When we took our drive up to Telluride a few days ago, we saw no evidence of the leaves changing anywhere, including up to 10,000 ft. of altitude. Looks like a later Fall might be shaping up, as far as color change is concerned. Often, when the summers are as dry as the one we’ve just experienced, the colors aren’t quite as vibrant when the change finally does come, but we’ll not give up on them yet. (Truth is, I don’t know nearly as much as I pretend I do.)
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When one is going backpacking, one gradually works with their gear to hone the pile down to where they are carrying the minimum amount of stuff needed to get the job done. You have to tote every single one of those grams wherever you’re going, so that anything that doesn’t have a purpose being in that pack is a sin against nature. But when you’re car camping, you tend to continue to keep adding crap until you completely fill up the space in your car. Or in our case, our car plus the space in that camping trailer which we just sold. We did that, and now we’re going through the accumulated treasures and rethinking our goals. It doesn’t require quite the discipline that backpacking does, but you can still bring a fair amount of careful thinking into what stays and what goes.
Thus, we are now proud owners of a Thule Force 3 rooftop box that will sit atop our little Subaru. It will hold 16 cubic feet of whatever we want to put up there. Mostly it will be our clothing, our sleeping bags, and our tent. Soft things that are not too heavy works best in a box like this. It is an engineering marvel.
We do have previous experience with a less well-designed rooftop box. When Robin and I first got together, we took her children to the Black Hills on a camping trip on a Fourth of July weekend. Everything was going swimmingly until one day when we were all together out on a hike, a downpour caught us out on the trail, a Biblical sort of torrent that also went through the campground in a flood that dismantled and damaged our tents. All of our sleeping gear and most of our clothing were completely saturated. We decided to break camp and take off looking for a motel that would accept five bedraggled travelers.
To shorten up this tale a bit, we ended up driving all the way back to Yankton SD (390 miles) that night, because there were no rooms available anywhere on that Fourth of July evening. (It’s really what one expects on the single largest travel day of all in a busy tourist season in a state like South Dakota.) But it was when we finally arrived at home and began to unpack that we discovered the full measure of our disaster.
To hold some of our softer camping stuff, I had purchased a large and bulbous-looking rooftop box from Sears. We had filled it with our wet gear back in the Black Hills, and not given it a thought after that. It turned out that even though we had buckled the box up as well as it could be buckled, the dynamics of that particular box were such that when you drove at highway speeds, a corner could peel up if the wind struck it just so.
Anything stowed near that corner might then be sucked out of the box and distributed along the highway, which is what happened to nearly all of daughter Amy’s bag of wet laundry.
As soon as we reached home and we realized what had happened, I was immediately informed how embarrassing it was to a teenage girl to have her undergarments strewn along a highway in the state where she lives, especially since her name could clearly be seen in labels on the waistbands of some of the items. My abject apologies and an offer to retrace our steps to try to collect what we could fell on deaf ears, and my name, like Voldemort’s, was not to be spoken for some days after that traumatic event. Therefore in selecting this new box from Thule, I took pains to see that there was no corner that could possibly lift up and repeat that bitter history.
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Well, “Suzanne” is just one of the best songs ever. Leonard Cohen was still pretty young when he recorded it in 1966, And when I first heard it, I thought, “Well, that is a way cool song” and “I think there might be an answer to one of life’s big questions hidden in there somewhere, and I’m going to start looking for it right now.”
I still don’t know about that answer, but it was a stunner. And even today, whenever I hear it playing, I stop what I’m doing to listen to it. Gorgeous, haunting, mysterious.
What I would like right now to do is introduce this cover by Nick Cave. He has made the song his own. And guess what? It, too, is gorgeous, haunting, and mysterious.
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Winds move firm and level
Cool and dry
Leaves turning, still on branches
Small sailers on tethers
Whistling tunes to anyone with ears to hear
Fall puts me at my ease
It always has
Dusty days of sun and frost
Of care, and loss, and change
Give me Septembers, keep the Junes
That promise but so often lie
September never does
A truthful month
Reminding us of our impermanence
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There’s a fine op-ed in Tuesday’s New York Times by David French, entitled, “Pete Hegseth Is A Wrecking Ball.” It pretty much summarizes what I’ve been telling everybody that would stand still for an impromptu lecture from me, the only difference being that Mr. French actually knows what he’s talking about.
I have read here and there that there are people who consider Pete Hegseth to be a traitor to his country because of the damage he has done to our military. Personally, I think that Hegseth is too dumb to be a decent traitor, but this doesn’t mean that he hasn’t done considerable damage. His purges of the leadership of our armed forces have been haphazard, sometimes ridiculous, and, to put it in the kindest possible manner, ill-advised. On the other hand, he is doing exactly what we could easily have expected from the very beginning by examining his record. He is a boob hired by a boob to do one of the most important jobs that our country has to offer, running one of our largest organizations of all. Of course, he is doing a disastrous job of it.
Each night I get down on my knees and thank the Republican Party for helping me to clarify what good leadership is by showing me abundant examples of its opposite.
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