One voice of reason

In a column in today’s Washington Post, Norman J. Ornstein addresses some of the wildly off-the-mark nonsense being bandied about concerning President Obama’s policy initiatives. These gobsmacking commentaries come not just from the usual radio crock-jocks but from the reputed leaders of the Republican Party:

“The most extravagant rhetoric has come out of the gathering of Southern Republicans in New Orleans, led by former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who called Obama ‘the most radical president in American history’ and urged his partisan audience to stop Obama's ‘secular, socialist machine.’

At the same conference, Liz Cheney, the former vice president's daughter who is often mentioned as a possible Senate candidate from Virginia, fiercely attacked Obama's foreign policy as ‘apologize for America, abandon our allies and appease our enemies.’ And last week the ubiquitous Sarah Palin said of the arms-control treaty Obama signed with Russia, ‘No administration in America's history would, I think, ever have considered such a step,’ likening it to a kid telling others in a playground fight, ‘Go ahead, punch me in the face and I'm not going to retaliate.’”

Orenstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, begs to differ:

“Looking at the range of Obama domestic and foreign policies, and his agency and diplomatic appointments, my conclusion is clear: This president is a mainstream, pragmatic moderate, operating in the center of American politics; center-left, perhaps, but not left of center. The most radical president in American history?”
He concludes with a paraphrase of a conservative Southern Senator’s question about Strom Thurmond’s defense of segregation some fifty years ago: “Does Newt Gingrich, a PhD in history, really believe that [expletive]?”

The expletive here being, let me guess, “shit.”

It’s good to hear a few conservative voices begin to call out their brethren on the ridiculous spew that passes for political discourse these days. Here’s just one more example; he quotes from “Mark Levin, who manages to make Limbaugh and Beck sound like calm voices of reason:

[Speaking of Oklahoma’s conservative Republican Senator Tom Coburn, who dared to call Nancy Pelosi “nice”] ‘We don't need you hack, detestable politicians telling us a damn thing. Most of you are a bunch of pathetic, unethical morons. And so, no, Mr. Coburn, we won't be told to sit down and be quiet. We won't be told by you to watch CNN to balance off Fox. You got that, pal? Who the hell do you think you are? You sound like a jerk, to be perfectly honest about it. You, the jerk, who backed John McCain.’”

I swear, I’ve heard kids having a supermarket tantrum scream more cogently than Newt, Rush, and Sarah. The difference is that, at the least, you would expect a harried parent to look embarrassed and take the kid out of the store.

Home again

We’ve been back for about ten days now, and I have to say I enjoyed our three-month trip enormously. I don’t like to think of it as a vacation because for now it’s just what we do in the winter: we go south. Still, it was a vacation in many ways.

For me, I can’t recall when I felt more at ease and in the moment for an extended period of time. In the moment almost never describes me, but while on the road, I could read a book all afternoon, practice Spanish or not as my motivation determined, go for an easy walk around the campground or a more vigorous hike up into a desert wash.

With my new Kindle, I could download newspapers for less that a dollar, and since we spent most of our time in Arizona, I usually read the Arizona Republic. If we felt like it, we would go into a nearby town and find an internet café and have coffee and maybe a sandwich while we caught up on our email and paid bills online.

I never felt bored. Never anxious. Never depressed. I never felt like I should be doing something else.

Our biggest concern during the first half of the trip was money, as many national, state and local campgrounds have substantially raised their fees if they haven’t actually closed down. But during the second half of the trip, we began to find free or very low-cost campsites. Organ Pipe National Monument charges ten dollars a night, and since I’m now officially a senior (sixty-two), fees are half price. Five bucks a night to stay in our favorite park.

You can stay three weeks at Organ Pipe, then move a few miles north of the park and stay for free on BLM land for another two weeks: five weeks of camping for $105. We were paying that for three nights before we found out better.

We also scouted some of the BLM Long-Term Visitor Areas, which charge $80 per year for camping within a certain area, usually very expansive. The biggest of these is near Quartzite, Arizona where hundreds of thousands of snow birds come for the winter and spread out across the desert, either tightly packed for those who enjoy the company, or widely spaced for those who don’t. We didn’t stay in Quartzite and probably never will, but there are other areas run in the same way that are much more appealing, and we can easily see ourselves staying for a month or so in a few different locations.

We also found Wal-Mart parking lots to be commodious and convenient for overnight stays while traveling to new locations. Wal-Mart doesn't mind, and with our GPS, I’ve found you’re never more than ten miles from a Wal-Mart. I forgive Wal-Mart for killing Chinese babies for pet food. I even shopped in a few, call me what you will.

For me, this kind of life is so enjoyable and inviting I’d love to sell out up here in Klamath Falls and go full-time, which some millions of Americans do. As small as our trailer is, we were very comfortable in it for three months, and there are middle-sized trailers that come close to the feel of a small apartment. It would be a simple matter to retain a legal address in Klamath Falls through a mail-forwarding service.

I envision staying here between three to six months a year and traveling the rest of the time. I could see us doing that for another ten years or so. Although we’d take a beating if we sold the house now, I’ve been thinking a lot lately in terms of how many good years I have left, and good years have come to mean a lot more to me than money.

Especially since we have the money. It’s actually a lot cheaper to live on the road than in a house, and when the time comes, it’s easy enough to settle down again in a nice rental or old persons’ home. I’d like to find one that accepts only liberals. The Hubert Humphrey Cozy Home for Aging Leftists or some such.

Mary is less thrilled than I am with the idea, though she’s not completely opposed to it. She loved the mobile life as much as I did, but she also feels more connection to our home here than I do.

Whatever we decide, we’re both happy with the way things are for now or could be in the immediate future. The best of it is that with both of us retired, we have choices now that we never had before. We’re also cognizant of our great good fortune to have a modest but secure income in this time of such a serious and painful recession, but we more than earned what we have. I don’t spend a lot of time feeling guilty that things have gone our way in the last quarter or so of our lives. It’s not like I was a bank president or something.

The Spanish word for “retired” is “jubilado.”

So, back home to a cold and sometimes snowy spring, but it definitely is spring and I can wait it out until the weather improves. I’ve enrolled for this summer in an eight-week, intensive Spanish program at Southern Oregon University, across the mountains in Ashland. I’m both excited and intimidated by it. I’ve been studying Spanish, mostly on my own, for about three years now, and despite making progress, it can only be slow progress without good instruction and a chance to practice speaking every day.

Classes start mid-June, and I’m trying to cram on my own so I’ll be as ready to start as I can be. I’ll be staying somewhere near Ashland in the trailer four days a week, then back home on the weekends. The trailer is a good place to study since it’s about the size of a jail cell but nicer, and there aren’t any distractions built in.

Besides, I see myself spending a lot of time on campus. There’s even an Hispanic Students Union. If I study hard, maybe I can pass for a Mexican.

My only souvenir from the trip is a rattlesnake-skin belt, but that’s a story for another day. He was a big mother.

The Cubs win the pennant

But enough about me. How ‘bout that Obama!?

Like most of his supporters, I’d completely given up on passing any kind of health care reform and had come to believe he represented an enormous and completely unexpected sign of great social change in our country, as well as being both a charming and inspirational figure as president. Sadly, though, in the end it seemed he didn’t quite have what it takes to overcome The Great Republican Wall of No, No, a Thousand Times No. He proved us wrong, with Nancy Pelosi deserving as much or more of the credit for the final outcome. Next, he signed the most comprehensive arms control treaty with Russia in the last two decades. Then he rested and shot a few hoops.

Nothing but net.

It may not be perfect, it may not even be great, but we progressives have done the near-impossible in passing this health care bill, and I’m hopeful we can survive the November elections and continue to build modestly on recent successes.

In the meantime, there’s a grand array of buffoons and jesters to entertain us, and granted, there are a lot of scary people out there; still, there’s much to enjoy in the antics of the Tea Baggers and their leadership.

I mean, Sarah Palin: what’s not to laugh?

Beethoven in the desert

Mary and I are dry camping on BLM land about twenty miles north of Organ Pipe and some twelve miles south of the town of Ajo. We’ve been into town a few times, mostly to buy groceries and have a coffee and use the internet at a nice little café called the Oasis.

Other than the IGA market and the Oasis, Ajo doesn’t have much to recommend it except that it hasn’t been discovered by tourists yet, there not being much to discover. For a hundred years, it lived off a giant open-pit copper and gold mine, but that closed in 1983, and I’m sure the town’s economy collapsed just like the economies of small Northwest towns collapsed when the mills shut down. Today, law enforcement is probably the biggest employer, with 450 Border Patrol agents alone, though many of them must live in Gila Bend, about forty miles to the north.

So Ajo, despite some impressive historical buildings and a quaint Spanish-style square, isn’t a place you’d expect to find much in the way of culture, which is why I didn’t quite register the 8 ½ x 11 announcement at the Oasis the first time I looked at it: “Tucson Symphony Orchestra in an evening of all Beethoven, Tuesday, March 9, Dicus Auditorium.” It was only the next time we were in town that I looked a little closer and saw that the concert was sponsored by the Ajo Council for the Performing Arts.

“Where’s Dicuss Auditorium?” I asked at the Oasis.

“The high school.”

“Where’s the high school?” I asked.

“Right there,” she said, pointing through one of the Spanish-style arches that surround the square.

I bought two tickets, twelve bucks each, thinking, Who knew Tucson had a symphony orchestra and why are they driving a couple of hundred miles to this little town, and could they possibly be very good, really? Maybe it was in fact the honors orchestra for the University of Arizona, located in Tucson, not Phoenix, but still, that would probably be worth going out to hear. We’ve been camping for three months and haven’t done anything that might be called cultural the whole time, not even visit a museum. I guess we’ve been looking for other kinds of rewards on this trip.

What a wonderful surprise and a musically exciting evening! The Tucson Symphony, it turns out, is the oldest in the Southwest. It auditions nationally and sometimes internationally, and its conductor, George Hanson, has an impressive musical biography, as printed in the program. Most importantly, to my not entirely untrained ear, they sounded marvelous, at least in two of the three pieces they performed.

The Octet for Winds was performed by eight musicians, and although it was from Beethoven’s mid-career, I didn’t find it to be very interesting. To me, there’s a rather dramatic point at which Beethoven stops sounding a lot like Mozart and begins to sound like something entirely new and unsurpassed in classical music. The octet was still from the Mozart period, I thought.

The second piece featured the much larger string section performing the Grosse Fugue in B-Flat Major, which is an expanded version of one of the late string quartets. I’ve actually listened to the late quartets rather a lot, though many years ago, and remembered this piece and was once again struck by how modern it sounds, a good hundred years ahead of its time in its harmonies and fractured fugue structure. As the conductor said in introducing it, it drove audiences insane the few times it was first performed. I loved it.

Best of all after the intermission was the performance of Symphony No. 2. I expected this second symphony to be again rather Mozarty but was surprised at how many twists and surprises it held. The performance was stirring, only in part because it was so unexpected on a Tuesday night in Ajo.

In the whole evening, I can only fault the acoustics of the room, which swallowed up vast quantities of sound and left the performances sounding anemic, especially the two pieces before the full orchestra came on stage. Nobody’s fault. A high-school auditorium was never designed for a concert like this.

Mary and I drove back to camp navigating the twisted little dirt roads by my GPS and still having a bit of trouble finding our trailer in the dark, but enjoying that fullness of spirit that can come only during and after an evening of fine music, regardless of genre.

My knowledge of classical music is limited at best (please don’t take any of my music-critic comments very seriously here, though I do know enough to know that “classical” is a period, not a genre), but I actually did listen to quite a lot of Beethoven for a couple of years in college, about 1972 and 73, say. I had bought a number of collections on LP: the complete symphonies, string quartets and piano concertos of Beethoven, along with a few other things by different composers I liked. I remember often spending an evening just listening to music. Some music should never be used for background, I thought for a long time, though I suppose that’s a foolish limitation.

But still.

Beethoven was the composer who most fulfilled me emotionally and intellectually. The wonderful evening made me regret a little that I haven’t paid more attention to classical music over the years. Jazz has so dominated my passion for music, and so much of what I think of as classical music is frumpy rubbish. But then so much of everything is frumpy rubbish or rubbish of some other kind. In listening widely and well, I’ve discovered a world of music in jazz that I’ve now refined down to a broad but essential collection that continues to grow and delight. Is there room enough and time for a vast expansion in my tastes?

In any case, since I still have a working turntable, I think I’ll get out some of those old LPs when we get back home.

Smugglers

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is our favorite campground so far. It’s located at the extreme southern edge of Arizona. The nearest town of any consequence is Gila Bend, eighty-three miles north. There doesn’t seem to be any air traffic headed for distant cities, so the night sky is unpolluted by light or noise. Temperatures are in the mid-70s. The campground itself is small and lightly used, and with my new Seniors Pass, we’re camping for half price, a budget-comfy six dollars a night. At that rate, we can actually afford to do this trip again next year and probably for as long as we’re physically and mentally able.

There are also numerous BLM areas close by where you can boondock free for up to fourteen days at a time. We’ve scouted some of these along the way, and they range from isolated spots with only one or two trailers to sites just off the highway with rigs packed in pretty tight. We’re moving out in the morning to see how we like it.

We’re moving to one tomorrow

Whoo-hoo!

The stay limit is here is three weeks, and we’ll probably max out; there’s lots of hiking, as well as an excellent visitors’ center and ranger programs in the amphitheater; tonight’s is titled Bark Rangers, about working dogs in the park system. Most of these programs are not rocket surgery.

The desert landscape is as beautiful as any we’ve seen, surrounded by mountains near and distant and lush desert vegetation made possible by somewhat higher rainfall than surrounding deserts get. And it’s been a wet year after years of drought. Everything is an unlikely green right now, and the whole thing looks professionally landscaped.

But in major ways, the rules of the park and the overall atmosphere are dictated by the common border with Mexico. Outside the safety and comfort of the campground and a few close-in trails, this is “no country for old men.”

The campground is only five miles from Mexico and the small border town of Soroyta. Much of the park itself sees high traffic from illegal immigrants and drug runners. Most of the park that used to be open to the public is now closed, including a fifty-mile dirt road with several historical sites, abandoned mines and ranches. The visitor center is named for a ranger who was murdered six years ago while tracking drug runners who had recently committed a string or murders in Mexico. The park’s own brochure warns of wandering off the few approved trails and cautions to keep valuables locked up, report any suspicious activity, and, most of all, not intervene personally if you see anything suspect. No other park we’ve visited has posted such warnings.

Also, the highway is thick with Border Patrol SUVs, some of them pulling trailers with quads loaded for off-road pursuits. There are also signs of the virtual fence being built on contract by Boeing, parked trucks coverer by camouflage tarps with cameras mounted on tall poles. From what I’ve read, the fence is a near-complete failure and way over budget, but work continues.

All of which has got me thinking about the problems of immigration, drugs, gangs, cartels, murders and rapes that have people talking about Mexico as a failed state and dramatically changed the way of life for many along the border, not to mention the explosion of gangs and related violence affecting all of our cities.

I have the solution, two different measures that would be easy to enact and would reduce all the attendant problems by something like ninety percent. Make it ninety-five.

Neither idea is new.

The first is to adopt—I hate to say it—George Bush’s immigration reform package. It provided for a guest worker program which would allow Mexican nationals to enter the country legally and employers to easily hire documented workers. Despite issues of social justice, the program would substantially improve the lot of Mexican laborers by regulating wage, health and safety issues. It would also allow them to return home and reenter the United States without fear of deportation. Everybody’s happy.

Bush’s plan fell flat because it also addressed the problem of long-time residents who entered illegally and have integrated well into their communities. Many of them have been here for decades and have children and even grandchildren who were born here and thus are themselves US citizens. Bush intended a “path to citizenship” for these long-term residents, which was immediately branded “amnesty” by others in his own party, and the future of the plan quickly died.

John McCain, Arizona’s senator, initially embraced the plan but quickly distanced himself when he became a candidate for president. Sadly, of all the problems Obama doesn’t need to take on right now, immigration reform is probably first on his list.

The other simple solution that will never happen is to legalize most drugs: legalize, regulate, and tax. The drug cartels would immediately collapse, as would American street gangs. They’d probably dabble a little in murder, prostitution, and double parking, but for the most part they’d be out of work.

Despite fears to the contrary, this doesn’t mean the country would suddenly be awash in drugs. We could still regulate drug use the same way we regulate alcohol and tobacco. No shooting up in restaurants or parks. No reporting for work while high on cocaine. No DUIs or you’re back in rehab and then jail. Certain professions such as airline pilots and Sunday school teachers could still have a zero-tolerance policy.

Pretty much, the same people who use drugs now would still use them if they were legal. Availability would be about the same since, demonstrably, the War on Drugs which started under Nixon has been an abject failure.
These two simple solutions would solve so many problems and work so immediately that it’s all the more heartbreaking that the current situation is tolerated and perpetuated by small-thinking, opportunistic politicians in both parties, backed by the full faith and credit of a bunch of stupid rednecks.

Or we could do what a camper next to me suggested yesterday: shoot them all and send the bodies back to Mexico.

That could also work.

Don't tell anybody but. . . .

There are at least two things I’ve never tried and thought I never would in this life: gay sex and riding a Harley-Davidson. The thought of both is repulsive to me, and in the case of Harley riders, I’m even more repulsed by the lifestyle. I feel more than squeamish about gay sex, too, but gay people are okay with me. Kind of the way I feel about vegetarians.

But I was starting to feel a little bored by the life of warmth and leisure we’re enjoying on this trip and needed a little something to liven things up, so yesterday I rented a Harley from the local dealer and went for a long ride into the mountains north of Phoenix.

I wanted a big one, a full-dress touring bike which turned out to be an Electra Glide Classic. Cost me a hundred and fifty bucks for the day, and when Mary dropped me off to pick it up, I have to say I was turned on by all the black and chrome on the engine and the sparkly red paint which glistened in the morning sun. A handsome motorcycle, I admitted to myself, and one that promised all-day comfort with its relaxed riding position and amenities such as cruise control and a full stereo system.

The morning ride was a real pleasure and I was starting to think I’d been a little unkind over the years to The Motor Company, as Harley likes to refer to itself. I stopped by our campground—a beautiful county park in the desert outside of Phoenix—and put on longjohns and a warmer coat because the temperature was still in the low 50s. Then I turned north and headed for Payson, a town a hundred miles away along a highway marked scenic on my map.

And scenic it was. I quickly climbed out of the Sonoran Desert, beautiful enough in itself, and into a jagged, hostile landscape of rocks, rocks and rocks, big mothers that increasingly were building up into their own mountain ranges. A big vista like this deserves a big bike. The view from the road was magnificent, looking out over a mountainous landscape, with tall ranges surrounding me and snow in the higher elevations. The oddity of saguaro cacti as the dominant vegetation created a feeling of weirdness, but as I climbed, even the saguaro could no longer get a foothold and the mountains became bare and even more imposing.

And it was cold, but the Harley provided reasonable protection from the wind and I was really enjoying the bike. It put me in mind of my truck: a behemoth of the road that surprises with its planted feel and reasonable good handling, its power, and its plush ride. Kind of the ¾-ton Diesel pickup of the motorcycle world.

The road continued to climb, a four-lane highway with little traffic and beautiful sweeping turns, long climbs and descents, and the imposing Mogollon Rim that divides Arizona west to east looming ahead. An Indian casino in the middle of nowhere announced that this was Apache country, which only added to my sense of a true encounter with what I think of as the real West. By the time I reached Payson I was up into the pine forest and some now near-painful temperatures, hovering right around 40 degrees. I hadn’t brought any riding gear, but was layered up with enough clothes from the trailer than I was only moderately uncomfortable. I had on a full-face black Harley-Davidson helmet, which kept my head and face warm. I had passed on the Harley Davidson dog toys for now but figured I could pick some up when I got back.

I had lunch at McDonald’s only because they’ve decided to compete with Starbucks and serve good coffee, and a good cup of hot coffee was worth the terrible food I knew would go with it. I cannot recommend the new 1/3 Pounder.

After that, I turned around and started back into the low country, where I hoped to find higher temperatures and some interesting desert cruising.

But on the ride back, I grew to like the Harley less and less. Having kept my speed at a comfortable 70 on the ride up, I now wicked it up to a more typical 85 or so, and at these speeds the Lard Glide was decidedly wallowing in self-pity. Turns taken at 70 on the way up became white-knuckle head shakers on the way back, and even the relaxed riding position was becoming a butt-torturing device as I began my second hundred-mile leg. Also, my legs hurt.

With stock pipes, I had been impressed with the dealership-Harley’s relatively quiet exhaust note, but after a couple of hours in the saddle, the big V-twin’s thunderous clatteration started to annoy. And the relatively heavy controls were wearing. I realized the Harley’s healthy torque curve was a blessing mostly because it’s so tiring to pull in the clutch and bust my toes on the John Deere shift lever. This is a bike that just wears you out, and I see now why its riders tend to be big, burley guys; it’s a big, burley bike. I’m not man enough to ride it all day, but then I don’t generally rate manliness by a double-plus shoe size.

When I got back to camp, I took Mary for a short ride, and she wasn’t particularly impressed from the co-pilot’s seat either. I got the bike back to the dealer right at 5:30 when it was due in, glad that I had decided against the big discount for a three-day rental. I declined the offer to speak with a sales rep.

In the end, it was worth it just to be out on a bike again, and I realized how much I miss riding and started thinking about how I might bring a bike down with me next year. There’s no easy way to do it, but on two wheels, I could take a ride into Comanche country and see how I do at their casino.

Maybe I’ll also try a little gay sex.

Endnote: Tomorrow we leave for Tucson, potentially a much more interesting city than Phoenix, which impresses only by its sprawl and which I rate as one of three American cities that would be most improved from a direct strike by an asteroid. The other two are Las Vegas and Dallas, and I’ve never even been to Dallas.

A favorite author passes

A moment of quiet appreciation for J. D. Salinger. I would say that he probably touched me more deeply and personally with Catcher in the Rye than has any other writer I’ve read before or since.

What was I like at that age? Read Catcher in the Rye.

Me and about a million other guys.

More on the road

With the big storms coming in, we left Anza Borrego on Monday instead of Thursday as planned. We should have left Sunday, as we still drove through heavy rains and high winds, although there wasn’t any major flooding yet.

We took shelter for a full week in Mission Viejo, just east of Laguna Beach. My cousins Mary and Chris run a household that thrives on near-chaos. They’ve been taking in abused foster children and adult women for about forty years now and always have a house full of people and activity. Some of these guests stay for years, most of them get their lives off to a good start, and many of them stay in close touch. While we were there, live-in guests included Vera, a battered woman who has been with them for two years; Jason, their older son who has health problems; and Steve, a grandson of twenty who hasn’t quite figured out where he’s heading yet. Mary and Chris require that he have a job and be in college earning passing grades, and he goes along with the rules, although I don’t think he’s going to be a big success in college until maybe he gets a little older. Great kid, though. He turned twenty while we were there.

The weather finally broke on Saturday, and Sunday morning we left for Joshua Tree National Park. The western half of the park is high-altitude Mojave Desert, and that’s where we’re camped. The most interesting feature here is the granite rock formations. As they cooled and pushed up through an upper layer, they cracked and weathered, so that now they form massive formations of boulders, both giant and small, nested together in every imaginable pattern. They look like cushions stacked in perfectly fitted but wild disarray.

Our campground has the quite uninspired name of Jumbo Rocks. There is also the occasional totally unexpected palm oasis where water seeps up near the surface.

The downside here is that we hadn’t anticipated how cold it would be at this elevation, about 4,000 feet. The climate, though not the vegetation, is much like the Pinnacles: mid-50s during the day, dropping quickly into the twenties at night. We came down here to get warm, after all, and tomorrow, after only three days, we’re heading for some of the regional parks in the Phoenix area. Again, our guidebook, Southwest Camping Destinations, offers a number of choices.

We’ve saved a lot of money in camping fees over the last ten days. Staying with cousin Mary was free, of course, though I did insist on buying a few meals out in return for their hospitality. The camping fee here at Joshua Tree is only ten dollars a night.

Still, travel is expensive, and I’ll have to face the cold reality of my online bank statement tomorrow. It might determine how much longer we can run around out here in the desert.
But in four days when I turn sixty-two, camping fees in many parks drop to half the usual rate. I also start receiving Social Security next month, so I guess it pays to be old.

Anza-Borrego

Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is California’s largest state park, and indeed the largest state park in the US. Most of it is Mojave Desert wilderness, set aside to protect native plants and animals, among them the endangered Desert Bighorn Sheep, of which only 750 survive. Around the borders of the park are a few scattered campgrounds, mostly undeveloped.

Palm Canyon, where we’re staying, is the largest and most developed, with about a hundred sites with power and hookups for RVs. We’re surrounded on three sides by mountains, and if you like dramatic desert scenery, you would love it here.

We’ve taken a number of hikes, most notably to Palm Canyon. It’s a two-mile one way, mostly easy trek up a desert wash, and for the last half-mile or so the trail runs along an improbable stream. At trail’s end is a beautiful desert oasis with palms and ferns and little waterfalls. Only the seventy-two virgins are missing to keep it from qualifying as a genuine paradise on earth. Despite it’s being the most-used trail in the park, we met only a few other hikers along the way.

One of the pleasures of travel during the school year is, not surprisingly, the absence of children. I love children, (no I don’t), but they’re noisy, and campgrounds are usually noisy places. Nine months a year, though, it’s pretty much just retired people like us that we meet, the exception being some weekends in some parks. We stayed here a week and had reserved another, but we realized Thursday night that this was the MLK three-day weekend (thus are our national heroes reduced) and by Friday families were arriving in large numbers.

Yesterday, Saturday, we drove five miles out a dirt road recommended only for four-wheel drive vehicles, (our truck is), and then hiked up a steep and rocky trail to Wind Caves, only to discover a troop of Boy Scouts camping there. We chatted with one of the adults sitting well away from the campsite, and he said he had to get away from the noise. Said he wasn’t sure he could make it through the weekend. Mary told him she had done it for thirty years, and he just kind of groaned.

The scouts managed to mostly spoil the effect of the wind caves, naturally sculpted sandstone caves used for shelter by Native Americans for thousands of years, but it was still a great view of the badlands, and the drive in up the narrowing canyon was exciting.

We have a reservation here until Thursday, but we’re leaving tomorrow, four days early because of a forecast for a series of storms that will hit the west coast starting tomorrow. The San Diego paper says this storm will join one of the four record storms since records were begun in the 1860s, and even allowing for a lot of media weather-hype, it sounds like a good idea to clear out early. Five days of rain are forecast, maybe more, and flash floods are likely, as are high winds. We can’t travel if the wind is much above thirty miles per hour, so we’re hoping to cut out early and make it over to the LA area, where my three delightful cousins live. They’re the last and the closest of my relatives I have any contact with, and I only see them every several years.

As I write, I’m hoping we didn’t wait a day too long as the wind is coming up fast and thick clouds are gathering. With luck, the wind will back off when the rain starts tomorrow and we can make our escape, much as we did when we left Klamath Falls, now five weeks ago.

After a week with the cousins, we’re coming back this way heading for Arizona, but we’ll probably stay in Joshua Tree National Monument a little to the north. Anza-Borrega, though, will be on our list of stops in years to come. We’ve talking to several people who have been coming here for years.

Adventures

We like to think of our winter travel as an adventure, but really, you can have about the same level of adventure at home by taking a warm bath. You could break your hip, but how many of us worry about that in the comfort of our home? I do.

A typical day in camp consists of reading, dozing in a chair, taking a nap (not at all the same as dozing in a chair), studying a little Spanish for me, sewing for Mary, going for a walk, and various other activities that will not raise your blood pressure more than a few millibars.

In fact, our trip to date has been so low-key and relaxing that I’ve been having roaring anxiety dreams every night, usually some variation of I’m still working and arrive at school totally unprepared to teach my classes. When I was actually teaching, I didn’t need this particular nightmare since it happened often enough in real life. Now that I get paid at the end of every month whether I even make the bed or not, my subconscious is punishing me by pretending that I still have something to worry about.

A few days ago, we thought we might be having an adventure when we drove our 4-wheel drive, high-clearance truck over a sandy two-track road five miles through the desert to a trailhead. What if we got stuck? Who would ever find us? When we got there, palms a little sweaty, there was a ranger in a jeep, probably ticketing offending dog owners for not having their dogs on a leash, which seems to be how the rangers spend most of their law-enforcement time.

(More later, maybe, on the changing official attitude towards dogs in county, state and national parks.)

In addition to the ranger, there were a handful of compact sedans with not-great tires which had somehow made it in.

The few occurrences which have reminded me that I’m no longer at home watching a Colbert rerun have involved coyotes. Back in Pinnacles, we were sitting around the campfire and our dog Nick grew increasingly uncomfortable and fixed on something just outside the ring of light. After telling myself it was nothing or maybe a deer or stray cow, I scanned the zone of anxiety, which is that area around me at night which I can illuminate with a powerful flashlight, and discovered not one but two Wileys moving towards us with the clear notion that Jack Russell terriers were excellent canapés.

Despite popular belief, coyotes do sometimes attack people, and they often pick off stray pets. In fact, their principle diet in the urban/rural interface where they are most numerous is the house cat, followed closely by toddlers. If a coyote has your cat, it’s best not to interfere, but most people will fight for a toddler. (Not everyone, apparently: “The dingoes got my baby!”)

We quickly took the dogs back inside Fort Arctic Fox (our trailer) and let the fire burn itself out. Later I went down to the flush toilets to make a poop but carried my walking stick with a sharp point and tapped it noisily on the ground while I made quick circles with the flashlight and occasional shouted “ bad doggies go home!. I actually did see another coyote which seemed to be considering whether or not my slight limp of late qualified me as one of the old and weak that it was his job to cull.

Last night I took the dogs out for a last walk before bed We ambled down to almost the end of our loop, several sites past where the last RV had left on its outside light, when some deep inner voice told me “go no further.”

“Farther,” I correct my inner voice.

We turned back to the trailer and both dogs made a poop, so I cleaned it up with a doggy bag and dropped them off in the trailer. Then I left my walking stick leaning up against the desert-weathered picnic table and made my way the hundred meters or so to the garbage to throw away the poop, but just before I got there a group of coyotes broke into full blood-clotting song, and they were very close, right in the campground I was quite sure. I kept my calm and didn’t run, which prompts the predator’s response to chase. With a great effort of will, I took the few extra steps to the trash bin, making sure to slam the top down as I started the fearsome walk back to safety.

The coyotes continued to howl, which could have meant “fresh meat!” or just “Is Colbert a rerun tonight?” but I walked determinedly back to safety and shut the door firmly behind me with a big exhalation of stressy breath.

Close call.

Santa Cruz

Today marks three weeks on the road. We left Pinnacles a week ago and traveled to Santa Cruz, where we stayed for five days at New Brighton State Beach. Again, we were more than a bit shocked at the camping fees: $35 per night for a site with no hookups. We started to consider the possibility that we will have to return home sooner than we planned, but for now we’re still heading south and planning to be out for at least two months. I’m still thinking four months, but I’m happy just to be traveling and still moving south.

On the way to Santa Cruz we stopped in San Juan Bautista, less than an hour away but a town I never visited when I lived here. It’s a nice enough tourist town, the likes of which we expect to see lots of on this trip, but what makes it special is the Spanish mission, which dates back to the late seventeen hundreds and which has been in continuous use since then. We were lucky to visit on a Sunday because mass was in session and I was able to stand in the open doorway and listen for awhile. The service was in Spanish and I could follow it fairly well, and the church is magnificent. I was reminded how long the Spanish and then Mexicans owned this land and all of the Southwest until we stole it from them in the Mexican-American War of the mid-1800s. That culture has lived on uninterrupted here for over three-hundred years, and it reminded me once again of the foolishness of much of the anti-immigration rhetoric.

Also, there were lots of chickens, magnificent roosters which wander loose on the streets, just as we saw in Kauai when we visited there last summer.

We wanted to stay at New Brighton for a few days before going on to stay with our friends Sue and Marty so we could visit old haunts on our own without putting them out too much as guests. In fact we went into town only once to do laundry and catch up on email and such in a coffee shop/internet café. We did drive by the old house on 14th
Avenue where I lived for four years in the early 70s and where Mary and I lived together for a couple of years before we made the permanent move north in 1975. The house, amazingly, is still standing and occupied, a one-room cinder block ugly little thing that I still love. This in the middle of a now mostly upscale neighborhood where by all expectations the house should have been torn down to make way for a new expensive home or condos.

I always have mixed feelings coming back to Santa Cruz. Much as I love it, the years I spent here were hard in many ways, especially when I graduated and had a hard time finding a decent job. The future looked bleak for a couple of years, with me working first for minimum wage in a deli in Watsonville and then as an area manager for 7-Eleven stores, by far the worst job I ever had. Although I did a good job for them, I never fit into the Slurpy culture and was finally fired. I still feel the shock of that, but it led to our decision to move away and all the good things and lucky breaks that followed for the rest of our years up to now.

Still, I’m drawn to Santa Cruz for its amazingly beautiful scenery, its artistic and intellectual culture, and its total hipness. If a modest little home could be had for less than half a million bucks, I think we’d probably move back, but as it is we have to be content just to visit. I get back mostly every year when I come down for the motorcycle races at Laguna Seca, but it’s been about fifteen years since Mary was last here.

And here it is 2010, and I’m just amazed at how time flies, or seems to have flown when I look back.

After a cool, rainy spell at New Brighton, the weather has taken a turn towards spring, with temperatures in the 70s and sunny skies. It’s always wonderful to visit Sue and Marty. Sue, Mary and I all met here now nearly forty years ago, and Sue and Marty are the only friends left who have managed to stay in Santa Cruz with its astronomical home prices and scarce employment. Marty has mostly stayed employed in the computer industry, though now he has to make the dangerous commute to San Jose every day. Sue is an artist of growing reputation.

We’ll spend a few more days here (free camping in their driveway!) and make at least one visit to Mary’s brothers in San Jose. Then we plan to head south again for a hundred miles or so and stay at Corrizo National Monument. We’re both still very happy to be on the road and are taking our time getting down to southern Arizona, which is as far as we plan to travel.

Not quite Christmas Eve, Pinnacles

We paid a premium to move our trailer to a site with electricity. It’s been cold enough here to run our propane heater often during the night, which uses expensive propane and drains batteries, so we have to run a generator much of the day to keep up. With electricity, we can run a small electric heater and keep the lights on instead of using battery lanterns, which make it feel like a cave in our trailer.

More about caves later.

The site with electricity is $36 a night, compared with $23 a night for a no-hookups site. This puts camping here at the cost of a private RV park with full hookups, not that there’s any comparison. I’m assuming the parks are having to cover their actual costs because of budget cuts, but you don’t have to multiply $36 by very few days to figure out that it adds up fast. And no WIFI.

We’ve more or less settled into a happy routine. Up about 7:30 to walk the dogs and make coffee. A few hours of reading or studying Spanish for me during the day. Mary is busy on sewing projects she’s brought along and also reading a great deal. We spend a lot of time walking the dogs, a little time with maintaining camp and cooking and eating. Every couple of days, we go for a longer hike. And evenings we listen to an hour or two of Anna Karenina, which we have on audio book.

I don’t think I would have ever read this otherwise, but as a story it’s quite engaging, and at this rate we still have a few weeks of Anna to go. I think we’ll make this a regular part of the trip with more audio books to come. We could do an all-Russian vacation but probably won’t.

Today we took an exquisite hike of about four miles to the Boundary Cave, a talus cave that connects the west and east sides of the park. The hike up was on one of the most lovely trails I’ve ever enjoyed, heavily wooded with lots of rocks covered with moss and lichen and views of the pinnacles through the canopy. I’m not exactly sure what a “glade” is, but I’m pretty sure this would be a glade.

A talus cave, I learned, is formed when earthquakes dislodge huge rocks from the peaks and pile them up in ravines. Since they don’t fit together like a puzzle, the open spaces get partially filled in but leave passages. Bats, of course, love it. We made it to the cave entrance, which was set in a magnificent rock formation, but unfortunately forgot to bring a flashlight so we couldn’t explore further. We might go up again before we leave.

Weather is still cold at night, and we’ve had a little rain, but daytimes are still generally beautifully sunny and relatively warm in the mid-50s. On a trip into town, I got online at a Starbucks and among other things checked the weather back in Klamath Falls.

Ha!

Tomorrow we’re going into Hollister to provision up again, get online, have a Mexican lunch, and explore the site of the 1950s biker takeover that inspired the movie “The Wild One.” If you don’t know the story, it was actually a rather minor incident, with a motorcycle gang buying a lot of beer and getting drunk, fighting, and breaking a few windows over the weekend. Somehow, though, Life Magazine got a reporter and photographer in. There wasn’t a lot of excitement left when they got there, so they got a few of the bikers to stage fake fights and sit drunkenly on their bikes. (Not all Harleys, btw. Brando rode a Triumph in the movie.) The article made outlaw bikers familiar and somehow fascinating to enough people to keep the myth and legends going long after Hunter S. Thompson’s The Hell’s Angles: A Wild and Terrible Saga.

The movie followed the article, and the age of outlaw bikers was born. The dark and brooding Brando didn’t make a very convincing outlaw, but Lee Marvin is actually scary.

What we’ve seen of Hollister so far suggests it’s a nice little town with great strip malls. Tomorrow we go looking for the real downtown deal.

Still at Pinnacles

I love it here, and with several days left on our reservation, I’m hoping we might decide to stay longer.

Or not.

The whole idea of this excursion is to do exactly what we feel like, and we have very few actual plans and no real commitments. If the money holds out reasonably well, we’ll be traveling for something between two and four months

Our campground sits at 1,000 feet of elevation, and it’s cooler than I expected. Daytime temperatures of about sixty degrees are perfect, but nights it drops to freezing, and there has been ice on our things outside most mornings. It warms up slowly and cools down fast, so we’re dressing warm.

In fact, on a run into town today, we stopped at the Goodwill and bought sweatshirts. Mine’s a Nike, in honor of Tiger Woods. Cost me nine bucks.

Another aspect of the cooler temperatures is that we’re going through propane quickly. We had to take the trailer with us to town, and eleven gallons cost $45. We’ve started a more serious conservation effort. I mentioned the part of the money holding out.

We’re surrounded by the steep, oak covered hills of one of California’s central ranges, beautiful in themselves, and the actual pinnacles are a few miles up the road. We’ve only been up once so far for a short but challenging hike for us, a one-mile, 1,100-foot elevation gain to a great viewpoint.

I won’t say I could have knocked this out without effort when I was younger, only that it was a slow crawl for me now. One of my big objectives of this trip is physical conditioning, so I hope to combine a vigorous walk every day with more serious hikes a few times a week.

The wildlife here is abundant. A herd of deer numbering in the dozens makes its home in the campground, not that exciting for us since deer are also common in our yard at home. But Thursday we sighted our first condors flying over the ridge above our campground. Even from a distance, the size of these birds is apparent, and there was no confusing them with the more common turkey vultures. The campground has a viewing station with high-power telescopes, and if you can lock on to one in flight, it’s easy to follow it for long periods.

Very exciting. The condor’s survival is far from certain and it’s been a treat to be able to see them in part of their natural range.

We’ve seen lots of coyote scat and heard them at night. A few nights ago we built a campfire and were enjoying the evening with our JR terriers Bandit and Nick. Nick was very nervous and kept fixing on thingsthat go bump in the night. We thought he was just being paranoid, but when I scanned the perimeter with my flashlight, there were two Wileys circling in, and they weren’t quickly scared off when I threw a few rocks at them. We’ve seen several since then. Sometimes when we’re walking the dogs to go pee at night, Nick jumps sky high at something he smells and pulls hard on the leash to get away from it. We think it’s probably coyote piss marking the location of a new fast food franchise. They’re known to quickly grab and run with little dogs left unattended for any time, so we’re extra careful.

We also saw a bobcat in camp, and I got some pictures of it at about 100 meters. Later in the afternoon, it wandered much closer, obviously hunting mice or ground squirrels (of which we have seen none) and I slowly made my way over to it taking pictures and got to within about 30 feet. I would guess its weight at about thirty pounds.

(If you’ve never heard a bobcat cry, btw, it’s about the scariest sound in all of nature. You can hear samples with a Google search, but if it doesn’t send a primal chill up your spine, you haven’t got close to the real thing.)

Shortly after the bobcat, we also sighted three feral pigs, which for all purposes are pretty much wild boar. We had seen signs of their rooting, and Mary guessed what they were before we asked a ranger, and she (the ranger) confirmed they’re common around the campground. She said that within less than a year, a domestic pig will take on all the characteristics of a wild one: a lean frame and prominent shoulder hump, plus tusks. These pigs have been wild for generations.

They are an imposing presence, and we were glad they were a hundred meters or so away and moving the other direction. The ranger also said they are shot on sight as part of an effort to eradicate them from the park, which explains two shots we heard close in yesterday.

Still, good luck with that. Wild pigs breed like rats, and I don’t know of any successful efforts to remove them.

Because the oak trees have had an abundance of acorns this year, the bird population is very high. Common are jays and magpies, quail and, not surprisingly, the acorn woodpecker. Also lots of hawks, golden eagles, and the always comely turkey vultures.

I suppose you have to be here to appreciate all this, and I’m very glad we decided on a whim to make this our first stop. We’ve been the only campers here until two other RVs came in today, but they’ll be gone after the weekend and we’ll have the park to ourselves again, save for the hikers and climbers who drive up to the trailheads early in the morning and leave late.

The rest of the time, it’s just us and the chickens.

Thursday, 12/17, Pinnacles

Our first full day here was very enjoyable. We went for a few walks around the camp area, finished setting up the trailer, and did a lot of reading and hanging around. We practiced yoga separately, which felt wonderful with our mats in the soft leaf bed from the oak trees and the warm sun on my back. I also did about an hour of Spanish. All in all, I was surprised how quickly the day filled up without either any sense of boredom or rushing. If anything, I would have enjoyed an extra hour or two for Spanish.

We haven’t explored the park beyond the campground yet. Plenty of time for that as we’ll be here another ten days or so. In camp, though, there is an abundance of wildlife to watch: a dozen or so deer which are quick at home with us campers, plus a large variety of very numerous and active birds: we’ve identified quail, turkeys, acorn woodpeckers, scrub jays, magpies, and our old friends from home the Oregon juncos. We haven’t seen any condors yet, though a very serious birder camped here yesterday uaesaid he could pick some out in the trees on the ridgeline above us with his very serious scope mounted on a tripod.

Other than him, we’re alone in the camper section. We’ve seen one tent in the tent section. There’s a lot of activity during the daytime, though, with workers busy building new rail fences and making other repairs and improvements. Stimulus money, I’m thinking, and glad to see them at work.

Last night we built a fire and were listening to Anna Karenina on audio disc, but were startled by an animal noise, a kind of combined grunt and growl. We both thought it was a deer, but we turned the disc off the listen more closely. Didn’t hear anything more. There aren’t any bears or cougars around, so we weren’t worried about getting eaten. It was getting cold, though, so we went in shortly after. It’s been warm and sunny during the day, about 60 degrees, but down to freezing at night.

This is a good test of boondocking since we don’t have any hookups. I ran the generator for a few hours yesterday and am not worried about the batteries, but water could be a few problem. The trailer carries sixty gallons, which seems like it should be a lot, but we’re down to 1/3 according to the indicator in the trailer, despite taking showers in the park shower/restroom. We’ve been out only three days now, and I was hoping we could get a week or more if we were careful. It doesn’t look like we’ll get anything like that now, though the indicator isn’t too accurate. For here, there’s a dump station and fresh water in camp, so we’d only have to hook up and drive over to them. Out in the desert, it would be a bigger undertaking.

Today we’re going into town for a few supplies.

Overall, we’re both enjoying the trip very much so far, but then it’s only been a few days. And we wouldn’t mind if it were a little warmer, but I think this is going to be typical of the weather. Actually, it’s very nice during most of the day, and we just layer up when it’s cooler.

Ross and Mary’s Voyage of Discovery: Chapter One

Mary and I left Klamath Falls on Monday, December 14th. We had the trailer up at the house for a couple of days and were hoping to get out Monday, but weather reports kept changing. After a week of sub-zero temperatures, now we had a series of storms coming in, and it was looking like the better window would be later in the week. By Sunday afternoon we had a few inches of snow on the ground, and I chained up the truck and trailer, mostly so we could be sure of just getting down our steep hill. Once we got on the highway, I was optimistic we would have good pavement. I thought we could drop the chains and drive with the truck in 4-wheel once we got on the road.

By Monday morning, though, the weather report was calling for heavy snow that night, so we decided to make a run for it. It took us until 1pm to finish packing and loading, which was something of a bigger job than usual since we’re planning to be gone somewhere between two and four months, considerably longer than we’ve been gone before.

The escape from Klamath was only a little harrowing. We had bare pavement all the way, but at Weed, the junction with I-5, we hit heavy winds, which I expected. I would guess 20 mph, with gusts as high as 40. The trailer was definitely getting seriously pushed around. By this time, it was also raining hard and the temperature was only 36. We had just made it out in time.

We were thinking to stay in Redding and try something we’d heard about but never yet done ourselves, which was to camp free in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Not that I don’t hate Wal-Mart as much as the next enlightened liberal, but free overnight parking and a chance to stock-up on any last minute supplies is hard to pass up. With our Garmin GPS, I did a search and found one in Red Bluff, so we motored on down I-5 another thirty miles and Flo led us right to it.

(Flo is the voice on the GPS, and when in doubt about directions, we always go with the Flo.)

Staying at Wal-Mart was actually kind of fun and we especially appreciated the free camping. Our first real stop is Pinnacles National Monument, and we were surprised that dry camping (no hookups) is $23 a night. We’re used to paying $10 to $15 a night in Forest Service or BLM campgrounds, and some of the parks and monuments we plan to visit in the Southwest are also free, so it’s hard to understand the high prices here, especially in the off-season.

But we’re staying twelve days and are looking forward to it. Pinnacles lies in the oak foothills (some would say mountains) that separate the Salinas and Central Valleys of California. What makes the park interesting is that it’s composed of the remains of an ancient volcano, mostly eroded away now but with peaks rising to above 3,000 feet. The landscape is dramatic and beautiful. Mary and I camped here with a friend almost forty years ago, probably our first camping trip together. We’re looking forward to some hiking and caving, and if we’re lucky, we’ll also see some condors, which were successfully reintroduced here some years ago.

We’re also looking forward to being warm. Part of the reason for our trip, which we hope to repeat in coming years, is to camp and explore the desert Southwest, but we’re also here as snowbirds, fleeing the snow and freezing temperatures of the Oregon high desert. It’s not that I hate winter, it’s just that after all these years, I mostly hate winter.

So, although I was surprised that the temperature was only 28 this morning, it’s sunny today and should get up to about 60.

Yes!

We’ll have to go into Hollister once or twice for supplies while we’re here, and we already saw a Starbucks, so we’ll stop by to surf the web and check our mail and I can post this rambling first entry of our trip. There’s no WIFI here and not even any cell phone reception.

What’s the latest news on Tiger Woods? Talk about roughing it!

Stephen and Eve

I thought Colbert went easy on tonight’s guest, Andy Schlafly, son of Phyllis The Wicked Witch of the Right, and founder of Conservapedia, an online alternative to the liberal bias of Wikipedia.

Here’s the Conservapedia definition of liberal:

“A liberal (also leftist) is someone who rejects logical and biblical standards, often for self-centered reasons. There are no coherent liberal standards; often a liberal is merely someone who craves attention, and who uses many words to say nothing. Liberalism began as a movement for individual liberties, but today is increasingly statist, and in Europe even socialistic.”

I just love a concise, unbiased definition. Stephan could have just read that and asked, “WTF?”

Still, Colbert did take his shots at Conserva earlier when “On October 7, 2009, [he] called for his viewers to incorporate him into the Conservapedia Bible as a Biblical figure and viewers responded by editing the Conservapedia Bible to include his name.” This resulted in articles on topics such as “Stephan and the Ark.”

For more on Conservapedia and other “alternative conservative sites” here’s a link to the evil Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia

[You still gotta cut and paste the links. Blogger is messing with me.]

Small world

Mary and I exchanged Christmas presents yesterday. Actually, we both kept the one we had bought for the other. We gifted each other (why not make another new verb? It’s all the thing to do) a pair of Kindles, and when we opened them, we found we had to register them if they came as a gift, but they were already registered to the gifter, not the giftee, so we said, well hell, let’s just keep our own.

Not very Christmasy (also written “Christmas-y”),but each year I try to move a little further away from any recognition of Christmas as a special day. Part of this has to do with not being a Christian and resenting this imposed holiday, part is a rejection of the commercialization of Christmas. Part is protecting myself from the melancholy of not being eight-years-old anymore.

But hell, I still want some presents.

I’m very enthused about the Kindle and have wanted one since I read a little about the new features, which include a dictionary that allows instant access to definitions as you read. “Bumptious” is now in my active vocabulary, and pretty soon I’ll be sounding like George Will or the recently departed William F. Buckley even. Also, by searching for a name in the current document, you can almost instantly generate an in-order list of all the references to a single character, which should come in handy when I’m reading mysteries because usually when the bad guy comes back on the stage in the last pages and has our hero at gunpoint in an isolated warehouse, I can’t remember who this bad guy is. Of course, it’s almost always a minor character from page forty-three whom I’ve completely forgotten. So now, I can search and go back to page forty-three and remind myself that he was the doorman that the crime boss whispered to as he was entering the banquet surrounded by bodyguards.

Ah ha!

I’ve already downloaded a couple of books, plus the New Yorker, which is not available here in my little town, and today’s Washington Post just to see what the Kindle version looks like.

This is a very practical tool for us as we prepare to head out on our winter travels to the Southwest:

Pioneers! O Pioneers!

COME my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?

Damn straight we do, and our Arctic Fox travel trailer and Dodge ¾ ton pickup with the Cummins diesel, and now two Kindles so we’ll have very expanded access to books, newspapers,and magazines as we travel mostly in the backcountry of parks and national monuments. We’ll have cell phone reception much of the time, which allows Kindle shopping and downloads, but few bookstores or WI-FI, where we can get the news online.

So I’m feeling pretty good about my new gadget and our trip coming up when I’m watching Colbert last night, and his guest is author Sherman Alexie. I’ve heard of him. Turns out he’s a Native American from the Spokane area, growing up there about the time Mary and I lived there in the late 70s. Also, the film Smoke Signals, which I’ve admired here in earlier posts, is based on one of his short stories, and he wrote the screen play. Small world, I’m thinking.

I’m pretty interested in the guy by now and ready to cue him up on my Kindle, but it turns out the whole interview is about how much he hates Kindle and how it’s destroying the relationship between authors and their readers, not to mention the independent bookstores (I’ve got some bad news here for Sherman, Kindle or not), and in fact finally destroying the printed word itself. Pretty soon, there won’t be anything left but downloads, which will offer a hugely reduced number of titles mostly falling within the bestseller category.

Again, have I got news, but still.

So Sherman won’t allow his books to be digitized, doesn’t want them getting all digit-y, and I had to go to Amazon and order the hardcopies, and I’m not sure I see such a big difference between which Amazon department I order from.

Actually, I share all these concerns but I don’t think there’s anything we can do to change much. Better maybe to try to find a way to ride the wave. Technology is now a force of nature as powerful as climate change and about as immediate as a massive meteor strike. Goodbye to the daily newspaper, the network news team, and now the local bookstore. I will miss them all if I live long enough, but actually, I think I’m about the perfect age to have enjoyed the best of everything life and human progress have had to offer, and I mostly won’t be around when the bills come due.

Meanwhile, I downloaded Anna Karenina for free to my Kindle. (It’s public domain now, so I might finally get around to reading it. Sorry, Leo.) And I have four more new books on there, plus a couple of magazines.

I’m really killing the publishing industry.

My (possibly) Irish heart

Somebody warned me off Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt because it’s depressing. I still might have started it earlier but the print in my paperback edition is small, and anymore, print size is one of the deciding factors in whether I’ll read a book or not. But I started it anyway a few weeks ago and, slow reader that I am, just finished it, and I would have missed something wonderful if I hadn’t finally picked it up.

This memoir of growing up in poverty in Ireland, “utterly heartbreaking” as one reviewer wrote, leaves me feeling far from depressed, though I admit to reaching for the Kleenex frequently as young Frank finally sails to America at age nineteen and the book comes to an end with me wanting much more. Although it’s a very personal narrative, for me it was impossible to read without a profound awareness of how truly wealthy we are to live in this country and in this time, the recession notwithstanding. At the same time, McCourt enjoyed a kind of protected youth, growing up in a brief era when poverty and violence were not so linked as they are today.

A quick look at Amazon confirms that I’ll have more to keep me busy as I try to find ways to pass the long afternoons in the deserts of Southern California and Arizona this winter. McCourt, who ended up teaching high school English and winning a Pulitzer Prize, has several other books, all of them again memoirs it seems, and his brother Malachy has a few of his own.

Angela’s Ashes was copyrighted in 1996, so as usual my “discovery” is over a decade old. It’s been a best-seller ever since, so my belated recommendation adds little to what has already been said, except perhaps to the few readers of this blog who haven’t yet come upon it.

What a difference

a day makes. . . .

Punditry on the chances for health care reform now seems to be focusing on obstacles, suggesting that it’s not at all clear that Obama will have a bill to sign. This is a complete reversal of what I was hearing just a day or two ago, when is seemed like we’d moved into the realm of forgone conclusion, even before the house voted.

An excellent reason to shit-can the filibuster: Joe Lieberman pontificating on why he would, in an act of moral conscience, prevent the bill from coming to a vote. One man can do this? One man who just last week was announcing that he would vote against the public option purely because it would be bad for the insurance industry concentrated in his state?

Oh, that Soupy Sales were still alive to hit this dick in the face with a pie. How about a nice piece of dick-face pie, Joe?

POW!

So now I’m going back to my cartoons.

Our word for today. . . .

“Mumblecore is an American independent film movement that arose in the early 2000s. It is primarily characterized by ultra-low budget production (often employing digital video cameras), focus on personal relationships between twenty-somethings, improvised scripts, and non-professional actors. Filmmakers in this genre include Lynn Shelton, Andrew Bujalski, Mark Duplass, Jay Duplass, Aaron Katz, Joe Swanberg, Todd Rohal, Ry Russo-Young and Michael Harring.

“The term "mumblecore" was coined by Eric Masunaga, a sound editor who has worked with Bujalski. Masunaga coined the term one night at a bar during the 2005 South by Southwest Film Festival, but it was Bujalski who first used it in an interview with indieWIRE.[2] The directors of the films are sometimes referred to collectively as "mumblecorps," as in press corps. Film journalists have also used the terms "bedhead cinema", "postgraduate naturalism", "Myspace Neo-Realism" and "Slackavetes," a reference to independent film director John Cassavetes.”

All of this, of course, from Wikipedia, getting to be the only reference tool you’ll ever need.

I mention it because I watched the film Quiet City last night, and although I initially found it shambling and pointless, I was rather quickly won over. It’s a very pretty film with engaging characters and only a hint at the developing romance between them.