conventions that they are no longer running and for the delegates to choose new candidates. Our country deserves better than this (or maybe we don't).
This month's reading included a cool history of a small plot of land in New England, a fascinating book of short stories on travel, the growing danger of wildfires, and a terrific novel about the end of the war in Vietnam. My rambling took me from the Poudre River canyon to the peaks around Boulder and then to the extreme northeast and southeast corners of Rocky Mountain National Park. Enjoy!
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Things My Grandkids Say:
After a discussion about who all his extended family members are, the 4-year-old asked: “Is Tom Brady part of my family?” Well kid, your mom is a Patriots fan, and your nana loves Tom Brady, so OK, we’ll make this exception. Best not let him see the Tom Brady Roast on Netflix....
Scientist Spotlight: Hildegard of Bingen
Born at the end of the 11th century, Hildegard of Bingen (aka Saint Hildegard, aka Sibyl of the Rhine) is considered to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany. A writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, and medical practitioner, she read several Latin texts and many of the monastery’s library books. She tended an herb garden and used many of its ingredients to treat people with various illnesses. In addition to her not insignificant medical and scientific work, she wrote the music and words for several compositions and has the most surviving chants of any composer from the Middle Ages.
She was the 10th and youngest child of Mechtild of Merxheim-Nahet and Hildebert of Bermersheim (both a mouthful). She claimed to have experienced many visions as a child and into adulthood. Of her visions she said, ”I can measure neither height, nor length, nor breadth in it; and I call it 'the reflection of the living Light.' And as the sun, the moon, and the stars appear in water, so writings, sermons, virtues, and certain human actions take form for me.” Sounds like she was certainly blessed with some special powers. Just the fact that she was a woman creating science in the 11th and 12th centuries, is a miracle. Someone should script a limited series about her.
Song(s) of the month: Bob Schneider
I checked my Google Sheets and sure enough, I’ve never listed any Bob Schneider songs on my blog. Well, I guess I’ll just have to correct that right now. Born in 1965 to an Opera singer father and a teaching mother, Schneider quit college at the University of Texas El Paso to start his musical career (good choice). With 20 albums in 30 years of recording it was pretty tough to narrow things down a bit. My wife and I saw him perform at the wonderful Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix a few years ago. It was just him and his guitar (and synthesizer to keep the beat and to repeat certain chords he would live-record). A great show. Interesting side note: he dated Sandra Bullock for a couple of years and since then many of his songs have made the soundtrack for some of her movies. I guess they broke up on a positive note. Here is just a very small taste of his varied musical styles. Enjoy!
Honeypot – great love song
Sample lyrics:
Got a heart lost in kindness
A mind that's mostly mindless
I can hold you up for air
I won't let you down I swear
Tarantula – I don’t even know how to categorize this fun song, but it’s great fun.
Sample lyrics:
I met a woman down in Mexico
Sweet as sugar with a heart made of stone
We drank tequila by the light of the moon
I didn't realize that she would be my ruin
She said she knew about the voodoo ways
Said she could love me till the end of her days
She lit a candle and turned around
And when she did my feet never touched the ground
Round and Round – So many musical styles in this song about getting yourself out of a funk because the world continues to turn.
Sample lyrics:
I know the time it's time to get up
And get out and get over this
But I don't know how and I don't know why
And the world goes round
And the world goes around
And the world goes round & round
40 Dogs – a fast moving love song, like he’s in a hurry to get this relationship going. Another great love song.
Sample lyrics:
Well you’re the color of a burning brook,
You’re the color of a sideways look from an undercover cop in a comic book
You’re the color of a storm in June,
You're the color of the moon.
You’re the color of the night, that’s right,
Color of a fight - you move me.
You’re the color of the colored part of The Wizard of Oz movie.
North Woods by Daniel Mason – I absolutely loved this book. It tells the story of a piece of land in what is now northwestern Massachusetts over three centuries, from colonial times through the late 1900s. From the foundation stone placed by two lovers escaping their puritanical settlement, a house is built and lived in by a succession of fascinating characters over the years; a woman and her daughter delivered there by an indigenous tribe, a British loyalist obsessed with growing an apple orchard, his twin spinster daughters who have a violent falling out, an abolitionist hiding runaway slaves, a woman with her schizophrenic son, and on and on. And that’s just half the story. There’s also the story of the plants and animals in these north woods and how they have come and gone over the years with population growth and disease.
The way in which Mason told this incredible centuries-long story was fun. Here the New York Times explained it best: “North Woods is a hodgepodge narrative, brazenly disjointed in time, perspective and form. Letters, poems and song lyrics, diary entries, medical case notes, real-estate listings, vintage botanical illustrations, pages of an almanac, modern-day nature photographs, a true-crime detective story, an address to a historical society: Mason stuffs all this (and more!) into his bulging scrapbook of a novel. That North Woods proves captivating despite its piecemeal structure is testament to Mason’s powers as a writer, his stylish and supple narrative voice.”
There are several great moments in this story, but one that struck me was the video tapes left behind by the schizophrenic son before he disappeared: he had heard voices all his life and these videos were labeled with people’s names but only showed natural areas being recorded…then you come realize that each of those natural areas were where some event had occurred during the past with the people that were listed on the tapes. So, the voices he had been hearing were the ghosts of the people who had lived in these woods over the centuries. “He had tried to capture his hallucinations. She had disbelieved him, and he had spent his final months trying to record what he had seen and heard, and offer them to her as proof.” Chilling, and brilliant.
Here are some lines:
She was to be married to John Stone, a minister of twice her age, whose first wife had died with child. Died beaten with child, her sister told her, died from her wounds.
You must understand what is about to happen must happen so that there is no more bloodshed.
Now, in the place that was once the belly of the man who offered the apple to the woman, one of the apple seeds, sheltered in the shattered rib cage, breaks its coat, drops a root into the soil, and lifts a pair of pale-green cotyledons. A shoot rises, thickens, seeks the bars of light above it, and gently parts the fifth and sixth ribs that once guarded the dead man’s meager heart.
And in the same place in her heart where Alice kept her list of children’s names, Mary kept a different list—far better referenced and annotated—of all the local husbands who got drunk and beat their wives.
she was a person whose hunger for the world was greater than what the world provided.
It is not the first time that the blight has passed through the forest. It has been almost twenty years since it began its march, and by now half of the chestnut forests of New England lie decimated.
On the road, still soft from the rain, the swerving tire tread and deep bear prints gave testimony to the night’s events.
The headsets were so loud that she had to turn the volume down. But this is what it would have sounded like, the wall text told her. Between 1970 and 2019 alone, nearly a third of all birds had disappeared from North America. Once, the forest would have been deafening.
Oh, things were far worse in the olden days, in his opinion, and if anyone disagreed with him, he asked them who’d been scalped of late.
Mount McConnel near Fort Collins – Another fun hike near Fort Collins to the top of a mountain with great views. I hiked the two trails that leave from the Mountain Park Campground along CR14 which winds through the rugged Poudre Canyon: the Kreutzer and McConnel trails. Both trails were named after pioneering forest rangers in Colorado. RC McConnel was one of the first rangers in the Poudre district in the early 1900s. He helped build the trail to Greyrock Mountain which I hiked in March. William R Kreutzer was the first official forest ranger in the United States back in 1898.
When I arrived on this windy day, the gate to the campground was closed so I had to park along the highway. There were some workers with picks and shovels getting the campground prepared for the summer busy season. Closure of the campground likely made me the first person to hike this trail since last fall. I had the trails to myself, and with the abundance of mountain lion poop, this was a bit unnerving. I started on the two-mile Kreutzer trail, which is a nice nature trail with several interpretive signs containing information on the plants, animals, and geology of the area. Then it connected to the McConnel trail which climbs to its namesake peak with great views of the snowcapped Mummy Range to the southwest. The terrain was similar to that of the drive up Poudre Canyon; rocky. It has a similar feel to the terrain between Phoenix and Payson in Arizona which I have explored many times in my past. The eastern portion of the McConnel trail is deemed a primitive trail, which basically means it’s not maintained. I would have to agree with this assessment. It was hard to follow in places but was also a nice challenge as it wound its way steeply among large rock formations up to the peak. I was somewhat protected from the wind most of the way until I reached the top, with its unobstructed views of the Mummy Range to the southwest. The wind was whipping up here. I headed back down the (maintained) western part of the McConnel trail down to the campground and my car.
There were several of these informative signs along the way
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk – I put this author on my to-read list since I heard she won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. And also because she was vilified by right wing nationalists in her home country of Poland. Normally when someone is hated by right wing nationalists it’s because they are portraying a truth that the nationalists don’t want to hear. She won the Nike prize for this book which is the highest literary prize in Poland where she is considered to be among the great writers in that country’s history. The novel was also winner of the International Man Booker Prize for its English translation by Jennifer Croft.
Flights was published in Polish in 2007 and its Polish title, Bieguni, is taken from an ancient Eastern Orthodox belief that being in constant motion helps to keep evil at bay. It’s a bunch of short stories, some true, some fictional, with connections among them spanning a timeframe from the 17th century up through modern times. Most, but not all, of the stories are related to travel in some way and are narrated by an unnamed female writer/traveler. Some of the stories are just a few sentences while others go on for several pages. Many of the stories are broken up and continue after several other unrelated stories are told. There’s the fascinating story of a man named Kunicki whose wife and child go missing on a Croatian Island. After an unsuccessful search by police for 3 days, the story suddenly ends. A few other short stories later, we’re in Kunicki’s apartment back home in Poland where he and his wife are arguing again about those three days. He wants to know what happened. Her explanation doesn’t seem real. Eventually he’s living on his own, divorced. Then there’s the story of the mother of a special needs child who disappears into the subway stations of some Polish city and ends up living with homeless people and trying to connect with them and to understand her impossibly difficult life. There’s the story of a biologist who gets an email from her college boyfriend who she hadn’t heard from in 30 years. He’s dying slowly from a cruel disease and asks her to mercifully end his life (as a biologist in New Zealand she was tasked with killing off invasive animals to preserve the island’s native species). And then there are these stories of scientists in the 1600s learning how to preserve body parts so that they can be displayed for future generations to see; future generations of travelers.
Overall just a really interesting set of stories unlike anything I’ve read. Here are some lines, which I suppose since they are in English have to be credited to both Tokarczuk and her translator, Croft:
Mean World Syndrome, which has been described fairly exhaustively in neuropsychological studies as a particular type of infection caused by the media. It’s quite a bourgeois ailment, I suppose. Patients spend long hours in front of the TV, thumbing at their remote controls through all the channels till they find the ones with the most horrendous news: wars, epidemics, and disasters. Then, fascinated by what they’re seeing, they can’t tear themselves away.
Flight from Irkutsk to Moscow. It takes off at 8:00 a.m. and lands in Moscow at the same time—at eight o’clock in the morning on that same day. It turns out to be right at sunrise, which means the whole flight takes place during dawn. Passengers remain in this one moment, a great, peaceful Now, vast as Siberia itself.
She has the whole day ahead of her. Not that she will spend it on herself, of course. She has many things to take care of. She’ll pay the bills, go grocery shopping, pick up Petya’s prescriptions, visit the cemetery, and then finally she’ll go all the way to the other end of this inhuman city so she can sit in the encroaching darkness and burst into tears.
Tears fly down her cheeks from the cold, which suits the wind, finally providing it a way to sting her face.
It was fortunate that Annushka got into a good teaching school in Moscow; unfortunate she didn’t finish the course. If she had, she would be a teacher now, and perhaps she would never have met the man who had become her husband. Their genes would never have blended together in that toxic mix that was to blame for Petya coming into the world suffering from a disease that had no cure.
On the walls hung black-and-white portraits of men—it was only in the physics department that you could find the single female face in the whole school, Madame Maria Skłodowska Curie’s, the sole indication of the equality of the sexes.
In the last few years she has realized that all you have to do to become invisible is be a woman of a certain age, without any outstanding features: it’s automatic.
She removes the drip from the IV and slowly injects all the droplets of the liquid she has brought. Nothing happens aside from the fact that his breathing stops, suddenly, naturally, as though the movement of his rib cage from before had been an odd anomaly. She runs her hand over his face, reinserts the drip into his IV, and smooths out the place on the sheets where she’d been sitting. Then she leaves.
Children become people when they wriggle out of your arms and say “no.”
“Are you okay?” Kunicki says he’s fine, but he knows that they’re headed toward the final confrontation now. Their kitchen will serve as battlefield, and they’ll both take up attack positions—he by the table, she with her back to the window, as always.
He looks like a guy who discovered not too long ago that he’s not really so different from everybody else—thus attaining, in other words, his own enlightenment.
Bear Peak Loop near Boulder – If you read my September 2022 blog where I describe the Tombstone Ridge trail in which I dislocated my finger, then you’ll know the lengths I’ll go to in order to connect up hiked trails with unhiked trails. On previous hikes in this area on the outskirts of Boulder there was a half mile section between Bear Peak and the Shadow Canyon trail which I’d never hiked; plus there was the one-mile Shadow Canyon North trail and about a third of a mile of the Mesa trail which I hadn’t hiked before. So I decided to hike a grueling 10.4 miles and 3,000 feet of elevation gain just so I could connect that 1.8 miles of trail I hadn’t been on before. I parked in the large lot at NCAR and started hiking west on the NCAR trail for a mile until it intersected with the Mesa Trail. Then it was south on the Mesa Trail for another mile before I headed steep uphill and west on the Fern Canyon trail. In these first two miles I had only gained a couple hundred feet of elevation. The Fern Canyon trail made up for that by climbing 2,200 feet in just over 2 miles. It’s just a constant uphill grind through the canyon and then up a ridge to Bear Peak. Since I’ve been on top of Bear Peak before, I decided to bag the peak bagging, since that last 75 feet to the top requires a bit of scrambling that I wasn’t interested in today. I had ahead of me that half mile of Bear Peak Trail that was virgin territory to my hiking feet down to the saddle between Bear Peak and South Boulder Peak, which is one of the coolest places to sit in the Boulder area. This is what I did for a bit before heading down the Shadow Canyon Trail which took me 2.5 miles and 1,600 feet straight down before veering off on the new-to-me Shadow Canyon North trail for a mile and a couple hundred more feet of elevation loss before connecting with the Mesa Trail again. It was another 2.7 miles on the Mesa Trail (a third of a mile which I’d never done) back to the NCAR trail for the last mile back to my car. Whew! Hiking OCD satisfied! There were a few hikers out on this day, but the trail runners outnumbered us. I’m just not in that category of fitness (nor have I ever been) to run these trails. There be beasts up here. Speaking of which, I saw no animals other than squirrels and birds.
Fire Weather by John Vaillant – A finalist for the National Book Award for nonfiction, this 2023 book is a must read for anyone interested in how climate has impacted wildfires; or for anyone interested in a riveting story of the devastating 2016 Fort McMurray fire in Alberta, Canada. All 90,000 people were evacuated from the town, making it the largest wildfire evacuation in history (at that time). Per a New York Times review, “Vaillant takes full advantage of resources that previous generations of journalists could only have dreamed of: cellphone cameras, dashboard cameras, security cameras, even stuffed animals with nanny cameras nestled inside. Countless people posted thousands of photos and videos to social media, and the digital trove, as well as interviews with witnesses, enables Vaillant to vividly describe the fire as it devoured Fort McMurray.”
His description of the fire is edge of your seat reading, but like all good authors, he intersperses the fire story with fascinating background. You’ll learn about the Alberta tar sands where bitumen is processed from the sands in an extraordinarily energy intensive process that only makes sense financially if oil is at more than $50 a barrel. He talks about the Hudson Bay Company which was the first company to extract resources from Canada (furs and pelts mainly in the 1700s and 1800s). You will learn about the resourcefulness of the town’s residents who have come from all over the world to cash in on this black-gold rush. And of course, you’ll learn about the business owners and oil companies that also came from all over the world to ravage this landscape of boreal forest for the fossil fuels buried in the sands.
At around the halfway point, Vaillant spins away from the story of the fire to brilliantly describe in about a hundred pages the science of atmospheric warming from the CO2 we’ve been adding to our air since the Industrial Revolution. And not only the science, but also the story of the scientists who have been trying to warn us of this existential issue since the mid-1800s. There actually was a brief period of time, in the 1950s and 60s when oil companies, politicians, and petroleum institutes listened to the scientists and even funded scientific studies of their own, proving the numbers correct. But then the 1970s and 80s happened and fossil fuel executives saw this as a threat to their profits and livelihoods. The author then describes the denial, delay, and attack methods the industry borrowed from the tobacco industry in order to sow doubt among the politicians and the public so that they could continue earning record profits.
After this interlude Vaillant talks about other major fires around the world in California, Australia, Alaska, Russia, well, everywhere actually. Then he circles back to Fort McMurray and the aftermath of that fire which wasn’t officially extinguished until 15 months after it started. His interviews with the survivors are poignant and portray well the devastation of lives involved in this sort of disaster that is becoming more and more normalized around the world.
It's brilliant. Please read this book. Here are some lines:
So huge and energetic was this fire-driven weather system that it generated hurricane-force winds and lightning that ignited still more fires many miles away. Nearly 100,000 people were forced to flee in what remains the largest, most rapid single-day evacuation in the history of modern fire.
“You go to a place where there was a house and what do you see on the ground? Nails. Piles and piles of nails.”
Bitumen (pronounced BITCH-amin) is a kind of degenerate cousin to crude oil, more commonly known as tar or asphalt. Surrounding Fort McMurray, just below the forest floor, is a bitumen deposit the size of New York State. Sometimes referred to as the Alberta tar sands, or the oil sands, it is one of the biggest known petroleum reserves in the world.
Across North America, and around the world, fires are burning over longer seasons and with greater intensity than at any other time in human history.
“I just happened to be standing next to one of the Slave Lake guys, and he looked me straight in the face and said, ‘You guys are losing part of your city today.’
There was one point where we were looking at a house—an entire house was disappearing—in five minutes.”
It may come as a surprise today, but in 1958, the potential for CO2-driven climate disruption was part of the public school curriculum.
In 1984, as scientists from every relevant discipline were comparing notes at international conferences and arriving at similarly dire conclusions regarding the impact of industrial CO2, the American Petroleum Institute disbanded its CO2 and Climate Task Force. Forty years on, the API’s decision to turn its back on a century of solid climate science is proving to be the most consequential policy reversal in the history of human civilization.
Why act on CO2 when you can sow the seeds of doubt and keep those profits (and those dividends) flowing just a little bit longer?
So otherworldly were the fire conditions on Black Saturday (Melbourne) that animals and people were killed by radiant heat alone, from hundreds of yards away, as if they had been felled by a death ray.
A camshaft, a flywheel, a kitchen sink, an oven door, and countless other objects were scattered through the charred forest. There was no glass anywhere. Grass, bark, and topsoil were gone.
According to Cal Fire, nine of California’s twenty largest fires have occurred just since 2020.
in 2017, Greenland experienced its first significant wildfire, a stunning development given that Greenland is treeless and frozen solid save for tenuous patches of tundra on the coastal margins of the ice cap.
One of the cruelest aftershocks for homeowners was the realization that just because their house was gone didn’t mean the mortgage was.
Craig MacKay works for a local branch of ClaimsPro, and he summed it up this way: “On May second we had no claims; on May third we had fifty thousand claims.”
Fort McMurray is not a town that is likely to survive the impending energy transition, but the natural instinct is to fight for one’s life, and for one’s livelihood, and Fort Mac surely will. It’s a long way back: the fire’s $10 billion price tag is equivalent to two banner years of royalty revenue,
Nobody tracks the incidence and costs of natural disasters as closely as insurance companies. In so doing, they provide us with some of the most objective and reliable data on the impacts of climate change and its accelerating severity.
Currently, we live in a dangerously bifurcated reality where senior executives at forward-thinking, publicly traded global companies like Exxon, Shell, JPMorgan, and the Bank of England accept the science of anthropogenic carbon dioxide and the threat it poses, and still continue to—literally—pour gas on the flames.
As of 2022, the number of U.S. petroleum engineering graduates had dropped 80 percent since peaking in 2017.
Truly unnerving to anyone heavily invested in oil and gas is the recent news from the International Energy Agency, a longtime ally of the industry. In their “World Energy Outlook” for 2020, the IEA announced that solar power is now the “cheapest electricity in history.”
The willful and ongoing failure to act on climate science is unforgivable; recrimination is justified, but none will be sufficient. In this case, at the planetary level, there is no justice; the punishment will be shared by all, but most severely by the young, the innocent, and the as-yet unborn.
North Fork Trail near Drake – I really enjoyed this pretty trail that takes you from the Comanche Peak Wilderness into Rocky Mountain National Park while following the North Fork of the Big Thompson River most of the way. I parked at the Dunraven Trailhead which is just under an hour from my home. I ran into 2 hikers and 4 rangers on this day. It’s a walk in the woods and through beautiful meadows. There is around a half mile of private property you walk through (with an easement) near the beginning; it’s an old boy’s camp run by Cheley Colorado Camps. No campers on this day, probably too early in the season. I entered RMNP at around the 4.5-mile mark where I walked an additional mile to check out the backcountry ranger cabin. In this year’s big wind event a pine tree had smashed in the roof of the cabin, so they have some work to do to get it operational again. There were two tents here, likely rangers doing trail maintenance work (two llamas were parked in the corral, probably used for carrying the log-clearing equipment). And there was a LOT of trail maintenance needed after the big wind. One of the rangers I passed said there were well over 100 trees downed across the trail. Most of them were cleared by the time I hiked it on this day. On the way back down, I ran into a couple of rangers doing an amphibian survey along the river. Eventually they passed me by but then I saw them stop cold on the trail ahead of me. There was a female moose in the middle of the trail. Perfect! I can learn from the experts what to do when encountering a moose on the trail (even though this has already happened to me several times). I watched to see what they would do. One of them picked up a large stick. Was she going to throw it at the moose?! No, she started banging the stick on a tree and saying “go moose” or was it “vamoose?” Anyway, it worked! The moose took off running into the woods. I didn’t get any photos because I was so interested in how they were going to handle this fairly common situation in RMNP. Cool. Another beautiful day in a new (to me) section of Colorado.
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen – So many metaphors! This 2015 novel won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and deservedly so. There is a new HBO series based on the novel that is getting decent reviews. I’ll have to check it out, but it seems unlikely to be as good as this well-written novel. It begins during the fall of Saigon in 1975 (the novel was published on the 40th anniversary of this fall). The story is told in the voice of a narrator who is writing his confessions to a communist prison camp commandant. The narrator (no name given) is a North Vietnamese spy working as an aide to a South Vietnamese General and for the CIA. We eventually learn that he is ostracized in his own country since he is the bastard son of a Vietnamese woman and a French Priest. This was likely a metaphor for the French invasion of Vietnam in the mid-1800s and their subsequent colonization. The narrator’s mixed race, in addition to his double agent work is also likely a metaphor for the dissection of Vietnam between north and south, communism and capitalism. As the narrator and his general escape Saigon, they end up settling in Los Angeles in what eventually became Little Saigon after the war. Here we learn about the issues of immigration and racism in the US, along with America’s lack of understanding about what we called the Vietnam War and what Vietnamese called the American War. One of the narrator’s jobs while in the US was to be an advisor to a director who was making an Apocalypse Now type of movie. This whole section was great – the narrator trying to give some dignity to the Vietnamese while the director just wanted to blow things up and make white men heroes.
While languishing in the US, the general establishes a revolutionary army with plans to invade the now communist Vietnam. The paranoid general sees spies everywhere and eventually commands the narrator to assassinate two people in LA. These two become pestering ghosts to the narrator throughout the rest of the novel. Eventually the invasion takes place, and it is squashed immediately because, well, the narrator is a spy and reveals all. What happens after the invasion is the most harrowing description of torture and rape that you will likely ever read. Not sure how the limited series is gonna show all of this. The rape is of a female communist agent being savaged by three South Vietnamese officials (another metaphor for the hatred and division within Vietnam). There were some big surprises during the last few chapters, and I couldn’t put it down. Here are some lines:
She was a poor person, I was her poor child, and no one asks poor people if they want war.
Some of my countrymen spoke English as well as I, although most had a tinge of an accent. But almost none could discuss, like I, baseball standings, the awfulness of Jane Fonda, or the merits of the Rolling Stones versus the Beatles.
I could hardly blame Americans for mistaking me as one of their own, since a small nation could be founded from the tropical offspring of the American GI.
I had an abiding respect for the professionalism of career prostitutes, who wore their dishonesty more openly than lawyers, both of whom bill by the hour.
I am merely noting that the creation of native prostitutes to service foreign privates is an inevitable outcome of a war of occupation, one of those nasty little side effects of defending freedom that all the wives, sisters, girlfriends, mothers, pastors, and politicians in Smallville, USA, pretend to ignore behind waxed and buffed walls of teeth as they welcome their soldiers home, ready to treat any unmentionable afflictions with the penicillin of American goodness.
If looks could emasculate, she would have walked off with my sac in her purse.
Even poor people in America had refrigerators, not to mention running water, flush toilets, and twenty-four-hour electricity, amenities that even some of the middle class did not have back home.
This particularly unfashionable neighborhood was a shady one despite the absence of trees,
Orange County, an hour away by car. It was the birthplace of the war criminal Richard Nixon, as well as the home of John Wayne, a place so ferociously patriotic I thought Agent Orange might have been manufactured there or at least named in its honor.
The majority of Americans regarded us with ambivalence if not outright distaste, we being living reminders of their stinging defeat.
Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment.
the doctor examining you for mandatory military service (an exam that you never fail, unless you are afflicted by wealth)
his shirt the rich yellow color of urine after a meal of asparagus.
Vodka was one of the three things the Soviet Union made that were suitable for export, not counting political exiles; the other two were weapons and novels.
Disarming an idealist was easy. One only needed to ask why the idealist was not on the front line of the particular battle he had chosen.
she cursed me at such length and with such inventiveness I had to check both my watch and my dictionary.
The Jeffersons, a TV comedy about the unacknowledged black descendants of Thomas Jefferson,
But Laos itself is the closest thing to paradise Indochina’s got. I spent time there during the war and it was incredible. I love those people. They’re the gentlest, most hospitable people on earth except when they want to kill you.
she came back to life, rearing her head and glaring at us all with a hatred so intense that every man in the room should have turned to cinders and smoke.
“For your own good” can only mean something bad, he said.
I emerged headfirst, thrust into a humid room as warm as the womb, seized by the gnarled hands of an unimpressed doula who would tell me, years later, how she had used her sharpened thumbnail to slice the tight frenulum holding down my tongue, the better for me to suckle and to talk.
Ouzel Falls Loop in Rocky Mountain National Park - I have a little backpacking trip planned for the last day of May and first day of June with my son and grandson in the Wild Basin area of RMNP (I'll report on that in my June blog). So, I decided to pick up my permit at the backcountry office near Estes Park and then to sort of scout out the campground and do a hike while I’m at it. We’ll be camping at the Pine Ridge backcountry site which is only 1.4 miles from the trailhead (should be doable for a 4-year-old). So, I scoped out the campsite and then headed up to see Ouzel Falls which were raging on this spring run off day. Less than a mile from the trailhead I spotted a mama moose in the trees. She was waiting for the trail to clear before crossing it to get to the river. I motioned to a family coming down to wait a bit. With me stopped, and the family stopped, she dashed across the trail to the river so fast that I only got a shot of her headless body. Oh well, I’ll have to be quicker next time. After checking out Ouzel Falls, I wanted to try and make it to Thunder Lake, but unfortunately, it started thundering (appropriately enough) and raining about 2 miles before the lake. So, I decided to head back. I opted to take the camping trail back to form an 8-mile loop. There were three rangers clearing the trail of the many downed trees here also. I stopped to chat with them for a bit before heading back to the car. A nice day with a raging North St Vrain Creek (more like a river today) and plenty of waterfalls.
Until next time, happy reading and rambling!
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After a discussion about who all his extended family members are, the 4-year-old asked: “Is Tom Brady part of my family?” Well kid, your mom is a Patriots fan, and your nana loves Tom Brady, so OK, we’ll make this exception. Best not let him see the Tom Brady Roast on Netflix....
Born at the end of the 11th century, Hildegard of Bingen (aka Saint Hildegard, aka Sibyl of the Rhine) is considered to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany. A writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, and medical practitioner, she read several Latin texts and many of the monastery’s library books. She tended an herb garden and used many of its ingredients to treat people with various illnesses. In addition to her not insignificant medical and scientific work, she wrote the music and words for several compositions and has the most surviving chants of any composer from the Middle Ages.
She was the 10th and youngest child of Mechtild of Merxheim-Nahet and Hildebert of Bermersheim (both a mouthful). She claimed to have experienced many visions as a child and into adulthood. Of her visions she said, ”I can measure neither height, nor length, nor breadth in it; and I call it 'the reflection of the living Light.' And as the sun, the moon, and the stars appear in water, so writings, sermons, virtues, and certain human actions take form for me.” Sounds like she was certainly blessed with some special powers. Just the fact that she was a woman creating science in the 11th and 12th centuries, is a miracle. Someone should script a limited series about her.
I checked my Google Sheets and sure enough, I’ve never listed any Bob Schneider songs on my blog. Well, I guess I’ll just have to correct that right now. Born in 1965 to an Opera singer father and a teaching mother, Schneider quit college at the University of Texas El Paso to start his musical career (good choice). With 20 albums in 30 years of recording it was pretty tough to narrow things down a bit. My wife and I saw him perform at the wonderful Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix a few years ago. It was just him and his guitar (and synthesizer to keep the beat and to repeat certain chords he would live-record). A great show. Interesting side note: he dated Sandra Bullock for a couple of years and since then many of his songs have made the soundtrack for some of her movies. I guess they broke up on a positive note. Here is just a very small taste of his varied musical styles. Enjoy!
Honeypot – great love song
Sample lyrics:
Got a heart lost in kindness
A mind that's mostly mindless
I can hold you up for air
I won't let you down I swear
Tarantula – I don’t even know how to categorize this fun song, but it’s great fun.
Sample lyrics:
I met a woman down in Mexico
Sweet as sugar with a heart made of stone
We drank tequila by the light of the moon
I didn't realize that she would be my ruin
She said she knew about the voodoo ways
Said she could love me till the end of her days
She lit a candle and turned around
And when she did my feet never touched the ground
Round and Round – So many musical styles in this song about getting yourself out of a funk because the world continues to turn.
Sample lyrics:
I know the time it's time to get up
And get out and get over this
But I don't know how and I don't know why
And the world goes round
And the world goes around
And the world goes round & round
40 Dogs – a fast moving love song, like he’s in a hurry to get this relationship going. Another great love song.
Sample lyrics:
Well you’re the color of a burning brook,
You’re the color of a sideways look from an undercover cop in a comic book
You’re the color of a storm in June,
You're the color of the moon.
You’re the color of the night, that’s right,
Color of a fight - you move me.
You’re the color of the colored part of The Wizard of Oz movie.
The way in which Mason told this incredible centuries-long story was fun. Here the New York Times explained it best: “North Woods is a hodgepodge narrative, brazenly disjointed in time, perspective and form. Letters, poems and song lyrics, diary entries, medical case notes, real-estate listings, vintage botanical illustrations, pages of an almanac, modern-day nature photographs, a true-crime detective story, an address to a historical society: Mason stuffs all this (and more!) into his bulging scrapbook of a novel. That North Woods proves captivating despite its piecemeal structure is testament to Mason’s powers as a writer, his stylish and supple narrative voice.”
There are several great moments in this story, but one that struck me was the video tapes left behind by the schizophrenic son before he disappeared: he had heard voices all his life and these videos were labeled with people’s names but only showed natural areas being recorded…then you come realize that each of those natural areas were where some event had occurred during the past with the people that were listed on the tapes. So, the voices he had been hearing were the ghosts of the people who had lived in these woods over the centuries. “He had tried to capture his hallucinations. She had disbelieved him, and he had spent his final months trying to record what he had seen and heard, and offer them to her as proof.” Chilling, and brilliant.
Here are some lines:
She was to be married to John Stone, a minister of twice her age, whose first wife had died with child. Died beaten with child, her sister told her, died from her wounds.
You must understand what is about to happen must happen so that there is no more bloodshed.
Now, in the place that was once the belly of the man who offered the apple to the woman, one of the apple seeds, sheltered in the shattered rib cage, breaks its coat, drops a root into the soil, and lifts a pair of pale-green cotyledons. A shoot rises, thickens, seeks the bars of light above it, and gently parts the fifth and sixth ribs that once guarded the dead man’s meager heart.
And in the same place in her heart where Alice kept her list of children’s names, Mary kept a different list—far better referenced and annotated—of all the local husbands who got drunk and beat their wives.
she was a person whose hunger for the world was greater than what the world provided.
It is not the first time that the blight has passed through the forest. It has been almost twenty years since it began its march, and by now half of the chestnut forests of New England lie decimated.
On the road, still soft from the rain, the swerving tire tread and deep bear prints gave testimony to the night’s events.
The headsets were so loud that she had to turn the volume down. But this is what it would have sounded like, the wall text told her. Between 1970 and 2019 alone, nearly a third of all birds had disappeared from North America. Once, the forest would have been deafening.
Oh, things were far worse in the olden days, in his opinion, and if anyone disagreed with him, he asked them who’d been scalped of late.
When I arrived on this windy day, the gate to the campground was closed so I had to park along the highway. There were some workers with picks and shovels getting the campground prepared for the summer busy season. Closure of the campground likely made me the first person to hike this trail since last fall. I had the trails to myself, and with the abundance of mountain lion poop, this was a bit unnerving. I started on the two-mile Kreutzer trail, which is a nice nature trail with several interpretive signs containing information on the plants, animals, and geology of the area. Then it connected to the McConnel trail which climbs to its namesake peak with great views of the snowcapped Mummy Range to the southwest. The terrain was similar to that of the drive up Poudre Canyon; rocky. It has a similar feel to the terrain between Phoenix and Payson in Arizona which I have explored many times in my past. The eastern portion of the McConnel trail is deemed a primitive trail, which basically means it’s not maintained. I would have to agree with this assessment. It was hard to follow in places but was also a nice challenge as it wound its way steeply among large rock formations up to the peak. I was somewhat protected from the wind most of the way until I reached the top, with its unobstructed views of the Mummy Range to the southwest. The wind was whipping up here. I headed back down the (maintained) western part of the McConnel trail down to the campground and my car.
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| Most of the hike was in this wilderness area |
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| This sign was no joke |
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| Views of the Poudre River along the 14 highway |
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| Lots of this type of footing along the primitive part of the trail |
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| Reminded me a bit of Arizona up here |
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| Nice mountain views approaching |
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| Very Arizona-like |
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| Big views up on top |
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| Lots of wilderness out there |
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| Views |
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| Cool cliffs on the hike down |
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| Tight squeeze |
There were several of these informative signs along the way
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| Poudre River near the trailhead |
Flights was published in Polish in 2007 and its Polish title, Bieguni, is taken from an ancient Eastern Orthodox belief that being in constant motion helps to keep evil at bay. It’s a bunch of short stories, some true, some fictional, with connections among them spanning a timeframe from the 17th century up through modern times. Most, but not all, of the stories are related to travel in some way and are narrated by an unnamed female writer/traveler. Some of the stories are just a few sentences while others go on for several pages. Many of the stories are broken up and continue after several other unrelated stories are told. There’s the fascinating story of a man named Kunicki whose wife and child go missing on a Croatian Island. After an unsuccessful search by police for 3 days, the story suddenly ends. A few other short stories later, we’re in Kunicki’s apartment back home in Poland where he and his wife are arguing again about those three days. He wants to know what happened. Her explanation doesn’t seem real. Eventually he’s living on his own, divorced. Then there’s the story of the mother of a special needs child who disappears into the subway stations of some Polish city and ends up living with homeless people and trying to connect with them and to understand her impossibly difficult life. There’s the story of a biologist who gets an email from her college boyfriend who she hadn’t heard from in 30 years. He’s dying slowly from a cruel disease and asks her to mercifully end his life (as a biologist in New Zealand she was tasked with killing off invasive animals to preserve the island’s native species). And then there are these stories of scientists in the 1600s learning how to preserve body parts so that they can be displayed for future generations to see; future generations of travelers.
Overall just a really interesting set of stories unlike anything I’ve read. Here are some lines, which I suppose since they are in English have to be credited to both Tokarczuk and her translator, Croft:
Mean World Syndrome, which has been described fairly exhaustively in neuropsychological studies as a particular type of infection caused by the media. It’s quite a bourgeois ailment, I suppose. Patients spend long hours in front of the TV, thumbing at their remote controls through all the channels till they find the ones with the most horrendous news: wars, epidemics, and disasters. Then, fascinated by what they’re seeing, they can’t tear themselves away.
Flight from Irkutsk to Moscow. It takes off at 8:00 a.m. and lands in Moscow at the same time—at eight o’clock in the morning on that same day. It turns out to be right at sunrise, which means the whole flight takes place during dawn. Passengers remain in this one moment, a great, peaceful Now, vast as Siberia itself.
She has the whole day ahead of her. Not that she will spend it on herself, of course. She has many things to take care of. She’ll pay the bills, go grocery shopping, pick up Petya’s prescriptions, visit the cemetery, and then finally she’ll go all the way to the other end of this inhuman city so she can sit in the encroaching darkness and burst into tears.
Tears fly down her cheeks from the cold, which suits the wind, finally providing it a way to sting her face.
It was fortunate that Annushka got into a good teaching school in Moscow; unfortunate she didn’t finish the course. If she had, she would be a teacher now, and perhaps she would never have met the man who had become her husband. Their genes would never have blended together in that toxic mix that was to blame for Petya coming into the world suffering from a disease that had no cure.
On the walls hung black-and-white portraits of men—it was only in the physics department that you could find the single female face in the whole school, Madame Maria Skłodowska Curie’s, the sole indication of the equality of the sexes.
In the last few years she has realized that all you have to do to become invisible is be a woman of a certain age, without any outstanding features: it’s automatic.
She removes the drip from the IV and slowly injects all the droplets of the liquid she has brought. Nothing happens aside from the fact that his breathing stops, suddenly, naturally, as though the movement of his rib cage from before had been an odd anomaly. She runs her hand over his face, reinserts the drip into his IV, and smooths out the place on the sheets where she’d been sitting. Then she leaves.
Children become people when they wriggle out of your arms and say “no.”
“Are you okay?” Kunicki says he’s fine, but he knows that they’re headed toward the final confrontation now. Their kitchen will serve as battlefield, and they’ll both take up attack positions—he by the table, she with her back to the window, as always.
He looks like a guy who discovered not too long ago that he’s not really so different from everybody else—thus attaining, in other words, his own enlightenment.
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| Nice view of the Flatirons from near the trailhead |
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| Fern Canyon starts steep and stays steep |
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| Storm clouds covering most of the big mountains |
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| Pretty down in Shadow Canyon |
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| Spring is here |
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| See? |
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| Boardwalk over the marshy parts |
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| One of many pretty meadows in this area |
His description of the fire is edge of your seat reading, but like all good authors, he intersperses the fire story with fascinating background. You’ll learn about the Alberta tar sands where bitumen is processed from the sands in an extraordinarily energy intensive process that only makes sense financially if oil is at more than $50 a barrel. He talks about the Hudson Bay Company which was the first company to extract resources from Canada (furs and pelts mainly in the 1700s and 1800s). You will learn about the resourcefulness of the town’s residents who have come from all over the world to cash in on this black-gold rush. And of course, you’ll learn about the business owners and oil companies that also came from all over the world to ravage this landscape of boreal forest for the fossil fuels buried in the sands.
At around the halfway point, Vaillant spins away from the story of the fire to brilliantly describe in about a hundred pages the science of atmospheric warming from the CO2 we’ve been adding to our air since the Industrial Revolution. And not only the science, but also the story of the scientists who have been trying to warn us of this existential issue since the mid-1800s. There actually was a brief period of time, in the 1950s and 60s when oil companies, politicians, and petroleum institutes listened to the scientists and even funded scientific studies of their own, proving the numbers correct. But then the 1970s and 80s happened and fossil fuel executives saw this as a threat to their profits and livelihoods. The author then describes the denial, delay, and attack methods the industry borrowed from the tobacco industry in order to sow doubt among the politicians and the public so that they could continue earning record profits.
After this interlude Vaillant talks about other major fires around the world in California, Australia, Alaska, Russia, well, everywhere actually. Then he circles back to Fort McMurray and the aftermath of that fire which wasn’t officially extinguished until 15 months after it started. His interviews with the survivors are poignant and portray well the devastation of lives involved in this sort of disaster that is becoming more and more normalized around the world.
It's brilliant. Please read this book. Here are some lines:
So huge and energetic was this fire-driven weather system that it generated hurricane-force winds and lightning that ignited still more fires many miles away. Nearly 100,000 people were forced to flee in what remains the largest, most rapid single-day evacuation in the history of modern fire.
“You go to a place where there was a house and what do you see on the ground? Nails. Piles and piles of nails.”
Bitumen (pronounced BITCH-amin) is a kind of degenerate cousin to crude oil, more commonly known as tar or asphalt. Surrounding Fort McMurray, just below the forest floor, is a bitumen deposit the size of New York State. Sometimes referred to as the Alberta tar sands, or the oil sands, it is one of the biggest known petroleum reserves in the world.
Across North America, and around the world, fires are burning over longer seasons and with greater intensity than at any other time in human history.
“I just happened to be standing next to one of the Slave Lake guys, and he looked me straight in the face and said, ‘You guys are losing part of your city today.’
There was one point where we were looking at a house—an entire house was disappearing—in five minutes.”
It may come as a surprise today, but in 1958, the potential for CO2-driven climate disruption was part of the public school curriculum.
In 1984, as scientists from every relevant discipline were comparing notes at international conferences and arriving at similarly dire conclusions regarding the impact of industrial CO2, the American Petroleum Institute disbanded its CO2 and Climate Task Force. Forty years on, the API’s decision to turn its back on a century of solid climate science is proving to be the most consequential policy reversal in the history of human civilization.
Why act on CO2 when you can sow the seeds of doubt and keep those profits (and those dividends) flowing just a little bit longer?
So otherworldly were the fire conditions on Black Saturday (Melbourne) that animals and people were killed by radiant heat alone, from hundreds of yards away, as if they had been felled by a death ray.
A camshaft, a flywheel, a kitchen sink, an oven door, and countless other objects were scattered through the charred forest. There was no glass anywhere. Grass, bark, and topsoil were gone.
According to Cal Fire, nine of California’s twenty largest fires have occurred just since 2020.
in 2017, Greenland experienced its first significant wildfire, a stunning development given that Greenland is treeless and frozen solid save for tenuous patches of tundra on the coastal margins of the ice cap.
One of the cruelest aftershocks for homeowners was the realization that just because their house was gone didn’t mean the mortgage was.
Craig MacKay works for a local branch of ClaimsPro, and he summed it up this way: “On May second we had no claims; on May third we had fifty thousand claims.”
Fort McMurray is not a town that is likely to survive the impending energy transition, but the natural instinct is to fight for one’s life, and for one’s livelihood, and Fort Mac surely will. It’s a long way back: the fire’s $10 billion price tag is equivalent to two banner years of royalty revenue,
Nobody tracks the incidence and costs of natural disasters as closely as insurance companies. In so doing, they provide us with some of the most objective and reliable data on the impacts of climate change and its accelerating severity.
Currently, we live in a dangerously bifurcated reality where senior executives at forward-thinking, publicly traded global companies like Exxon, Shell, JPMorgan, and the Bank of England accept the science of anthropogenic carbon dioxide and the threat it poses, and still continue to—literally—pour gas on the flames.
As of 2022, the number of U.S. petroleum engineering graduates had dropped 80 percent since peaking in 2017.
Truly unnerving to anyone heavily invested in oil and gas is the recent news from the International Energy Agency, a longtime ally of the industry. In their “World Energy Outlook” for 2020, the IEA announced that solar power is now the “cheapest electricity in history.”
The willful and ongoing failure to act on climate science is unforgivable; recrimination is justified, but none will be sufficient. In this case, at the planetary level, there is no justice; the punishment will be shared by all, but most severely by the young, the innocent, and the as-yet unborn.
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| Most of the hike was in this wilderness |
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| Leaves sprouting along the North Fork of the Big Thompson |
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| Lots of burn scars from the 2020 Cameron Peak fire |
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| Rocky Mountain National Park in the background |
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| Lots of pretty meadows along the way |
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| So many downed trees were removed by trail workers working hard |
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| 4.5 miles from the trailhead is RMNP |
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| Something died here |
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| Not much snow left |
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| Rangers had to camp outside due to tree damage |
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| Tree damage |
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| Llamas! |
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| Broken stumps looking like Bryce Canyon |
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| Pretty North Fork |
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| Crazy burn scars on the hillside |
While languishing in the US, the general establishes a revolutionary army with plans to invade the now communist Vietnam. The paranoid general sees spies everywhere and eventually commands the narrator to assassinate two people in LA. These two become pestering ghosts to the narrator throughout the rest of the novel. Eventually the invasion takes place, and it is squashed immediately because, well, the narrator is a spy and reveals all. What happens after the invasion is the most harrowing description of torture and rape that you will likely ever read. Not sure how the limited series is gonna show all of this. The rape is of a female communist agent being savaged by three South Vietnamese officials (another metaphor for the hatred and division within Vietnam). There were some big surprises during the last few chapters, and I couldn’t put it down. Here are some lines:
She was a poor person, I was her poor child, and no one asks poor people if they want war.
Some of my countrymen spoke English as well as I, although most had a tinge of an accent. But almost none could discuss, like I, baseball standings, the awfulness of Jane Fonda, or the merits of the Rolling Stones versus the Beatles.
I could hardly blame Americans for mistaking me as one of their own, since a small nation could be founded from the tropical offspring of the American GI.
I had an abiding respect for the professionalism of career prostitutes, who wore their dishonesty more openly than lawyers, both of whom bill by the hour.
I am merely noting that the creation of native prostitutes to service foreign privates is an inevitable outcome of a war of occupation, one of those nasty little side effects of defending freedom that all the wives, sisters, girlfriends, mothers, pastors, and politicians in Smallville, USA, pretend to ignore behind waxed and buffed walls of teeth as they welcome their soldiers home, ready to treat any unmentionable afflictions with the penicillin of American goodness.
If looks could emasculate, she would have walked off with my sac in her purse.
Even poor people in America had refrigerators, not to mention running water, flush toilets, and twenty-four-hour electricity, amenities that even some of the middle class did not have back home.
This particularly unfashionable neighborhood was a shady one despite the absence of trees,
Orange County, an hour away by car. It was the birthplace of the war criminal Richard Nixon, as well as the home of John Wayne, a place so ferociously patriotic I thought Agent Orange might have been manufactured there or at least named in its honor.
The majority of Americans regarded us with ambivalence if not outright distaste, we being living reminders of their stinging defeat.
Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment.
the doctor examining you for mandatory military service (an exam that you never fail, unless you are afflicted by wealth)
his shirt the rich yellow color of urine after a meal of asparagus.
Vodka was one of the three things the Soviet Union made that were suitable for export, not counting political exiles; the other two were weapons and novels.
Disarming an idealist was easy. One only needed to ask why the idealist was not on the front line of the particular battle he had chosen.
she cursed me at such length and with such inventiveness I had to check both my watch and my dictionary.
The Jeffersons, a TV comedy about the unacknowledged black descendants of Thomas Jefferson,
But Laos itself is the closest thing to paradise Indochina’s got. I spent time there during the war and it was incredible. I love those people. They’re the gentlest, most hospitable people on earth except when they want to kill you.
she came back to life, rearing her head and glaring at us all with a hatred so intense that every man in the room should have turned to cinders and smoke.
“For your own good” can only mean something bad, he said.
I emerged headfirst, thrust into a humid room as warm as the womb, seized by the gnarled hands of an unimpressed doula who would tell me, years later, how she had used her sharpened thumbnail to slice the tight frenulum holding down my tongue, the better for me to suckle and to talk.
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| Something furry died here |
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| Lower Copeland Falls |
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| A very fast apparently headless moose |
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| Calypso Falls |
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| Ouzel Falls |
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| Lots of slushy snow past Ouzel Falls |
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| A very big moose was here |
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| Trails look like streams in late spring up here |
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| Upper Copeland Falls |
Until next time, happy reading and rambling!