I believe in you (07/04/2026)

We are about to celebrate the 250th anniversary of this country that I adopted as my home. We should be celebrating, but why? This country is being run by a narcissistic egomaniac who waged a war and let the other side win. He is only in this game for his glory, and his handlers let him while they pull their racist and capitalistic strings. Our leader is just their puppet as long as they feed his ego and his wallet.

On July 4th we will be celebrating the USA’s independence; the signing of the Declaration of Independence from England. Three of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were Unitarian – my religion-: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, while Benjamin Franklin had a Unitarian leaning. One of the items that upsets me currently is that Unitarian Universalism was relegated to the ranks of non-religion, and the military does not even allow chaplains from our denomination among their ranks. You can imagine how upsetting this is to me. Our daughter is a Unitarian minister, and she served as a chaplain. Moreover, I have a leadership role in our church at the moment.

All three signers of the Declaration of Independence that I mentioned above, believed in a God, but not in a trinity that most if not all Christians believe in. Over the years this has evolved and after the merger with the Universalists the church embraces all believes including pagans, atheists and humanists. One of my favorite sayings now is that we UUs believe in each other.

How celebratory am I, are you, should we be? I more or less permanently moved here in 1986, and I did not grow up with the 4th. I eventually became a citizen in 1994; studied the constitution and history for my citizen’s test. Ever since I retired as a naturalist instructor, I have been into studying Lewis and Clark, Jefferson, the abolitionist movement, women’s suffrage, and of late Lincoln. I should be celebratory with all that has been achieved in this country and in my life over the years, but I feel lukewarm. It feels like we are going back on all the progress that was made in the past. I feel saddened and concerned.

How about you? I am sure there will be people out there that are celebrating because they think things are going great. Some of you may party because you are just a party animal. Others will be like me ambivalent about the current state of affairs, or just down on it. Whatever you do this weekend, take time to reflect on where we are as a country and maybe even you personally. What do you think is the outlook for the future, again yours, your family, society, this country and the world.

Plastic fantastic lover (1/18/2026)

I am traveling this week and was struck by what is on my pill box.  We live in a "What the Fuck" time. (I know it is a plastic box)

A few years ago, I first learned from the book “Finding the Mother Tree” by Suzanne Simard that trees in the Northwest had accumulated fish DNA. This occurred in trees with a lot of fish carcasses around the base. All these fish bones were likely left there by bears (grizzlies) after they ate the salmon they caught. Can you imagine bears leaning against a big tree and munching on dead fish. It sounds like a Gary Larson Far Side comic. Some of these trees were a considerably distance removed from the stream from which the fish were harvested by these animals. It seems the mycorrhizal fungi were decomposing the carcasses and sharing the nutrients including the DNA with the tree.

Thinking about it, it begs the question will human DNA also be incorporated into nature? Could it be that the trees in the woods behind our home have some DNA from George Washington? He spent time in these woods, and I am sure that he left some DNA behind. I am not sure how long DNA remains unaltered when single cells are deposited in the natural environment.

Next question: is my DNA being incorporated into nature since I love to pee outside in the yard and in the woods? I learned that we are able to detect if people have corn products in their diet. Corn has a certain isotope composition that can be incorporated into our bones. An isotope analysis of these bones will show archaeologists what a person’s diet was like. Now this is not DNA, but I can now imagine that if I consistently use a single tree out there for my urination practice, it may actually incorporate something of me into its structure. This sounds like an idea that is fascinating and cool, but also scarry. Fascinating and cool because something of me may continue its presence after I am gone. I don’t know how long or even if it is more than a few molecules. Nobody has come back from being incorporated into a tree to tell me.

The scary part of this equation is that if this is true, anything we do has a long-term impact on nature. This seems to be undeniably the case anyway. It might explain why the eggs of chickens that are fed fish by products have a fishy taste, or the milk from cows solely grazing in organic pastures has a higher nutritive value than those fed with corn. The milk from these pasture and grass-fed cows has a higher Omega fat content. I have also heard somewhere that the meat from these cows rivals the Omega fat content of salmon.

While that may be not the scariest, even scarier is that we are so busy screwing up nature. We appear to be cavalier about what we are doing; it is insane. We know now that plant cells have PFAS and microplastics in them, and those chemicals are also being incorporated in us. We now find these chemicals in our brains and in men their testicles (this reminds me of Jefferson Airplane’s Plastic Fantastic Lover). Plastic babies anyone? (Is that a Frank Zappa song?)

It is unbelievable what we are doing to the environment! And then to think that the current administration is dialing back the clock and weakening the environmental regulations in favor of industry. It also seems that the large Wall street firms are distancing themselves from environmental causes. Many of the most polluting industries are in or near minority areas. It seems to be another form of genocide that they are attempting. Affluent folks can afford more expensive organic food, the costlier glass food storage containers, and so on, but let’s feed the poor and racial minority the unhealthy processed food. This seems to be the plan of the ultra-rich and the Stephen Millers of the bunch. If they cannot kill them with the Trumpstapo, by rounding them up and shooting them using the military or ICE like what happened to Heather Good, then we can at least try to poison them slowly. It is obscene! 

We need to set aside our politics. We need to protest what is going on in our environment, and fight for civil rights, environmental and social justice . Alternatively, we need to prepare ourselves to apologize to our children, grandchildren, and future generations for fucking up their world.

No snow in Montana in January.  Must be global warming.  

Does the natural world communicate with us? (1/10/2026)

I have started to read a book by Robert Macfarlane entitled “Is a River Alive.” In the introduction he writes that his 9-year-old son asked him the title and premis of the book, and when he told him, his son said: “well, that is going to be a short book, of course it is.” Reading this I wondered whether nature or the natural environment is talking to us. I am a pantheist and would like to argue that even rocks, stones, and clouds are alive and communicate with us, even though they do not have DNA.

This idea reminds me of a post I wrote some time ago entitled: “Does the world love us.” These are interesting questions. I know that I love the world. I take a walk with my dogs in the woods behind our home almost every morning. I wrote about this in 2018 (The Old Man and the Woods), where I describe taking a walk with our previous dog Jake. To think I called myself old more than 7 years ago. I had just re-read Hemingway’s book “The Old Man and the Sea,” and felt inspired by it. I just used the title to spin off the title of my post.

I try to live in the moment whenever I am out in nature. I always look around, take it all in and try to learn. For example, I love large beech trees; I like their elephant skin like bark, and I love their root spread. During the past years I have tried to make an inventory of the large beech trees in the woods behind our home. I do this by getting off the trails and bushwacking. To date I have found 17 bigger trees. I have no idea how old they are, but I always wonder if they were planted by folks that lived back there before it was converted to park land, and unlike the pines, oaks and maples these beeches were never harvested.

One of the beeches I found the other day

I am in LOVE, whenever I am in nature. Even in times like the other morning when we ran into Blondie, the blond coyote and our two dogs go absolutely insane. But as the song goes “Love hurts,” and I often find it more entertaining that aggravating, even if their howls and barks are deafening and they are trying to pull your arm off (yes, we always walk them on the leash). Those coyotes are getting bolder. Early in the morning, around 2 am on January 1 and 3 they were in our neighborhood, just a few houses over. Their howling and japing woke our dogs, and our dogs woke us. It was crazy.

But back to our woods. Before the invasion of the English settlers, the woods behind our home were the home of the Kiskiack tribe, a group that was part of the Powhatan Confederacy. Kiskiack means wide land or broad place in their native language, and it also seems to be the name of the town they lived in, near the current Yorktown. From what I can determine, the woods must have been cleared in spots for agriculture using slash and burn. Corn was their main crop. The area was also used as hunting grounds.

The Brits eventually cleared large tracks for the cultivation of tobacco. Our woods were part of something that was called the Edgehill Plantation, although there was no actual plantation house. The area was straddled by two roads: Warwick to York and Hampton to York (later on Warwick was incorporated into the town of Newport News). During those times, our region was a very active participant in the Revolution and later the Civil War. I wrote a tongue in cheek post about it once <here>.

I do not exactly know what happened after the civil war. It was around the 1930s when our immediate area was taken over by the National Park Service and most likely the Newport News water works. Recently, we examined the tree rings of a large pine that had fallen across our trail, and someone cut the trunk to allow passage. Dating it by counting the tree rings showed us that it was approximately 80 years old. It appears that the tree probably germinated around the 1940s and was allowed to grow without much interference. This again dates to a time just after the annexation of the area by the Park Service. The tree was one of the bigger ones and is located in an area with some of the largest trees in the woods behind our home.

There is so much to explore and think about when I walk through nature, listening to nature talking to me and to each other.

The beeches so far

A good haul today, we found 3

More detailed account of our Sept. 2025 trip - Part4 (11/3/2025)

So now it was time to turn the front of the vehicle towards the south and southeast. That morning, we headed to the so anticipated Mackinac bridge. This is a 4.9 mile (8 km) long bridge that is 200 feet (61 m) above the water. It has four lanes (two each way) with the center lanes over a metal grid; in other words, when you look down you can see the water. This bridge seems to unnerve enough people that you can rent a professional driver to shuttle you across. Not for us, it actually was a fun easy drive across in our Transit on our way to Traverse City.

Little did we expect that the drive through the northern part of Michigan would be so beautiful. We fell in love with Charlevoix (another French name) and Traverse City. The next day, we stopped over at the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore Park on our way further south. Sleeping Bear Dunes is another place we need to spend more time at during a subsequent visit. It is absolutely all that it is made out to be. That afternoon, after a nice hike through the dunes, we drove south to Weidman via Pontiac. But first lunch and coffee in the parking lot at the park. It is nice to be able to do that in the van. Our Anker Solix (no I am not sponsored by them) has been an invaluable during this trip; we had no problem brewing our own coffee while just sitting in a parking lot.

The KOA in Weidman was at least better than the one we visited on our way up; the owners had really made an effort, but our site selection was somewhat dismal. Our neighbor, a welding inspector from Texas, had been living there for a couple of months. When he returned from work, he sat outside a spoke very loudly over the phone with his brother who had his birthday. We learned more about that family than we wanted to know. We now learned that inexpensive sites come with their own challenges. But then the cheap off-grid $10 and $20 sites are sometimes much better.

We had missed Holland, Michigan, so this Dutchman had to go there. We first stopped in Muskegon at the Hackley and Hume Historic Site and had a nice walk along the harbor. The father of a dear friend of ours grew up in the Hackley and Hume house in the 1930s. The windmill and the New Holland Brewing were on our schedule for that late afternoon and evening. Holland reminded me a little of what I left in the Netherlands. For example the Dutch Reformed Church (de Gereformeerde kerk or Zwarte Kousen Kerk = Black Stockings Church), there were four on one block in the beautiful center of town. Shops in parts of the town were closed on Sundays, another relic from old Europe. The architecture downtown was charming.

The next day we went further south, with the Hocking Hills in Ohio on our radar. We left the interstate highway after a beautiful hike in Hudsonville and headed south to Bowling Green, Ohio. A little piece of highway near Kalamazoo and then we drove relatively narrow farm roads to our motel. While driving, we wondered how many people would enjoy the narrow rural farm roads and observe farm life, like we did. It was absolutely delightful; corn and soybeans were yellowing which cast a wonderful fall vibe to our drive. The next day down to the Hocking Hills we tried to do the same thing but eventually could not avoid the hustle and bustle of the highways around Columbus, Ohio. We did stop for a very brief walk at Stepping Stones Park in Upper Sandusky; another place where after exterminating all the native Americans we memorialize them; at least that was our feelings after visiting the place.

Hocking Hills is a must-visit place. It was crowded, but that is not surprising since it was a nice warm Sunday afternoon. We had a great hike in the canyon. The most expensive space at the KOA in the area gave us a concrete pad where we finally could get rid of some of the sand we had picked up in Michigan. We have an outdoor rug that we put out, and oh boy, did it accumulate a lot of sand during our beach camping nights

This brings us back to the post about September’s trip that I started out with; Douthat State Park. I hope that I did not bore anyone to death with these travelogs. Let me know. I have tried to add a few of my observations and thoughts in this four/five-part series and tried to stay away from a travelog that goes like: we went here to here and then here; although that is unavoidable. I promise, my next posts will probably again be more political, philosophical and educational. Moreover, one of these days I will write about my impressions of America after four extended trips through this amazing country. But I encourage all of you to travel, see your country and learn from the folks who’s lives you touch in your daily lives and during the trips you take.

Fall in Central Ohio

Hiking in the Hockin Hills, OH

The Hackley Hume Historic site

Camping in Weidman, MI

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