On the road (9/12/2024)

Not a very imaginative or original title, but it is appropriate. As I mentioned in my previous post, I have been traveling the famous U.S. highways and some of the byways. This last time, it was a quick trip across, delivering one of our cars to my daughter and her spouse. We had three vehicles and that is more than enough for a retired couple. It was a solo trip this time; my wife stayed home to take care of the dogs and bonsai. In addition, it is hurricane season and it always feels risky leaving home for an extended period. The region was hit by a tropical storm when we took a similar trip last year.

In the past we have taken a few road trips across and I still enjoy it. In 1979 we drove from Delaware to Utah for our graduate studies. We did the opposite trip in 1981 on our way to a new job in Nepal. Those were my really first multi day road trip. On the way we visited my wife's friends in Lexington (KY), Louisville (KY) and Columbia (MO). We continued on through Denver to Cheyenne, and ended our trip in northern Utah. We drove an AMC Pacer, which looked like a fishbowl on wheels. On the way back we raced through Nebraska, Iowa and the Midwest; we were in a hurry. We somehow fixed my wife's paintings (she's an artist) to the ceiling of the car, and the gap between the paintings was occupied by our two cats; our two dogs were on the back seat. The other memorable thing that I remember is hearing Barbara Mandrell’s song titled “Crackers” over and over while driving through the prairie states (Nebraska and Iowa). It always amazed me that this song was so popular in the Bible belt since she invites someone back in her bed after a fight and I didn’t think it was her hubby.

Our next trip across the continent was in 1986, but now from Delaware to southern New Mexico. This time in a Honda Civic Wagon, with the same two dogs and only one of the two cats. The most exiting episode was when our cat escaped out of our room of an Indian run motel, in Artesia, NM. We had to stay another night before we found our cat and we could complete the journey. We got to know that town quite intimately that layover day. During those study years we made one more road trip, back and forth for Christmas vacation. Another time we drove to Dallas and flew from there to visit the grandparents of our 1 year-old daughter. In the mean time we made some other trips: to Corpus Christy for one and later on to California (the San Luise Obispo area).

Finally, we did the trip across that I describe in last year's posting: Yorktown to Montana to Long Beach and back home. In addition, my wife drove across one time to take our daughter to Sacramento and now I did this solo trip. I also made a solo trip from Gallup (NM) to Richland (WA) and from Virginia to Maine (I-95). We also have traveled to Charleston (SC) by car. In the past we frequently traveled the Pennsylvania Turnpike when we lived in Cincinnati and visited the (grand) parents in Delaware.

What highways did we take. We lived on Route 66 in Gallup, NM, and we did other Route 66 sections in Arizona, California, Oklahoma, and Missouri. These past two years Interstate 64 was a common route in our trips across the country. We have also traveled Interstates 70, 35, 40, 44, 15, 70, 76, 80, 84, 10, 37, 90, 94 and 95. Highway driving is fair. It is a great way to quickly get from point A to point B; however, the landscape typically flies by. We always joke that the Texas Interstates are the reason we were able to conceive our daughter; all those early arrivals in motel rooms and having time for more time for intimacy (aka wild monkey sex … we were still young … sorry daughter). Naturally, the radar detectors assisted in our speedy arrivals.

Honestly, I like the byways. We have taken large sections of the Lewis and Clark trail through Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Idaho, and Montana. We have driven some of the country roads in Missouri, Kansas, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Arizona on some of our other cross-country forays. I like those much better. It allows you to sightsee and just spend time to take it all in.

Things have changed over the years. While in the old days we poured over maps to plan our trips; Google maps is now my go to source. I still plan a trip marking destinations and aiming to keep a day's drive to around 300 miles (480 km). That distance can amount to approximately 6 to 7 hours of driving. Going west is easier because you gain time when crossing into another time zone. Going east you can lose an hour and a 7 hour drive all the sudden results in an 8-hour trip (on the clock) when you cross into the next time zone.

This is just a sampling what we have done. We have spread our wings and shared our exhaust gasses with many places. We still enjoy traveling the highways and byways by car (and now our van).

Bison near the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.  All the pictures below are from my latest trip.

Me at the North Rim

The Four Corners

Highlands of Colorado

Not knowing what you want (9/29/2021)

My last installment I wrote about the crossroads I was at and my trip to Maine. During this trip, I had time to hike, and spend a lot of time in nature. The area we visited in Maine has a lot of natural preserves owned by foundations that are open to the public, which were absolutely wonderful. We also visited the arboretum in Augusta and a State Park. Everything to do with nature and plants really floats my boat. My daughter and I spent our time identifying ferns and looking at other plants.

One of the photographs I took in coastal Maine at the Wolfe's Neck Woods State Park.  One of the few state run places.

Vacations are nice that way; no pressure to watch the news, my daughter and partner cooked, and I had more time to catch up on my reading. Just great therapy for a few days before getting back to the grind of working. I am reminded of the fact why many folks in Europe have six weeks vacations compared to our measly one to three weeks. I strongly believe that vacation actually increases the productivity at work. I have noticed that mine has gone up these two weeks since I have been back. In the past, I explained to my supervisor that when I get stuck in my course design, it is best for me to go for long walks in the woods and mull things over. Honestly, I am not kidding, I really play things out in my head while walking; ideas come to me, away from the computer.

But that is really not what I was planning to write about in this post this time. Or maybe it is all related.

What I did want to write more about is those crossroads, my time in Maine and what I am reading at the moment. During our walks, I tried to explain to my daughter that one of the things I would love to do is become a certified forest bathing therapist. I explained to her what it was and what therapists do. You are supposed to take an expensive course to be able to call yourself a therapist, and I am sure you are considered a charlatan if you sell yourself as a therapist without the official certification, or worse, you can get sued by some forest bathing association.

That somehow gets me to the book I am reading and the quote that struck me and was the prompt for this post: “The problem with not knowing what you want is that you want everything.” I found this in a book written by Scott Stillman entitled “Nature’s Silent Message.” Darn it, you may want to put “to do” behind the words “want” and you have me, or as my mother always accused me to know a little about a lot (too many things) and be “a master of nothing.” I have been told that I am a darn decent teacher and hopefully I try to research the subjects I teach enough that I am credible as well. I study a lot of bonsai videos, but I still consider myself a dilettante. The writing I am doing here for this blog never really took off; probably because I am all over the place and not focused enough. I have 200 to 300 steady readers; I am definitely not an influencer, and neither is my Instagram site. But then, do I want to be that, or just comfortable with a few steady readers?

I realize that the critique of Stillman’s book is that it meanders and is all over the place, and so is my blog, I am afraid. But hopefully is has a common thread or in the end it comes back where I started. I just wonder if I need to focus, just on my bonsai; or on my teaching; on my environmental stance and opinions; on my biological and ecological background; on nature or forest bathing; on (god forbid) my political views; empathy; on sailing ( which I have had no time for the past two years); on my love for wine and microbrews; food and cooking; on reading; or just on (my) life and musing on what is going on around me. If you look at my subject list it is exhaustive. Crazy!

I would love to hear from you all what you think, what you prefer to read. Because I know that if I do not know what to write about (or what you all want me to write about) I will want to write about everything, to paraphrase Mr. Stillman. The story of my multifarious life.

Although I rarely post a selfie in my blog, here it is.  A happy Maine picture, waiting for lunch.

Crossroads (9/14/2021)

I have been somewhat at a crossroads in my life and on the other hand at peace with being there. Looking back at these past few weeks, it has been an interesting time, as it probably is for many of you or eventually will become for many of you. Being part of the so called “sandwich generation.” I am not sure which generation the top half of the bread is a which is the bottom, but although one, the parent part, has been reduced to only one, it has become progressively heavier or thicker. The kid, we only have one daughter, part of that sandwich is progressively getting thinner or lighter. But she has not gone away all together, in particular since she decided that she is going to get married early next fall and she wants to do it here in Virginia while she lives in Maine. So, you get the message, it looks like we will need to do a lot of leg work. We have absolutely no problem with the marriage itself, we just hoped she would elope (not really, that is just me joking).

In the middle of August, we moved my father-in-law from his spacious condo to an apartment in an independent living facility. Since he is 94, hard of hearing, technically blind in one eye, and has difficulty walking, the task fell on us to downsize him. He is still very much with it, thank goodness. But it was a lot of work going through his home and figuring what to take and what would go to our home or what we would have to take to Good Will. I think my back has finally recuperated somewhat. But our home is still one big tripping hazard. We look like hoarders! But a lot of his stuff is much better quality than ours which we accumulated in our student days of the late 1980s. Yes, we bought some new later with our limited budget.

However, it is not over. During the past year and a half of COVID, I did most of the shopping for my father-in-law. We were hoping that this would be a thing of the past with his move. Before he lived 10 minutes away, which has now become a 25-minute drive (each way). But the orders are still pouring in: peanut butter cup ice cream, lactose free milk, Post grape nuts, just to name a few of the essentials. Today I ordered a chair for his shower. His dry-cleaning lady misses him and asks my whether he is eating enough at his new place.

There are good things too. He gave us (me) his car, which is 9 years younger than mine and the same make and model. My car has 313,000 miles on the odometer, his had 31,000. I am paying is forward, I think, and I’ll be driving my car up to Maine this weekend to give it to our daughter and her fiancé, in the hope it holds up and they can use it as a second car. But Hondas should be able to do it for a while, I hope. (Postscript … I am editing this post while sitting in Maine. The car made it, and everything is fine).

Typical Jersey turnpike breakfast for champions like me.  

So yes, watching people getting older, talking about a daughter getting married, and approaching 70 in a few years (I am 68 right now), makes you wonder when it will be my time. These are the crossroads I was talking about. Should I retire or not retire, that is the question. Reading an article in the newspaper this week that Jill Biden who is 70 returned to the classroom to teach was somewhat interesting if not encouraging. Hey, I can do that too! I had a physical just before Labor Day, and while the words physical exam is somewhat disappointing, I came through it with flying colors. It was just a set of blood test which showed I was more-or-less healthy. It does make you feel good, and it was another piece in the puzzle in making that decision on retirement. Maybe I can try to break Jill Biden’s record.

There you have it. These are some of the things messing with my head and with my life. My crossroads right now. Not necessarily bad. This is why I am at peace with what is to come in my life; maybe more than ever.

Travels, nature and breweries (4/9 through 4/16/2016)

My wife and I have been away on vacation for a week.  It was wonderful, away from work, away from the regular travel I do for work, just away from all the regular crap I do all the time.  We spent time in New England; we visited our daughter who goes to graduate school in Boston (Harvard) and (as we describe it to friends) we stole her car for a few days and drove to Maine.  This entry: however, is more about a few experiences I had and how they relate to some of the subjects that are a common thread in this blog.

As any good naturalist or any good Unitarian Universalist that visit New England should do (it helps I am both), I visited WaldenPond.  It is somewhat of a pilgrimage site for many of us.  I often mention Aldo Leopold, who introduced the idea of environmental ethics, but in truth, it was Henry David Thoreau who was one of the first persons who introduced naturalism to the American public and the need to get away in nature.  He had a strong need to go back to the land, to get his sanity back, learn what life was all about and what it could teach him:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

The location of Thoreau's cabin near Walden Pond.

The plaque showing the location of the chimney of the cabin.

This is one of the most common used quote from Thoreau when it comes to Walden.  Walden was published in 1854 and was based on a more than 2 year stay in a cabin in the woods near Walden Pond.  It is just interesting to see how already in the mid-1800s there was an obvious need by some to get away from it all and go back to nature, to connect to nature, to experience nature and describe it.  Did Thoreau experience nature deficit disorder in 1850?  But it definitively shows the need to connect to nature.

Walden Pond

Thoreau was a fascinating character he did a lot more than just live for two years near a pond, he is worth a read and a study.  I have read a few books by him or books that tried to retrace his steps and it was impressive what he did.  But he was more that a naturalist he also was a philosopher, a humanist and humanitarian.  There is a whole society set up around this scholar and thinker.

While sitting in coffee shops, microbreweries and funky restaurants is wonderful, albeit maybe not so wonderful on the budget, they can only satisfy me so much.  It is really the nature that nurtures me and satisfies me in the long run.  Our most favorite times and memories of our trip to New England will definitively be our hikes around Walden Pond and on Mount Dessert Island (Acadia National Park); our trip to the top of Mount Battie to look over the Penobscot Bay; and our walks around all those wonderful lighthouses looking over the water (that’s nature too).  They will be staying with us much longer than that food we ate at that restaurant.

Visit to the Allagash Brewery (my favorite) in Portland Maine)

We encountered a beaver dam in Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island (near Bar Harbor, Maine)

Looking down on Camden and the Penobscot Bay from Mount Battie

One of the many lighthouses we visited and had an opportunity to enjoy ocean views.  We saw a lot of common eiders swimming in the waters below these lighthouses. 

The need for nature really struck me during our walks through downtown Boston.  It is great to see how the famous "Big Dig" stuck a major highway under ground and turned the above ground part into a park.  Moreover, it was great to walk on the Boston Commons, in the Boston Gardens and even along the Charles River.  All little pieces of green, where people could enjoy a little nature.  One bizarre thing struck me and I had to take a photograph of it (below).  Not far from the Paul Revere house was a church that where the outbuildings were completely covered with a canvas depicting plants, branches and leaves.  It reminded me of Richard Louv's in his book "The Nature Principle" in which he describes that research has shown that even pictures of nature in buildings and offices help in reducing stress.  Personally, I know that being in nature is so important in bringing down my stress level and (I assume) bringing down my blood pressure.  Nature can be the woods (green) or the water (blue).  That's why I was so fascinated by what I saw on the church; hopefully it does the same in the area near the church.  I found it such an interesting idea of using a bare wall.  What a sight!

The canvas nature mural on a church in downtown Boston