The Virginia Nomad

I am a (retired) trainer with the State of Virginia. I used to travel throughout the state to teach Erosion and Sediment Control and Stormwater Management. I like taking photographs. I am a naturalist, trained in biology and ecology with a very deep-rooted love for nature. In this blog I like to share my photography hobby, other hobbies of mine, including my passion for sailing, biking, hiking bonsai, and nature. I will also share my philosophical outlook on life and some of experience.

Thursday, May 8, 2025

Serenity please (5/8/2025)

I have a friend whose adult son is addicted to fentanyl. He has been kicked out from rehab clinics for the stupidest things such as giving (selling?) cigarettes at the clinic he was in for rehab (yes, he was stupid). His son now lives out of his car in Richmond; he refuses help from his father and is still using drugs whenever he can. My friend was told that he is essentially helpless and just must wait till his son either dies or genuinely asks his father for help and to put him in rehab again. In the meantime, my friend’s counselor told him to pray. The problem is that he does not believe in a god, and we had a long discussion on prayer. We concluded that the best would be to recite the serenity prayer that I started out with in this post.

My wife and I are extremely upset by what the current occupier of the White House is doing. So much so that when we watch some of the comics making fun of tRump or mUsk and accomplices, she gets even more upset. We refuse to watch the national news shows any longer, although we do read the New York Times and the Washington Past. She is getting more and more distressed. I told her to recite the serenity prayer:

I have adopted a more Buddhist attitude: you cannot do anything about the past (or dwell on it), you cannot impact or be worried about the future (or get upset about it). However, best is to try to live in the present and enjoy the shit show!

Maybe a strange way of living; and yes, I get pissed about what these people and the republican house and senate are doing. The only thing that I can do about it is to contact my elected officials, to demonstrate, and to advertise my displeasure in my writings, postings and interaction with people.

As I promised in my latest post, I will continue writing and let you know where my heart is and what’s going on in my mind and heart. We are living in difficult times; USAID, the EPA, NOAA, Social Security, health and money items more are being assailed by these nuts, they want the clearcut and mine our national parks and monuments. They are going after art and education, planning to turn museums into prisons. This all feels very much like what happened in the 1920s and 30s in Germany; and we know what that led to. They built their first concentration camp in Poland, the republicans built one in El Salvador. Nicely out of the way of the public in both cases (the 30s and now). So don’t get me wrong, I am angry and upset; however, I keep reminding myself to “enjoy the shit show.”

One more time:

Last week we spent some time at James River State Park near Gladstone, VA. It was so nice to be off the grid and enjoy the night sky in this dark sky park,

Wednesday, April 16, 2025

April 2025 Update (4/16/2025)

I have been laying low, lately. This is partially because of the current political climate. I don’t want to have a knee jerk reaction to all the things I read in the news and then need to retract it, as seems to be the rule in the current administration in the Whitehouse. In addition, there has been a lot of things going on in my life. To start with, I was asked to teach a course for an outfit in Northern Virginia, like I have done in the past. This required a lot of extra time developing a course. While that was taking up a lot of my time, I got the request whether I was willing to serve as president of the “Board of Stewards” of our Unitarian Church. After some deliberation I agreed to step forward and volunteer for that position. Leading a church is a huge job and I have been slowly preparing for it. The job will start on July 1. However, I am already being sucked into it and I am reading Roberts Rule of Order. Lastly, I am going back to the Lochsa lodge (ID) and Clay Jenkinson this coming winter to talk about “Thomas Jefferson and the West.” This requires me to read all kinds of non-fiction works on and by Jefferson, although interesting, it is not something I have done a lot in the past and it is therefore not completely in my wheelhouse. I just enjoy the American west and even written a published essay about the relationship between the east coast and the “wild west.” This and the presidency will require a steep learning curve.

Let me assure you that I do not plan on quitting writing. Things may slow down in the next few months, I really do not know. Am I afraid of commenting on the political climate in these posts? Hell no, I do a lot of editorializing on Facebook, Threads, and my Bluesky accounts, and I am not afraid of being targeted by anyone. I am sure they have much larger fish to fry. Although I might have wanted to be an influencer and monetize on my ramblings, I realize now that my readership is very limited (last month I had 6897 hits and this month only 131), and I don’t reach a lot of folks. Moreover, I have given up on the idea of getting rich from my writings.

So why am I doing this? The Unitarian Universalist Kurt Vonnegut (one of my favorites) supposedly said/wrote this:

That sums it up for me. This blog is somewhat of a diary and a way to blow off steam, to vent my anger and anxieties. Being a consummate teacher, I also try to educate you. It will hopefully make my soul grow, keep me young and hopefully, and if you are able to read this far into this post, maybe you are too and hopefully you will learn a little from my ramblings. I am not going to change the world, we need to do this together, and soon it will be up to you.

Participating in support of the democracy in our country

Friday, March 7, 2025

Honor your ancestors (Story of my life 4) (3/7/2025)

I have been watching a documentary on YouTube called Kintsugi (The Ancient Japanese Practice that Will Heal You). While a lot of people that know me closely might say that this is wasted time for me; I am so screwed up and cannot be healed. As part of the healing process, the 4-part series taught me about the importance of honoring the people who came before me: my ancestors. I feel that the least thing I can do is write about them, which is as close as I can get to visiting their past lives and thus honoring them. I don't know where they are buried; moreover, that is a continent, and an ocean removed from where I now live.

I come from a long line of builders. My father started out as an engineer and road builder. After the Second World War he briefly worked for his father who owned a construction company. He married my mother in August 1948 and sometime after that they departed to Kinshasa in what was then the Belgium Congo, where he had taken a job in the road construction business. Back then it was called Léopoldville. He did not last long and after two years or so took a job as a director of the furniture manufacturing company in Albertville (now known as Kalemi) in the eastern part of the Congo. This is the place where I was born. We moved to Antwerp in Belgium when I was 2 years old. In Antwerp, dad was working on the restorations of the “Grote Kerk,” the main church in downtown Antwerp. We moved to the Caribbean in 1956 and lived 13 years in Curacao and a half year or so in Aruba. Dad started out in the road building industry, became a director of a construction company, and an architect. He continued managing the restoration of some of the old buildings along the harbor of Willemstad, the capital of Curacao. After moving back to the Netherlands, my father worked in the construction management field and traveled all over the world. He spent time in Germany, Turkey, Congo, Cameroon, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Indonesia before he finally retired.

Uncle Willem (Wim), dad's brother owned a construction company, and when we moved back to the town of Capelle and den IJssel in 1996 he had developed and built almost ¾ of that town. As I mentioned before my opa (grandfather) owned a construction company, as well. However, my uncle Wim built his company on his own, from scratch. My great-grandfather (my grandfather’s father) was also into construction. He was a very skilled carpenter and his claim to fame was that he supposedly built the Bijenkorf (a large department store) in the center of The Hague (Den Haag). This must have been in the early 1900. The odd duck out was Karel, my father’s oldest brother. He ended up owning an optical store. Anyway, from the two brothers down to my great-grandfather they were all very skilled and talented carpenters. Even Herke, Karel's son, was a very accomplished woodworker.

I do not know much about my mother's side. Her father was not into building. Opa van den Ende was a butcher and owned a butcher shop in Terbregge a small suburb of Rotterdam. Mom (or Ma as we called her) had three brothers, one (Jan) died in a German concentration camp, and another (Cor) was an accountant. I do not know what the third brother (Siem) did. The only thing that is somewhat related to building is my mom's second nephew Ben. Ben was the owner of a kitchen installation and renovation company.

Naturally, one cannot help comparing all these folks that went ahead of me with my skills and abilities. However, together, my wife and I have renovated three bathrooms, including two in our current home. In Yemen I built my own house and a plant nursery and office; I also built a wooden play structure for our daughter, in Gallup, NM. In our current home my wife and I tiled a huge portion of our home (kitchen, breakfast room and library/stove room), we built two sheds from scratch and a woodshed. I also built a large built-in bookcase in our home. Finally, during the past 15 years I taught environmental compliance to folks in the construction industry. In other words, I dare say that I somewhat continued the family tradition in the building industry (sorry Opa van den Ende).

It is fun to see where your forefathers come from and how you fit in the continuing story of a family, of your life. And yes, I do believe there are healing properties in writing and paying respect to your forefathers. I am really not writing this as a self-gratification exercise, but also for my daughter, my future grandson, nieces and nephews. I believe that family history is important and honoring them by documenting their existence in this manner will hopefully make them live forever. We have such powerful tools to do this by being able to blog on the internet, unlike our forefathers who did not have these tools and depended on passing stories down orally. The internet can be a very useful tool when it is used in such a way, as opposed to constantly maligning one another, as is seen in the case of the social media where it is often done now, in our polarized world.

This is the only thing I have from my great-grandfather. It is a fishing basket he made. It is supposed to be suspended in the water to hold the fish you caught, and shaped in such a way that you can easily carry it laying on your side while hanging from a strap

Thursday, February 27, 2025

We are going to the birds (2/27/2025)

We pride ourselves on having an eco-friendly or wildlife-friendly yard. We do not use fertilizers and pesticides and mostly use plants native to the area or those that have at least some wildlife, bird or pollinator benefit. We have five birdfeeders and at least two water stations. Birds are therefore plentiful in our backyard, in particular this winter. It has been a fairly severe winter for us in the Tidewater of Virginia. There have been days that the temperatures did not come above freezing and we had at least three snow events. This has not been fun for the birds in the area, and our feeders have been busy. Below is a list of the visitors that came over for some food or drinks:

Yellow Rumped Warbler	Cedar Waxwing
Red-Winged Blackbird	Song sparrow
White crowned sparrow	White- throated sparrow
Carolina Chickadee	Tufted titmouse
Carolina Wren	Brown Thrasher
Northern Mockingbird	Northern Cardinal
Red bellied Woodpecker	Downy Woodpecker
Hairy Woodpecker	Northern Flicker
Eastern Bluebird	American Robin
European Starling	Brown-headed Cowbird
Yellow-bellied Sapsucker	White-breasted Nuthatch
Common Grackle	Dark-eyed Junco
American Goldfinch	House finch
Purple finch	Blue Jay
Mourning dove	Eastern Towhee
Hermit Thrush

At least 31 species, not bad for a suburban yard. This list is not in any particular order, but just as I remember them. Watching them on the feeders or bird baths is interesting. There definitely is a pecking order amount the birds. I am amazed about how dominant the yellow-rumped warblers try to be. They will stand up to the big birds on the feeders, sit in the middle, ruffle their feathers and take a defensive stand. They even peck at other birds. Tough little critters they are! They will vacate the feeder when confronted by the bigger birds such as the mockingbird, the bluejay and the various blackbirds. But they will stand up against the thrasher. Bluebirds are a different story. They are fairly dominant as well and they will confront the warbler with varying result. At times they tolerate each other. There is somewhat of a peace between the cardinals and the warbler as well. The goldfinches use a different tactic. They dominate by the numbers, and all the sudden a feeder is swamped by 5 or more goldfinches and there just is no room for other birds, until a bully bird such as the blue jay or mockingbird flies in.

The shiest birds (or maybe the lowest on the packing order) appear to be the thrush, cedar waxwing, titmouse and the junco. The cedar waxwing only uses the birdbath. Thrasher is very secretive but will stand its ground, especially when they gorge themselves on the suet. It is just a lot of fun to observe all the birds, their interactions and behavior during our breakfasts and lunches.

One of the nicest moments occurred the other day. We were sitting inside with our morning coffee and newspaper when we heard a familiar bonk against our sliding door, a bird strike. Looking for the poor victim, I noticed a tiny bird, face down in a snow drift on our deck. Actually, the only thing I saw was a tail sticking out of the snow. I ran outside and softly scooped the poor bird up. It was a “butter but” or a yellow-rumped warbler as they are officially known as. I gently put it under a chair in our yard, in the sun but out of the snow. When I went to check it an hour later, the bird was gone; it had survived the crash. Approximately 15 minutes later I was in the yard and right above me in a tree was a “butter but’ flitting around in the branches, looking at me and chirping like crazy. I had never experienced that, and we have a large number of these warblers in our yard and around the feeders. I figured it was the warbler I pulled out of the snow and brought to its rehabilitation spot in the sun, and it was now thanking me for saving it. I realize that I am anthropomorphizing here but it just made me feel good. It made my day!

A dark-eyed junco on our feeder.

Wednesday, February 19, 2025

Stories of my life 3 (moving) (2/19/2025)

I have lived in my current home for almost 25 years now. Since I am almost 72, that means that I have lived here 34.7% of my life. Before moving to our current domicile, I moved approximately eleven times before getting married. That does not include four longer vacation stays (more than a month) in the Netherlands. Once out of college I served in the Dutch army at three different locations during the 16 months that I served. Moving while in the Army was easy, just a large duffle bag. We got married while serving on the last military base and that allowed me to move into civilian housing. We rented a vacation home on a Dutch camping nearby, where we lived for the first few months. First, we rented a camper from a minister but left after a few weeks when he tried to get into my young bride’s pants. Not very surprising from a religious leader trying take advantage of a young girl. A young (she just turned 22) somewhat vulnerable lady in a foreign country who doesn't speak the language, trying to fuck her. Then to think that he was married and had two young daughters. We moved into a ramshackle cabin on the same camping after that and we lived there for two months.

After leaving the service we lived in at least 13 more locations, not counting brief stints of a few weeks with both sets of parents. Twenty-eight moves or new homes in the first fourty-seven years of my life. On average , I moved from one place to another every 1.67 year or every one year and eight months. During that time I lived in nine countries (that count includes two islands in the Caribbean) on five continents (placing the two islands as Central or South America). Phew, I am tired of thinking about all that travel and moving. But on the other side, I miss it at times.

During the past thirty years I had careers that required a lot of traveling. First as a consultant I traveled for the various projects I was assigned to. I traveled to Los Angeles and a week later I was in New Hampshire or up state Pennsylvania. Then it was Louisiana or Michigan; you get the idea. When I took a job as an instructor for the state of Virginia, I was required to travel overnight at least two weeks per month, albeit in State. I liked the pleasure of solo traveling, be it by car or by air. While traveling with colleagues is fun, I somehow liked to be alone, for meals or just in my motel room. I assume that is a true sign of being an introvert, although my wife think that my claim of being an introvert is pure bull shit. However, my career forced me to be out in public and act extroverted. Marketing is the game as a consultant; although I was never good at it or comfortable with it.

And now I am retired. Do I miss the traveling? Yes and no.

Since retirement I have been across the country three times; really from the east coast to the west coast. I have written about these trips <here>, <here> and <here>. We camped at least three times around our state and stayed in a cabin at a state park. I should not forget our camping trip to the eastern shore of Maryland. Finally, another solo trip this year to Missoula, MT where I explored Walden and Desert Solitaire with a group of like-minded folks as part of the “Listening to America” organization.

Today I got the news that a friend of mine passed away last night; I am going to miss you, Roy! At least Roy led a good life (although you might say he was not kind to his own health). During retirement he and his wife travelled to South Africa, Egypt and to Petra in Jordan, just to name a few places. Other retired friends are currently in the Galapagos Islands; another good friend spent ten days in Marocco straight after retiring this year, and finally some very good friends just returned from a trip down under (New Zeeland and Australia), they were in Finland last year. I told my wife today that we better do some traveling before it is too late. Although we have seen a lot of this world and tell people things like “been there, done that, loved it, and got the t-shirt,” there are still places I would like to explore or even revisit.

Here I am in the woods behind the house I now have lives almost 25 years. I love to walk and explore these woods, I forest bath as much as I can. After 25 years I am starting to feel restless and start thinking of moving closer to our daughter.

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Transform yourself ... Stories of our life 2 (2/11/2025)

I am reading a book by Neil King, Jr. entitled “American Ramble" and was struck by a passage in the chapter on his visit to Amish country. It was a quote from the Bible: St. Paul's letter in Romans. It goes: “Be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” A little later in the book the author provides his own interpretation or translation: “Do not let the world form you. Do not conform to it. Instead, transform yourself through a renewing of your mind.” A very interesting thing to think about in todays world, indeed.

I also ran into a quote by Erasmus the other day. This quote takes me to the political situation we are finding ourselves in as a country. The Dutch humanist, philosopher, priest Erasmus’ words still ting true when he warned us in the late 1400s and early 1500 about today's politics when he wrote: “The less talent they have, the more pride, vanity and arrogance they have. All these fools, however, find other fools who applaud them.” These two quotes (Erasmus’ and King’s) intersect each other in an interesting way.

Fools in this sense does not infer that these folks are poor, destitute, have a low IQ, or not successful; just plain dumb. Bringing it back to King, these fools have been formed by a demagog called tRump. However, I am not sure who is the largest fool tRump or mUsk, who is following who in that case, and who else conforming to them and applauding them? They do not want to renew their mind but be back in the 1920s and 30s, or even earlier (McKinley?) and make this country backwards and racist again.

I want to leave it there and go on with some of the stories of my life and go back to Mr. Kings interpretation of St. Paul's words. “Do not let the world form you. Do not conform to it.” This was somewhat of the motto that I live by from my mid to late teens (late 1960s) and probably all the way until 2010. I mentioned in my previous post that I was moved to The Netherlands in August 1969 from the island of Curacao. I use the term “was moved" because it had nothing to do with my free will. As a 16-year-old you are not supposed to have free will but do what your parents think is best for you or the entire family. This move set me off on a more nihilistic path. I came from an exotic island that a lot of my new fellow students never heard of, let alone had never been too. The attention allowed me to become somewhat of a class clown, rebellious, different with an attitude of I don't give a damn.

The second part of King's translation: “Instead, transform yourself through a renewing of your mind” is also part of my life. I have always wanted to learn, but usually on my terms and not the way you are supposed to in today’s society. I took double the number of required courses in grad school and a lot of them were outside my major of study. We still have a library of a wide variety of books, some of which we are currently trying to get rid of; we are getting older and do not want to saddle our daughter up with having to dispose of them.

As I reported in an earlier post, this year I went to a retreat to discuss Walden and Desert Solitaire. Honestly, I felt like I was infected by a case of “Imposter Syndrome.” Me a scientist/educator/ecologist studying and discussing literature and philosophy? But I was renewing my mind, broadening my experience; and I had fun, learned a lot and was inspired; so much so that I am going back next year.

This brings me back to where I started with this write-up. I will continue visiting my stories as discussed in my previous post. In addition, I will keep pointing out what my perception is of what is going on in these politically and socially difficult times.

Out with the old. These mushrooms are digesting an old stimp to make place for a new tree.

Some nice forest bathing this morning. I just sat on a stump for 15 minutes and mediated in the woods.

Thursday, January 30, 2025

The Stories of our Life (1/30/2025)

The folks at my church (the Unitarian Fellowship of the Peninsula) have established what are called “Fellowship Circles.” These spiritual circles are approximately eight persons strong, meet twice a month for approximately an hour and a half and discuss a specific topic. The topic this week was “The Stories of my Life.” We were asked to discuss three questions (in a round).

The questions were:
1. Tell us a story from your life that tells us something about where you came from.
2. Tell us a story from your life that tells us something about what you are.
3. Tell us a story from your life that tells us something about where you are going.

If you read my blog regularly, my possible answer to the second question should be familiar to you; this is what this blog mostly is about. I could have given four stories that address question 1. One of the stories is about the kid that was killed for stealing a pig. This happened in Uganda (1978) and the event is still haunting me. The other stories include one on how my career started; secondly about the first kiss my wife and I exchanged in 1976 while skating on the ice between Gouda and Rotterdam; and lastly the labor riots in Curacao 1969 and what this eventually led to.

Let’s start at the beginning: Curacao. I was 15, when on May 30, we were on lunch break at our high school. We were standing just outside the gate of our school, having just returned from buying some snacks at the Portuguese shop (toko, or convenience store) across the street when a huge crowed of angry protestors marched by the school on their way downtown. I was personally blown away from seeing all these angry faces walking by and so many! The school closed down and I think it was my father who picked me up. We lived on top of a hill fairly far removed from downtown (20 or so miles) but that afternoon we watched dark billowing clouds of smoke rising from the town (Willemstad). It later appeared that downtown was partially destroyed and put ablaze by the rioters. I read reports that eventually 432 rioters were arrested. Based on those numbers you can imagine how many rioters I saw that faithful morning passing by our school. The islands went into martial law for a week, and I remember 1) family friends coming over to stay with us, to be far enough from the epicenter of the riots, 2) with my father franticly driving around the island trying to find an arms dealer or some place where he could buy a weapon to defend the family, and 3) being safely at home with my scared parents and their friends. The name of the leader of the rioters was called Pappa Godett. You can just imagine what the white minority on the island was joking about or hoping for.

A little background, we had lived in the Congo and although we had not gone (suffered) through the independence war in that country (read Atwood’s “Poisonwood Bible” or Naipaul’s “A Bend in the River”). Many of my parents’ old friends (yes, white colonialists) had and had shared the horror stories with them. These riots scared my parents shitless, enough that they started panicking. Eventually things settled down, but my parents had enough; they decided to move back to the Netherlands. They stuck me on a plane in early August to start my 3rd grade (9th for those readers in the US) in high school (the move put me back one grade). I was sent to live with my aunt and her four daughters (two more or less my age) for the first few months and was reunited with my family in December of that year.

You can imagine how this shaped me. I had just discovered girls, already fallen in love at least twice and now had a steady girlfriend. These riots pulled me away from it all, my beloved island, its culture, my friends and my girlfriend. It changed my life forever, setting a course for who I am now, not better or worse. It just made me who I am today.

Stay tuned, I will write more about the next two stories that shaped me. Who knows, I may even write the story of my future in one of these posts; however, I hinted at it in my previous two posts about the workshop with Clay Jenkinson. Conversely, the current political happenings make me feel that I cannot and should not keep my mouth shut; I still have so much to say. In other words, my life stories may be interspersed by some more social and political commentary.

Yorktown Battlefield, a place where at least two battles were fought and a lot of stories were told, and lives were shaped.

Sunday, January 19, 2025

What a week, part 2 (1/19/2025)

What did I learn during the retreat? About Clay Jenkinson, members of the group or myself? I will not detail very personal information on the first two, but I guess that I am somewhat of an open book to my regular readers, and I will write a bit more about myself and the activities I participated in.

What did we do? On Sunday we started out with a gift book exchange, where you gift a favorite book to someone in the group, while introducing yourself to the group. I gave “Solace of Open Space" by Gretel Ehrlich to one of the participants and received a book on poetry from another (“The Trouble with Poetry” by Billy Collins). On Monday we started with meetings in the morning and afternoon. There was a campfire every evening and some free time, sprinkled in between. We ate our meals together. I was surprised by the copious amount of alcohol that was consumed in the evenings. Folks shared wine, single malt and there was beer as well. We had a hike to the river to discuss Lewis and Clark and another time to reenact Thoreau and throw burning sticks in the river. A trip to a hot spring was the capstone to our get together.

Clay is as intelligent as he sounds on the radio and podcasts. He runs a fairly tight ship during the meeting and is an amazing facilitator. He is clearly the best-read person I have ever encountered with a great number of interests. He is caring and is very interested in the well-being of the participants. He engages in personal dialogues with folks during the discussions and social hours. Clay was trying to be as non-political as possible, hinting at the fact that he lived in a conservative State; however, he kept mentioning a great number of times that “Your vote matters.” My guess is that all but one participant were liberal; however, all were very well off (I counted four of the nine participants in first class on out plane on the return trip from Missoula, and I was definitively not one of them). Lastly, his daughter and future son-in-law had joined us for the first few days, and you could see his pride and love for those two. Both are also very intelligent and well read.

The participants ranged from a winemaker and his wife, to a foreign service person and wife, to retired naturalists, to retired park rangers/managers, to writers. Let’s not forget the copious number of retired lawyers (3), a financial advisor and a wall street guru. An eclectic but at the same time a very intelligent group. At least two were searching for what to do with the rest of their lives. This search was brought out to the foreground during our Walden discussions. Thoreau champions simple living, with nature. As a transcendentalist, Thoreau discusses spirituality, self-determination and personal growth. Coupled with his love for nature made most of us that week could consider ourselves to be Thoreauvian in some form or fashion. Hence, the search by some of us for the deeper meaning of life and the next step in the life we are living. Clay was good I hearing them out and making them think.

I had one of the most wonderful experiences in my life, psychologically, mentally and intellectually stimulating; it was a good kick in the ass: get going, there is such a wonderful life still to live. If you are a regular reader of these posts, you must understand that I at times have struggled with the purpose of the rest of my life. I am retired and have blogged about getting old. I have mentioned that it sucks! I too am (was) trying to find purpose in (the rest of) my life. This clearly was an issue that one of the participants was struggling with and I eagerly listened in to what Clay had to tell him, without saying much myself. My understanding is that in a Thoreauvian sense, we all have a purpose in the greater whole, but sometimes we do not understand what it is. We should embrace where we are in our stage of life, suck the marrow out of the life we have been given (to loosely quote Thoreau). Yes, getting old sucks, but at least I can blog and hopefully teach something to someone. As I always thought about the classes that I taught, if one or two of the students in my class of 40 goes home thinking “I learned something” (and hopefully also thinks “and I am going to apply it") than my task for that day is done. The workshop that week somehow enforced that idea. I do not have to be an Einstein, a Thoreau, or an Abbey to have an impact on other people's lives and to make a difference how small that is.

Yes, I came out of that week refreshed and optimistic again, even though the results of the elections had left me depressed and ready to move to Mars or some other place sane. I realize that “your vote matters," and in future elections I will make mine count and make sure that you all vote as well. In addition, I will be reading more and not get sucked in so deep into the television (especially the news) and social media. I need to do more for my family and finally do more for myself. Like Clay, I will be trying to declutter my life. Wish me luck.

The Lochsa lodge

Ready to discuss Walden

Monday, January 13, 2025

What a week it has been (1/13/2025)

What a week it has been. I write this while sitting in the Missoula, Montana airport, waiting for my flight home. A guy all the way from the East Coast in cold wintery Montana. As I have mentioned in a few previous posts, we decided that it was my turn to do something different or extraordinary and go to a week meeting (or workshop) at the Lochsa Lodge with likeminded folks. The workshop was put on by Clay Jenkinson and his “Listening to America” organization. Clay puts on two winter workshops back-to-back. In addition, he has a number of summer programs. I went to a four-day (and evening) retreat/discussion on the book “On Walden Pond" by Henry D. Thoreau, and “Desert Solitaire” by Edward Abbey. On first thought an interesting comparison. I am not sure if this post will turn out to be a book report, an account of our meeting, or a free-flowing dump of my impressions and takeaways. Maybe it will become a combination of all three. I will try to keep it somewhat short and sweet, the length of most of my regular posts.

For those of you who do not know who the heck this Clay Jenkinson is, he is a humanities scholar who used to impersonate (played) Thomas Jefferson on a radio show (The Jefferson Hour), he also is an expert on Oppenheimer and on top of that an accomplished scholar on the Lewis and Clark expedition. Here I am just giving you an extremely short resume of Clay, but since this is my blog I have some discretion on what I write about the man.

Comparing Walden and Desert Solitaire may seem somewhat far fetched. When I mentioned Abbey to my friends on the east coast, only a select few (one) knew who I was talking about; and she is a Ph.D. in English literature and professor who teaches composition. Out west he is a more familiar person. I learned during our meeting that everyone who joins the National Park Service in the Southwest is recommended or maybe even required to read his Desert Solitaire. I learned about him in the early 1990s when I lived in Gallup. Abbey is an interesting character; the way I try to describe him to my friends is part hedonist, part environmentalist, conservationist with libertarian tendencies. But that might be too mild for someone who writes about his “love rocket" in his journals. An interesting character, indeed.

History is not certain if Thoreau had a “love rocket” and it is speculated that he died a virgin. What a contrast to discuss in our meeting in the mountains. Honestly, our discussions were more ethereal than the sexual exploits of our celebrated authors; however, this particular subject was good for a few laughs and (nervous?) giggles. For the readers who know my political leaning and the company I tend to keep, it also elicited some noises of indignation by some of the feminists in the group.

I am not sure if we ever came to a conclusion or if that even was necessary, but I think the group really felt that Thoreau was more difficult to read, he was more flowery; very observant and descriptive; at times arrogant or dismissive of the folks around him. He was a transcendentalist and in his own way very spiritual. I was somewhat tickled by his overt love of some of the east Asian and Chinese traditions, the knowledge of which must have been in its infancy in the mid 1800s.

Abbey was more crass, more in your face; however, the beauty of his descriptions mirror those of Thoreau. He is a true nature lover and he showed his disdain for the development of the National Parks. I think we concluded he was a visionary, somewhat predicting the over use of the parks and what we see now, the rationing of access to some parks.

I can write books about our meeting in the Bitterroots on the Idaho-Montana border. I suspect that it were fertile grounds for potential books that Clay might write. I have just scratched the surface here and plan to write some more about it in the future; albeit I am not planning a book. It was a fun week; it challenged me intellectually, something I have not had in some time. Moreover, it dealt with self-improvement and resolutions (simplify, simplify, simply). I will make this vague promise to revisit this past week again and again in future posts; however, I still need to decompress and determine what I think we accomplished there, socially and intellectually. Stay tuned.

Below a few photographs of my week at the lodge.

Saturday, January 4, 2025

2024 Redux (1/4/2025)

Realizing I owe you all a review of my 2014, I am starting this essay at the airport in Denver. I am not sure when I will be able to finish it (Missoula, MT), but I will make my initial effort. So why am I in Denver? I am on my way to a workshop held by Clay Jenkinson in the Lochsa Lodge in the Lolo National Forest in the Bitterroots of Idah o. I previously mentioned that we were going to discuss Thoreau’s On Walden Pond and Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, in these two post (here and here). I am still somewhat mystified why this scientist would sign up for a discussion on literatur e; in other words, this was one crazy thing I did in 2024. However, I do enjoy reading both authors, especially Edward Abbey, the consummate environmental libertarian.

What are some of the additional things that happened to me this past year? It feels crazy to report that three times this past year I/we drove across the country. A solo trip in September, to give my car to our daughter and her wife. In November we took the camper van across and back to celebrate Thanksgiving with the gang. You would think the drive gets old after a couple of times; however, we try to make it more interesting by choosing a different route. We took part of the Lewis and Clark route in 2023; returning through Colorado, generally in the track of the Santa Fe trail. I started out using the same route in September of 2024 but I changed it up after Alamosa, Colorado and went direction Monument Valley, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and back into Nevada, before heading to Long Beach. November and December can be relatively chilly so we opted for a more southern route.

The November trip led us from home through North Carolina, to South Carolina to Georgia. Around Atlanta we figured we were south enough to head west through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona to our final destination in Long Beach, California. We visited the same states on the way back, but took a different route that was more southern and stopped over in a few National Parks. So what were some of our observations from our travels?

While I still like the prairie states, especially the Tall Grass Prairie Natural Preserve area, Kansas still stinks (smelly feedlots). Enough so that it almost made vegetarians out of us. Now today my wife asked me what I thought of Denver airport. I told her it reminded me of Dodge City, but without the smell. Too many people stuck in a small space (like the cattle in feedlots), especially in the food court. On the other hand, I am still in love with the desert and the Grand Canyon area.

This love for the desert was strengthened during our return trip in November and December. On our way home we drove from Long Beach to Death Valley. From there it was on to Sedona, Arizona (heaven). After an overnight stop in far western New Mexico, we drove through Guadalupe Peak National Park to Van Horn, Texas. The next day we drove though the Davis Mountains and the McDonald Observatory to Big Bend National Park, three to three and a half days in the Chihuahuan Desert heaven.

Other observations include (and yes here I go again being political), that the Republican States in the south are the poorest of them all, in horrible shape, and just depressing. Visits to the First Baptist Church in Birmingham and Selma Alabama made us realize that in their eyes, black lives absolutely do not matter. We came away depressed after visiting both important landmarks of the Civil Rights era. The white dominated Tuscaloosa was in bit better shape. Central Louisiana and whatever we saw from the interstate of Mississippi were slightly better, but let’s not talk about the few parts of Jackson that we drove through.

Sugar Land, Austin and Fredericksburg Texas were a huge contrast with much of the rest of Texas that we saw. Places like Uvalde (the scene of the horrible school shooting) and anything between that town and Victoria appeared to be either big game ranches or dilapidated small town and villages. We got the impression that a lot of the inhabitants were Hispanic, which appear to be treated as second class citizens in Texas, much like the blacks in Mississippi and Alabama. I would not be surprised if Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina are similarily depressed, but we stayed mostly on major highways or the interstates since it rained incessantly during those days.

What else happened in our lives? I taught two 3-hour classes and we got a fence around our back yard. Other things include of course the election of the orange-colored white guy to the office of president. Remembering what we saw while driving through the south, the election of tRump and a Republican legislation does not bode well. Will the entire country be transformed into a perfect copy of Mississippi or Alabama? Only time will tell. But it seems that none of these morons understand that education is what makes this country great and cutting education, plus making fun of the educated elite is going to force this country back to the middle ages. Education and knowledge is what makes this country great. And let's not write about the economic safety nets they plan to demolish and all the other budget cuts they are threatening with.

I may write a bit more about our trips around this country in future posts, but I better stop for right now.