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Diffstat (limited to 'published')
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2011-06-10-natural-science.txt | 61 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2019-08-25_georgia-road-trip.txt | 55 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2019-09-12_hanging-around-town.txt | 56 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2019-09-25_old-growth.txt | 86 |
4 files changed, 228 insertions, 30 deletions
diff --git a/published/2011-06-10-natural-science.txt b/published/2011-06-10-natural-science.txt index 27ea720..5e46efd 100644 --- a/published/2011-06-10-natural-science.txt +++ b/published/2011-06-10-natural-science.txt @@ -1,50 +1,51 @@ ---- -template: double -point: 43.76987122050593,11.254618042254865 -location: Firenze (Florence),Tuscany,Italy -image: 2011/florenceh.jpg -desc: There's no way around it; Florence is crowded. Fortunately less well know museums like La Specola, rarely see visitors. By Scott Gilbertson -dek: There's no way around it; Florence is crowded. It may well be that Naples is the only Italian city that isn't overrun with tourists in the summer, but after three days of hardly seeing another traveler, I wasn't prepared for the crowds. Luckily it isn't hard to avoid the tourist hordes, just get up early and then when everyone else is starting to stir, head for obscure museums like La Specola, part of the Museo di Storia Naturale di Firenze. -pub_date: 2011-06-10T20:54:00 -slug: natural-science -title: Natural Science ---- +The America family road trip -- immortalized so well by [Chevy Chase](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHThGmVfE3A) -- a pretty miserable experience in my view. Pack the kids in the car to drive all day and half the night to Disney World? No thanks. -<div class="col"> +Driving long distances is pretty awful. Our rule in the bus has always been no more than 200 miles a day. There are plenty of days when we don't even hit triple digit mileage. When you do this full time there's no reason to hurry anywhere. The only time we've ever hurried anywhere was because we were meeting someone. -<p>There's no way around it; Florence is crowded. It may well be that <a href="http://luxagraf.net/2011/jun/06/new-pollution/" title="Naples the only Italian city without tourists">Naples is the only Italian city that isn't overrun with tourists</a> in the summer, but after three days of hardly seeing another traveler, I wasn't really prepared for the crowds in Florence.</p> +One reason we didn't immediately head west out of Texas for spots more to our liking was that we knew we'd be heading east to Georgia at the end of summer. Corrinne's parents came up from Mexico for a couple weeks and we wanted to see them. We knew we were going to drive and less driving the better. -<p>Florence is, admittedly, more of what tourists expect Italy to be. There's no graffiti, the streets are free of trash and the city looks like something out of a fairy tale cliché -- narrow, winding streets, beautiful river walks and plenty of English-speaking waiters. And so they come.</p> +Visiting family and friends in Athens sounded like a whole lot more fun than Wally World or Disney World or any other fake world. We're awfully fond of the world we have, so why not try a good old fashioned road trip to Athens, GA? -</div> +We left the bus in Texas, but there was still no way we were going to drive 12 hours straight through. Jackson Mississippi is roughly the halfway point, so we set about finding something fun to do in Jackson. Something better than [wrecking our health or making a big fool of ourselves](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGhCsznO0S8). -<img class="picwide" src="[[base_url]]2011/florence-river.jpg" alt="Afternoon light on the river, Firenze (Florence), Italy" /> +Corrine discovered that the natural history museum was hosting a dinosaur exhibit complete with huge animatronic dinosaurs. Sold. We set out early Saturday morning and made Jackson by afternoon. The dinosaurs were a hit and the crowds weren't too bad considering it was a weekend. -<p><img class="postpicright" src="[[base_url]]2011/florence-emptystreets.jpg" alt="Early morning streets, Firenze (Florence), Italy" /><span class="drop-small">L</span>uckily it's never that hard to dodge crowds. Sometimes you head out to <a href="http://luxagraf.net/2006/mar/21/angkor-wat/">Angkor Wat in the sweltering midday heat</a>. In Florence you just need to get up early and the streets will be deserted. Once everyone else is up, head over to "La Specola", the Museum of Zoology, which is part of the Museo di Storia Naturale di Firenze. Zoology isn't something near the top of most must-see lists and in my experience, you'll pretty much have the place to yourself.</p> +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-24_150842_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2072" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-24_151011_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2071" class="picwide" /> -<p>Of course how much you'll enjoy La Specola depends a little bit on how much you enjoy wandering through rooms filled with dead animals. My father taught biology and zoology for many years, so I grew up around dead animals, but clearly, La Specola is not for everyone. </p> +The rest of the museum wasn't quite a nice as the traveling exhibit. It had a semi-broken down feeling to it and many of the stuffed specimens were old and ratty, but not really in a charming or understandable way like [La Specula](/jrnl/2011/06/natural-science) in Italy. -<p>Part of the appeal of the museum is simply the antique wooden cabinets used to house the various lions, leopards, monkeys, birds and butterflies. The old, uneven and warped glass ripples as you pass, distorts the view from the corner of your eye, giving all the animals a shimmering hint of movement, as if there were still a bit of life left somewhere behind the glass.</p> +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-24_154250_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2069" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-24_152640_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2070" class="picwide caption" /> -<p><img class="picfull" src="[[base_url]]2011/florence-museum-birds.jpg" alt="Birds at La Specola, Firenze (Florence), Italy" /></p> +When it doubt, more dinosaurs. -<p>Beautiful glass aside, what makes La Specola special is how amazingly old the specimens are. La Specola records the very beginnings of natural science as we know it. The visible specimen tags I could read ranged from the early 1700s up through the late 1800s and into the 1900s. A few specimens come from the Medici family's private collection and are even older. That means the vast majority of the animals in La Specola date from well before Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, and some were brought to Florence even before Linnaeus had come up with the means of organizing them. </p> +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-24_160722_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2068" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-24_160853_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2067" class="picwide" /> -<p><img class="picfull" src="[[base_url]]2011/florence-museum-cats.jpg" alt="Big cats at La Specola, Firenze (Florence), Italy" /></p> +After we'd had our fill of animatronic dinosaurs we had a mediocre dinner and crashed out in a hotel room. -<p>Of course stuffed specimens from 300 years ago aren't going to be in the best of shape. Feathers have fallen off many of the birds, scales have dropped from the fish, the large mammals have badly dried and cracked hides and the natural coloring has long since faded from many. </p> +You might think, after years on the road, that we'd be super-organized, super-efficient packers, but no, we're not. It's pretty much a chaotic sprawl of bags, clothes, and toys. -<p>What's fascinating isn't so much the specimens themselves, but the glimpse they offer into the curious minds of the time. When La Specola was founded in 1771, western culture was just beginning to shrug off thousands of years of religious dogma, dropping a vision of the world where everything was the province of god, for a vision of the world in which the human mind could explore on its own. La Specola hails from the very beginning of that yearning to know more about the world, to reject doctrine and discover first hand the creatures that share our planet. </p> +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-25_064853_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2066" class="picwide" /> -<p>In the late 17th and early 18th century there was an explosion of exploration, travel and discovery. The "age of discovery" as it's commonly called in hindsight, was the age of people like you and me, curious about the world and determined to see it for themselves, stumbling around, finding what they found. In the case of zoologists much of what they found was sent back here, to La Specola. It was a unique time, there were no professional scientists yet, no authorities or academic review boards, everything was new, everything was a discovery. </p> +The next day we drove the rest of the way into Athens. Overall not to bad. Are we there yet did not reach cliche road trip fever pitch and no one got too grumpy. -<p>Yes, there's something perverse about heading out into the world, discovering exotic and fascinating animals and then killing, gutting and stuffing them. It's gruesome business if you go into the details. There's no reason to do it now, but circa 1700 it was the only link between those who could go into the field and those who stayed behind to make sense of it all.</p> +Our AirBnB in Athens was a strange place. We found and unplugged 15 air fresheners. No joke. Who lives that way? I suspect that many air fresheners put out enough petro chemicals to shorten your life by a measurable amount. Even without them, the place still smelled like someone was trying to cover up something awful. -<p>La Specola is a link between then and now. A record of the conversation between those who discovered and those who took discoveries and turned them into something meaningful. Stuffed carcasses are not particularly meaningful in and of themselves. Colorful perhaps, exotic and even alien in some cases, but finding and recording is only half of what creates the store of human understanding. La Specola lays that conversation open for anyone to walk through and experience.</p> +At least the view across the street was good, some neighbor had a 1970ish Crown school bus at least partly converted to an RV. If we ever do the school bus conversion thing, the 60s and 70s Crown school buses would be high on my list. The mid-body diesel engine is awkward though, eats up all the room for your tanks. Not that I've put a lot of thought into this or anything. -<p>If stuffed and canned dead animals aren't enough to keep the tourists at bay, then the last two rooms certainly are. The last section of La Specola is nothing but wax models of dissected human bodies, flayed open to varying degrees to show muscle structure, viens, organs and even nerves. The models were created in the 1800s from real human bodies and were used to teach anatomy to medical students. The models are remarkably life-like and cover the entire spectrum of human existence from stillborn, syphilis-riddled fetuses to otherwise healthy adults and even larger-than-life skeletons.</p> +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-26_150054_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2065" class="picwide" /> -<p><img class="picfull" src="[[base_url]]2011/florence-museum-meat.jpg" alt="Wax model of human innards at La Specola, Firenze (Florence), Italy" /></p> +I first came to Athens in 1999, moved here on a whim. I've never really felt at home anywhere except the wilderness, but Athens is probably as close as I come to having a home town at this point. Whatever the case, it's always fun to come back for a visit. We wandered around, went to some of our old haunts, took the kids places they claim not to remember, ate some good food, even managed to put together a huge cousins sleepover party. -<p>At first glance the wax models are a touch disturbing, not necessarily because they're life-like, but because they put us on the same shelves, in the same warped glass cases. Otherwise, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? We are after all just one more animal roaming the planet. But a curious, inquisitive animal that can dream anything it wants, including a natural science to explain how curious inquisitive animals can dream anything they want... just remember, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Turtle" title="Wikipedia entry on the World Turtle">it's turtles all the way down</a>.</p> +<div class="cluster"> +<span class="row-2"> +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-28_161235_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2084" class="cluster pic66" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-30_161235_trip-to-athens_ZY6qFv3.jpg" id="image-2087" class="cluster pic66" /> +</span> +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-26_151313_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2064" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-29_161235_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2085" class="cluster picwide" /> +</div> +Around the time we were getting ready to head back, an opportunity to stay presented itself. Well, not stay in Athens, but hang around the area for a few months. After thinking it over for about five minutes, we said sure, why not? The next day I got in the rental car, drove it back to Texas and returned it, grabbed our stuff out of the bus, threw it in the Volvo, said goodbye to the bus and headed back to Athens. diff --git a/published/2019-08-25_georgia-road-trip.txt b/published/2019-08-25_georgia-road-trip.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..02cc98c --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2019-08-25_georgia-road-trip.txt @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +The America family road trip -- immortalized so well by [Chevy Chase and company](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHThGmVfE3A) -- is a pretty miserable experience in my view. Pack the kids in the car to drive all day and half the night to Disney World? No thanks. + +Driving long distances is pretty awful. Our rule in the bus has always been no more than 200 miles a day. There are plenty of days when we don't even hit triple digit mileage. When you do this full time there's no reason to hurry anywhere. The only time we've ever hurried anywhere was because we were meeting someone. + +One reason we didn't immediately head west out of Texas for spots more to our liking was that we knew we'd be heading east to Georgia at the end of summer. Corrinne's parents came up from Mexico for a couple weeks and we wanted to see them. We knew we were going to drive and less driving the better. + +Visiting family and friends in Athens sounded like a whole lot more fun than Wally World or Disney World or any other fake world. We're awfully fond of the world we have, so why not try a good old fashioned road trip to Athens, GA? + +We left the bus in Texas, but there was still no way we were going to drive 12 hours straight through. Jackson, Mississippi is roughly the halfway point, so we set about finding something fun to do in Jackson. Something better than [wrecking our health or making a big fool of ourselves](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGhCsznO0S8). + +Corrinne discovered that the natural history museum was hosting a dinosaur exhibit complete with huge animatronic dinosaurs. Sold. We set out early Saturday morning and made Jackson by afternoon. The dinosaurs were a hit and the crowds weren't too bad considering it was a weekend. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-24_150842_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2072" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-24_151011_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2071" class="picwide" /> + +The rest of the museum wasn't quite a nice as the traveling exhibit. It had a semi-broken down feeling to it and many of the stuffed specimens were old and ratty, but not really in a charming or understandable way like [La Specula](/jrnl/2011/06/natural-science) in Italy. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-24_154250_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2069" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-24_152640_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2070" class="picwide caption" /> + +When in doubt, more dinosaurs. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-24_160722_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2068" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-24_160853_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2067" class="picwide" /> + +After we'd had our fill of animatronic dinosaurs we had a mediocre dinner and crashed out in a hotel room. + +You might think, after years on the road, that we'd be super-organized, super-efficient packers, but no, we're not. It's pretty much a chaotic sprawl of bags, clothes, electronics, and toys. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-25_064853_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2066" class="picwide" /> + +The next day we drove the rest of the way into Athens. Overall not to bad. *Are we there yet* did not reach cliche road trip fever pitch and no one got too grumpy. Or else I blocked all that out in my memory. + +AirBnB we rented in Athens was a strange place though. We found and unplugged 15 air fresheners. No joke. Who lives that way? I suspect that many air fresheners put out enough petro chemicals to shorten your life by a measurable amount. Even without them, the place still smelled like someone was trying to cover up something awful. + +At least the view across the street was good, some neighbor had a 1970ish Crown school bus at least partly converted to an RV. If we ever do the school bus conversion thing, the 60s and 70s Crown school buses would be high on my list. The mid-body diesel engine is awkward though, eats up all the room for your tanks. Not that I've put a lot of thought into this or anything. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-26_150054_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2065" class="picwide" /> + +I first came to Athens in 1999, moved here on a whim. I've never really felt at home anywhere except the wilderness, but Athens is probably as close as I come to having a home town at this point. Whatever the case, it's always fun to come back for a visit. We wandered around, went to some of our old haunts, took the kids places they claim not to remember, ate some good food, even managed to put together a huge cousins sleepover party. + +<div class="cluster"> +<span class="row-2"> +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-28_161235_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2084" class="cluster pic66" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-30_161235_trip-to-athens_ZY6qFv3.jpg" id="image-2087" class="cluster pic66" /> +</span> +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-26_151313_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2064" class="cluster picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-29_161235_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2085" class="cluster picwide" /> +</div> + +Around the time we were getting ready to head back to Texas, an opportunity to stay in Athens presented itself. Well, not stay in Athens exactly, but hang around the area for a few months. After thinking it over for about five minutes, we said sure, why not? + +The next day I got in the rental car, drove it back to Texas, and returned it. Then I grabbed our stuff out of the bus, threw it in the Volvo, said goodbye to the bus for another little while, and headed back to Athens. Boom, done. The less you have the easier it is to drop it all and do something else. + +Okay, so I forgot the silverware. No one is perfect. But one thing I've learned on the road is to trust our intuitions. If something feels right, it generally is. If something feels wrong, it's time for change. It took quite a while and several second-guessing failures to get that confidence, but even those failures taught me that no matter what happens, things have a way of working themselves out in the end. diff --git a/published/2019-09-12_hanging-around-town.txt b/published/2019-09-12_hanging-around-town.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5227ab1 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2019-09-12_hanging-around-town.txt @@ -0,0 +1,56 @@ +Athens has always been a good town to come back to. It's something of a joke among those of us who've been coming and going for decades now. Most of my friends in Athens have left for somewhere else at least once, many have left more than that, but most seem to find their way back here again too. + +I thought about this a good bit as we walked around town, exploring what's left of the Athens I once enjoyed. + +<div class="cluster"> +<span class="row-2"> +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-30_161235_trip-to-athens_ZY6qFv3.jpg" id="image-2087" class="cluster pic66" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-08-28_161235_trip-to-athens.jpg" id="image-2084" class="cluster pic66" /> +</span> +</div> + +It's always interesting to take the kids to places I've been and see how they react, how they like it. They don't have any history to get in the way of enjoying it as it is now, which helps me figure out if a place really has started to suck, or if it's just me. + +The kids don't remember downtown Athens before it was all chain restaurants and banal, new-construction high rises. They love walking around downtown Athens the same way they love walking around downtown San Miguel de Allende, downtown San Francisco, or downtown New Orleans. I don't anymore though, try as I might to see it through their eyes. + +<div class="cluster"> +<span class="row-2"> +<img src="images/2019/DSC_0028.jpg" id="image-2088" class="cluster pic66" /> +<img src="images/2019/DSC_0029.jpg" id="image-2089" class="cluster pic66" /> +</span> +</div> + +I came to Athens for the first time in 1996 and moved here for good in 1999. I left for a few years in 2002. Came back in the 2005. Left for a couple more. Came back in 2007. Stayed a decade that time, which is as long as I've lived anywhere since I moved out of my childhood home. + +In that decade things changed in Athens. Things are always changing, but this time things changed more than usual. California came to Athens. + +<img src="images/2019/P1010005.jpg" id="image-2090" class="picwide" /> + +It's the same story everywhere, a handful of greedy people sell out their town to highest bidder, which is inevitably wealthy refugees from California[^1]. In Athens it was, as far as I can tell, a semi-senile mayor and a handful of real estate developers who did the damage[^2]. Whatever the case it's done. It'll be decades before the pendulum of wealth swings back the other way, and then decades more before it gets back near the balanced center, where it was when I first arrived in 1996. + +When we left in back 2017 I didn't figure we'd ever come back. Visit sure, but hang around for any length of time? Probably not. It'll be years before the housing market crashes back down to sane levels. House prices are currently well out of the price range of staff writers. Houses in our old neighborhood sell for well over half a million dollars (do I wish I still had ours? Not even a little bit). + +Still, an opportunity came up for us to spend a few months around here and, after talking it over for ten minutes, we took it. So we're going to hang around our old home town for Autumn, maybe Winter too. + +The key to living on the road is learning to deal with the uncertainty. You never knowing where you'll be in two weeks, which is both freeing and stressful. To cope with it you need to act slowly, and be able to turn midstream as it were because things will very rarely turn out as you plan. + +In some ways I think much of my travel strategy is something I read once in poker book: be selective, but be aggressive. That is, do not play many hands in poker, but when you do, play them aggressively. In travel terms that means spend a lot of time making plans. Not plans you act on, just possibilities. Think things over, explore possibilities in your imagination. And I mean that literally. Sit in a chair, back straight, hands on your knees, breathe slow to relax, clothes your eyes and bring some ide a to mind and follow it out. + +Part of the beauty of living on the road is that you have much more relaxed, quiet time than most people, which means you can think things through much more easily. You can have a lot of sit and thinks as my [favorite kids' show](https://www.sarahandduck.com/watch/) calls it. You can't be selective if you haven't considered all the options. So you consider as many as you can. + +But then when it is time to act, you must act decisively and without hesitation because you have to commit. Once you jump, you can't unjump. Sometimes you have to correct your course on the way down, sometimes you go oh shit and start flapping your arms. Sometimes you hit the ground hard. It happens. But this is just a metaphor so you pick yourself up, dust off, and carry on. Usually. And you have to be okay with any and all of the outcomes. Otherwise, this is probably not a lifestyle that's going to make you happy. + +We've spent a lot of time in the sit and think stage of late. We've been trying to figure out what comes next for us for the better part of year now and we've been all over the map. We've put significant effort into lots of different imaginary plans, all of which were appealing for a time, but none of which drove us to actually take that decisive step forward and commit. + +The ones that stick out range from the obvious, continuing to travel in the bus, to the less obvious, like moving to the Yucatan. We had another plan that would have seen Corrinne running a small school in Costa Rica. We considered living on the coast of Serbia, which then somehow led us to consider living in a remote village in Alaska, and then a small town in Nevada. + +Then we thought no, let's buy a boat, or maybe an Airstream, or maybe a smaller Travco. There were other ideas in there I can't remember now, and those are just the ones we were semi-serious about. Not that we could actually have made all these things happen. There are all sorts of technical and financial hurdles to overcome in all those plans, but when you're just having a sit and think you don't have worry about details, rather you worry about whether or not it feels right. + +If it does feel then you move on to practical things. Maybe (probably) it turns out you don't have the money for a boat. Okay, scratch that off the list. Or you make a longer term plan to get the money you need. And so on. + +Like I said, you have to be willing to think things over, consider every possibility. There comes a time to act though. In my experience the universe will present you with an opportunity to move in some direction you've been considering. I try not to think of these things as *suggestions* from the universe. Just because an opportunity comes doesn't mean you *should* take it, just that *hey here's something that will help you do X if that's what you think you should do*. + +For us, right now that opportunity was to hang around Athens GA for a while. It's not our whole plan, but it's a step in the direction we want to go. So you go. One step at a time. + +[^1]: They're wealthy by every standard of wealth save those of California. +[^2]: And let's not forget complacent constituents like myself who could have gone to some city council meetings and made an effort to stop said developers and mayor. While it would most likely have been ineffectual it would have been worth a try if Athens were a place worth fighting for to you. For me, I take it, it was not. Because I did not. I prefer to move on rather than resist. diff --git a/published/2019-09-25_old-growth.txt b/published/2019-09-25_old-growth.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..133367e --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2019-09-25_old-growth.txt @@ -0,0 +1,86 @@ +In my usual manner of reading things that have no bearing on where I actually am, I've been sitting in the linger summer heat of Georgia reading Barry Lopez's *Arctic Dreams*. It's one of the finest books of natural history I've ever read and many things have jumped out at me, but one in particular has stuck with me for a while now. + +Lopez comes to believe that for the native peoples of the Arctic "land does... what architecture sometimes does for us. It provides a sense of place, of scale, of history." + +I think this is true of anyone who frequently moves through the land, you begin to do the same thing that Lopez identifies in Arctic natives, searching out our own sense of scale and history in the land around us. + +I've noticed myself doing this more. This struck me because whenever we are around non-travelers I notice how much I talk not just of what happened, but where it happened. + +I have developed a largely unconscious need to locate my past in both time and space. I have to watch out for this because it is annoying to non-travelers. Space, the land around the event, is information most of us don't need. + +But Land becomes paramount to life when you live this way. Where you are is as meaningful as who. Where defines who. Landscapes rise up, become more than backdrops against which we live. Land shapes our lives, all our lives, all the time, but out here it becomes so plain, you feel it deep within. + +It's not something you seek out. It is something that arrives. Slowly, almost unnoticed. Until one day you realize you're not talking to the trees, you're answering them. + +You gain a sense of place by merging into it, however briefly, in way that can only be done by giving up familiarity. Novelty sharpens the experience of place. Perhaps because we evolved to be wary of the novel, to be on edge in experiencing the unfamiliar. Now the evolutionary threat is largely gone and novelty becomes the grindstone that sharpens the experience of place until it comes to the foreground for our lives. + +Out here you mark time by space. The land is always present in you. The smell of wet leaves after a rain. The grit of fresh soil under your nails. The silence of snow. The glitter of water in noonday sun. The small patch of gravel where you first noticed your broken axle. More than the words that describe them, places become real things in which we exist and locate ourselves, our past, our present, and how we measure the scale of ourselves. We speak not of things that happened, but of things that happened and where they happened. Experience gains extra dimensions. Places become a way of locating the self within the world that is either not necessary or not possible when the places in which you exist rarely change. + + + + + +Spread out a map of the United States and trace your finger down the border of North Dakota and Minnesota. Let your finger drift to west a little as to comes down through South Dakota, across eastern Nebraska, the middle of Kansas and down from Wichita City Texas to Laredo. This line you have just drawn separates The East from The West. + +There's no real consensus on this line. You'll have to give a couple hundred miles of gray area in either direction to make everyone happy, but by and large this is where two things happen as you move west: the humidity drops and the forest stops. + +Trinidad Texas, where we spent the summer, is just to the east of this line, but still mostly out of the great hardwood forests of the east. When we decided to stick around Athens for a bit it had been well over a year since we'd spent any amount of time around trees. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-10-12_065444_elberton.jpg" id="image-2096" class="picwide" /> + +I was born out west, and the wide open spaces and skies of the west will always feel more like home to me than the forests of the east, but my people come from forests, I think there are trees in my blood, somewhere back there. I don't know everything about my ancestors, but what stories I do know are of people in the primeval Beech forests of the southern Carpathians on one side, and the ancient Hemlock and White Pine forests of eastern United States on the other. For me, going back into the woods will always be a kind of homecoming. + +I feel relaxed in forests. But also sharper. All the leaves require more visual acuity, sharpen the senses. After a few days in the trees I start to feel more what might be called poise, that balance point between relaxation and tension. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-09-13_161623_watson-mill.jpg" id="image-2093" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-09-11_153337-1_watson-mill.jpg" id="image-2092" class="picwide" /> + +Maybe it's the extra oxygen. It would make senses to me that the more trees around, the more oxygen you have and the more oxygen the clearer and sharper you feel. I'm not particularly interested in the science behind it though, just the experience of it. And interestingly, I get the same feeling of clarity, sharpness, and overall well-being walking in the desert, above timberline and other places without trees, so maybe it's not that at all. + +Perhaps its not strictly trees, but the entirety of the ecosystem around me. The wholeness of it. The way everything is continuous, intertwined, uninterrupted. + +<img src="images/2019/L1000031.jpg" id="image-2098" class="picwide" /> + +We often talk about these parts of the world as though they were some separate thing. We say "ecosystem," or more often "nature," as if this were something other than the world we live in. + +It's not though. We are part of nature, part of the ecosystem, part of the world. We are never separated from anything else on this planet. But I do understand what people mean when they say they want to "get out in nature" as opposed to where they live. + +<img src="images/2019/L1000009.jpg" id="image-2099" class="picwide" /> + +I think what we seek when we seek "nature" is part of something where all the connections between all the parts remain intact, where hard edges of modern human ideas do not exist. Where everything flows into everything else. Where the connectedness of life has not been severed to serve human purposes. Where roads and sidewalks to not keep the earth hidden away, the grass divided, the trees encased. Where power lines do not bisect the sky into segments, where hedges are not trimmed, grounds not neatly swept. + +<img src="images/2019/L1000022.jpg" id="image-2100" class="picwide" /> + +We seek places away from the order we have attempted to impose on the world because our imposition fundamentally does not work. Drawing lines between things does not work. The worst part is all the lines we draw around ourselves, as if we were not part of all this. + +We are creations of earth. We come from here. We are part of this planet. Nor more and no less than any other part of it. And like every other species we shape it, it shapes us. We seem to have lost sight of that. We see ourselves on one hand as special snowflakes, exceptions, immune to laws of this planet. We are not. We cannot continue to draw everything out for ourselves without also drawing everything down on ourselves. + +On the other hand I think it's just as naive to think the world, "nature," needs to be protected from us. The world does not need to be protected from us, it needs respect from us. It needs us to recognize it for what it is, rather than how it's "useful" to us. It needs us to treat it with dignity and respect, like a brother, sister, mother, father. Like family. + +Thanks to science our current perception of the world is more nuanced and detailed than any culture we're aware of in the past. This has opened a thousand doorways and done some much good it's difficult to capture in words, certainly not in a few paragraphs. But it's always left us very cut off from the world in ways that no other culture we're aware of has ever been. We know so much and understand so little. + +<img src="images/2019/L1000014.jpg" id="image-2102" class="picwide" /> + +It seems to me that this has happened because our stories, our ways of understanding the world, have seriously diverge from the way the world actually is. This is the source of our problems: on the one hand self-destruction and the other self-loathing. Vicious cycles repeat. + +I think we are slowly coming to realize that we need different stories. We need stories that better reflect the world as it is, not the world as we think it should be. + +I don't have a solution. Sorry. I don't even think this is a problem we will solve. Not you and I. We will play our parts, whatever they may be. We can show that there are other possibilities by living them. + +But this is a problem of grand historical proportions. The stories that shape our world, the processes that got us here, have been in motion for thousands of years and will likely continue along for many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, more to come. + +Still, we have our lives here, now. In the trees or out of them. + +<img src="images/2019/DSC00031.jpg" id="image-2101" class="picwide" /> + +For us, lately, it's been in them. + +From what I read, the great forests of the east are not what they used to be. They are not virgin, always Europeans with their virgins, but to my mind these woods are still a grand thing. A beautiful place to sit quietly in, to play in, to drink this early morning coffee in, to live in. + +The heat has not yet broken. The afternoons swelter. The river with its slick, algae covered rock slides is a cool and welcome escape. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-09-07_122209-1_watson-mill.jpg" id="image-2103" class="picwide" /> + +The heat isn't gone yet, but you can feel Autumn at the edges of evening. The breeze stirs, the dead still, stagnant air of summer is broken by wind wandering through the trees. It comes in fits and stutters. Cool puffs of air that find us as the sun sets. + +It's coming though. I watch the chickadees and squirrels, they know it's coming too. If they are right this winter will be long and cold, even down here in the South. |