paddling – Little Home In The Valley

Cry Havoc!

February 9, 2025jono55

Let’s face it, folks. Elon and his junior partner Donald are no friends of America. What they are doing is what an invading army does when it takes over a country. Dismantling the government, then installing their toadies and sycophants into the spaces left behind after firing the people who knew what they were doing.

It’s hard to tell which one of these evil twins is the poorest example of a leader. They treat a great nation as a corporate raider would treat a chain of hardware stores they were taking over, blowing it up and then pretending they know how to put it back together.

Hubris describes a personality quality of extreme or excessive pride or dangerous overconfidence and complacency, often in combination with (or synonymous with) arrogance. The term arrogance comes from the Latin adrogare, meaning “to feel that one has a right to demand certain attitudes and behaviors from other people”. To arrogate means “to claim or seize without justification… To make undue claims to having”, or “to claim or seize without right… to ascribe or attribute without reason”.

Wikipedia

They couldn’t pull this off without the help of the Republicans in Congress. That batch of quislings must share the blame for every part of the ugly mess being created daily.

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Robin and I have slipped into a new pattern, at least for us. When we got together 33 years ago, both of us were coming off of unpleasant divorces (are there pleasant ones?).

One of the great attractions of a new relationship is that you have no mutual baggage. Every conversation is brand new, a fresh and exciting exploration of the other person. Our recent pasts were still so heavily filled with events involving our former marriages that neither one of us wanted to spend much time in those neighborhoods. So we didn’t.

Time flew and there were new memories being created almost faster than we could catalog them. But time eventually slows down, and now we are exploring parts of our histories before we met, one tidbit at a time. This son or daughter did this, when I was ten I did that … some of you may know how that drill goes.

But it has been really interesting to learn so many new/old things about someone I’ve been living with for quite a while now. Today we talked about lean times in our families of origin when bread and butter with sugar on it was supper.

A small thing. Not remembered as a hardship. Just two a decade and hundreds of miles apart who eventually would have a conversation at a supper table and realize yet one more thing they had in common.

Perhaps a photo of these nutritional victims would be in order here.

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In a recent post I spoke lightly about mounting the barricades if the need for revolution ever came. I may have been boasting. It’s a common practice of mine, as you may have noticed if you’ve been regular readers. Perhaps better to think of it as a metaphor.

These days if one puts up a barricade they will soon have a bulldozer in front of them and a drone behind, neither machine caring much about a man’s cause or well-being.

But there was a time when pure valor went a long way … this song from Les Miserables is of that time and is my favorite from the film.

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Today’s header photograph is labeled simply “Boundary Waters.” It’s been a while since I explained what that meant, so indulge me for a moment.

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BW) is in northern Minnesota, and for many decades has for me been a place of beauty, mystery, and almost mythological significance. It is a million acres of forest, water, and rock. The only watercraft allowed within its boundaries are those that one paddles, primarily canoes with a few kayaks thrown in.

The BWCAW extends nearly 150 miles along the International Boundary, adjacent to Canada’s Quetico and La Verendrye Provincial Parks, is bordered on the west by Voyageurs National Park, and by Grand Portage National Monument to the east. The BWCAW contains over 1,200 miles of canoe routes, 12 hiking trails and 2,000 designated campsites. 

U.S. Forest Service

I have visited the “BW” more than fifty times. Some of those trips only involved driving to the town of Ely MN for a touristy visit, some to rent a lake cabin on its periphery for a few days, but most of them were to take a canoe along with a bit of camping gear and push off from an entry point to enter one of the few places left in the US where industrial life is shut out.

What to find there? Well, solitude, natural beauty, aching muscles, loons and their library of calls, occasional bears and wolves, rocks under your camping pad, blisters, and spiritual renewal. That’s just to start with. I used to go twice a year, but the Rockies are a long way from the BW, and the last time now was six years ago, when Robin and I took grandson Aiden for his first trip in. The header photo was taken when Robin and I visited in 2011, and was marked by very warm days, grand scenery, and occasional attacks by hordes of particularly bloodthirsty mosquitoes.

It’s a piece of America that requires something of the visitor, but is worth the effort ten times over.

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Lei Lady Lei

July 14, 2024jono55

I’ve never been to the Hawaiian Islands. People tell me that it is lovely there, and I believe them. I might visit the islands if they were the Hawaii of 1941, when the novel and film “From Here To Eternity” took place.

At the time that I read the book I was young and very impressionable, and it “imprinted” with me. Later I saw the movie and I became permanently bonded to a time and place. In fact, that film had more than a little influence on my enlisting in the Air Force as a teen. The military life seemed the life for me.

Especially since there was always the off chance that I might meet the real life incarnation of Deborah Kerr’s character in the movie … ay ay ay … that scene … still … after all these years …

Well, that adventure didn’t last very long. I never got to be a pilot and I never got to Hawaii. But I did get to spend several weeks sweating profusely at Lackland AFB in south Texas in August, and came back home resolved to pick up my college career and get serious about it.

So if you look at it in in a certain cockeyed way, “From Here To Eternity” may be the reason that I finished college and med school.

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There is a certain genre of Hawaiian music that I have come to love, called slack-key guitar. And one of the most beautiful musical pieces of any genre I have ever heard comes from this tradition.

Here is the King’s Serenade (‘Imi Au Iā ʻOe), by Keola Beamer.

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While it is true that celebrities are no smarter than anyone else when it comes to politics, and there is no reason to give their opinions any more weight than let’s say, any old un-famous person, there is no reason to give them less, either.

George Clooney is a favorite of mine in the actor department. If he had only done O Brother Where Art Thou, and nothing else, it would have been enough to win me over.

So I gave his op/ed in the Times the same level of scrutiny that I would give yours. The only difference between he and we being that he is closer to the center of the action than most of us. And when he says we’re in a tight spot, I am prone to believe him.

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From The New Yorker

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How often does something turn out exactly the way you’d hoped? Robin and I had planned a several-day getaway to a small campground at Woods Lake, about 1 1/2 hours from home. The heat was rising here in Paradise, and at 9,600 feet, the temperatures promised were 20 degrees cooler, and off we went.

To get there you go through the marijuana capitol of our area, Ridgway CO, continue on for about twenty miles, then turn left to go past Placerville (home of the Yo Mama moving company), until you are almost to the megalopolis of Sawpit CO. You then turn right to drive up the Fall River road, which is 2.5 miles of pleasant blacktop followed by 6.5 miles of equal parts good gravel road, tooth-loosening washboards, bomb craters, and boulder fields.

Where that road finally ends is at Woods Lake. An alpine gem.

We launched our now almost-new kayaks onto the water and the wind did not blow. The sun did not scorch. The insects did not bite. The least movement of the paddle was enough to move the boats on a near-mirror surface. The lake is not a large one, and we were able to circumnavigate it a couple of times before supper on the first afternoon. Sometimes we just floated out there, admiring the mountains around us.

A handful of photos from Woods Lake.

We paddled through forests of neon-blue damselflies, watched clouds of tiny anonymous summer insects whirling over the water in the golden light of early evening, spent several minutes observing a beaver the size of a panel truck gnaw on an inch-thick branch, saw shorebirds of several different species running back and forth on narrow mudflats.

After all those hours of paddling and hiking we returned home wishing we had servants to fan us and brighten up our lemonades. That’s one of the two things life requires to be perfect and is almost always missing. People whose only aim in life is to make you comfortable and keep you fed.

The other missing part is having a background score for your life. Music that swells when feelings are building. Becomes expansive when you are confronted by beauty. Chills when your ex comes for a weekend with the kids. Weeps at times of misfortune.

No doubt about it. I need someone to write my soundtrack. Maybe this guy, Richard Thompson would do it for me. This dramatic melody from the movie Grizzly Man could just as easily be playing in the background as I spoon yogurt onto my granola in the morning.

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From The New Yorker

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I Am, I Said

April 1, 2024April 3, 2024jono55

I am a writer. I’ve denied it for years because I once thought that it didn’t count unless you wrote the novel of the year. But I write short pieces and string them together to make this blog, and that is the niche I occupy. It’s not Tolstoy. It’s not even Stephen King. It’s a sort of blather that I started to amuse my children and then found that those children were not easily amused and I was going to have to work at it to keep them reading.

Then it was something that I also did for myself, like writing a journal that you allow people to see, rather than keep it secreted away in a leatherette volume protected by a weak lock that will open with a tiny golden key (or you could just cut the flimsy leather strap with any household scissors). To me it was saying, like the Neil Diamond song – I am.

I Am, I Said, by Neil Diamond

I suspect that there are others among you who have had times in your lives when you wanted to say I am. Writing has been helpful to me, and you can see how little talent it takes to do it by reading my stuff. So write without fear, friends. You have nothing to lose but your dignity, and you may say something that resonates with a stranger on the other side of the world.

A change has occurred in my own thought life as the years have passed, and now I find myself saying more and more as my bucket o’days accumulates – We Are.

The horrorshow that reading the daily newspapers has become is never going to improve if all of the bozos like me do nothing but run around saying I Am in our separate and desperate identities. Except for those among us who are card-carrying psychopaths, there should be enough common ground for the remainder to stand on while we roll up our proverbial sleeves and get to work.

For me, at least, that means thinking more in terms of We and less in I. Alone I can make little progress in any of the problem areas America faces. But WE can.

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