path: root/scratch.txt

The energy of chaos is required to change the existing order.

"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing" -- Helen Keller

# Scratch

Your power is proportional to your ability to relax.

---

People need... the freedom to make things among which they can live, or give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others.

If you don't define success for yourself, you can never be successful. That sounds silly, but it's true. Not defining where you want to get to means you'll never get there. This lack of vision isn't an accident usually, it's actually a clever dodge your subconscious mind comes up with because it also means you can't fail. If there's no target to hit, you can't miss.

But without a vision of what success if for you, you will never be successful. And that will haunt you and leave you feeling incomplete in vague, difficult to recognize ways. You have to define what success looks like *for you*, lest you always feel like you're failing -- whether or not you actually are.

I submit that it is better to know you failed than to have no idea where you are.



The thing to remember is that your definition of success will have to change and evolve. The dangerous thing is to coast. If you're coasting, you're not adapting, you're not changing and the only thing I can tell you is that nothing in life is static, everything is changing.


, even if it's like my definition, which is somewhat nebulous: I want to keep doing those things that I want to do more of and less of those things that I want to do less of.

The primary tools that one needs in modern day culture are to know how to make things up, and how to figure things out. This is creativity in two of its forms. These are called imagination and problem-solving. —STEVEN SNYDER

Technology is a means to an end, not an end

---


### Yuma scene.

lemon yellow Volkswagon Dasher. smell of radiator fluid. hot wind. simba on the floor in the only scrap of shade. inside the diner, air conditioned, cool. eating ice cream. laying down in the backseat, the windows wrapping around above me. 

### stoic journal:

1. Prepare For The Day Ahead: Each morning you should prepare, plan and meditate on how you aim to act that day. You should be envisioning everything that may come and steeling yourself so you're ready to conquer it. As Seneca wrote, "The wise will start each day with the thought, 'Fortune gives us nothing which we can really own.'" Or think of Marcus’s reminder: "When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil."

2. Put The Day Up For Review: Stoicism isn't just about thinking, it's about action—and the best wayto improve is to review. Each evening you should, like Seneca did, examine your day and your actions. As he put it, "When the light has been removed and my wife has fallen silent, aware of this habit that's now mine, I examine my entire day and go back over what I've done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by." The question should be: Did I follow my plans for the day? Was I prepared enough? What could I do better? What have I learned that will help me tomorrow?

---

S.M. Stirling’s characters*. “History becomes myth, myth becomes legend, and legend becomes history [as people act it out in their deeds]. Time is not a straight line. Time is a serpent.”

*The character was our old friend The Wanderer, here seen as an old mountain man in a sheepskin poncho, making coffee over a campfire – who suddenly, for an instant, is also seen with long black braids, a black Stetson, and the face of Coyote Old Man. 

---

In his 1870 essay What is Authority?, Bakunin wrote:

Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person.

---

As Matthew Crawford observes in Shop Class as Soulcraft, “shared memories attach to the material souvenirs of our lives, and producing them is a kind of communion, with others and with the future.”

## advertising

One of the interesting things about living the way we do is that we're subjected to very little advertising. We don't have a television, we don't go out to eat (and see TVs there), and we seldom drive on interstate highways, subject to billboards. There are some billboards on the backroads we favor—I don't think it's possible to escape billboards completely, save in Vermont, Maine, Alaska and Hawaii, all of which have outlawed them -- but not that many. I think the main place we encounter advertising is at the gas pump and that's pretty easy to ignore because I don't think I've ever put gas in the bus without having a conversation with someone passing by.

Despite the gas pumps, it seems safe to say that, living as we do in the bus, we are subjected to very little advertising. This is something I generally spend absolutely zero time thinking about until we come into major American city—something we try to avoid doing -- and I am awestruck by how much advertising there is -- it absolutely saturates the environment.

## What are people for

a line from Wendell Berry that has stuck with me for a long time: “it is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines


## Collapse notes
---

Other Owen, and for good reason! But that’s an important part of what I was talking about. A market economy depends on the fundamental agreement that the seller will provide the buyer with a product worth buying. Now that corporations by and large no longer do this, the market is collapsing, and they have no idea what to do about it — since listening to consumers and providing them with what they need and want is nowhere in the modern corporate vocabulary.
-JMG


Making sense of the ideas of one great culture from within another great culture is notoriously hard. (It’s an interesting detail of history, for example, that the first two European scholars to study the I Ching both went incurably insane.)  Thus I don’t claim to be able to sound the depths of either of the two future cultures I’ve sketched out here; I was raised in a culture weighed down by the Faustian veneer, and I live in a region that mediates between western Europe and the North American heartland. (The ground under my feet is part of the same long-vanished continent as the western half of Britain.) Being who, when, and where I am, I’m poised unsteadily between two great cultures, the fading Faustian culture and the future American culture.  That’s part of the hand I was dealt when I was born.

That awkward position, between the dissolving forms of the Faustian vision and the first stirrings of tamanous culture, seems to be becoming common among my American and Canadian readers, for what it’s worth.  (I haven’t yet seen it among my European readers, which comes as no surprise—again, each great culture is rooted in its own land.)  Here in North America, the Faustian veneer seems to be cracking very rapidly just now, outside those classes that have adopted Faustian thoughtways as the basis for their identity and their power. The widening gap between the Faustian managerial caste and the post-Faustian masses is among the major facts in American public life today, and it accounts for a great deal of the total incomprehension with which each side regards the other.

One of the chief questions in my mind right now is how that gap will evolve in the years ahead. Most great cultures, once they leave their ages of reason, wind up their creative eras, and settle into stasis, can expect a long slow decline—in cases such as ancient Egypt and traditional China, this lasted for many centuries.  The surge toward infinity is so central to the Faustian ethos, however, that the total failure of the will to power that drives it may send the nations of the West down another, harsher route. We’ll talk about that in two weeks.
-JMG

---



## On the Economy of Walden

Walden is a curious book. Curious because what the world has chosen to remember about Thoreau is that he opted to go live in the woods for a time, renounce in some way the modern world and get fback to nature. But this isn't at all what Thoreau did. Forget the historical context (which is that Thoreau went into the woods to write another book, A week and concord and merrimack river, while at the same time processing his bother's death. Forget that because if you just come to book without any of that there is still no reason to walk away thinking you've read a book about a man who renounced the modern world. He does nothing of the sort, and most of the book isn't nature writing. The first and longest chapter is called Economy. 

Thoreau's writing on nature and his own inner expereinces is just something you should read. Me telling you about it won't mean anything. It is experiential writing. 

This is what struck me about Walden when I recently reread it: that it starts with something very practical, very bound up in 19th century Concord, very grounded you might say in the world of its day, and yet ends up in place that is very spiritual. It struck me because I have had exactly the same experience. 

In getting in the bus I did not set out to step away from society. I have not stepped away from it at all. I am typing this using grid powered electricity, listen to the cacophony of helicopter rides while staring at the dense Florida branbles around our campsite, which, were I to bushwack through them, would lead me to the Walmart parking lot where I stocked up on steak, eggs and veggies not four hours ago. I am in Concord. And yet I am not. I understand now HD. And I also see both your flaws and mine. 

20th-century French anthropologist René Girard's mimetic theory takes this idea of Thoreau's -- that we do not want things a vacuum, we want them because other people want them -- and reminds us that when you leave behind one certain mimetic process, you always enter into another one. You might not want a big fancy house, but you might really want a cool vintage RV, or a particular sailboat. Something will always fill that vacuum of desire and unless you're really on your toes -- and I certainly am not -- chances are that thing that fills it will again be something you don't need at all and only want because someone else has it. 


What one needs to do is question the forces which are pulling them. Mimetic desire runs deep, so deep that most of it is simply accepted as opposed to worked with. What I mean by this is that the majority of items we have and actions we undertake are not acquired or undertaken out of conscious wanting, but out of the general acceptance that they and that is what you do/get. People have 3-piece sofas, fridges, tons of cutlery and plates, nic-nacs, new cars, new phones etc. People go to school, have kids, get mortgages, take out loans, perform Christmas day etc. And all of this falls under the idea of 'It's just want you do.' In fact, perhaps that's a good place to finish up, as I've just found my new favorite slogan...

is in many ways a restating of the standard arguments agains





---

"The best you can do in this moment, with whatever awareness and resources you can muster right now. Make the best spaghetti sauce you can with what you have and who you are, right now. Make this the best staff meeting you could possibly have, given the circumstances at the moment. While talking with your friend, your spouse, your mom, or your son, make it the very best conversation that you could be having. The best proposal, the best drive with my family, the best performance review, and the best nap."

---

The true warrior is not the one who is willing to kill. That doesn’t make a warrior. The true warrior is the one who is willing, if need be, to die - Charles Eisenstien

---

A thousand times in history—a million, more likely—visionaries, prophets, artists, and philosophers have wandered away from the social world that made them and sat themselves in nature, to see what could be seen when you stop demanding that nature echo back precisely the creeds of your community. We can think here of Elijah or John the Baptist, Muhammad or the Buddha, or Christ. Closer to our own time, Thoreau, Whitman, and Emerson went to nature to find a renewed, energized version of America. Analogous solitudes have been sought and found even in prison cells—think of Martin Luther King Jr. or Fyodor Dostoevsky. As much as all of these men’s cultural formations accompanied them into solitude, shaped what they would see, there is also—in nature, in reality—more than is contained in any philosophy or culture. The main things that are needed are silence and trust—and not just for the would-be prophets among us, but for all of us: teachers, policymakers, clerics, parents, humans of any stripe. Panicked catastrophism will only ensure that our challenged cultures stay brittle and stuck. https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/hope-itself/articles/deep-down-things-in-a-time-of-panic

---

Richard Wagamese’s lovely movie (from his book), Indian Horse:

"Mystery fills us with awe and wonder. It is the foundation of humility and humility is the foundation of all learning. So we do not seek to unravel it. We honor it by letting it be that way forever."

---

There is an underground movement of people united around a common goal of relocalizing life. Many, probably not all, but the examples I know of anyway, of the people driving this movement have embraced what is sometimes called a front porch culture. That is, a culture of staying in one place all your life, of being a part of your community, and so on. I completely support this, which might seem odd for someone who lives in an RV, but I see what we do as a similar kind of localization. Localization need not be literal, at least not for everyone. Every culture everywhere 

---

And stupidity combined with greed and arrogance is frankly more dangerous than deliberate evil. Someone who's evil and smart usually has the common sense to know when the risk of blowback is getting too high, and backs down fast when that happens in order to save his own skin so he can enjoy his nasty pleasures and ill-gotten gains. Somebody who's arrogant, greedy, and stupid doesn't do that, and such people go charging ahead and create major disasters that cause much more suffering and misery, and get dragged down with their victims.

---

Art is the transmission of a feeling across time. The artist feels something that drives him or her to make something and then the viewer experiences a feeling when they see or read or otherwise interact with that thing that the artist made. Those may be very different feelings, the feeling in the artist and in the viewer, but that thing that is making that connection is, I think, art as we define it in western culture. There are different conceptions of art. Even our culture at earlier periods had different definitions. And there are still artists who would probably disagree with this and say that the purpose of art is actually the expression of the divine, but I would still argue that it's the feeling of the divine that drives the artist to create. So it may not be that they're trying to communicate their own feeling, but that feeling is still the driving impulse behind the creation of the thing. And then, like I think of cooking, and I think well, at it's best cooking is exactly what I just described, but then also other times I am just scrambling these eggs so the kids can eat before Corrinne starts work at the table. 

---

Working in Crawford quote:

Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft captures this feeling in a way that no other books I've read manages. Crawford defines this desire, this need to be capable of repair as a desire to escape the feeling of dependence. What he called the Spirited Man, becomes a kind of archetype of the antidote to passive consumption. Passive consumption displaces agency, argues Crawford. One is no longer master of one's stuff because one does not truly understand how stuff works. "Spiritedness, then," writes Crawford, "may be allied with a spirit of inquiry, through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance."

In the years since Shop Class was published I have witnessed a convergence of two worlds, the collision of the spirit of inquire that looks to books and the spirit of inquiry that wants to works in the real world, to fix things, to get one's self moving down the road again. I see this in the work of Van Neistat, who explicitly took the Spirited Man mantle and ran with it. But also in the thousand people without filmmaking skills who are quietly working in their yards, in their garages, at the side of the road. Shade tree mechanics. Tinkerers. Spirited men and women who want first and foremost to understand, to expand their understanding of the world around them, to know how to use the tools we toolmakers have created for ourselves.

I think this goes the heart of the question of existence... why are we here? Are we here to optimize our days in service to some unknown thing are we here to be entertained? Or are we here to understand the world around us, to take part in the co-creation of our world? Are we along for the ride or are we standing at the helm, trimming the sails and pointing the bow into uncharted territory? 

Crawford writes that the spirited man "hates the feeling of dependence, especially when it is a direct result of his not understanding something. So he goes home and starts taking the valve covers off his engine to investigate for himself. Maybe he has no idea what he is doing, but he trusts that whatever the problem is, he ought to be able to figure it out by his own efforts. Then again, maybe not—he may never get his valve train back together again. But he intends to go down swinging." 

This was the spirit in which I set off in the bus. I had no idea how the engine worked or if I would be able to keep it running, but I intended to go down swinging.




Passive consumptions displaces agency. One is no longer masters of one's stuff but a servant of its makers. 

---

I don't want to report stories, I want to live them.

Have your own code. Not a contractors code. Not any organizations code. Your own code that means something to you, that makes you take pride in your work.

When you live in a small space you have to be organized. Everything needs a place. Even if that place is to just shove it in a messy cabinet and close the door quickly. Otherwise you space will be unbearable.

I think after a while the novelty of anythin wears off. even living on the road. or perhaps its that I felt the need to dial back the novelty a little. first we returned to places we'd already been, but that wasn't the answer. Then we went to new places, but moved much slower. settled in a bit. but that wasn't entirely the answer either. it wasn't until we enrolled the kids in juijitsu that i realized, oh, this is what i am supposed to do. i am supposed to look more closely at these places. to befriend the people within in them, to understand them to a greater degree. I do not know why, I just know that this is part of it. i still do not have all of it, it is still not perfected, but every day that passes i get new ideas and things fit more. 

as a spin off of the moving slower idea i came to realize that okay, i have achieved the thing I set out to do. we live on the road. now what? it wasn't until i sat twith this question for a long time in meditation that something like an answer began to form. and a big part of the answer was, now you make stuff. now you write, now you build, now you create, now you fix. now you do all the things you have always done, but you find a way to do them on them within the constraints of how you life now. Fewer tools, less space, in some cases i've added some ttools that seem strange at first glance. 

the answer is to put the art back in. to blend the books and the life and use them to make some kind of art. mechanical, analog art. and digital recordings to supplement it. but that mechnaical stuff needs to happen. it has been missing too long.

---

For Midgley, the post-Enlightenment myths that orient us in the modern world are so potent because they base their authority, paradoxically, on the myth of mythlessness. That is, the Enlightenment project was, among other things, committed to overcoming the restrictive chains of religious dogma, inherited belief systems, and, yes, grand narratives of mythology. But this was only to change one set of answers to our biggest questions for a host of others. We can’t escape myths; we only exchange them. And some of the post-Enlightenment myths by which we continue to live tell a tale of humans as autonomous and atomized beings, of an inert world of knowable laws scrutinized by the detached and disinterested rational gaze, of an environment whose value is reduced to commodification and utility, and of a human species that is on some ineluctable frog-march of progress.

But myths are not just intellectual abstractions. They manifest in the real. The industrial—and arguably now digital—revolutions and the built world of mass manufacturing, global trade networks of shipping lanes and rail lines and interstate highways, and the ever-increasing consumption of fossil fuels and the mining of scarce and precious resources in whose name we will even wage international war are, in part, the physical embodiment of this deeply ingrained post-Enlightenment mythology. What we make reveals to us what we love and believe. And over centuries, these lived, incarnated mythologies shape our posture and stance to the world.

https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2022/08/what-in-the-world-is-the-world-a-review-of-this-sacred-life-humanitys-place-in-a-wounded-world/

---

Paul Kingsnorth on solutions:

Climate change is a great example of that. It’s really interesting to me that we talk about climate change as if it were somehow disconnected from all the other things that are happening to the planet. The industrial economy’s assault on the earth, which has been going on for a couple hundred years, has basically wrecked the health of the planet in all sorts of different ways. And there are a lot of things happening — large rates of extinction, soil erosion, ocean pollution, a changing climate, all sorts of smaller, subtler things as well — but it’s climate change that’s just a one-off, almost self-contained phenomenon that has somehow grabbed the headlines and has become this enormous thing that we somehow have to stop. That’s the problem, so what’s the solution? And the solution inevitably is always technological, because nobody can think about anything else. That’s the way we think in our culture: we’ve created the problem with technology, so we must have to solve it with technology. So the issue has boiled down to, the wrong kind of gas is going up into the atmosphere, so we need a fuel technology that doesn’t put it up there, as if that were the problem, rather than the way we’re living our lives, the entirety of the economy, the value system that it’s based on. It’s the kind of notion that we’re extractive individuals and we just live in a market system. All of these complex things have happened over the last hundred years where we’ve completely retooled the way we live — we’ve disconnected ourselves from nature and culture and community, and we’ve made ourselves consumer individuals living in a machine. And the problem then is seen as, the Machine is using the wrong fuel, so let’s do something else. It’s not going to work, anyway, but even if it did work, what would the solution look like? Is that the world we want to be living in? Are the values correct? Is our disconnection okay as long as it doesn’t pollute the atmosphere? Is it okay to live in this kind of radical individualistic machine world as long as we’re not putting carbon up into the air?

It’s very difficult to ask the bigger questions because, as you say, relentlessly, as soon as you do, there’s an immediate backlash, which usually comes in completely familiar clichéd language —“So you’re saying we should go back and live in caves?” etc. And there’s not really much you can do with that.

it’s not neutral technology, it’s only designed for one thing. A gun only does one thing. But a smartphone is not neutral technology. If you use that thing, you are going to get addicted to that thing, you’re going to be taken into a certain way of life, you’re going to be acting in a certain way, you’re undoubtedly going to have your brain rewired by your use of it. Yeah, sure, you could be using it to promote organic farming rather than pornography, but you’re still on your phone all day, and so is everybody else who has to do that, and you’re still pumping carbon into the atmosphere — but more to the point, you rewire your whole life. Nobody has time to go folk dancing when they’re on their phone all the time. It doesn’t matter how well-intentioned you are.

I perpetually would like to get the internet out of my house, but then I wouldn’t be able to earn a penny, so I can’t. So there it is! So we have to make these choices. I would genuinely like to live without the internet, but I have no idea how I would feed my children, so I can’t at the moment. So there it is. But you know, maybe it’s just the process of drawing lines, like it is with anything else. You just say, okay, I’m not going over this line. It’s just a thing I’m not going to do. So I’ve said for a long time I’m not having a smartphone. I’m just not going to have one. And I don’t care what that means. It’s inconvenient for me in all sorts of ways, but I’m just not going to do it, so that’s that. I don’t have to think about it. And that’s one of my lines. There are things I’m just not going to do, that I’m not going to compromise on, and then there are other things I go, Well, okay, I have to do that because we’re all living in the world. So I think that’s probably the way to think about it.

https://mereorthodoxy.com/following-christ-in-the-machine-age-a-conversation-with-paul-kingsnorth/

---


## What Happened to 'How Are You'?

One used to meet up with an old friend and ask, “How are you?” And get a little recap of how that person has actually been. Today, when we ask how someone is, it’s quite common to get back a “BUSY!” Yes, of course. Busy.

I’m not asking about the tempo of your life, I’m asking about you. I’m interested in you. Tell me about you.

We’ve come to somehow equate worth with how harried we are. We are the VIPs of our own little worlds, engrossed in the importance of our serious affairs. Busy! So busy! To me, this busyness is evidence of a mismanaged life. If all I can say to someone when they ask me what’s happening in my life is, “BUSY!” I’m doing a poor job of it. It’s like a thermometer with the temperature climbing, a little tell of something going askew. 

We can have much to do, deadlines and meals and kiddos and never ending tasks, but that doesn’t mean we need to feed the busy monster. We don’t have to allow frenetic energy to drive us into that whirlwind of tasks. It’s not helpful.  I’ve learned that my perspective truly does determine how I show up in my life. Who I am to my people. How I experience my time here. By a shift in that perception - say from focusing on the overwhelm to one of gratitude, everything changes.


## Gurdjieff Do It By Hand


Gurdjieff notion that you should do a task by hand. if you have to dig a ditch you should do it and dig it by hand because there's an opportunity there for spiritual growth. if you're offloading it to a machine you're losing that opportunity for spiritual growth. if we offload tasks to machines we lose the opportunities that they have for spiritual growth and we may not fully understand the consequences of offloading things to technology because we'll never go through it to see what Spiritual Development we might have had if we had done it ourselves

## Have your own code

Not a contractors code. Not any organizations code. Your own code that means something to you, that makes you take pride in your work.

When you live in a small space you have to be organized. Everything needs a place. Even if that place is to just shove it in a messy cabinet and close the door quickly. Otherwise you space will be unbearable.


## Fire Notes: Seeking the Sun

People have forgotten how important the sun is. You can die from lack of sun. 










# Stories to Tell

## Niagara Fails

We left Long Point Canada bright and early, headed back to the United States to check out Niagara Falls. We originally planned to see the falls from the Canadian side because the view is better, but then there was a lot of traffic and on the map it didn't look like there was much parking for the bus. We decided to get through the border, grab a campsite, and come back to check out the falls later.

It was another pleasant drive through the Canadian farmland of Ontario for most of the morning. In an older vehicle 80 km an hour is a much nicer speed than 55 MPH. I'm not sure why, there isn't a huge difference, but people weren't tailgaiting me constantly -- yet too timid to actually pass -- and everything felt a bit more relaxed. Maybe that's just the way people drive in Canada. Whatever the case it was a pleasant drive despite some road construction and confusing detours.

We made it to the border shortly after lunch and were waiting in line to get through to the US side when Corrinne started gesturing to me. I was mostly worried about the bus sitting there idling in the heat, the Jeep never crossed my mind, but then she got out and walked back and said the Jeep had died. Well, shit.

I jumped out and open the hood and had her crank the engine. I could tell there was no gas getting to the carburetor because I couldn't hear anything squirting when she pumped the gas. I figured it was either vapor locked or the fuel pump had died. I knew the previous owner had put in a new fuel pump not long before we bought it, but I also know from my own experience in the bus that fuel pumps don't last. Whatever the case, I knew I wasn't going to get it started again right there. I waved a couple of cars around us and was just starting to push it off to the side to get it out of the way when three border patrol agents came out of the building. 

They asked what was wrong and I gave them a short rundown. They said okay, we'll push it. And I said, push it where? They said, through the border. So the kids hopped in the bus with me, and the border patrol pushed Corrinne through the checkpoint. She stopped and showed her passport and the whole bit and then they pushed her on through and off to the side where the bridge maintenance crew had their workshop. I didn't take a picture because my experience has been that cameras and national borders don't mix well, but I did get a shot of the maintenance crew pushing the Jeep over to the parking lot.

<img src="images/2023/2023-10-04_131800_niagara-falls.jpg" id="image-3730" class="picwide" />

Once I'd brought the bus through the checkpoint we pulled over into the parking lot and I went back to work on the engine. There are only three things an engine needs to run: air, fuel, and spark. As far as I could tell, fuel was the issue, but I had no clue why fuel wasn't getting to the carburetor. I decided the fuel pump was a likely culprit and called around to see if I could get a new one. A nearby Napa said they could have one by 4 that afternoon so we decided to tow the Jeep over there and work on it in the parking lot. 

The kids and I jumped in the bus and went to run a few errands in the mean time. Corrinne stayed with the  Jeep and waited on the tow truck. After we'd restocked our cupboards (nothing guarantees trouble like being low on food or water. Fortunately we had plenty of water) and refrigerator we headed over to the Napa. The tow truck showed up with the Jeep right as we got there. This time around AAA came through, surprisingly.

Not long after that the fuel pump showed up and I got to work. The new fuel pump's bolt holes were slightly narrower, so I ended up having to drill them out a bit, but otherwise there was nothing to it, I install the fuel pump and cranked it. And cranked it, and cranked it. Still no fuel getting to the carb. I even took the line off the fuel filter and cranked it with the line just sitting there and no gas came through.

A handful of people had stopped to talk to us and offer advice by this time, but it was starting to get dark and I was stumped. I got Napa's permission to leave the Jeep overnight and we all loaded in the bus and drove out to a strange little New York State Park up on Lake Ontario.

I'm pretty sure this was the first time we've ever driven the bus at night, but we made it safe and sound and found a campsite in the dark. I got a hot shower, which always helps improve your mode after you've been covered in oil and gasoline all day. 

The next day I had to work, so I didn't get back to the Jeep until evening again. I caught a very expensive Lyft into town and got to work. First I walked a couple of miles and filled up a gas can and brought it back. I put two gallons in the tank just to be sure there was gas,a nd then I squirted some down into the carb and sure enough it started right up. So, the problem was somewhere between the gas tank and fuel filter.

I was planning to disconnect the fuel lines and blow air through them to clear any debris that might possibly be clogging them. The tank had what looked like a cover that extended out to cover the place where the fuel lines attached. I figured I'd drop the cover, get access to the fuel lines and go from there. I had two bolts out and was beginning to realize that what I thought was the cover, appeared in fact to be holding the tank to the frame, which was not what I wanted. That's when I noticed a pair of work boot appear beside the Jeep.

I crawled out from under and started talking to a man who'd pulled up in a big truck. From what he said he seemed to know everyone at Napa. We talked for a bit, and he suggested just blowing air in the fuel tank to force it down the line. This hadn't occurred to me, but I liked it. Especially as opposed to dropping a tank that was very full of gas. That's when he said, you know I have a little shop down the road behind my house, I could tow you over there if you want to get out of the parking lot. He offered me the use of his tools, including his air gun.

I thanked him and said let's do it. We hooked up the tow rope and he pulled me a couple of miles while I steered and braked, making sure not to rear end his nice truck. His little shop turned out to be a full on garage that was a side gig. He was mainly a diesel mechanic working on big trucks, but he also had a side business at home. 

We put the Jeep outside his shop bay and he ran out a long compressor hose and I blew it into the gas tank. Then I cranked the engine. Still nothing. Then I disconnected the fuel pump and blew again. Fuel came through the line. We talked it over for a bit and he asked if I still had the old fuel pump, which I did. We put it in a vase and worked the handle and it seemed to be fine. He said, I bet that new pump is either seated wrong or broken. This one you know is good, put it back in. So I did.

This time we blew air in, cranks the engine and sure enough, fuel made it past the pump. I hooked all the lines and hoses back up and cranked it up. It ran like a top. Well, not really, the carb is all gummed up and it has hard time idling, but once I revved it, it was fine.

I know what you're thinking: if the old fuel pump was fine, why did it die at the border? I don't know. Either there was something in the fuel line and we cleared it into the new fuel pump, which then, when I switched them, got rid of the problem, or... something else happened? It's been almost a month since then and we haven't had another problem. And we've sat in some traffic very similar to the border situation so my money is on the fuel line being obstructed, but to be totally honest, I don't know what happened and I probably never well with any certainty. Such is life. 

We were able to get back on the road the next day, but we didn't. Instead we finally got to backtrack to see Niagara Falls. It was a windy, blustery afternoon, but I think this actually worked in our favor since it cleared some of the mist away from the falls.

<img src="images/2023/2023-10-06_145204_niagara-falls.jpg" id="image-3732" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-10-06_155337_niagara-falls.jpg" id="image-3733" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-10-06_155711_niagara-falls.jpg" id="image-3734" class="picwide" />

Niagara Falls is one of those terribly touristy things that is, despite the kitch, actually pretty cool. But it's also the sort of thing you look at for a bit and then you're done. 

The campground we'd been staying in was on the banks of Lake Ontario, but oddly had no lake access. I'd been there three nights and still hadn't seen Lake Ontario. In fact the campground was a little strange in that it was just a campground, there was nothing else to see or do, you camped, end of story. From what I could tell it was mostly used by locals who came to sit around the campfire and talk. I thought this was actually pretty cool and marveled at the lack to cell phones. People really sat around the fire talking all day. There were some people with TVs watching the Bills game, but otherwise it was like a place people went to spend time together. Which, go upstate New York. It's a tragedy you're outnumbered by city people, but good on ya, as the Australians say. The world needs more places and people like this.  

All that said, I wanted to see Lake Ontario. We hit the road the next morning and drove alongside the lake toward another park that was up near the eastern edge. We got there in the early afternoon and went down to the shore. The weather had turned stormy in the late morning and by the time we got to the water none of us were feeling it. Too cold, too windy. Too many ice banks. Just kidding. Not those yet.


## Before The Motor Laws



Electric cars are limited to a city for the most part. I don't think this is a design flaw. I think this is a design intent. Kill the ability to take to the open road and you kill the myth of the open road and the myth of the open road is the quintenssential myth of america. It is, I would argue, the entire idea on which america was founded, long before the road was paved or had cars on it. The electric car is designed to castrate that idea and the current reality along with it.

f the urban operating system is going to happen, as the WEf and all the smart city avocates believe, I want to throw my lot in with the free softwareists -- the drivers.

## Car Show Post

Someone stopped by the bus the other day to talk about it. I answered his questions, but then as he was getting ready to go he said something that stuck with me, "thanks for keeping it going". It jumped out at me because he was the second person to say that to me. *I love knowing these things are out there, still going.*

This evening I went to the grocery store in town and there was an early 1970s-ish Ford Bronco at the gas pump. I'm not a huge fan of Broncos, I'll probably never own one, but it was my kind of car, not perfect, plenty of patina in the finish. It had been around and I thought, you know, I too am glad it's out there, still running. 

It's not the thing though. The thing is irrelevant. *Thanks for keeping it going.* What is it? The past? Thanks for keeping this tiny thread of the past alive in the present. Thanks for the path back, thanks for keeping these things, and the memories we have that are connected to them alive. 

Nostalgia is commonly used pejoratively. The American Psychological Association considers it a subset of depression, which is, ahem, depressing. But then I guess if you're stuck trying to prop up the present as better than the past, at this point, you have to do some serious philosophical dancing. 

I find it far more telling that the meaning of nostalgia has shifted over the years from the original conception of "pain, grief, and distress" from trying "to reach some place, escape, return, get home," to our more modern connotation, "wistful yearning for the past." The genuineness of grief has be replaced with the easier to dismiss *yearning*. 

The word nostalgia comes from two Greek words, *algos*, which gives us the "pain, grief, distress", and *Nostos* the returning home bit. But combining these two words and then ending up with a "wistful yearning for the past," says far more about our values than anything. 

*Nostos* is the part that interests me. It has an Old English cognate, *genesen*, which means "to recover." There's also the Gothic *ganisan*, which means "to heal." This is the thread I think of when I see those Broncos and Travcos, those old appliances that actually work, those old clothes not made of plastic, all these things are not a homesickness for another time or place, but a yearning to heal the present. It's a yearning to recover those elements of the past that were better than what we have today. Not nostalgically, but tangibly, demonstrably better.

*Thanks for keeping it going.* Thanks for maintaining a path to healing the present. Thanks for pointing the way. 

I didn't say anything to the Bronco though. There was no one around. Maybe the steel and iron understand, I think they do, but no one, including me, wants to be the weirdo talking to the car in an empty parking lot. Besides, it's the person who's maintaining that connection that matters. It's their struggle to keep that thing working that matters. All those people laboring to keep those bits of the past working in the present, that's what matters. Without them the objects are just rust and decay. Someone has to maintain them, recover them, repair them -- this is what matters. This is the bond in the present to the past. Those who keep things going understand them, understand where they came from, why they work the way the work, and what that means. You have too, otherwise you'll never be able to keep whatever it is working.

This means you're constantly communing with the past. If that sounds too hippy for you, don't worry, that communication with the past often goes like this, "what #$%@ idiot wired this together with electrical tape" or words to that effect. It's not all good, the past. But most things from prior to about 1995, were made with the implicit understanding that they would, at some point in the future, need to be repaired. This was an understood part of the design process, even if the designer assumed the repair person would be "a professional".

Go back a bit further and not only is that part of the design process, but there's no assumption about professionals, the assumption is that the owner would be fixing it. Read any car manual -- not the repair manual, just the owner's manual -- and you'll find the manufacturers assumed owners would change the oil, repair the brakes, and perform other basic maintenance.

Somewhere in the last 30 years, we lost this culture of repair. 

Actually lost is the wrong word. I believe it was a concerted effort to destroy not just the ability to repair things, but the culture of repair, the idea that repairing things is something you could and should do. 

Today we live in a world where even professional mechanics can't repair some vehicles. It's so bad that Massachusetts passed a law requiring vehicle manufacturers to allow third-party repair and the United States federal government suggested that car makers not comply (the feds just changed their mind, somewhat). The primary effect of the Massachusetts law so far hasn't been what it's author's hope for though. Instead of giving mechanics and users access to the data the dealers can access, car makers like Kia and Subaru have decided to disabled their telemetric systems completely for Massachusetts drivers. The logic, if you can call it that, seems to be "if we have to give it to you, we'll just not record it, then we *can't* give it to you."

This is why, in 2073, no one is ever going to see a 2023 Subaru at the gas station and say, "hey, thanks for keeping it going." The 2023 Subaru is going end up in a landfill with every other car made since about 2012.

I write about cars because it's something I've come to know and love, but you can swap out car for washing machine, refrigerator, toaster, what have you and the story is the same.










Right now keeping it going is often a hobby, though for many of us it's an economic necessity as well. The day is coming though when it will be more than an economic necessity. It will be a necessity because there is no alternative.

No one knows when that's going to be, but increasingly, I think we all feel it coming. The world as we know it is going away, and we have a front-row seat to the change. The question is, what are we going to do? 

The past hundred years have been unlike anything in human history. Today you can buy things made in China for a $1 at your local hardware store. But the global trade that's made our world possible is falling apart. We aren't going to keep getting endless replacements doodads, and most of the things that surround us now can't be repaired. We're going to have to reach back, to dig the old stuff that was repairable out of the weeds and get it running again.

This is where I believe the anachronists can guide us into a saner future -- by going through the past -- but that's not why I started learning to fix things and it isn't why I fix things now. 


Where we spend our summers there are a number of campsites that are designated "seasonal", that is, the occupants, like us, have the site from the middle of May to the middle of October. As you would expect, we get to know the other seasonal people. 


In the past things had to be repairable because replacing them would be too expensive. This is the world we will return to, but you don't have to wait for it to be forced on you. You can start now. You can get ahead of the curve. Repair is something you can learn to do right now and it has benefits *right now*, even if global trade remains a stable thing for decades to come. 



It likely won't, I think we are just a couple of high profile acts of piracy away from the death of international trade as we know it. 

There's nothing your or I can do about the fate the seas, but the next time the blender breaks we could have a crack at fixing it before we throw it away. Even better we could learn to do without a blender by gaining skills with a chef knife or mortar and pestle.

Learning skills like this, whether to repair things or how to use older, more robust systems of doing the same task, is an investment in the future. In your future, in our future. If not you, then who? If you can repair it, then you might never need another. That's a future in which you're a little less dependant on the fragile, global systems. 

I think of all skills this way. I've spent the last year teaching myself to cook over open flame, especially using a dutch oven, in part because, well, open flame is the way all cooking was done until about 100 years ago, there's that connection to the past, but also because, if we happen to run out of propane, or don't have the electricity to run the waffle iron, it really doesn't matter, so long as I can start a fire I can cook just about anything.

Every withdrawal you can make from fragile systems empowers you.











Why be glad that someone else has an old car? It is a peculiar thing to think. I think it has to do with recognizing a kindred spirit in the person behind the car. In a culture that prizes the new and chucks the old without a thought, those of us who appreciate the old, the time-tested, the well-worn are anachronisms. We're out of pace with the world and it can be lonely to be left behind by your culture. It helps to know there are others out there like yourself. The things, the cars, the trucks, the buses, they're talismans perhaps, so we anachronists will know each other when we see each other.


Thanks for that reminder that cars used to be objects of art rather than commodities. 


Making and fixing things with purpose. Extending the life of this thing is extending its potential to the world. Repair with purpose. 





We know what it's like to bang our heads against a problem for weeks. We know the pain of seeing that white smoke coming out the valve cover vent. We understand the sense of victory when it starts up and purrs after hours of work. We know these things. 


Will my children feel a nostalgic connection to iPads and e-bikes? Perhaps. 







This is why I am always disappointed to meet people with classic cars who just take it to the mechanic. I know not everyone has the time or inclination to do it themselves, but I won't lie, I am always disappointed to hear it. The shared experience isn't there. They don't know. In some respects I do think perhaps you should have to earn the talismans. 

It's the same with people who ask if we plan to paint the bus. We don't. I wouldn't if it were free. Every worn patch, every scrape, every dent and frayed bit of fiberglass has a story to it. I don't know all the stories, but I've spent a good bit of time thinking about what might have happened. I've made up some stories. I've added a few of my own. I won't erase any of them, even ones I don't know[^1]. 


[^1]: If there were rust, or something that threatened the longevity of the bus, then I would patch and paint if necessary, but fortunately that's not a factor since the bus is two giant pieces of fiberglass.

## Parts of the Whole

One of the interesting things about repairing engines is that they teach things about life more generally. Engines have taught me that while the parts might influence how the whole functions, all that really matters is the whole. If the whole isn't right, it doesn't matter how good the parts are.

It doesn't matter if you have the best headers in the world if your rings are cracked and leaking. Your brand new rings are useless if you put them above an old and worn cam. All these parts have to function as a whole[^1]. They only matter in the context of the whole. And that whole, you quickly learn, is greater than the sum of its parts. All wholes have something that cannot be found by breaking them down into parts.

This is the way of the world. Everything must work as a whole or it doesn't work at all. The engine stutters and dies, the heart stops, the tree falls, the salmon floats belly up. All those things are themselves also part of larger systems, and those in turn are part of larger systems until there is, one primordial system, *the prime movement* if you will, which began everything. 

Strangely, we live in an age where the dominant myth, the story most of us live by, says the exact opposite. 

The myths we were handed from 17th-century culture (which is where most of our myths begin) claim that everything can be reduced to understandable parts, dealt with at that level, and the whole will somehow benefit. The famous mechanistic universe. Anyone who has spent any time working on engines should have serious doubts about Descartes mechanistic universe. Pipe organs, which were the beginnings of the modern engine in many ways, were probably no different than internal combustion engines when it comes to mysterious failure of the parts to make a whole, which means Descartes had no excuse. Descartes, I suspect, did not turn his own wrenches.

If he had he might have saved us a 400-year-long detour into the fantasy world we currently inhabit. We do not experience the world as the sum of its part and, so far as I can tell, this is just not at all how the world works. It might be nice if it were how the world works. But it doesn't. On the plus side, if the universe truly were mechanistic I don't think half the hacks and things I do to keep the bus going would work. I think this is a big clue that things are very different than what the stories claim -- things that should work didn't, things that shouldn't work often do.

I read a lot of writers who explore this space, that is, the gap between myth/story and the reality we experience, and there tends to be a good bit of hand wringing about how this leaves us fragmented, incapable of certain things that were easy to someone living 500, 1000, 5000 years ago when myths better matched the world. That may well be the case. Certainly what I have read of indigenous people of North America, they seemed by the large have cohesive myths that created a world in which they were... content? Where things made sense to them. They had a place within their world that they fit into you.

That's not where we are now. It's not, apparently, where we need to be. We are here, which I take to mean we need to be here for some reason. Perhaps we need figure out how to either live with the gap between myth and reality or to create new myths that better match reality. Perhaps both in some cases.

I don't know that I am capable of creating a new myth, but one thing I can say is that you can certainly cast off the old myths. You can leave behind most of what culture handed you and get by on your own terms. It's a lot of work, and it will really bother some people (which is odd, but it happens), but it's worth if if it's something you truly want to do. There a plenty of days when you think *what in the hell am I doing this for?*, but then there are far more days when you know exactly why you're doing this.

You're doing this because if the whole doesn't work then none of the parts matter. 

That said, when the parts break, the whole falls apart. I've been ordering parts, slowing building up a whole. The tailpipe is at the shop several hours away, hopefully being rebuilt into a new whole. The seats are about to be pulled out and torn down and remade, whole, new.












This is basic systems theory. A good intro to the study of systems is Gerald Weinberg's *An Introduction to General Systems Thinking*, though it's worth keeping in mind that even breaking things down into systems is fraught with problems. In other words, it helps the have your cooling system sorted, but if your exhaust system is a mess then the whole system doesn't work and your cooling system really doesn't matter.

Divisions between systems are useful at times. While it's true that the bus running is a small part of the system that is our live in it, it is a part that can generally be dealt with as though it were discreet. I find though that I am better at keeping it running when I am conscious that this division is artificial and arbitrary and best treated as such. The idea that there is a division between the bus and my life is a temporary tool I use when it useful and discard when it is not.

Personally though systems theory leaves me cold and I think is in the habit of, ironically, focusing on very small systems. It is really just considering larger parts, but it still isn't willing to confront that everything is connected through that prime movement (and throughout the flowing of the universe).


[1]: On the other side of the coin, your worn cam might not matter that much if the rest of the system is fine.

You can drink all of the structured water, bask under the UV rays, dim your EMFs, clean with baking soda, only wear organic materials on your body, breathe good air, lift weights and move until the cows come home, (and you should) but if your mind is full of poison and your heart is closed to light, it’s all for naught. 

I know people often read sites like this because they think we lead interesting lives and like to live vicariously. There can be a trap to writing a site like this because you feel the need to be interesting all the time, which tends to translate as doing stuff. 

Really though I think what's interesting about our lives is how little we do. We've essentially traded a certain level of stability (I would argue it is illusory anyway, so not much of a trade really) for the ability to appreciate the now

The secret to 

One morning twenty-four years ago I went to work and found the coffee shop I worked at padlocked shut with an eviction notice on the door. Unsure what to do, I ended up going back home where I found another eviction notice on my own door. It wasn't the best day. I decided it was best to ignore it all. I went to the beach for the rest of the day.

A few short weeks later my roommates and I moved from Los Angeles, California to Athens, Georgia. A few years before I'd done the sort of long road trip you do when you drop out of college and don't know what else to do, and Athens had been the highlight of the trip. This, I thought, was a place I could live. It was cheap, everyone was nice, and no one cared about appearances. It was about as far from LA as you could get in every way.

And I was right. I lived there for most of the next fifteen years. It's the first year I think about the most though. 

## Fire, cooking with fire


"No longer did pre-humans hide in the safety of their trees, but communicated, learned to make music, discuss politics, gossip and laugh under the protection of ground predator’s worst enemy - the campfire, while cooking meals that were collaboratively brought home.{

"During the age of the campfire, communication and language, cunning and humor, strategy and camaraderie all intermingled in a shared life by the warmth of a fire. The campfire imposed advanced communication and social interaction onto the arc of human evolution, and this is the time in which the human brain swelled in size - rapidly by evolutionary standards - to meet the demands of a socialized group."

from: https://www.notesfromtheroad.com/cascadia/dark-divide.html

There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace. . . . To avoid the second, he should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside. If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where the heat comes from, and with a wealth of detail denied to those who spend the week end in town astride a radiator.

–Aldo Leopold (“February” in A Sand County Almanac)

"First and foremost, heating with wood requires planning. Paradoxically, *well-seasoned* wood does not grow on trees. Best practices for heating with wood dictate that one had better budget for several months of curing and drying—a year is even better. And this is not an aspirational best practice given that burning unseasoned, “green” wood is frustrating, inefficient, and dangerous: unseasoned wood leads to greater creosote build-up in the flue and thus an increased risk of a flue fire."

"To have a year’s supply of firewood stacked and covered twelve months before one plans to burn it requires a commitment to preparation that runs counter to our “on demand” and “just-in-time” world. "

"Thus, depending on wood for heat places one in a close relationship with wood. In addition to the BTUs particular species contain, one who is mindful and observant can learn much about other, sometimes subtle characteristics of specific species of trees for, as Thomas Hardy notes at the beginning of Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), “to dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.” Black walnut (Juglans nigra), as it burns, buries itself in a layer of ashes that insulate and preserve coals. In this regard black walnut even seems to outlast long-burning, high-BTU species like oak, hickory, and locust. I don’t know exactly what to call this quality other than an afterlife. Black walnut seems to me to have the longest afterlife I have come across—even after the fire has dwindled and the stove cooled, I have uncovered a bed of glowing embers that enables me to bring the fire back to life. Tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) is about the opposite: it ignites quickly and burns out rapidly. And it gets its other name (yellow poplar) from the way it “pops” as it burns, so be wary of leaving an open poplar fire unattended."


https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2023/01/heating-with-wood-as-a-habit-of-mind/

The best food I've ever eaten was cooked over a campfire. 
Ever seen people pull up lawn chairs, encircle the gas grill, roast marshmallows, and sing Kumbaya? Didn’t think so.

https://amazingribs.com/more-technique-and-science/grill-and-smoker-setup-and-firing/campfire-cooking/?p=22415

## loss of getting lost

https://www.vagabondjourney.com/you-cant-get-lost-anymore/

# jrnl

## Canada

When we plotted our route east we planned to duck south of Lake Erie. The more direct route -- along the north shore of Lake Erie -- involved going into Canada, and the kids' passports were expired. 

About two weeks before we left Washburn we mentioned something about that to our friend Mark and he said the you don't need a passport for kids in Canada, just a birth certificate would do. A little investigation proved him right, and so we altered our plans to go along the north shore of Lake Erie, through Ontario and then back into the states in Niagara.

We crossed into Canada just outside of Detroit (which seems like a fine city, not the smoldering apocalyptic thing you see in the media). We don't have international service on our phones so we promptly lost all navigation and communication. Which was fine. It's Canada, what could go wrong?

<img src="images/2023/2023-10-01_110341_canada.jpg" id="image-3707" class="picwide" />

I must confess that most of what I know about Canada comes from watching [Strange Brew](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Brew), [Kids in the Hall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kids_in_the_Hall), and [listening to Rush](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0xkMfiHIec). When I saw a man coming out of the McDonald's at the border wearing a Rush t-shirt I took it as a sign everything was going to be okay.

We headed south, sticking to smaller roads along the shoreline for most of the day, communicating with hand gestures at stop signs. Once the smaller road... just stopped and we had to cut up to the interstate (interprovince?), but otherwise it was a nice drive through rural Ontario, which seems like it might actually be full of small farms still.

I follow a [Canadian farmer](https://www.slowdownfarmstead.com) on the interwebs and she is always suggesting that people get to know their local farmers (as a way to *know* where your food, especially meat, is coming from), which in the United States... in most places there aren't that many farm stands and one does not just drive up to random farms and ask if you can buy something. I've always found this bit of advice confounding, but driving through Ontario I suddenly saw what she was thinking of, nearly every farm we drove past had a stand and someone manning it. It would be easy to get to know your local farmer. If you were local. We are not. 

It seemed like a long day for some reason, though we only went about 140 miles. It was well into the afternoon before we pulled into Long Point Provincial Park, which sits out on a long peninsula that sticks out into Lake Erie, a bit like the opposite of the Keweenaw. 

We managed to get a campsite for the night, and since it was a beautiful day, temperatures in the 70s, we headed down to the beach.

<img src="images/2023/2023-10-01_165507_canada.jpg" id="image-3708" class="picwide" />
<div class="cluster">
    <span class="row-2">
<img src="images/2023/2023-10-01_170042_canada.jpg" id="image-3710" class="cluster pic66" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-10-01_170155_canada.jpg" id="image-3711" class="cluster pic66" />
    </span>
</div>
<img src="images/2023/2023-10-01_165540_canada.jpg" id="image-3709" class="picwide" />

The water was warm in the shallows, not just by Lake Superior standards, but actually, like, warm. When you waded out deeper you could find the colder thermal layers and it was possible to stand there with your feet turning to blocks of ice while the rest of you was fine. So long as you stuck to the shallow areas though, which had been warmed by days of sunshine, it was like playing in bath water. We hadn't spent that much time at the beach since we [left Florida in May](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/05/goodbye-florida).

After dinner we went back down to watch the sunset over the lake, one of the nice things about being on the east side of a great lake -- you get to see the sunset over the water.

<img src="images/2023/2023-10-01_174334_canada.jpg" id="image-3712" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-10-01_174424_canada.jpg" id="image-3713" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-10-01_174709_canada.jpg" id="image-3714" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-10-01_175125_canada.jpg" id="image-3715" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-10-01_175329_canada.jpg" id="image-3716" class="picwide" />


That night we decided we should pause and stay a few days in Canada, enjoy the warm weather and beach time. I put some Rush on the stereo, took off work, and, the next morning, went up and booked our site for two more nights. Canada.

<img src="images/2023/2023-10-02_142744_canada.jpg" id="image-3718" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-10-02_142708_canada.jpg" id="image-3717" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-10-03_165111_canada.jpg" id="image-3719" class="picwide" />


## Greenfield Village

It's always seems slightly perverse to me to head east in a country that once lived by the slogan, go west. Whatever the case, we're eastbound again and when planning our route we ran across something called Greenfield Village. 

Greenfield Village is difficult to describe, but it's what happens when someone with resources (Henry Ford) decided to try to preserve some relics of American history. Since one of the reasons we're going east was to show the kids early American history, we stopped a couple nights in Detroit to visit Greenfield Village.

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_085338_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3691" class="picwide" />

What appealed to me about Ford's approach to preserving history is that his view of history mirrors my own: that the things we record in books and celebrate with monuments rarely have much impact of the lives of ordinary people. The things that actually mattered to people of the world before us are usually glossed over by what we call history.

> When I went to our American history books to learn how our forefathers harrowed the land, I discovered that the historians knew nothing about harrows. Yet our country has depended more on harrows than on guns or speeches. I thought that a history which excluded harrows and all the rest of daily life is bunk and I think so yet. <cite>&mdash; Henry Ford</cite>

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_104935_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3699" class="picwide" />

Ford started small, collecting things from his own childhood. In 1919 he found out that his birthplace was going to be destroyed for a road so he moved his childhood farmhouse and restored it to the way he remembered at the time of his mother’s death in 1876. The he tracked down his one-room school, the Scotch Settlement School, and then the 1836 Botsford Inn from Farmington, Michigan, a stagecoach inn where he and his wife Clara had once gone to dances.

Then it started to spiral out of control and next thing he knew, Ford had built his own village, a kind of semi-living monument to the everyday life of Americans over the centuries. By then people were bringing projects to him and he ended up moving Edison's Menlo Park lab here and rebuilding it, and later he added other things like Noah Webster's house, tidewater home from Maryland, a Cotswald cottage, farms from various parts and times in America.

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_112036_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3700" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_093652_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3695" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_092335_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3694" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_091352_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3693" class="picwide" />

Today Greenfield Village is over 80 acres with everything from Edison's Lab to the Wright brothers original bike shop to the oldest working carousel in the United States. It has so much in fact that that is my only criticism: it was overwhelming. Fun, but sometimes almost too much.

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_085810_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3692" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_123030_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3704" class="picwide" />

We managed to squeeze it all in, though we did come back to the carousel several times since it provided a kind of break from history. Or perhaps a reminder that relics are supposed to be fun.

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_104321_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3697" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_123543_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3705" class="picwide" />

The most fascinating thing to me, and I think for the kids, was the glassblowing workshop, which is used daily to produce things that are for sale in the shop nearby. I had never seen anyone blow glass before and despite the heat of the workshop we spent a good half an hour watching a shapeless lump of molten glass get shaped into a drinking glass. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_114640_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3702" class="picwide" />





## Drive My Car

After last summer's [sprint north](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/05/going-up-north), we swore we'd never try to move that fast again. We are heading back down south for the winter, but we're going to take months to get there. We're going to wander, at a leisurely pace, stopping frequently, the way we traveled when [we first set out](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/04/edge-continent).

We said goodbye to our friends in Copper Harbor, and to Lake Superior, and then we meandered south, taking our time, driving but also stopping to explore, and then on again. It was a nice mix of the road and relaxation with no need to be anywhere beyond escaping bad weather.

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-25_074936_driving-out-keewenaw.jpg" id="image-3681" class="picwide" />

We took a week to slowly work our way down out of the UP, along Lake Michigan, across the Mackinac Bridge, and down into The Mitten. We hugged the shores of Lake Huron, one of the Lakes we've visited the least.

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-27_093330_driving-out-keewenaw.jpg" id="image-3683" class="picwide caption" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-09-25_161946_driving-out-keewenaw.jpg" id="image-3682" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-09-27_095626_driving-out-keewenaw.jpg" id="image-3684" class="picwide caption" />

Every other time we've left Lake Superior we've gone west, out into the Dakotas. Once [through South Dakota](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/08/wall-drug), and last year [through North Dakota](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/09/ease-down-the-road). This year we're headed the opposite way, east and then south. 

When you head west out of northern Wisconsin the notable change is that the trees fall away. After a day of driving you're out of the boreal forests and into the vast nothingness of the plains. Going east the trees never stop, the boreal forest does fade and give way to a much more mixed hardwood forest, but it's still mainly trees unless you stick to the shoreline. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-27_110008_driving-out-keewenaw.jpg" id="image-3685" class="picwide caption" />

I love to drive, I always have. I got my driver's license at 15 and a half and never looked back. At 19 I dropped out of college and went on a three month road trip around the United States. 

<img src="images/2023/crossCountryTrip_-_09.-11.jpg" id="image-3689" class="picwide caption" />

Had I been born a century or two earlier, I suspect I'd feel about the horse the way I feel about the automobile. Both are, on one hand, ways to get down the road, and on the other, things that human being obsess over in their effort to go farther.

I haven't ridden horses enough to know how I'd feel about them, but the car quickly came to feel like a natural extension of my body. There's an interview with Steve Jobs where he talks about how, per kilometer a human being isn't very efficient. The most efficient animal per kilometer is the Condor. But, and this is the part Jobs zeros in on, put a human on a bicycle and he becomes astronomically more efficient than any other human. 

What Jobs doesn't mention, but any cyclist can attest to, is how the bicycle quickly becomes more than a tool, turning rather to an extension of the body. This also happens with cars and is, I think, more than anything else, is why I like driving *older* cars -- they are more directly connected to you and your decisions, they are more fully an extension of the body.

There is very little abstraction in vehicles from the 1970s and earlier. The mechanical workings of an old car form a clear picture in my head at this point -- I know what happens when I push on the gas pedal. I know the entire chain of connection from the pedal to the piston compression to turning that detonation into rotational energy that actually moves you down the road. This clear picture in turn (I feel) gives a deeper connection between driver and machine.

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-27_170422_harrisville-sp.jpg" id="image-3686" class="picwide" />

When you stop and think about it, an engine is a miraculous creation. Every time one breaks down on me I find myself amazed that it ever ran at all. 

An engine is a hunk of metal with holes in it really. A piston moves up and down through those metal holes. Cylinder if you want to get more technical. On the down stroke the piston rapidly increases the available volume of the cylinder, which creates a vacuum. Remember high school physics? Nature doesn't like vacuums, she fills them. In this case she fill the vacuum with a mixture of air and atomized gasoline, which comes in through an open hole. That hole then gets closed, and the piston changes direction, moving up and compressing that mixture of fuel and air, and then, right about at maximum compression, the spark plug sparks. Boom. Gasoline has more energy per unit of mass than TNT[^1] and it sends the piston back down the cylinder, which turns the crankshaft. This is the step where we get the rotary motion necessary to actually move down the road.

With an old engine like the bus you're much closer to all of that. I can feel it through my foot, and hear it roar. I push a little harder, the pistons move up and down a little faster. It's a very direct, unmediated connection, at least relative to more modern engines. I can feel the road through my foot, I can sense what the tires are doing from the way the steering wheel feels in my hand. Driving the bus thus becomes an almost entirely intuitive operation, I don't sit around thinking about what to do, I just do what *feels* right when I am driving.

When I stop and think about it though, all I ever think is how miraculous that an engine just does this over and over again, thousands of times a day, millions of times, possibly billions of times in its life. It just keeps doing it. What else has humanity ever built that does that?

Maybe that's too much for some people. A lot of people just want to get somewhere. I understand that I guess, but it doesn't make for a very interesting experience. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-27_171228_harrisville-sp.jpg" id="image-3687" class="picwide" />

Still, the further we got from the UP, the more we re-entered the world fast drives. Everyone who lives near a city seems to be in a hurry. All the time. At least to judge from how they drive, which is the chief way I have to observe city folks at this point.

We are incredibly fortunate to live a life where we are very seldom in a hurry, and I always look at the cars darting around me on larger highways and think, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that you have have to rush about. I wish I could give everyone the time to slow down, take a deep breath, relax, try to enjoy the fact that your engine is working, you hurling down the highway at speeds unthinkable just 100 years ago, that everything around us is in fact miraculous.


<img src="images/2023/2023-09-28_154106_harrisville-sp.jpg" id="image-3688" class="picwide" />


[^1]: Contemplate this for a while and tell me again how we can replace fossil fuels with "clean" energy (which is nothing of the sort, but we'll leave that alone for now).

## Copper Harbor

After getting [kicked out of our site in McLain State Park](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/09/stop-breaking-down) we weren't thrilled at the prospect of more time in a Michigan State Park, but there's not really anything else in Copper Harbor. We pulled in around 3 and asked for a site. The woman at this check-in station was very nice and told me to drive around and pick what site I wanted. 

We did that, but by the time we got back there were other people already booking some of the sites we'd been told were open, which I guess makes sense, but it's a crazy way to do things. No one had taken the site we wanted, but I made a joke about putting someone in a choke hold to make sure they didn't take my site and she said, "oh, we have fights in the office sometimes." I see. Well, there you go. Note to self: JuiJitsu is never not useful.

We managed to get a site without any violence, which was nice. We also booked it up for a few days so no one would steal it out from under us. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-21_082623_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3667" class="picwide" />

Copper Harbor is a place that remains mostly beyond the reach of the world. It's like [Ocracoke](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/05/ocracoke-beaches), [Apalachicola](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2013/05/all-the-pretty-beaches), [Patrick's Point](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/10/pacific), [Edisto](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2020/01/walking), and other places I've [never named](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/08/canyoneering). They are not off the map -- that's not possible any more -- but they are at the edges, far enough outside the lines to be mostly ignored, visited like shrines by devotees. 

These are worlds where cell phone service is spotty to non-existent and the people who live in them interact more, it seems to me, with the world around them. They are more present, more connected to the people around them than other places.

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-20_140714_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3665" class="picwide caption" />

This is my best guess. I don't live in any of them, but after spending months in several I would say that one characteristic they all share is some kind of external hardship that unites the people living there. Up here that's snow. Ocracoke and Apalachicola have storms, for others it's the sheer remoteness of life that bring people together. When the nearest store is hours away, when the nearest hospital is probably too far to help, the nearest services don't really serve you, you have to band together to get by, you share, you help others out, they help you. The way the world has been since the beginning of time -- until the last 50 years anyway, when the [outside expert](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming) arrived to tell people they were doing it wrong. Look where that got us. We need to get back to the way of Ocracoke, the way of Apalachicola, the way of Copper Harbor.

All that said, I also think that much of what saves these places from the ills of modernity has to do with size. It might be that this kind of culture can't scale beyond a certain size.There are certain things you can't do if you live here. You can't put your headphones on and ignore the world when the world consists of only a few hundred people. Humans haven't regressed that much yet, thankfully. 

To be clear, I have no romantic notions about small town living. Small towns can be really awful if you want to buck the trends of the town. My favorite example of this is from the 1820s, when Transcendentalist Joseph Palmer -- who was considered eccentric because he dared to grow a beard -- was mobbed by his New England neighbors who tried to shave him in the street. He was then thrown in jail for defending himself, being charged with "unprovoked assault." 

No, I have no particular love for small towns, but it does seem to me that these places that are "beyond the wall" as my friend Josh likes to say, tend to be small. Perhaps it's that there are not that many people who want to live outside the world. Perhaps these really are some kind of ideal small towns made up of eccentrics who drifted in the tides of civilization until they ended up out here in the eddies. 

I'd have to live in one to know, and I don't. I like to visit them though. I like it when my phone stops working, when I can't even find a coffee shop with internet.

One day I stayed home to do some writing, Corrinne took the kids and went with our friends out to a place they call Horseshoe Bay. It was sunny and almost warm. It was enough that the kids braved the water (which is about 45 degrees around here right now).

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-21_133557_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3668" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-09-21_134907_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3669" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-09-21_140648_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3670" class="picwide" />

The next day they convinced me to come out. The fog didn't burn off as much as it had the day before, but the girls went swimming yet again.

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-22_131005_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3672" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-09-22_130139_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3671" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-09-22_135733_copper-harbor.jpg" id="image-3673" class="picwide" />

Copper Harbor is also home to Fort Wilkins, which the U.S. Army set up in 1844. It was supposed to keep the peace between the miners flooding in to the great copper rush and the local Ojibwe. While some Chippewa opposed the Treaty of La Pointe that had ceded this area to the United States in 1842, the fort seems to have been mostly unneccessary. The miners and Ojibwe got along. That's the story anyway. 



## Stop Breaking Down

I had a bad feeling pulling out of Washburn. The bus sat for nearly four months this summer. The bus hates sitting. I had time to drive it to the upholstery shop and back and that was the extent of my test driving. I was hoping, whatever was going to break, would do it in a populous area with an auto parts store. 

To dash my hopes, our first stop was the Keweenaw peninsula, the long arm of Michigan's Upper Peninsula that sticks out into Lake Superior. In an already remote place, the Keweenaw is even more remote. That's very much the kind of place we enjoy though, the outer edges, the forgotten places that the 21st century, and in some cases most of the 20th century, has passed over. The Keweenaw isn't as unknown as it once was, but it's still out there.

Fortunately for us the bus made it less than 50 miles before it died in a Walmart parking lot. One minute it was cranking over, about to start, and then boom, dead. Not even a click when I turned the key. Well, well. Electrical issues were not what I had expected to go wrong, but I went and dug out my multimeter (which I'm pretty sure is my most used tool), and started checking connections. 

My instinct was that the starter relay was bad (or remote solenoid as some people call it). It went bad once long ago, before we even hit the road, and left me stranded at a dump station. That's the sort of thing you remember. I swapped out the relay with an extra one I carry, but nothing changed. Damn. 

When I bent down by the starter relay and listened closely I could hear it attenuating, or at least it sounded like something was happening and really it's a pretty simple device, a coil is charged and two pieces of metal touch, completing the circuit and sending the charge on to the starter, which then turns the flywheel.

I've seen quite a few mechanics complaining that over the last few years the quality of parts have done a nose dive. Maybe I'd replaced a dead relay with a dead relay? I called a local parts shop to see if they had a relay but they'd have to order it and it wouldn't be there until Monday. Damn.

One of the things I learned at that dump station long ago was that you can bypass the relay by using a screwdriver to bridge the gap. I did that and she cranked up. Pretty sure I'd solved the problem, I quickly packed up my tools and figured I'd just get another relay somewhere down the road.

As I was pulling out of the Walmart parking lot, smoke began pouring out from under the dash and a strong electrical smell of melting plastic filled my nose. Then some burning wire dropped on the ground between my feet. I quickly hooked the bus back around, parked it in a corner, grabbed my fire extinguisher and started tearing apart the front of the bus looking for the source of the fire. Thankfully stopping the bus had stopped the short and there was no fire.

Still, having hung around Travco forums and other places online, I've heard my share of [electrical horror stories](https://www.bumfuzzle.com/fire/).To head that off I had re-wired everything related to the house batteries, and I replaced the old glass fuse panel under the dash with a modern one. But the "wiring harness" of the Travco is a rat's nest of chaos. It seems to have come that way from the factory as far as I can tell. Whatever the case, I was feeling like I'd just cheated the mechanical gods with so small a fire and I wasn't about to hit the road again until I knew everything was good with the wiring.

The problem was: was the fire related to the engine not starting? Or something totally unrelated? It seemed mighty coincidental to have an electrical fire right after you were messing with the wiring, so I figured they must be related.

I found the remains of the wire on the back of the instrument panel and it turned out to be one of two wires going into a single blade. The other wire went to the windshield wiper, which made it a reasonable assumption to think the other probably went to the other windshield wiper switch. I pulled out the manual and looked over the wiring diagram. The wiring diagram had every instrument and dial on the dash. Except the windshield wiper switch. Damn.

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-17_090539_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3654" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-09-17_090935_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3655" class="picwide" />


At this point I'd been troubleshooting the wiring for a couple of hours. In six years of traveling we've never spent a night in a Walmart parking lot, but it was beginning to look a lot like we weren't going to move. We called AAA, thinking that it'd be easier to do whatever work needed to be done back in Washburn. We called at 2 PM, they said it'd be about an hour. We made some lunch. AAA called back and said they didn't know when a tow truck was coming. 

I kept testing wires. I went through the whole ignition harness and everything tested fine. I moved on to the relay, which now was giving me nothing on the starter side. Hmm. I decided, since I had nothing else to do, I might as well pull the starter and have it bench tested, so I did. When I did I noticed that one wire from the relay to the starter was pressed up against the transmission lines and the insulation had melted. Not good. I went ahead and took the starter to the auto parts store and had it tested. It was fine.

I came back and re-installed the starter and made a new wire to replace the melted one. I also bent the transmission line down some so it wouldn't touch the wire. That's when I realized I had probably bent it when I installed the exhaust. That felt like the problem to me, but it still wouldn't start, which confused me.

By now it was painfully obvious that AAA was useless. I could see the towing shop they claimed they'd called across the street, so I called them and asked if AAA had contacted them. They had not. Corrinne called AAA back and found that the person entering our info had listed us as an A108 van, which is about 1/3 our size. She got a manager who promised he'd have a tow truck there in an hour. An hour later, guess what wasn't there?

By now I'd given up hope of going back to Washburn. Olivia made dinner while I kept testing and trying to follow the wiring diagram. It started to get dark not long after that, so we called it a night -- our first in a Walmart parking lot. I've spent quite a few nights in various parking lots with the bus and I have to say, Walmart was by far the best.

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-17_074501_keweenaw_T93HZTH.jpg" id="image-3653" class="picwide" />

The next morning I was up and at it after an early breakfast. My plan was to rewire everything related to the ignition. Before I got started though, a couple came over to say hi. They turned out to also own a Travco, and lived just down the road. I told him we were having electrical issues and he offered to help. He went through basically everything I'd done the day before (which made me feel like at least I was on the right track), and ended up at the same point: the relay. Could it be as simple as having replaced a bad relay with a bad relay?

Chris called a friend of his who was a Mopar guy and said to bring the relays by and he'd bench test them. He also thought he had a spare lying around. So I jumped in Chris's car and we went over to his friend's house which turned out to have a massive shop with more tools than some professional mechanics have on offer. When we got there he was welding new tension rods for a model A he was restoring. 

He bench tested the relays and they were both bad. Chris then opened them up and they were both broken in the same way. Odd. While the relay was clearing the breaking point, what was breaking it? Chris's friend dug out an old relay. It was from a manual transmission so it didn't have the neutral safety switch (which means it would start in drive, which doesn't matter in a manual because the clutch is engaged), but otherwise it was a working relay.

We headed back to the bus and installed it. She fired right up. By that time Chris and I had worked out that probably the wire touching the transmission line had sent current back up and burned out both relays. His friend called a few minutes later and said, you know, I was thinking, that wire you mentioned that melted, that's gotta be what blew out the relays.

Problem solved. The melted wire we decided was just an unlucky coincidence, a result most likely of me bumping a wire when I testing the ignition wires.

Chris and his wife invited us over to check out their Travco, which we did. It was a couple years later than ours, and strangely had some parts from a 1972 and some from a 1973, making it one of the more unusual models I've ever seen. Chris had replaced the 413 with a 440 engine and swapped out most of the drive train to get disk brakes in the front. I have no doubt it screams up mountains. I also liked Chris's collection of motorcycles, most of which he'd built out of spare parts.

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-17_142048_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3656" class="picwide" />

After chatting for a bit, thanking them profusely for getting us back on the road, we headed out again, bound for the Keweenaw. We made it to Fort McLain, about half way up, and called it a day. We woke up the next morning on the shore of Lake Superior.

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-17_194236_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3658" class="picwide" />

We'd had reservations for the weekend, but we were supposed to head on that morning. We liked the look of the place though and decided we'd try to stay. We were hunting for a vacant site online when the person next to us mentioned that their site was first-come first-served and they were headed out that morning. Perfect. I went down and booked it for two more nights and we pulled the bus over.

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-18_113449_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3659" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-09-18_180526_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3661" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-09-19_192043_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3664" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-09-19_061303_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3662" class="picwide" />


The next day I took the kids back to the town of Houghton, which has a park called Chutes and Ladders that their friends back in Washburn (who have a cabin up here) had been telling them about. I was a little worried that it might have been overhyped, but I was wrong. It was probably the best playground/slide setup I've ever seen, including parks you have to pay for, and this one was free.

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-18_143136_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3660" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-09-19_112155_keweenaw.jpg" id="image-3663" class="picwide caption" />

The kids liked it so much Corrinne took them back the next day while I got some work done. In fact, we like camping on the edge of the lake enough that we figured we'd extend our stay. At about 11 AM on the day we were supposed to check out, Corrinne went down to extend our stay and... found out that in Michigan people can buy your camp site out from under you. No one in Michigan seemed to see anything amiss about this, but I can assure you Michigan, this is not normal. In every other campground we have stayed in seven years of living on the road, a first-come, first-served site is not vacant until the current occupant leaves. There are no exceptions to this. State parks in 36 states, national parks, forest service campgrounds, state forest campgrounds, country parks, city parks, metro parks. Never an exception. Except Michigan state parks, where occupation counts for nothing. 

No wonder Michigan is hotbed of militia, these poor people have been having the government steal their campsites all their lives. I'd be pissed too. I was pissed. But not really at the policy. That is what it is. Silly, and dare I say unAmerican, but to my way of thinking, Michigan is free to do what Michigan wants and I am free to go elsewhere. What blew my mind was that the woman working in the front office totally went crazy on Corrinne when Corrinne pushed back and said, hey, that's not how it works everywhere else, where does it say that here? The woman exploded in front of the kids, swearing and telling Corrinne "I have a fucking Ph'D, I came here to get a break."

Now it just seems funny to me&mdash;just one more ridiculous person working at one more misguided government institution, but at the time I was very mad. I went back up told that woman exactly what I thought of her and her Ph'D. Corrinne is very southern and polite and nice even when people swear at her. I was born in Los Angeles. I am not nice to people who swear at my wife.

In the end, what are you going to do? We packed up in a hurry and headed out, bound for points farther north.






## Ready to Start

If you're not excited about where you're going, you're going the wrong way.

Where you're going may be challenging, difficult, a real pain in the ass even, but come what may, you should be excited about getting there&mdash;both the getting, and the there. That's how you know you're [on the path](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/01/path). 

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-17_151928_open-road.jpg" id="image-3651" class="picwide" />


I know people struggle with finding their path. It's not easy. I lose my way sometimes too, but it's still there, inside you.

I think the best way to find your path is to slow down, be quiet, and listen. 

There's a lot of noise in the world, a lot of people telling you what you should do. Some of them may mean well, but no one knows your path. There are no exceptions. No one knows your path. And you don't know anyone else's path. 

I think that's part of the reason some people read this site -- they're not happy with their path.  Our path is appealing, if only, I think, because it's very different. That doesn't mean it's right for you, but it's an option. Most people I've met through luxagraf are looking for something that our culture didn't offer them. If you think the grand dance of existence might involve more than working all your life for [two TV sets and two Cadillac cars](https://inv.vern.cc/watch?v=9iJQQTg5_Kg), as Lou Reed put it, this site is here to tell you you're not alone. 

I believe that we are here to give the gifts that we have built up inside us over millennia of our soul’s existence, that we are here to shepherd each other toward our gifts and give to the world those things that we have inside us. How you do that is for you to figure out, but I have found that letting go of the ideas that haven't been working is a good place to start. You don't have to follow the scripts you were handed. Those may not be your path. Sit down, quiet your mind, and listen. Be patient. 

Toward the end of August I was starting to feel the pull of the road again. We love spending the summer up here, being anchored to a part of the world for a while, but we also get excited to get going again, to see new things. There's always sadness in leaving, we'll miss our friends, but we also know we'll see them again. 

Getting ready to go means getting busy too. I probably have less time to be sad about leaving because I end up running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to get everything done in the last couple of weeks. As always, there's a balance to be found. I spent a good bit of time working on the vehicles, but we also found time to do some paddleboarding, pick blueberries, and put together a big sleepover for the kids and all their friends.

Our new exhaust pipe arrived one day toward the end of the August. Since the man who made it couldn't actually be there to fit everything together, it came back to me as a bit of a jigsaw puzzle, with plenty of extra pipe on each piece, and even made a few extra pieces, so I'd have a better chance of getting it all to fit. That was a good call on his part, but it did mean I had to do a lot of cutting to get everything fitted properly.

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-02_103527_bus-work.jpg" id="image-3647" class="picwide" />

The tough part was wrapping around the driver's side, keeping the exhaust far enough from the oil pan, but not too close to the transmission cooler lines. There's not much room down there and this took quite a bit of doing, but I was pretty sure I'd done a good job. Actually, I had done a good job if those where the only two factors to consider. Alas, they are not, but I did not realize that when I was installing the tailpipe so I was happily ignorant. That's called foreshadowing.

Once I had it cut and fitted around the engine, fitting the rest was was easy since it's mostly straight. The only hiccup is the bend over the rear axle, but the man who made the pipe did a great job and it fit perfect. We even have a muffler now. Fancy. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-01_131017_paddleboarding.jpg" id="image-3648" class="picwide" />

With the tailpipe in we were pretty close to being mobile again. We just needed seats. For about four weeks this summer we lived with no seats in the bus. No front seats, no couch, no table. Nothing. We slept on the ground, ate on the ground, worked on the ground. It wasn't a ton of fun, but the seats really needed to be recovered. 

The vinyl that was used in the initial job was probably dead stock. Or at least well past its ideal sell date. It turned brittle and began to fall apart last year, getting worse at an accelerating pace until we decided something had to be done. Coincidentally, this summer a new upholstery shop opened up in Washburn[^1] and we were able to get everything redone. Adam of Adam's Upholstery did a fantastic job and the seats look and feel better than they ever have.

Somewhere in there we squeezed in a trip to a blueberry farm, and, after plenty of aborted attempts, we finally got to go sailing on our friend Bob's boat. I don't think the kids have ever talked so fondly about anything we've ever done. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-03_124254_sailing-superior.jpg" id="image-3649" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-09-03_131017_sailing-superior.jpg" id="image-3650" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-08-24_103527_blueberries-play.jpg" id="image-3646" class="picwide" />

The weekend before it was time to go we set up the tent and the kids invited over some friends from town and had a kids' sleepover/camping trip. They somehow squeezed 8 people in our tent, and despite the rain, managed to stay dry and have a good time.

Meanwhile, a couple days before we were set to go, I came down with a pretty terrible head cold that left me lying down most of the day. I had a list of things that needed to get done, but by the time I was up and doing things again it just wasn't possible. I had to pick one thing and I picked giving the bus a quick coat of wax. I only managed to get three sides done, but she looks good.

It might sound like an odd choice, but there weren't any mechanical things that *had* to be done, and I have found that appearances matter. An old rig that's dirty and beat up just looks old. Take that same rig though and make it shiny and clean, and all the sudden it's vintage and everyone wants to say hi and talk about it. More than any mechanical fix, that good will, much of which comes from that clean first impression, is what gets us down the road.

This is part of our path I think. My experience has been that when you do find your path, and it's not the path most people are familiar with, or want anything to do with, it's best to make them comfortable by making your path at least relatable in the small things. Everyone appreciates a clean home. Everyone knows that when things are shiny, it's because the people who own them care for them, and everyone cares for something. 

I said earlier that no one can tell you your path, and you can go your own way, but you're still part of the world and sometimes you need to make concessions to the rest of the world. You have to meet the world half way. For us that means keeping a tight ship, as it were. Other people might not want your path, they might not even like your path, but most of them will respect it if you give them a way to do that. So wax it was. And then, we were off.


[^1]: Technically not new, but relocated to a place we actually noticed it.

## Every Day It's 1984

Nostalgia is commonly used pejoratively. As if the very idea of looking backward in time and saying, hmm, maybe we lost something between then and now were... bad? The American Psychological Association considers nostalgia a subset of depression, which is, ahem, depressing. But then I guess if you're stuck trying to prop up the present as better than the past, at this point, you have to do some serious philosophical dancing. 

Whatever the case, call it what you will, but one of my goals for us in living the way we do is to provide our children with a world that resembles the world of 1984. With maybe some notable elements from 1969 thrown in. But not having lived through 1969 I can't even try to authentically replicate it. 1984 though. I know some things about 1984.

<img src="images/2023/2023-08-06_142744_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3630" class="picwide" />

In 1984 no one was looking at their phones. In 1984 no one was wearing masks. In 1984 no one was wearing helmets. In 1984 no one went on play dates. In 1984 playgrounds were made of metal. In 1984 no one called the cops on kids left alone for the day. In 1984 everyone expected children to be self-governing individuals capable of surviving the day unsupervised and no one thought twice about it.

This is how I grew up. It's how my peers and elders grew up, and from what I've seen of the world my peers and elders are considerably more capable individuals than the people who've grown up in the hyper-managed, ultra-safe, everyone-gets-a-trophy world kids inhabit today. 

I want my kids to grow up the way we did. Yes, they get hurt sometimes. You should have seen Lilah's toe when she caught it on a root while riding her bike barefoot. It happens. One minute you're riding along, the next minute your toenail is gone. Childhood is supposed to have sharp edges and moments of pain, it's how you learn and grow.

<img src="images/2023/2023-08-08_152605_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3631" class="picwide" />

I picked 1984 somewhat at random, but the point stands that part of what I want to do living this way is provide my kids with access to the freedoms that I enjoyed and give them room to figure things out for themselves, explore new places, learn new things, meet new people, and build and sustain relationships -- on their own.

To be able to do this is a skill everyone has to learn, but we've had several generations now that were never given the chance to do this and... it's not good. These grown men and women are only couple steps above helpless in many cases and we're all starting to see the effects of that. When Mommy and Daddy are always there to fix things and suddenly they aren't.... 

To be a self-regulating individual capable of exploring the world, learning on your own, and building friendships as you go, requires practice. It requires the space to make mistakes and find the success that builds confidence as you go. Our kids need to work things out themselves, to reason things out themselves without anyone telling them the answer. 

This is a big part of why we keep coming back to Washburn. It's not just that parenting has changed since 1984. Culture changed too. We no longer have a culture that allows kids these freedoms even if the parents are willing to give them. Parents go to jail for these things in some places. Utah, Oklahoma, and Texas have actually had to [pass laws](https://reason.com/2021/05/18/texas-becomes-third-state-to-pass-free-range-kids-law/) legalizing the act of letting kids roam around unsupervised. Wisconsin has no such law that I know of, but in small towns around America the culture of letting kids roam remains much more in tact than it does in more populated areas. This is a big part of why we spend so much time on the fringes.

The people we've met, the people who are here regularly, they think like we do, they grew up like we do. The sort of people who'll call the cops on an unattended child, do not come here. And so we keep coming back.

<img src="images/2023/2023-08-13_102715_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3638" class="picwide" />

<img src="images/2023/2023-09-02_144746_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3642" class="picwide" />

This means that a good bit of what we've done this summer -- is nothing. We've stayed around town and let the kids wander the creeks, make friends, ride their bikes around town, make food over a fire, fish, swim, and whatever else they want to do.

<img src="images/2023/2023-08-11_173916_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3636" class="picwide" />
<div class="cluster">
    <span class="row-2">
<img src="images/2023/2023-08-11_173551_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3644" class="cluster pic66" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-08-11_173732_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3645" class="cluster pic66" />
    </span>
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<img src="images/2023/2023-08-11_150404_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3633" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-08-31_111330_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3641" class="picwide" />


And sure, I was there to take these pictures. I like to swim. I like to explore. But these are just a handful of moments. The kids had most of the summer to themselves. We let them wander around in a kind of mile or two radius where they could get up to whatever they wanted. I'm grateful to all their friends' parents who also let their kids roam around and to the people of Washburn who've made a community where that's possible. Where bikes won't be stolen, no one calls the cops on kids, and the world is, well, more like it was in 1984.



## Little Girl's Point

The rest of my family loves rock hounding. I don't even know if that's what you call it, but that's what I'm going with. They enjoy walking around, hunting for rocks. Agates are especially popular with rock lovers, and one of the best agate beaches in the area is across the lake from us, in Michigan, at place called Little Girl's point. 

We were over there one Thursday afternoon, hunting for rocks on the beach. The beach sits just below a small bluff where there is a county park with some campsites. The kids asked me why we never camped there. I didn't have a good answer, so we decided we'd come back the next weekend and camp, if we could get a campsite. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-06-08_123408_little-girl-point.jpg" id="image-3621" class="picwide" />

We somehow managed to grab probably the best site in the campground for the following weekend. Since the bus tailpipe was still being bent into shape somewhere down in Eau Claire, we loaded up the Jeep with our camping gear and headed out for a few nights in a tent. 

It might seem like camping is strange thing for us to do, since we're sort of always camping. If the bus had been running, we'd have brought it, but then again sometimes it's good to change it up, get a little more primitive so you appreciate what you have the rest of the time. Although it's hard to consider yourself roughing it with views like this.

<img src="images/2023/2023-07-20_155734_camping-little-girls-point.jpg" id="image-3611" class="picwide" />

The main difference from our usual day trip forays to Little Girl's Point, was that we were able to linger, watch the shadows lengthen, see the orange ball of evening sun sink into the smoky edges of the lake. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-07-20_171236_camping-little-girls-point.jpg" id="image-3614" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-07-20_204023_camping-little-girls-point.jpg" id="image-3617" class="picwide" />

We got to Little Girl's Point after a day of heavy rains, which turned the patches of clay soil in the bluffs into some impressively large mud pits. The kids scampered up and down the cliffs all day, looking for larger and larger mud pits to play in before jumping in the lake to rinse off and do it all over again.

<img src="images/2023/2023-07-20_171640_camping-little-girls-point.jpg" id="image-3615" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-07-20_150305_camping-little-girls-point.jpg" id="image-3610" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-07-20_171209_camping-little-girls-point.jpg" id="image-3613" class="picwide" />






## Build

*When in doubt, build shelves*. Building things is an essential part of life. Shelves are easy and satisfying to build. They're useful too. Everyone needs more shelf space. Everywhere I've ever lived I built some shelves or bookcase or some sort of flat surface on which to put thing. When you're done with a shelf your life is inevitably neater and more organized and better in some small way. 

Social critic and priest Ivan Illich writes in *Tools for Convivality* that "people need... the freedom to make things among which they can live, or give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others." 

Maybe that seems like too much weight to put on something as simple as shelves, but I think it's important to have an active hand in shaping the world that surrounds you. It give that world more meaning. Shelves are an easy place to start. Get a single sturdy board, a couple angle brackets and you're on your way. Or you can get fancy if that's your taste, search out how to do a french cleat. Either way you have given shape to your things yourself.

<img src="images/2023/2023-06-17_130839_washburn.jpg" id="image-3596" class="picwide" />

I've been shelf building my whole life. When I don't have anything else to do, I build shelves. Or at least paint them. I used to repaint my bookshelves whenever I moved because after a move you never quite know what to do in your new space. The answer is to build shelves. I also tidy up a lot when I can't think what else to do, which inevitably makes me think, hmm, I should build a shelf. 

Despite the image many people have of me sitting in hammock doing nothing most of the time, that's not all that accurate. I mean, I try to get in the hammock as much as possible, but this summer I've built quite a few shelves. Shelves for books, shelves in the bathroom, shelves in the closet. Then I branched out and built a new towel rack. I still have a few more shelves planned before we hit the road again.

<img src="images/2023/2023-06-17_160323_washburn.jpg" id="image-3597" class="picwide caption" />

I was building shelves in part because I couldn't work on the engine. I pulled the tailpipe out of the bus--all 28 feet of it. I it cut up into manageable pieces and sent off to Eau Claire where a machine shop is building us a new one. Slowly. That pretty much means I can't work on the engine. Well, I can't start it, which makes it hard to work on it and know the results. So shelves. 

We stacked the summer up with activities for the kids. Well. For us anyway. We're not used to being in one place for so long so we went maybe a little overboard. There were baseball games, juijitsu and wrestling practice, sailing camp, theater camp, and what feels like an inordinate number of other activities. The kids have had fun though.

We managed to do some exploring too. We made a day trip to Little Girl's Point, which is one of the more popular agate hunting beaches in the area. Not being a rockhound myself, I usually bring a notebook, stove, coffee pot and fixings, and sit on the beach, writing and relaxing. I do lounge around in a hammock occasionally, there's just nowhere to hang a hammock on this beach.

<img src="images/2023/2023-06-08_115737_little-girl-point.jpg" id="image-3593" class="picwide" />

<img src="images/2023/2023-06-08_134509_little-girl-point.jpg" id="image-3594" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-07-13_105224_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3602" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-06-08_135922_little-girl-point.jpg" id="image-3595" class="picwide" />

The girls turned 11 in July, though this year, thanks to a family visit just before their birthday, they managed to drag it out into something like a birthday week. On the actual day there was, of course, [waffle cake](https://luxagraf.net/essay/waffle-world).

<img src="images/2023/2023-07-11_062305_11th-birthday.jpg" id="image-3600" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-07-11_151007_11th-birthday.jpg" id="image-3601" class="picwide" />

Quite a few people have reached out to see how the smoke was up here. Most of the time it really hasn't been that bad. There's been a general haze that I don't recall from last year, air quality is not what you'd call good, but for the most part it hasn't been as bad here as I've seen elsewhere except for a handful of days. There were a couple of days though where the sun looked like this at 11 AM and the world was preternatually dark.

<img src="images/2023/2023-07-15_070855_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3607" class="picwide" />

To balance it out, there have also been days where it's so clear it seems like an easy swim over to Ashland.

<img src="images/2023/2023-07-16_192240_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-3608" class="picwide" />

The bad air didn't affect the cherries at least. The great lakes area is for some reason home to the best cherries I've ever had. Around here it's mostly red cherries, and they're very good, but if you ever make it over to the UP, keep an eye out for the golden cherries, which are slightly more sour and somehow better. The reds are damn good though and after reading Ralph Moody's *Little Birches* books, which involve some cherry picking, the kids had to try their hand.

<img src="images/2023/2023-07-14_120512_cherry-picking.jpg" id="image-3603" class="picwide" />
<div class="cluster">
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<img src="images/2023/2023-07-14_123000_cherry-picking.jpg" id="image-3604" class="cluster pic66" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-07-14_121845_cherry-picking.jpg" id="image-3605" class="cluster pic66" />
    </span>
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<img src="images/2023/2023-07-14_124113_cherry-picking.jpg" id="image-3606" class="picwide" />

I believe we came home with 12 pounds in all. We gave away a few, but I'd say we ate at least 7 pounds in two days. 

That's sort of the way summer goes up here, it's so short you have to cram a lot into it. On the one hand there's an element of gluttony to it, everything grows so fast and is gone before you know it, but on the other hand you can feel how valued and appreciated this time is. This is a land where winter is always either here, or just around the corner. Any time you don't need a jacket and skis to get outside is reason enough to celebrate.
## Second Spring

Driving 1800 miles north in a week was like stepping back in time. Spring came and went in Florida back in early march. By the time we left Florida was well into summer, whatever the calendar might have said. Here in Washburn though spring had barely arrived. 

The night we got in the overnight low was 34 degrees. The trees were mainly still bare, save the birches, which leaf out really early. The undergrowth was still spindly and the creek, which normally afforded the kids somewhere to play where no one could see them, was visible to the whole campground.

There was also almost no one in the campground save us, the camp hosts, and few other seasonal campers. We even mainly beat the birds up here. There were a few warblers around, some swans, geese, and ducks, but the resident merlins, and most of the spring warblers had not shown up yet, and there were hardly any flowers to be seen.

In two short weeks all that changed. Leaves came out so fast I swear the kids and I watched them grow one day. In two weeks the creek was hidden again. Unfortunately the mosquitoes also grew. Thicker than we've ever seen them around here. I was some small comfort to hear some locals say this is the worst mosquitoes have ever been around here, so far as anyone can remember.




## Going Up North 

Eight days of travel. Six days driving. 1508 miles from the shores of St George Island to the shores of Lake Superior. 

It was too fast. I knew it was too fast, but we wanted to get out of the heat. I was ready for the toll it takes on us, but I was not prepared for the toll it would take on the vehicles. If you do the math there, we were doing over 250 miles a day. Often considerably more since one of those days was mostly spent by the side of the road.

<img src="images/2023/2023-05-14_073213_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3543" class="picwide caption" />

The first day started smooth. It was hot and we left early so we wouldn't be driving in the heat. Everything was fine until the last 100 miles when the bus engine sudden got real loud. I pulled over and popped the doghouse to make sure an exhaust manifold hadn't cracked. Nothing that bad fortunately, so I crawled underneath and sure enough there was the tailpipe, broken in two just past the t-joint on the passenger's side.

<img src="images/2023/2023-05-13_094713_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3542" class="picwide" />

I limped into the nearest town and stopped at Napa. Which was closed. I limped back to O'Reilly and went in to see what I could find to try to rejoin those two pieces. After some debate with myself I went with a thinner piece that would fit inside. I borrowed a spreader tool and tried the widen the rear section, which would have allowed a wider diameter piece to fit, but I backed off, it just seemed to brittle to possibly stretch, more likely I'd crack it. I went with the next smaller diameter piece. It fit, the problem was that I couldn't just shove it in because that would block the flow of exhaust from the passenger's side. 

I fitted it as best I could and figured I could drill a hole and then widen that with a metal blade on my jigsaw. That would have worked, but one of the O'Reilly employees saved me a ton of time by announcing that he had a vice and a reciprocating saw in his truck. As we all should. He had welded up his own vice stand that fit in the two hitch. It was genius and I may have to copy it if I can get someone to weld it for me.

<img src="images/2023/2023-0-513_124245_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3548" class="picwide" />

With the vent hole cut, I inserted the pipe into the other and anchored it with a machine screw. Then I fitted on the back half of the tailpipe and anchored it with another machine screw. I bought some putty and shoved an entire container of it into the cracks and wrapped it all up with a patch to seal it.

But this time it was hot and miserable and Corrinne and kids had done everything there was to do in this little Alabama town so after I bought some baling wire, we hit the road. The Jeep did not like the heat though, and the wind had drained from our day, so we ended up calling it a day and getting hotel. We stopped about fifty miles short of goal, but we figured the hotel would let us get an early start the next day.

We were on the road at 6 AM the next morning, trying to beat the heat up to Tupelo. We ended up driving over 300 miles, which I think is maybe the longest day we've ever done. Both vehicles ran great, though by the end of the day, when we pulled into Tombigbee State Park for the night, the supposedly heat-resistant exhaust wrap was pretty well burned off. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-05-14_163115_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3551" class="picwide" />

We pulled into the first site that looked appealing, and headed for the cold showers. So long as you stayed in the shade it was actually tolerable. We whiled away the evening playing baseball and grilling burgers. After the sun set that night, and it cooled down, I got underneath and re-wrapped the repaired joint with some header tape I had lying around and then anchored that with baling wire.

The next morning we hit the road again early and pulled off another long day up to Metropolis IL, to the same campground [we stayed in last year](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/06/prairie-notes). We took a day off the next day to get some work done, but even here we hadn't truly escaped the heat so we didn't linger. The only problem was that the last few miles to Metropolis the bus had been making a horrible scraping noise that sounded like it was coming from the left front wheel. I suspected either the brakes or the wheel bearings, the latter of which would be especially bad. 

Leaving Metropolis I didn't hear a thing, so I pushed on. After about 100 miles I stopped to get gas and again, once I dropped below highway speeds, there was the scrapping again. I got gas and got back on the highway, scraping until I was up to about 35 MPH and then it went away. Curious. 

Then I hit a particularly large bump and heard it again. Hmm. Then something in my head screamed wheel bearings. I know I have a piece about [safety third](https://luxagraf.net/essay/safety-third), but I don't mess around with wheel bearings so I pulled over. Corrinne and kids joined me at a gas station. I told her I needed to get the wheel off and apart and take a look. They headed off to explore an antique store while I went off to convince a diesel mechanic to help me get the wheel off. He agreed to help, he even spun the bolts off for me, but then he had to go run an errand. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-05-17_085108_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3544" class="picwide" />

He left his tools for me, so I got the wheel apart and... the brakes looked okay. One of the wheel cylinder pins was slightly off kilter and the cylinder was leaking, but neither of those were making the scraping noise. I dug deeper and the bearings all looked okay to me.

<img src="images/2023/2023-05-17_101812_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3545" class="picwide" />

Eventually the mechanic came back and he agreed with my assessment. Then he looked at me funny and said, "weird thing is, back down the road from here a car just blew out its wheel bearings, sheared off the whole wheel and it hit a motorcyclist. They're all down in a ditch, they're trying to get them out now." We talked for a while after that. He told me some sad, sad stories about his town, his family. It was a strange stop that left me feeling like things in this country are more painfully broken than I thought. 

Eventually he helped me repack the bearings and we put the wheel back together. I paid him for his time and tools and hit the road again. The scraping went away when I got above 35 and I figured if it wasn't the wheel bearings or the brakes maybe I could  just keep driving and try to puzzle it out. Which is what I did for about another 100 miles or so. 

It's tough to find camping in the middle of Illinois, but there are some county parks in the small towns. We pulled into Arthur, Illinois -- mostly notable for its Amish population -- not really knowing what to expect. We found a gravel lot behind the high school with electric and water. Good enough of the night.

<img src="images/2023/2023-05-17_174622_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3546" class="picwide" />

We were also in the middle of several baseball fields so after dinner I took the kids over to watch a little league game for a couple innings. When we came back there was a softball game going at the field right in front of the bus. We sat around watching the Amish play softball against the English (that's what the Amish call you and I). We arrived late, and the lighted scoreboard didn't work so I don't know who won, but the Amish were damn good and I'd be surprised if the other team won.

<img src="images/2023/2023-05-17_175902_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3547" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-05-17_200204_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3552" class="picwide caption" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-05-17_185941_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3550" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-05-17_183512_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3549" class="picwide caption" />

The next morning we hit the road early, but we decided to split up. Since stop-and-go was not good for the bus, I decided to take the interstate while Corrinne would continue on the backroads that we usually take. This worked for about 50 miles. Then I hit a bump and that was the end, the scraping became a grinding and I pulled to the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere. 

It's been a long time since I was at the side of the road with no clue what was wrong. I got out and crawled under the bus but I didn't see anything wrong. The conclusion I came up with was that maybe the slightly crooked pin in the wheel cylinder had become worse, making the brake pad rub the drum. That didn't feel right, but I had no other ideas. I limped along a couple of miles on the shoulder and pulled off in the tiny town of Tonika IL where there was a Casey's gas station with a truck parking lot we could leave the bus in if we needed to. And we did.

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People always ask if we're actually as calm as I make it seem when things go wrong. It comes up enough that now Corrinne and I joke about it whenever something does happen. *Are you stressed? Never.* 

I actually was stressed this time because we wanted to meet up with some friends the next day in Wisconsin, and I was supposed to meet a colleague who lives in Rockford for coffee that evening . None of that was going to happen and I was stressed about that. I don't like to flake on people. But once I accepted that those things weren't going to happen, the stress went away, and I was able to get to work. You have to start where you are, not where you wish you were.

I called around to find a new wheel cylinder and found a parts store that said they'd have it the next morning. We got a hotel for the kids and I stayed with the bus, camping in the parking lot for the night. I was at the parts store the next morning at 8 AM and... the wheel cylinder did not arrive. Actually one did, since I ordered both left and right side. The right side was there, the left was not. I got back on the phone and found a Napa that said they could have it by 2 that afternoon. 

With a few hours to kill we decided to check out nearby Starving Rock State Park. It proved a very crowded, but interesting park. As with most places, a little walking and you soon left most of the crowds behind. 

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After the hike we ate lunch and then I went back to the bus and set about taking the wheels off so everything would be ready to go when I got the parts. Except I couldn't get the lug nuts off. I stood and bounced on my breaker bar and they just wouldn't move. I walked over to a Semi truck repair shop behind the gas station and borrowed a four foot long breaker bar. Still no dice. I took it back and ended up talking to the owner for a bit. He agreed to spin off the lug nuts for me so I pulled the bus over to his driveway. He listened to my story, but I could tell he didn't think to sounded good it either. We jacked it up and spun the wheel. No scrape. "Take me for a drive then," he said.

<img src="images/2023/2023-05-19_144050_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3559" class="picwide" />

So we did and about half way across the parking lot I started having deja vu. "Nah, that's your drive train," he said, "spin it back around." I pulled it back onto the concrete and he and I and his son all crawled under to inspect the u-joints and shafts. That's when the deja vu got stronger and all the sudden it hit me. [King City, California](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/12/aquarium-kings). I will quote myself: "there was a horrible grinding noise that really sounded like wheel bearings to me." But it wasn't then and it wasn't now. Once it hit me I slip forward and there it was, the rear transmission mount had broken again. The first u-joint was hanging down, scraping against the cross member. 

Once I pointed it out the owner and his sons made quick work of it. They pulled it out, welded it back together and had it back in about 10 minutes. They wouldn't even take any money for it. Yet again we continue on by the kindness of strangers.

By then it was late in the day and we'd already paid for the hotel for another night, so I just drove over there and we went to a nearby Mexican market and got a rotisserie chicken that was pretty damn close to what we used to enjoy all the time in San Miguel.

From there on out it was a pleasant drive. We mostly stayed on the backroads, as we usually do, though I did grab the highway through Madison because the faster I get through cities, the better. We stopped off in Edgerton WI to visit the boyhood home of Sterling North, since we'd [recently read his novel Rascal](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/03/gone-fishin), which the kids loved. In fact part of Rascal takes place on the Brule river, not far from where we've been spending our summers in Wisconsin. I looked up where Sterling North lived and discovered that his house has been preserved, so we decided to stop. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-05-20_092724_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3560" class="picwide" />

The house is only open Sundays, so we just saw the outside, but the Methodist church caretaker happened to see us outside and asked the kids if they wanted to come into the church and ring the bell. The bell tower figures prominently in the book, but even if it didn't, what kid doesn't love to ring a huge bell?

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I spent some time in Edgerton trying to fix the steering wheel of the Jeep, which has become rather loose, but in the end I broke off the pivot pin puller and had to put it back together the way it was. That one ratcheted up my frustration levels because it was not just nut and bolts. It was weird torx screws, steering wheel pullers, and other specialty tools. If I want to get the steering wheel of the bus it's just one bolt. I love the Jeep, but the complexity increase from one bolt to three hours of work is not progress. 

We had one other small issue that day after we left Sterling North's house. One of the bolts that holds the alternator on to the front of the bus engine snapped off and vibrated forward until the head of it was hitting the fan, making another horrible clanging noise. For a second I did panic that time. I pulled over and it really did sound like a piece of metal was bouncing around inside the engine. Then I saw the bolt vibrating around loose and relaxed. Twenty minutes later I had rigged it up well enough to get us the rest of the way to Washburn. 

We'd left the heat behind a few days before in Metropolis IL, but that night in the middle of Wisconsin was the first night it was genuinely cold. This was what we'd been wanting. We pulled out our jackets before the sun had even set. I lay for a while outside on the picnic table thinking, we did it, we actually did it. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-05-20_181421_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3565" class="picwide" />

Eight days. Only three things broke on two cars that are more than 80 years old between them.

It wasn't until I was sitting there, staring up at the pines above our campsite, that it occurred to me that everything that had gone wrong on our drive -- the broke tailpipe, the cracked rear transmission mount, the broken alternator bolt, the lose steering wheel bolts in the Jeep -- all those things ultimately happened most likely because of excessive vibration. You can maybe blame some of that on general engine vibration, but two of them happened after hitting potholes.

American roads are falling apart. I remember when we first started we'd notice bad roads. Louisiana's roads were terrible. Corrinne's grandfather built roads in Louisiana most of his life, we'd joke that the roads were probably the same surfaces he'd help lay. I also remember thinking that highway 101 in California, just north of and down through San Francisco, was one of the worst roads in the country. The point is we noticed bad roads. 

Today, we notice good roads. And there are very few of them.

Luckily for us, the last day was a pleasant and very smooth drive over what was definitely the best road surface on our entire drive. We were in Washburn by mid afternoon, tucked away in the campsite that will be our home for most of the summer. Except for when we have to get our new tailpipe made. And probably when I rebuild the front brakes. And maybe when I pull the entire engine out for a rebuild. But for now at least we have nowhere else we need to be.

<img src="images/2023/2023-05-21_150743_driving-to-washburn.jpg" id="image-3566" class="picwide" />




## Leaving Florida

In the evenings the song of whippoorwills echoes on all sides. Spring peepers croak and creak in the marsh reeds. Here and there through the trees I can catch a glimmering flicker of flames from a campfire. Only the truly committed are having fires in this heat. The air is still and heavy, with only the occasional puff of a breeze.

We drove into Florida in December of last year, a few days before Elliott's birthday, nearly six months ago. In six years of living on the road this is the longest we've stayed in one area. The general consensus is that it's time to go. Not from any dislike of Florida, but simply because it is time. 

Science says that no one knows exactly what prompts birds to migrate, but I have a theory: individual agency. That is, *a* bird feels that it's time to go. It looks at other birds. They know that look. They give it some thought, they weigh it against their own feelings. They nod. And off they go together.

<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_165013.jpg" id="image-3529" class="picwide caption" />

From Big Lagoon we drove east, stopping off at Fred Gannon Rocky Bayou for a couple of days. In that time I managed to get some work done on the Jeep, and an oil change in for the bus. The Jeep needs more work than I have time or knowledge to do. I am really just crossing my fingers on the Jeep.

I left out a story back when we left Apalachicola. The bus had been starting rough for a few days, but one day it turned ugly, like someone had poured a bag of marbles in the back of the engine. After a bit of research I saw some people say that a starter wheel can sound like that. The starter is one thing I've never touched. Chrysler starters are notoriously hard to access on cars. I've heard of people having to pull off their exhaust headers just to get to the starter. Fortunately ours is not so bad. I was able to track down a new starter and got it installed without too much trouble. I was tightening up the bolts on the new starter when I noticed the missing teeth in the flywheel. Damn. Guess it wasn't just the starter. 

There turned out to be two teeth missing. They aren't next to each other fortunately, but still not great. I got the broken teeth out and that turned out to be the bag of marbles sound, which is gone. For now it starts well enough, but eventually we'll likely lose more teeth. A new flywheel is now on my list of projects for the summer. Along with new exhaust pipes and possibly a full engine rebuild.

One day I was out running some errands when I spied a bunch of planes outside a building not too far from the campground. It turned out to be the Airforce Armament Museum. I took the kids over the day before we left so we could check out all the planes.

<img src="images/2023/2023-05-04_111017_fred-gannon.jpg" id="image-3525" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-05-04_123129_fred-gannon.jpg" id="image-3526" class="picwide" />

There were a few things inside, including a room full of machine guns to answer the question of just how big a machine gun is, but most of the planes were parked outside. We ate lunch in the shade of some WWII bombers and then walked around, moving forward in time through the history of American warplanes.

<img src="images/2023/2023-05-04_125637_fred-gannon.jpg" id="image-3527" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-05-04_131400_fred-gannon.jpg" id="image-3528" class="picwide caption" />

From Fred Gannon we drove east, back to St George. Because why wouldn't you start your drive north by going southeast? We needed one last week on the wilds of the island before we said goodbye.

It turned out that every no see um on St George had hatched since our last visit, but thankfully they weren't bad outside of our campsite. It was too hot for campfires anyway. We split our time between the beach and the bay, depending on the wind. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-05-10_155526_st-george.jpg" id="image-3533" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-05-10_132149_st-george.jpg" id="image-3532" class="picwide" />

I've finally got to the point where I can stay on the paddleboard well enough to take it out in the ocean and kinda sorta surf on the little Florida waves. I had a few good rides and then I faceplanted and lost my nice sunglasses. At least we aren't going for a long drive any time soon.

My favorite thing became going down to the bay in the evenings to go for a swim as the sun set. The water was plenty warm enough and if you mostly submerged yourself in the shallow water the no-see-ums would leave you alone. The kids would play and I would just lie back, kick my feet up and relax, which always feels better after you've put in a good days work on a few old vehicles. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-05-09_181653_st-george.jpg" id="image-3531" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-05-09_155338_st-george.jpg" id="image-3530" class="picwide" />

## Bus Work and Baseball

Our last few days on St. George between all of us we saw a Scarlet Tanager, Rose-Breasted Grosbeak, and an Indigo Bunting. The migrant birds were moving through. That's one of our cues that it's time to go. When the birds are headed north it's about time for us to do likewise.

A couple days later we were headed back over to Pensacola to take care of some unavoidable business. We dragged our feet though. The day before we were set to leave a spot opened up at Grayton Beach, so we stopped off there for five days and enjoyed the white sand beaches. And the occasional low flying attack helicopter.

<img src="images/2023/2023-04-17_160745_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3499" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-04-19_130210_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3500" class="picwide" />

When that week was up we finally headed for Big Lagoon. It was on that drive, stuck in bumper to bumper traffic on highway 98, that we knew it was time to wrap things up and head elsewhere. We had to stop off at Joe Patti's again to have a last seafood fest.

<img src="images/2023/2023-04-20_131819_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3501" class="picwide" />

We came back to the crowds and cities because we needed to sell our old Volvo, which had been sitting in a storage facility ever since we [bought the Wagoneer](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/03/wagoneer). We would have sold it right away, but we didn't have the title. As it turned out the woman who ran the storage unit office had a friend who needed a car so getting that off our hands proved easier than we thought.

That left us with some time to catch a baseball game at the local minor league stadium. Ever since he watched the world series this fall, Elliott has been obsessed with baseball. We've played sandlot games and he's got the basics down, but he really wanted to see a real game so we'd had our eye on the Blue Wahoos' schedule and timed it right for a home game. 

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It turned out to be a great game, plenty of action to keep the kids enthralled. I think the final score was 12 to 1 Blue Wahoos (which are a farm team for the Florida Marlins). 

<img src="images/2023/2023-04-21_194417_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3505" class="picwide" />
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At one point a foul ball came vaguely our way, landing in the stands a section below us. That prompted Olivia to ask me if people ever got hit by balls. I told her I'd never seen that happen, and that I wouldn't worry about it. The minute I said that I thought, hmm, maybe I should not have said that. Sure enough, about ten minutes later a foul ball came right at us. It ended up hitting the ground about a foot from her, and hard enough that it bounced clear over the section behind us and out of the stadium. I think it happened so fast she didn't have time to be any more than startled. It was moving fast enough that no one around us made any move to catch it, not even the kids with gloves. 

Thinking about it later I realized at pro games a net usually covers the seats where we were, which is why you never see fouls come down on anyone. At a minor league game there's not much net. Yet another reason to prefer the minors really. Whatever the case, we had a good time, though I must say, Major League Baseball seems to really be on a quest to alienate baseball fans. The poor park management had signs up apologizing for not taking cash anymore, but apparently MLB won't let them. Buying tickets on the MLB site was a nightmare. Some friends of ours who recently went to the Braves game in Atlanta endured one hassle after another, including having their water bottle confiscated. The only people going to pro games anymore are true, diehard fans. People like us would never put up with it. I'm glad the kids got to experience the minor leagues first since they're a little less tainted by the mobsters running MLB.

The next day I got busy readying the bus and Wagoneer for the long drive north. It was, naturally, hot, humid, and buggy. I always make grand plans of all things I am going to get done, with post-its the length of my arm full of tasks. In the end I usually end up doing about 20 percent of it and I base that on okay, what do I have to do to keep everyone safe and comfortable?

The bus is easy at this point. I do a tune up, change the oil, plugs, wires, all the filters, top off the fluids, lube the various undercarriage joints and make sure I have a spare fuel pump, because those always seem to go out whenever we're on a long drive.

Less frequently I reseal the windows, but it was time. The Florida sun is not kind to rubber or sealant. One afternoon I was scraping the old sealant off the windows, prepping them for a fresh coating to withstand any rain we might hit on our drive, when I realized I was miserable. The Florida sun can feel like a heat lamp, relentless, baking, all you want to do is get out of it before you completely shrivel up like breaded shrimp. I was sweating and scraping and the old sealant was warm so it was gummy and not coming off the way it does in cooler weather and I was hot and frustrated and mad and feeling like I'd rather be at the beach and why was I doing this anyway? What kind of idiot lives like this?

<img src="images/2023/2023-04-26_160049_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3521" class="picwide" />

Just then my daughter walked by and said *hey, that's our window*. *Well, we share it* (meaning her and her twin sister). She pointed to the pane that is behind her head and the pane that is behind her sister's head and then she walked off. And I stood there for a minute and thought right, that's why I am doing this, to keep my family warm and dry.

That's really the only job there is in life -- making sure my wife and kids have a warm, dry, safe place in the world. Strip away all the pretensions of culture and what's left? We make shelters and feed our family and friends, maybe even strangers. That's what all creatures do, each in their own way. My way includes heat and no-see-ums, but you know what, whatever needs to be done, needs to do done.

The Wagoneer is a more difficult thing for me to get a handle on because I don't know yet what needs to done. Right now I am just playing whack-a-mole. The first mole was the power windows, which stick. This turns out to be the bane of many a Jeep owner's existence. Not knowing that at the time, I ordered some new plastic tracks and started tearing apart the doors. One fringe benefit of the Wagoneer is the massive tailgate, which gives me something I've never had -- a workbench.

<img src="images/2023/2023-04-23_083437_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3519" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-04-23_105223_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3522" class="picwide" />

I replaced three of the little plastic tracks and the windows kinda sorta rolled up and down a little better. I also need to replace the felt tracks, but that can happen down the road. At least the kids could roll their windows down. They're going to need to because the air conditioning gave up the ghost about two weeks after we bought it. I took it to a mechanic and paid him a service fee to track down the source of the leak, which turned out to be the compressor. The compressor that's barely two years old (I have the records from the previous owner). The mechanic wanted $800 to change it out. Which was funny. Corrinne and I decided we didn't need air conditioning that bad so long as the windows worked. I did find a rebuilt compressor for $150, so at some point I'll replace it and get it recharged, but for now we have old school WD60 air conditioning: windows down, sixty miles an hour.

After going over the Jeep for a couple of days I headed to the parts store and tracked down some new brake pads, along with all the various filters I could find and decided that's where I'd leave it. When something comes up down the road, we'll deal with it then.

Lest you think everyone in this bus spends their days sweating and covered with no see ums, fear not. The kids do fun things even when I don't. Big Lagoon finally re-opened some sections of the park that had been closed since the last hurricane (which was almost two years ago now) and there's a new amphitheater, which, so far as I know, so far has only been host to plays and dances put on by three children.

<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_134708_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3513" class="picwide" />
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<img src="images/2023/2023-04-22_134611_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3512" class="picwide" />

The kids have also started doing nature journals, which they learned about at the Esturary Center back in Apalachicola. John Muir Laws has [a fantastic book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-laws-guide-to-nature-drawing-and-journaling-john-muir-laws/12658634?ean=9781597143158) and [series of free videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Fb65ZOjBDA&list=PLpcRk9AaBeWjswF9kYxwcVwxx7oHFT5sH&index=40) that are well worth your time no matter what age you are. In Big Lagoon we finally got to see the resident alligator, which spent the entire afternoon patiently floating just below the wooden bridge so the kids could draw it.

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Just around the corner from Big Lagoon is a road named Blue Angel Parkway. At one intersection on Blue Angel Parkway there's some big box stores and a nice large parking lot where people gather every Monday and Tuesday to watch the Blue Angels rehearse. It's basically a free airshow. We headed over and dropped the tailgate with the rest of the spectators.

<img src="images/2023/2023-04-25_103838_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3523" class="picwide" />
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<img src="images/2023/2023-04-26_103900_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3520" class="picwide" />

And then it was back to work. Onward and upward.



=======


## Under The Bridge

Halfway through our stay on St. George we had a little problem called Friday night. The problem was that the campground at St George was full for Friday night. One night missing in a string of twelve nights. We knew that when we came out here, but I was really hoping something would open up. It did not. That's how we came to be under the bridge in Apalachicola again. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-04-06_150219_st-george.jpg" id="image-3485" class="picwide" />

We [stayed under the bridge in 2018](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/04/st-george) for similar reasons. Back then we just literally pulled under the bridge. Now the city of Pensacola has formalized things. You have to stay in the grassy field next to the marina and it costs $30 a night. The internet is full of people complaining about how you're paying for nothing, because there's no water or electricity, and it does feel like a heavy-handed money grab, but we didn't mind. It beats driving an hour just for the night.

It was a hot day without much breeze so we parked the bus and headed out to explore Apalachicola until evening when it cooled down some. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-04-07_091835_st-george.jpg" id="image-3495" class="picwide" />

We walked around town for a bit, but quickly found the every shop had the same thing as the last. [St. George Island hasn't changed much in the last decade](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/04/the-lost-coast) we've been coming, but Apalachicola definitely has. Part of that is due to the inevitable, gradual, crapification of everything. But around here the hurricanes often accelerate that process.

Hurricane Michael hit here in 2018. I remember watching coverage from Mexico, trying to figure out how bad the damage was on St. George. St. George seemed okay, but Apalachicola was hit hard. The after effects were still all around us as we walked. Buildings that were headed downhill in our last visit were in total ruin now. Several restaurants were boarded up. Shops were gone. The maritime museum has yet to re-open, though its phone recording claims it's planning too.

Along with the wreckage there is the seemingly inevitable "upgrades" that come when real estate developers get an opportunity like a hurricane. The old local favorite watering hole, which was always a little rough around the edges, was gone, replaced by an upscale brewer offering $10 microbrews and kids menus.

We headed out to the same place we always get oysters. Most of it's food is straight of the Sysco truck[^1], but it does at least serve up local oysters. We got a dozen raw and a dozen steamed. The kids have tried oysters when they were younger, but none of them remembered it. They were unimpressed with raw oysters, though the girls liked the steamed oysters.

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After the oysters we walked around some more. We ended up buying some coffee from a local roaster, and couple of whale and shark guides done by [our friend Val](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/06/seining-with-val), before we gave up on downtown Apalachicola. 

We headed out to the old cemetery for a bit. It hasn't changed much. Maybe the Spanish Moss is a bit longer, the trees a bit taller, the general feeling of neglect a bit stronger, but the dead, and the land they claim, can usually be counted on not change too much.

<img src="images/2023/2023-04-06_151259_st-george.jpg" id="image-3486" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-04-06_161406_st-george.jpg" id="image-3487" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-04-06_161456_st-george.jpg" id="image-3488" class="picwide" />

The cemetery is right across from [The Pig](https://www.pigglywigglyfl.com/locations/piggly-wiggly-apalachicola/) and while we had plenty of food, we didn't want to use the stove in the heat. So we did what you used to do when it was hot: we bought some food we didn't have to cook, a bag of ice, and a few pints of ice cream. Back at the bus we ate the ice cream first, of course, and sat around in the shade drinking cold water. It wasn't too long before the sun got low enough that the heat faded.

Parking the bus in the middle of a grassy field in town is like hanging out a big sign that says, come say hi. And quite a few people did. We also seem to meet interesting people when we camp under the bridge. After dinner a man drove up in a truck and started chatting with us about the bus. He had spent years in the area as a general contractor, had even built some of the structures on the state park back in the 1980s. 

We talked about how Apalachicola had changed (he's the one that told me about the bar that was now upscale) and how hurricanes reshape people as much as they do land. In some ways the real devastation of hurricanes comes later, when all those people who didn't have the money to set up shop again have to sell their businesses, and inevitably they sell to outsiders who see real estate opportunities without ever considering their impact on the communities they're buying into. That how you get to the point where there are more shops selling beach trinkets from China than anything produced locally, more restaurants serving up whatever came on the Sysco truck, and fewer and fewer places to get an oyster on the half shell. 

Sam (not his real name) had been a traveler too, living in an RV while he toured on the rodeo circuit as a bronc rider. He told us stories about George Strait and what life was like going around the country back in the day when there wasn't a lot of money in rodeo riding, "you don't win, you don't eat." We looked him up later and realized he was a famous rodeo rider back in the 1970s and 80s.

He offered us a free place to stay up the river on a 100 acres of wood with a river nearby. It made me a little sad to have to say no, we couldn't do it, we had to get back to Pensacola to wrap up some business there, but he told us if we ever needed a place to stay to just drive into the middle of a small town near his property and ask anyone, everyone will point you to my place, he said. 

By the time he left it had cooled down enough that we weren't sweating in the sun anymore, but it was still pretty warm to sleep so we sat around in the twilight. The kids sketched and wrote in their journals and I did a little work on the Jeep. 

We woke the next morning to the cries of seagulls and the sound of fishing boat motors as every charter fishing trip and private boat in the area put in at the marina's boat ramp. 

On our drive down the battery I bought around this time last year had died on us. This was probably partly my fault for charging it with a battery charger rather than using the alternator (the bus's voltage regulator was shot and it took me a while to track down a new one). Whatever the case the auto parts chain I bought from exchanged it for a new one, no questions asked. Unfortunately, while I was installing that I accidentally shorted something and blew the fuse from our house battery to our inverter, which meant we had no power for the fridge and it was warming up quickly. 

While I wrestled with all that, Corrine took the kids over to Eastpoint, where there's an estuary nature center they could explore.

I eventually gave up trying to find a replacement fuse and just ordered four new ones off the internet. It'd take a week, but we were headed back our to St. George state park anyway, so we'd have shore power to get us by. We don't use shore power much, mostly we live off solar, but we can hookup to 30 amp power in a pinch.


[^1]: Sysco is a food supply company that offers complete meal "kits" that your local restaurant then assembles on-site. If you've ever wondered by so many restaurants have such similar menus and food, Sysco is a big part of why.


We've seen this all up and down the Gulf Coast dating back to Katrina (and before I'm sure, but I didn't live in the south then). Hurricanes take out small businesses, large ones scoop up the land on the cheap. 

I don't know that there's anything to be done about it. Tourism may be [a short-sighted industry that ruins better long term bets](https://live.luxagraf.net/jrnl/2013/05/oysterman-wanted), but we all have to pay rent in the short-term. And it isn't just hurricanes bringing real estate opportunists -- fishing and other gulf coast economies have been in decline for some time.  Everything from water quality to foreign investment had a hand in killing off the local oyster industry here in Apalachicola. Our friend Amy Evans has been covering this for years. Her article [The Oysterman](https://bittersoutherner.com/the-oysterman), in the *Bitter Southerner* is the best thing I've read on it.

It's not just an abstraction though, the changes wrought by hurricanes and culture play out in the streets of Apalachicola as they do everywhere, and I think the short story, from my point of view, is that the good guys are not winning.

I have been called nostalgic, but I don't think it's nostalgia to wish for the days when there local oystermen with plots on the bay rather than international seafood conglomerates. The days when buildings were made of real brick and wood rather than thin metal "2x4s" and wallboard. If it's nostalgia to recognize that things today are not as well made, and designed to serve the needs of corporations rather than people, then fine, I am nostalgic.

## St George

Driving west on Florida's highway 98 is a little like traveling back in time. It's hard to believe standing amidst the crowds of Panama City Beach, but not ten miles east, once you pass through the actual Panama City, the crowds disappear, along with everything else. 

After winding through some rundown warehouse districts at the very eastern edge of the city the highway passes over East Bay and onto the property of Tyndall Air Force Base. The base is a kind of barrier that stops Panama City from advancing eastward. Once you clear the long stretch of pine forest that makes up the eastern portion of the base you come to Mexico Beach, which is in the process of expanding. I'm not sure why, it's the least appealing part of this area. My working theory is that it's cheap. If you can't afford 30A, you buy here maybe. 

It's after Mexico Beach that you begin to slip back in time. The road alternates running along the seashore and winding through slash pine forests. It's wilder, and only occasionally interspersed with small towns. This is the part of Florida we've been visiting regularly since 2010.

<img src="images/2023/GX010132-f001676.jpg" id="image-3481" class="picwide" />

The region from roughly Port St Joe in the west, to Alligator Point in the east, is known as The Lost Coast. That's mostly a local marketing term, but it has an element of truth to it. Far fewer people come out here. It's too far from any airports and it lacks high end resorts to draw in the tourists. Those who come here like it that way.

<img src="images/2023/2023-04-15_071331_st-george.jpg" id="image-3466" class="picwide" />

Having been coming here for so long, I've written about this area quite a few times so I went back and read some of my older pieces. In [All The Pretty Beaches](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2013/05/all-the-pretty-beaches) I call this area "a little backwater in time" and it still is, mostly. It's a slice of the world as was before the proliferation of mega-resorts and all-inclusive vacation package extravaganzas. 

There's still little more to St. George than a store, a gas station and a couple of seafood trailers offering up fresh shrimp and scallops from nearby Apalachicola. Sure, there are plenty of AirBnBs and condos, and I'd guess that there are fewer full time residents than there were in 2010, but the two motels are still rundown affairs that still look like holdouts from the early 1990s. Nothing on the island feels all that different than it did over a decade ago. Perhaps this place really is lost.

Little things have changed of course. Doug's seafood trailer is no longer there, Doug passed away several years ago now. The grocery store on the island is considerably fancier than it used to be. A Boar's Head Deli has replaced the dried out breaded shrimp under heat lamps. But otherwise the same resturants still serve up the same food to people that look much the same as they always have.

Prices are through the roof though. We couldn't afford to rent the beach house we used to stay in even if we wanted to. AirBnB changed everything everywhere for the worse. That's okay. These days we head even further away from civilization to the state park at the far end of the island. It's a good thirty minute drive from our campsite to the first signs of the civilization, which is a rarity on the east coast, let alone on the Florida coast.

We embrace the remoteness. When we come out here we load up on food before hand so we don't really have to leave the park. For about ten days we didn't do much other than wander the maritime forests of oak and pine and swim and play in the sea. 

The only problem was the purple flag. 

Coming from California, I find Florida's use of warming flags downright hilarious. I have never seen any beach conditions in the Gulf that would warrant more than a yellow flag in California. If that. But here the red flag is almost constant. I've already said my piece about our [safety-third philosophy](https://luxagraf.net/essay/safety-third), I won't repeat it here. Suffice to say that the color of flag never has much bearing on what we do at the beach here. But a purple flag is different. 

We did not have those in California. The purple flag is for "stinging marine life". I talked to a ranger about it. Portuguese man o' war had been washing up the week before. He said it had been a few days since they'd had any reports. But then, you never know. Portugese Man-o-war are pretty obvious in clear water, they stick up above the surface and are bright purple. The problem is their tentacles can be alarming long and often proceed them in the water, depending on current.

<img src="images/2023/2023-04-05_113155_st-george.jpg" id="image-3463" class="picwide" />


I decided -- wait for it -- that is wasn't worth the risk. When we were here at Christmas the kids and I stumbled on a little trail that led down to the leeward side of the island, which faces St. George Island sound. This became our hang out spot. Everyone else headed to the windward beaches, leaving the sound side to us. We spent whole days out there without seeing another soul.

<img src="images/2023/2023-04-04_151441_st-george.jpg" id="image-3457" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-04-04_152419_st-george.jpg" id="image-3458" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-04-04_163641_st-george.jpg" id="image-3462" class="picwide" />

I got out the paddle boards, we'd pack lunch and head down to the water. There was even a little picnic table I could work at while the kids played. I'd be hard pressed to think of a better place to spend our time. Not coincidentally, the campground on Lake Superior where we spend our summers has virtually the same setup, picnic table by the water with a little beach. We really don't need much to call a place paradise.

<img src="images/2023/2023-04-03_142846_st-george.jpg" id="image-3454" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-04-04_151356_st-george.jpg" id="image-3456" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-04-11_152823_st-george.jpg" id="image-3465" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-04-04_162252_st-george.jpg" id="image-3461" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-04-04_160444_st-george.jpg" id="image-3460" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-04-04_155857_st-george.jpg" id="image-3459" class="picwide caption" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-04-03_151352_st-george.jpg" id="image-3455" class="picwide" />

One day I took the paddle board on a longer trip, paddling for a few hours up the coastline. I am in the process of editing a movie about, but it was interesting. I made me realize that longer paddles, perhaps even going overnight would definitely be possible. Florida is too hot these days to make that comfortable, but I'm looking into some trips when we get up north. I'd be curious to hear from anyone who's done an overnight paddleboard trip.

As happens when you live this way, we reached the day when it was time to head on. We had some business to take care of back in Pensacola. I mentioned this to the camphost one day and she kind of wrinkled her nose and paused for a moment before saying, "oh... it's very crowded up that way". I smiled because I knew exactly what she meant. You get used to life at the pace of the Lost Coast and everything else starts to seem like... too much. We decided Pensacola could wait and managed to book a few more days out here.



## St. Andrews

St Andrews State Park is a beautiful little postage stamp of beach off the coast of Panama City, Florida. When the sea is calm it looks almost like Thailand. 



Despite the lovely beach, I was dreading returning to St. Andrews. We had some bad experiences with the staff on our first trip. And the campground is a parking lot. When I mentioned that last time a reader asked what was so bad about it so I climbed on top of the bus one morning and took a picture.



It's not an awful, but to borrow a 60s-ism that I think is worth keeping around, the vibe is not the sort we enjoy. 

Still. That beach. It did get increasingly crowded as we got closer to spring break, but even at its worst it wasn't half as bad as my home town gets in the summer. Considering this is Panama City, hardly anyone comes out here.


One day while we were at St. Andrews I went to a nearby gas station to fill up the Jeep. I went inside the building to give the cashier my money, and found several other people already in line. There was only one cashier, but in front of us off to the side there were three self-check out kiosks. No one made any move toward them. We all waited for the person at the register. After a couple minutes a man who'd been over at the soda machine came toward the front to pay. He looked around confusedly at those of us in line, gestured toward the self-checkout and said to no one in particular, "do you mind if I cut ahead here?"

The young man in front of me immediately turned and smiled at the man and said, "Go right ahead." "Thanks," said the man and he stepped forward to the self-check out. He turned around as he started to ring up his fountain drink and asked the young man, "do you just not like self checkout or are you waiting in line for a reason?"

"Last time I checked," the young man drawled, "I don't get a W2 from Racetrack, so I can't see myself doing their work for them." 

The other man chuckled, but didn't say anything. He finished checking out, and went on his way. 

I will confess I had never thought of self checkout this way, but now I can't see it any other way. It's become almost impossible for me to use the self-checkout because I just see myself willfully becoming, for a few minutes, an employee of that business, doing their work for them.

Something about the whole encounter reminded me of a moment in David Foster Wallace's famous Kenyon graduation speech, *This Is Water*. Wallace talks through how these default thought patterns take over when we're tired, overworked, in a hurry, and so on. But that's the problem he argues, that these default settings are a choice. Not a conscious one, but a choice still and they are robbing us of seeing something more in those moments. Stopping at the store on your way home from work at rush hour doesn't have to be a moment of consumer hell, we experience it that way because our default programming has conditioned us to see it that way.

> If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important -- if you want to operate on your default-setting -- then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars-compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.  

I think a lot time I use those self checkout kiosks as a way to avoid having to spend another second in crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situations. That's what they're there for right? To avoid having to add a cashier to what's already *by default*, at least that's the assumption, a terrible situation. But again, that's a choice. And not the only one.

I have a note in my journal, written months before the incident above, that reads: "Every little withdrawal you can make not only resists The Machine, but empowers you. Even a tiny act, like paying cash to a person rather than swiping your implant at the self checkout screen is a choice where you can retain your humanity and the humanity of those around you."



Not really though. Really I don't need anything. I need less things. It's the time of year when I find myself taking stock of things and seeing what I can streamline, simplify, and do without. It's my form of a new year's resolution I think. Or perhaps some seasonally wayward attempt at early spring cleaning. Whatever the case this time of year is when I go through my life and think, what can I get rid of? What can I do without? What can I improve on? What is no longer necessary? 

It's a fun thought process. I always change things up. Sometimes silly things, like the number of spoons in the drawer. Too many damnit. Out spoons, out. Other times I realize a don't need some tool I've previously considered indispensable. Some other tool I hardly pay attention to will turn out to do the job even better and I didn't realize it because I'd stopped thinking about the problem when I found the first solution.

The problems is those first solutions are often ugly hacks, temporary patch jobs, but then you forget to go back and redo them. Or I do anyway. It's good to go back and check your old work, make sure there aren't any hack jobs left around.

I don't do this annual taking stock to change my life, it's more of a cleaning out. It's a chance to pull off the rutted road for a few days and see what all is going on down there in the grooves. This is especially true when I get past the silly stuff like too many spoons in the drawer and start looking at my thought patterns.

Any pattern of thought soon becomes transparent. That's part of what the pattern is for, and for many things that's good. I don't want to think *what should I do?* every morning. I want to make a cup of coffee and relax for a bit, like I always do. Still, I am sometimes alarmed to find patterns I didn't know I had when I step back and detach, and really *look* at myself.

David Foster Wallace has a parable that I think is relevant:

> There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

Wallace's whole text is [worth a read](http://bulletin-archive.kenyon.edu/x4280.html) if you're not familiar (it was a commencement speech originally), but the salient point is, to quote Wallace's own explication: "the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about."

I think "realities" is too vague. I don't know exactly what Wallace had in mind, but for me "realities" are the patterns of thought that govern my day.

These patterns are hardest to see because they are the things that provide the framework in which we live. They're the things we decided way back when we couldn't even conceive of 2021 as a now that would eventually be *now*. They're the things we figured out so long ago we can't even recall exactly what we figured out. Still, they're there in the background informing everything we do. They're the water in which we live.

When you see the water around you, you see yourself differently. Sometimes that means you find a few spoons you don't need. Other times it might mean something more. 

So every year, around this time, I take a pen, a scrap of paper, and go for a walk. Woods are ideal for this, there's such a tangle of growth and life all around you that somehow the tangle of your own thoughts becomes less intimidating. From the tangle patterns emerge, pathways of thought through the trees. Somewhere in there I try to figure out what it is I am doing, where I am going, where I want to be going, and which patterns are going to close the gap between those two things. With any luck I find my way home before dark.









And problems with the staff came up yet again. We had to move around a lot. We didn't boo a year in advance, so we booked what we could. A couple nights in one site, a night in another, and another, and so on. The park clearly isn't set up to handle that sort of thing. Nearly every park employee we talked to told us something different when we'd go to move camp sites. We were supposed to move whenever we wanted, after we checked in at the front office, not until 12, not until 1, not until 3, as soon as the camp host said it was okay, or as soon as the front office said it was okay. Literally never got the same answer twice. 

One camp host even lied straight to our faces. He told us to go ahead and move sites and then came back and yelled at us for moving sites. This made Corrine quite livid. Do not try to gaslight my wife. I was less moved because I read Kafka in college. I credit this with my ability to see the post-2016 world as amusing rather than endlessly frustrating. If the modern Machine State confuses you, I suggest grabbing a copy of *The Castle* or *The Trial*. They won't help you understand anything, but at least you'll know some people saw this coming and found humor in it.

I eventually found someone higher up at St. Andrews and learned the actual rules regarding moving sites (ask a ranger in the front office, if there is no ranger in the front office walk away). After that we ignored everything else and just did what that ranger had told me. I mentioned that one of the camp hosts had lied to us. The ranger seemed unsurprised. He even said to me, pointing the at ranger badge on his shirt, "if you don't see this on their shirt, just ignore them." Sound advice I had already come up with on my own.

Two days later we saw the camp host who lied to us pack up and leave. I have no idea if it was because of us, but I can say this: don't lie to my wife.

That probably makes it sound like we had a terrible time, which really we didn't. Most of the time we spent enjoying ourselves at the beach. The circus of moving was relatively minor and the beach is still beautiful.






One day while we were at St. Andrews I went to a nearby gas station to fill up the Jeep. I went inside the building to give the cashier my money, and found several other people already in line. There was only one cashier, but in front of us off to the side there were three self-check out kiosks. No one made any move toward them. We all waited for the person at the register. After a couple minutes a man who'd been over at the soda machine came toward the front to pay. He looked around confusedly at those of us in line, gestured toward the self-checkout and said to no one in particular, "do you mind if I cut ahead here?"

The young man in front of me immediately turned and smiled at the man and said, "Go right ahead." "Thanks," said the man and he stepped forward to the self-check out. He turned around as he started to ring up his fountain drink and asked the young man, "do you just not like self checkout or are you waiting in line for a reason?"

"Last time I checked," the young man drawled, "I don't get a W2 from Racetrack, so I can't see myself doing their work for them." 

The other man chuckled, but didn't say anything. He finished checking out, and went on his way. 

I will confess I had never thought of self checkout this way, but now I can't see it any other way. It's become almost impossible for me to use the self-checkout because I just see myself willfully becoming, for a few minutes, an employee of that business, doing their work for them.

Something about the whole encounter reminded me of a moment in David Foster Wallace's famous Kenyon graduation speech, *This Is Water*. Wallace talks through how these default thought patterns take over when we're tired, overworked, in a hurry, and so on. But that's the problem he argues, that these default settings are a choice. Not a conscious one, but a choice still and they are robbing us of seeing something more in those moments. Stopping at the store on your way home from work at rush hour doesn't have to be a moment of consumer hell, we experience it that way because our default programming has conditioned us to see it that way.

> If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important -- if you want to operate on your default-setting -- then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars-compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.  

I think a lot time I use those self checkout kiosks as a way to avoid having to spend another second in crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situations. That's what they're there for right? To avoid having to add a cashier to what's already *by default*, at least that's the assumption, a terrible situation. But again, that's a choice. And not the only one.

I have a note in my journal, written months before the incident above, that reads: "Every little withdrawal you can make not only resists The Machine, but empowers you. Even a tiny act, like paying cash to a person rather than swiping your implant at the self checkout screen is a choice where you can retain your humanity and the humanity of those around you."




## Gone Fishin

Every morning when I step outside I am greeted by a chorus of Ospreys circling in the glint of the rising sun. There are between four and six of them, depending on the day. They spend their days fishing, building nests, and fighting. Every evening, sitting out by the fire as dusk turns to darkness, we hear them winding down their day, circling until they settle into roosts in a dead trees around us, the females returning to their nests. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-03-12_174659_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3383" class="picwide" />

The osprey is a consummate fisherman. Spend any time casting a line into the surf along the gulf of Mexico and you will see them. You will see them come along, hover for a few minutes, not far from wherever your line is, and then they'll drop down like a rock falling out of the sky and snatch a fish before heading inland again. Meanwhile you will sweat in the humid sun all afternoon and not get a bite.

The Osprey has been here far longer than humans. The Osprey will probably be here long after we have retreated. The Osprey doesn't get sunburns. If it gets hot it doesn't complain about it. It's willing to live just about anywhere. It loves old dead trees, but it'll settle for the top of telephone poles, collapsing radio towers, even the 1970s-inspired Pensacola Beach welcome sign. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-03-07_131029_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3419" class="picwide" />

Osprey's always make me feel like I could catch a fish. We carry quite a few fishing poles on the roof of the bus, but I rarely get them down. It's some combination of sloth and fear of failure. But those damn Ospreys. If they can do it we have to try.

The weather was pretty near perfect. Sunny, but not too hot. Enough breeze to stir up waves for the kids to play in and get the Pompano out running. Or so they say. Maybe for other people the Pompano come out. Our friend John caught two in the time we were there. We caught zero. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-03-07_152732_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3375" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-03-07_150322_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3374" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-03-09_161424_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3378" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-03-07_150303_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3373" class="picwide" />

The problem is that we are not serious enough about fishing. The Osprey is single minded, maniacal even, about fishing. If you want the rewards you have to put in the time. We don't put in the time. We'd rather lie around reading and playing in the surf. We reap the rewards of that, which are numerous, but fresh fish is not one of them. If we want fish, we have to be more like the osprey, focused.

<div class="cluster">
<img src="images/2023/2023-03-16_133050_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3389" class="picwide" />
    <span class="row-2">
<img src="images/2023/2023-03-16_132451_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3388" class="cluster pic66" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-03-16_132325_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3387" class="cluster pic66" />
    </span>
<img src="images/2023/2023-03-16_145252_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3390" class="picwide" />
</div>

The one time we did hook something we didn't even know it. When Lilah went to reel in the line, as I was taking the image above, I noticed she was having trouble. We were using a 5 oz sinker, which none of us were used to, so I thought maybe it was that. But finally she said "Dad, I can't get it in, it feels like there's something on it". I came over and took the pole and started to reel it in. It felt like the hook was snagged on a log. I have never felt anything that big on a line before. I didn't even have the drag set for something that big (I'd switched from a lighter line and forgotten all about the drag setting). 

Luckily a fellow fisherman nearby came over and while I kept tension on the line, he ratcheted down the drag and I started reeling in. Whatever it was had run quite a ways out before we noticed it. It took a few minutes to even get it anywhere near shore. Once it got into the surf though, it must have charged the shore, or somehow managed to get the hook out of its mouth. The line went slack before we ever saw what it was. Giant red fish? Possibly. Definitely too big to be a Pompano. Could have been a huge ray, in which case I'm glad it got off. Either way now the kids, especially Lilah, have a good story about the one that got away. I feel like that is a kind of necessary initiation into fishing. 

Having failed to catch dinner we headed across the bay to [Joe Patti's wholesale seafood](https://joepattis.com/joe-pattis-seafood-and-our-history/) to buy dinner. We'd driven by it several times going between Fort Pickens and Big Lagoon. It's hard to miss, there's a life-size viking vessel out front. But sometimes as an outsider it's hard to tell the legit from the tourist trap. I'd always kind of assumed it was the latter, but our friend John assured us it was legit. And that we had to try the Caribbean Grouper. He was right. About both.

<img src="images/2023/2023-03-15_133738_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3386" class="picwide" />
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<img src="images/2023/2023-03-15_132844_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3384" class="cluster pic66" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-03-15_133105_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3385" class="cluster pic66" />
    </span>
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We bought a mess of Caribbean Grouper and Royal Red shrimp. If you've never had Royal Reds, which are only really found in the Florida Panhandle and along the Mississippi/Alabama coast, they're very different than ordinary shrimp. As the name implies they're deep reddish pink and they taste like lobster. We had a huge seafood cookout. Never let one getting away stop your seafood fest.

<img src="images/2023/2023-03-07_175029_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3376" class="picwide caption" />

Fishing slacked off even more after we added boogie boards to the list of things we don't have room for. They've proved very well-loved though and they definitely take precedence over fishing most days. Can't say I blame the kids for that, when the waves are big enough I'd rather be out there surfing too. Osprey don't surf.

<img src="images/2023/2023-03-10_140713_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3380" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-03-10_141326_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3381" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-03-11_130530_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3382" class="picwide" />

Then the weather took a turn. It was my fault. I donated the heater. It happens every year. We buy a heater in December or so and then we donate it come spring. There's just no room for a heater so the sooner we get rid of it, the better. But almost every year as soon as I take it to the donation center, the weather turns cold. This year was probably the worst -- it dipped down below freezing for two nights in a row. We have plenty of blankets, and just turning on the stove to make tea and coffee in the morning makes the bus plenty warm, so it'a minor discomfort. But someone has to get up and turn on the stove.

<img src="images/2023/2023-03-09_173839_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3379" class="picwide" />

With it too cold to swim, we took to playing games, climbing trees, and reading books, sometimes at the same time.  

<img src="images/2023/2023-03-18_171601_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3392" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-03-18_165300_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3391" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-03-08_173457_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3377" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-03-20_133751_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3394" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-03-20_133546_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3393" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-03-20_140834_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3395" class="picwide" />

Part of the reading in a tree comes from reading Sterling North's *[Rascal](https://bookshop.org/p/books/rascal-sterling-north/7815241?ean=9780142402528)*, which was one of my favorite books as a kid. Sterling and Rascal spend some afternoons reading in a tree, with Rascal lying in the tree on his belly. Lilah reports it is relaxing and comfortable. She recommends it to everyone.

I recommend *Rascal* to everyone. Grab a copy from your local library. It is well worth re-reading as an adult. For those unfamiliar it is Sterling North's account of a year of his boyhood in small, rural Wisconsin town in 1918, which for that year he shares with a pet raccoon named Rascal. It's a world that hasn't existed since that time, but the book somehow manages to balance nostalgia with piercing, sometimes heartbreaking doses of reality. There's no changing reality, one is saving Sterling. The world must be dealt with. It cannot be changed, it cannot be shouted at, it just is and Sterling has to deal with that.

It's made me realize that a big part of why we live this way is to try, as much as possible, to let our kids inhabit the sort of world young Sterling lives in, surrounded by nature, able to do what what they please with their time, but also knowing that the world is full of real responsibilities and no one is [coming to save them](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming). To remain innocent requires facing up to reality, not hiding from it. I know that the world of *Rascal* is hard to find these days, but I think it's worth chasing the idea still there, even if, in the end, it should get away from us.



## Renaissance Fair

One of the things I find most peculiar about our current age is our utter disregard for the past. That's only true in the realm of mainstream culture though. Step outside the increasingly tunneled vision media presents us and you find that most people love the past. They love visiting it. They love learning about it. Most of all they love pretending to be in it.

What better way to understand other people in other times than to put on the clothes, use the tools, and see where you end up?

We're no different. The kids love history. Travel would be pretty dull if you didn't like digging into the history of the places you're going. We've enjoyed all sorts of [re-enactment festivals](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/07/around-washburn), [working 19th century farms](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/06/alberto-and-land-between-lakes), [historic forts](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/10/rodeos-and-fur-trading-posts), and more. Our most recent foray was something less strictly educational and more oddball fun -- [The Gulf Coast Renaissance Fair, Pirate Festival, Wild West Roundup, and Historical Festival](http://gcrf.us).

I have never been to a Renaissance Fair before, but I've heard some stories. This one was pretty laid back compared to some accounts I've heard. There were plenty of costumes, but there were also plenty of us not in character. Or in totally different characters, like the girls, who dressed in Greek Chitons. Ancient Greece wasn't on the bill, but the very first person we saw inside the festival took one look at the kids and said, "are those Chitons?" Clearly these were our people.

<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_130920-1_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3367" class="picwide" />

The festival was true to its name. There was a section for Wild West enthusiasts, a section for pirates, a section for all things roughly late Medieval to Renaissance, and plenty of random elements as well, like fire eaters and a woman laying on a bed of nails. 

As anyone who's ever been to Medieval Times knows (I have not, but I assume), the big draw for kids is always going to be the jousting. Huge war horses done up in armor, knights in full metal armor as well, riding at each other with actual jousts -- who doesn't love that?

The answers is, everyone loves that. Pro tip: head the stands early if you want a seat. We did not, and had to content ourselves with some standing room in what was, I think, the cattle pen when the rodeo is in town. The jousting turned out to be slow getting started, with overly long intros to the knights that we couldn't hear because we were behind the speakers. 

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<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_123138_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3363" class="cluster pic66" />
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The girls lost interest so Corrinne took them over to do some archery. Even I was contemplating heading elsewhere, but Elliott was not to be dissuaded. Eventually the real action got underway though and it did prove worth the wait.

<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_134709_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3368" class="picwide" />


It doesn't look like much in the photos. In fact it looks like they're missing each other, but they aren't. It was wood ramming metal . It look I believe seven passes before one knight unseated the other.

<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_140100-1_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3369" class="picwide" />

When that was over we wandered off to try our hand at archery. Anything hands-on is always the favorite thing with out kids. Arrows were flying. A few even hit the bullseye.

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<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_130455_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3364" class="cluster pic66" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_130508_renaissance-fair_x3dx4KX.jpg" id="image-3366" class="cluster pic66" />
    </span>
<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_162330_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3370" class="cluster picwide" />
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<img src="images/2023/2023-03-04_162411_renaissance-fair.jpg" id="image-3371" class="cluster pic66" />
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</span>
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We ate a packed lunch with some overpriced lemonade in the shade and then the kids decided to break into their savings accounts to buy bows and arrows and a cross bow before we called it a day. We're now the most heavily armed campers in Big Lagoon. Well, most visibly armed anyway.




## Wagoneer

My favorite way to travel is with everyone in the bus, no other vehicle involved. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-02-19_080825_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3360" class="picwide" />

As we've slowed down our travels though, spending more time in an area makes it nice to have a car to go exploring, run errands, and get to places the bus can't. For that reason we bought a 2006 Volvo during the pandemic and have been relatively happy with it ever since. It's easily our lowest maintenance car ever. Other than changing the oil periodically we haven't done anything to it. 

Which is to say, we never loved it. It was practical, ran well, but it was just a modern car. They're all the same. Ours was black, but this graphic illustrates what I think of modern cars better than anything I could say.

<div style="margin-top: 4rem">
<img src="images/2023/design.jpg" id="image-3355" class="picfull"/>
</div>

We talked about replacing the Volvo. We decided we'd get a late 1980s Jeep Cherokee, with the 4.0 engine. Chrysler's last inline six is, by all accounts, a great engine. In some ways it's a bit like the 318 in the bus, it runs forever. My kind of engine. And hey, I could figure out fuel injection. Probably.

But the Volvo ran fine. I don't fix things that aren't broken. The Cherokee was just a rough plan.

Then the Volvo started to show some alarming behaviors -- stuttering and dying in parking lots, randomly rolling down windows. Things I found best described as "electrical gremlins"[^1]. I tried to ignore these as best I could, but one day in Destin the Volvo stuttered and died in a parking lot and it took me quite a bit of tinkering to get it running again and home.

From what I read on the internet that night it sounded like it could be the battery. Or something far more expensive. The battery is in the trunk (I don't know either) and it was a two-year battery going on year five, which seemed like a reasonable culprit. The next day I dropped the kids off at the condo my parents had rented and headed over to the auto parts store to get the battery and alternator tested. 

On the way I happen to past a very cool looking old Jeep Wagoneer. Not a Cherokee, but in most ways cooler than a Cherokee. One of my best friends in high school had a Wagoneer and it had hauled all our gear climbing, hiking, and skiing more times than I could count. I always loved that Jeep. It seemed strangely fated that I should see one now. I texted Corrinne a photo and said, hey, maybe we should just buy this Wagoneer and be done with the Volvo. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-02-17_162333_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3357" class="picwide" />

She immediately started doing research to figure out if it was a good deal or not. I got the alternator and battery tested. Both were fine. According to the test. I decided to replace the battery anyway. Except that the parts store told me I couldn't. I did not believe them so I looked it up myself and sure enough, you can't change the battery in a 2006 Volvo without the expensive diagnostic tool to "reset" everything. Sigh. The Volvo was on its way out of our lives.

I drove back over to the Wagoneer to have a closer look. A cursory inspection revealed a little body rust here and there, the front windshield had leaked on the passengers side, but the body was in surprisingly good shape for being being 34 years old. I was shocked to learn in was a 1989, it looked much older thanks to what's known as a "Rhino Chaser" front end the owner had put on. 

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<img src="images/2023/2023-02-17_133235_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3356" class="cluster pic66" />
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I took a few more pictures and texted the owner to see which engine it had. It turned out to have a rebuilt stock engine, the V8 AMC 360. Despite being a 1989 vehicle, the AMC 360 is an aspirated engine. The Venn diagram of vehicles with carburetors and post-Freon air conditioning systems is very small. But the Wagoneer is in there. Check.

We had family in town and it turned out the owner was out of town for the week as well, so we mostly set the idea aside for a week. 

After life settle back down we moved up to Fort Pickens for [the bus's photo shoot](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/02/photo-shoot), but before the photographer got there I took a drive back to look over the car in more detail and talk to the owner. Everything I was interested in checked out. The number of recently replaced things on this vehicle is too long to list. It's easier to say the transmission is original and pretty much everything else is new. The previous owner sunk a lot of money into it and then, apparently, his wife wanted to get rid of it. My wife wanted to get it. We had a deal.

A week later we wired over the money, signed some papers, and drove off in our new 1989 Wagoneer.

<img src="images/2023/2023-02-20_200820_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3359" class="picwide" />

We haven't had a chance to really shine it up yet, but



[^1]: Further research revealed that electrical gremlins in a Volvo of this era are not uncommon and notoriously difficult and expensive to solve. They sometimes include fun things like the car suddenly shutting down at highways speeds, the brakes deciding not to engage, the throttle sticking open, and other treats brought to you by modern over-engineering.


## Fort Pickens Photo Shoot

After [shining up the bus in Rocky Bayou](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/02/family) we headed back over to Fort Pickens where we were scheduled to meet up with a photographer who was shooting the bus for an article I wrote for *Wired* magazine. Both *Wired* and I wanted us to be out west for the photo shoot, but that didn't happen. Fort Pickens is the most wide open place in this area, it would have to do.

<img src="images/2023/2023-02-19_080841_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3345" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2022-02-14_075619_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3341" class="picwide caption" />

How I came to write a story about the bus for *Wired* is something of a story in itself.

I don't recall how it came about, but a few years ago some enterprising person at Wired put together a mentoring system, which connected those of us with less experience with more experienced writers and editors. Now, my current title at *Wired* is "senior writer", but I signed up to be mentored because this seemed like a good opportunity to learn.

People sometimes ask me for advice about becoming a writer and I always tell them, find something useful to do for money and keep writing in your spare time. Making a living writing is very difficult. Most people I know who have succeed have had some way to get through the lean years -- either they come from money, have a significant other who makes makes enough to support them, or were prepared to live on lentils and rice and beans for a very, very long time. I went the latter route. I hate lentils.

I was fascinated by the early internet and started putting together websites in my spare time way back in 1996-1997. By 2000, the height of the dot-com bubble, I was pretty good at it, such as it was back then. I was still working restaurants to pay the bills, but I had a nice side income building websites. Meanwhile, a friend became a writer, and later editor, for Webmonkey.com, which was *the* place to go if you wanted to learn how to build websites on the early internet. It was a collection of tutorials mostly written by the developers working on Wired's website, which was then called Hot Wired.

By coincidence in about 2002 I met up with him and his wife in New York. Despite me living in Georgia and them living in San Francisco, somehow we were all in New York at the same time (we've also met up in [Paris](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2011/05/from-here-we-go-sublime) and [San Miguel de Allende](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2019/06/hasta-luego) by coincidence). I remember telling him that I'd just been rejected by a bunch of graduate writing programs and he said something like, meh, that's for the best, pitch me a tutorial about web development, I'll get you a little money, and then see how much you care about grad school. 

So I did. And he rejected my first pitch. Hilarious.

Even when you have an in, you don't always get the story. 

<img src="images/2023/2022-02-14_111142_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3342" class="picwide caption" />

But he took my second pitch. And the third. I was still working my day job running a restaurant kitchen, but it wasn't long before I was making more money writing than I was in the kitchen or building websites. Don't worry, that didn't last long. Luckily for me, I liked cooking and I didn't quit that job because eventually economic times changed and the tutorial money dried up. Not entirely, but it wasn't nearly as good or frequent. Eventually *Wired* sold Webmonkey and my friend went on to other things.

I'd been saving every penny I could for several years though, and so I did finally did quit the restaurant. Rather than getting serious about writing though, I took my savings and went [traveling around Southeast Asia](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/southeast-asia/2/) and [Europe](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/europe/) for a year. 

Writing for Webmonkey did open quite a few doors, but mostly they led to programming jobs, not a ton, but enough to extend my trip in Southeast Asia. I'd go travel around Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, periodically returning to Bangkok to work and earn some more money. Then I'd go out again. I ended up worked freelance this way for about three years, some of it traveling, some of it back in Athens, GA.

<img src="images/2023/2023-02-13_165517_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3346" class="picwide" />

Around 2008 *Wired* re-acquired Webmonkey.com and relaunched it with my old editor now in charge. I went back to writing nearly full-time, though I was still technically freelance. That lasted for about five years. One day *Wired* got a new editor who decided he didn't want Webmonkey anymore and shut it down. I went back to programming. About a year later is when we sold our house and left on this trip.

When we were in Mexico my primary client in my freelance business tragically passed away and the company he founded cut me loose. I had put all my eggs in one basket (classic small business mistake, don't do it, no matter how good that client is, don't do it) and I had to scramble to find work. One day Corrinne noticed a full time position at *Wired*. I still did the occasional freelance review and enjoyed it so I applied. I also applied for a job elsewhere as a documentation writer, but I was tired of writing about technical subjects. I didn't want to tell people how to make things on the web. I didn't want to write about software anymore. Moving from Webmonkey to Wired would, theoretically, give me a chance to write about other things. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-02-13_172501_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3348" class="picwide caption" />

That is how I ended up a product reviewer for *Wired*. Note the total absence of journalistic experience in that story. So when the mentorship opportunity came up, I jumped on it. I was extremely lucky to get paired with someone from a very different part of *Wired*, who primarily worked on long, involved pieces called feature stories. This is what you probably think of when you think of reading a story in a magazine. 

I told that editor that I'd always wanted to write a feature. She very kindly started coaching me. This was right around the time we moved to the house in Iva and, despite being stationary for the first time in years, our internet was worse than ever. I decided I should write about rural internet and how bad it is. I called experts. I got lots of quotes. 

But then I started paying more attention to my neighbors out there in the woods. They didn't seem to be hurting for internet. Sure it wasn't great, but what use was the online world anyway? There was livestock to feed, fields to plow, work to be done. I came to believe that whole notion that rural America needs better internet is a story people in cities tell themselves because it's what they would want if they were out here. It's not what the people out here want. Rural America does not need further dependence on the complex systems that are already failing all around us. Rural America needs investment in localized systems and resources for local entrepreneurs. The internet is good enough. 

I had to come back to my mentor and say, you know what, this isn't the story for me. She was very gracious about it and kept meeting with me. The mentorship was supposed to last six months, but a year later we were still talking once a week. Somewhere in that time I started telling her stories about living in the bus, and she said, you know, you should write one of these stories down, but tell it in such a way that Wired readers will get something out of it. I ended up wrapping a story of how I came to love working on engines around the larger culture of repair. 

Now, almost three years after we started talking, that story is going to be in the May issue of *Wired*. At least that's the plan, you never really know until the ink is dry. I do know that it's real enough that *Wired* paid a professional photographer from Houston to come hang out and take pictures of the bus for a few days. The photographer they sent was very nice and made something we were all dreading not that bad in the end. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-02-19_072422_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3354" class="picwide" />

That's the story of the story. Of course the photo shoot was only one weekend out of nearly two weeks we spent at Fort Pickens. We had plenty of beach time and even discovered a spot we could get away from everyone and play baseball in the cool of the evenings.

<img src="images/2023/2023-02-14_161701_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3349" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-02-14_163903_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3350" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-02-20_170138_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3351" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-02-13_170550_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3347" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-02-19_072035_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3352" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2022-02-15_163007_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3344" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2022-02-14_165109_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3343" class="picwide" />

I still worry that this story may bring unwanted attention to us, but we already get quite a bit of attention, I can't see one story adding too much. Hopefully. While it's about the bus, and me to some degree, it's really more of a ode to the dying culture of repair, the DIY spirit, and the love of sturdy old things that so many people I've met over the years share with me. For me at least, it's about everyone else. We'll see what the rest of world thinks in a couple of months.

<img src="images/2023/2023-02-20_200926_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3353" class="picwide" />


## Family

After a few weeks in the Pensacola area we headed back east, across the Florida panhandle to St. Andrews state park, a little postage stamp of protected land off the coast of Panama City Beach. 

Apparently this was once a gem in the Florida State Park system, but the universal consensus is that when it was remodeled following a hurricane, they ruined it. I'm not sure when they ruined it, or who they are, but if St. Andrews was ever a nice place, it's not now. Now it's indistinguishable from the over-priced RV parks across the bay in Panama City. Maybe this is what people want, but everyone we've met talks about how it was ruined, so I don't buy that. As with so many things right now, I think St. Andrews is what you get when you let a very vocal minority push an agenda. Luckily we were only there for three days. 

While the campground is awful, the rest of the park is nice and there is some excellent birding, with a heron rookery in the middle of a pond. Hiking one day the kids and I happened upon an osprey devouring its catch on a branch not more than ten fee above our heads. It didn't pay the slightest attention to us until we walked directly underneath it.

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-23_163634_01_st-andrews-birds.jpg" id="image-3323" class="picwide" />

From St. Andrews we backtracked a few miles inland to Fred Gannon Rocky Bayou State Park. Tucked on the northern side of Choctawhatchee Bay, in a well-preserved maritime forest of live oaks and palmettos, "Fred," as the kids dubbed it, was much more our speed. There were plenty of trails to explore and the campsites where nice and spread out compared to St. Andrews.

<img src="images/2023/2022-02-05_144107_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3324" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2022-02-05_144223_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3325" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2022-02-03_101408_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3327" class="picwide" />


My parents flew in for a visit, arriving the same day we did. They rented a condo across the bay in Destin and we took turns driving back and forth across the bridge, spending the nice days hiking around Fred Gannon and going to the beach in Destin. Fred Gannon was the highlight though. There are just two trails there, but they're really nice trails through forests carpeted with deer moss and old growth pine.

<img src="images/2023/2023-02-08_164740_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3335" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-02-08_164543_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3334" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2022-02-03_113739_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3326" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-02-08_164233_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3330" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2022-02-03_114305_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3328" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-29_141030_fred-parents.jpg" id="image-3329" class="picwide" />

It turned cooler and we had a little bit of rain, which made it nice to have a condo to hang out in. The kids could spread out their art supplies and books and lounge in oversize chairs, which sounds strange, but is something they're not really used to doing. We also discovered there is such a thing as black light mini golf, though let me tell you, the novelty of that wears off around hole three.

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-29_144449_fred-parents.jpg" id="image-3331" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2022-01-30_163427_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3321" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2022-02-01_161803_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3322" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2022-01-30_153050_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3320" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/IMG_20230129_144610.jpg" id="image-3336" class="picwide caption" />

Toward the end of my parents' visit, my cousin and his wife, who were on their way back to Washington, stopped by to hang out for a couple of days. My cousin and I hadn't seen each other in over five years, not since [Thanksgiving in Nevada](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/12/the-city). It wasn't long, but we spent plenty of time around the fire, which is always the best way to spend time with people. 

<img src="images/2023/2022-02-03_135536_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3332" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2022-02-03_164440_rocky-bayou.jpg" id="image-3333" class="picwide" />

It was good to see everyone, but then, all too quickly, everyone had to head home. 

We spent a couple extra days at Fred, catching up on missed work, running some important errands, and give the bus a fresh wash and wax for an upcoming photo shoot. More on that next time.







## Pensacola History

From Fort Pickens we came around the entirety of Pensacola Bay to a small park on the western edge, Big Lagoon. From our campsite there it was a short car ride to Perdido Key, which is another part of Gulf Islands National Seashore. Although it takes the better part of two hours to drive all the way around from Fort Pickens, in the end, you can just about skip a rock from the tip Perdido Key back to the tip of Fort Pickens.

We were hoping to get some more beach time at Perdido Key, but the temperature dropped considerably, making it less beachy. Then a storm blew in a couple of rainy days. I use rainy days to get ahead on work so that I have more free time when the weather is nice, but being inside is no fun for the kids. That's when we look for indoor things to do. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-18_184523_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3298" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-18_184335_big-lagoon.jpg" id="image-3297" class="picwide" />

We wanted to go [back to the Naval Aviation Museum](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/03/island-sun), but it's on the Navy base and the base is closed to anyone not on active duty. Driving through Pensacola though I noticed a sign for a museum of commerce that said it had a street scene, which in my head was going to be just like what we [saw at the Milwaukee Public museum](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/07/hello-milwaukee). And it was, just a bit smaller, but it led us to the rest of Pensacola's very cool historic village.

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_153051_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3301" class="picwide caption" />

It must have been absolutely mind blowing to come from the crowded, filthy, disease-ridden cities of Europe, like London or Lisbon, to the Americas in the 16th century. 

It's difficult for me to imagine what it would have been like to make landfall here in the 16th century, but my guess is that two things would stand out: the sheer amount of wildlife and the relative lack of people. Not to say that there weren't huge civilizations here in the Americas, but by and large they were not on the coasts, so they weren't something you'd likely notice at first. 

What I think you'd notice at first, at least what I think I would notice at first, is the staggering number of birds. Even 18th century accounts of this region are still full of descriptions of the huge flocks of shorebirds, flying overhead for hours, in the words of the well-traveled William Bartram. And that's after over a 100 years of Europeans hunting.

Despite all the press the Plymouth area gets, Florida is where the early European exploration of the present day United States began. Pensacola was established in 1559, making it the oldest point of settlement in the U.S. The catch is that Pensacola was abandoned after two years and then taken up again later, so if you count continuous settlement, Saint Augustine, Florida, established in 1565, wins by a few years. Maybe don't bring that up in Pensacola though.

I know about early Florida history because I am fascinated by the life of Álvar Núñez, better known by the unfortunate nickname Cabeza de Vaca, or head of the cow. Núñez was long dead by the time any cities were finally established, but he started kicking around Florida as early as 1528, and ended up being shipwrecked, made a slave, escaping, shipwrecked again, and then wandering the desert southwest of America and Mexico for eight years. Along the way he befriended the local inhabitants and lived among them for many years. His is one of the few Spanish accounts of the area that spends any time describing the people he met.

He's just a footnote to the history in the Pensacola historic village though since all trace of him, and most traces of the Spanish, are long gone. The buildings that make up the downtown historic area are pulled from Pensacola's more recent past -- cottages of 19th century settlers, a museum of industry devoted to everything from lumber and turpentine, to brick making and fishing, along with a couple of train cars from the railroads moving it all out to the rest of the world.

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_161005_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3303" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_153755_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3302" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_133509_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3317" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_154604_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3318" class="picwide" />

It may look boring in photos, but I love these tributes to the times when people did work of actual value to the world rather than getting paid to blabber about random garbage like I do. At least my wife does stuff of actual value. And yes, I know it's hard to live on the road when you have to slash pines and haul sap, but it still has a certain appeal.

In terms of the hardships we endure in our work, I don't think it's ever been easier to live than right now. Even the worst jobs I can think of are nothing compared to say coal mining in the 19th century. In terms of work, I don't think anyone in European history has had it easier than the current western world. And yet no one seems very happy. I don't think the answer is to go back in time and draw a box around that world and say this is how it should be, but clearly making work "easier" has had some unintended consequences.

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_160211_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3316" class="picwide caption" />

Across the street from the industry museum was the commerce museum with its turn of the century Pensacola street scene. I'm not a nostalgic person by nature, but there are some things I am mad that I missed, like street cars. I wish we still had street cars in every city. Street cars are just fantastic.

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_162801_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3304" class="picwide" />
<div class="cluster">
    <span class="row-2">
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_162831_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3305" class="cluster pic66" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_162914_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3306" class="cluster pic66" />
    </span>
</div>
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_163258_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3307" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_163331_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3308" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_163417_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3309" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_163456_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3310" class="picwide" />

The tickets to the historic district also get you into the Pensacola Museum of History down the street, which is mainly a natural history museum, but then somewhat inexplicably has a huge room that's a replica of a much-loved local bar that shutdown a few years ago. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_173649_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3311" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_175629_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3312" class="picwide" />

After a long day wandering the town we decided to grab some pizza, which normally I probably wouldn't write about, but this pizza place happened to be in the bottom floor of the old Sacred Heart Hospital, which is an imposing, and frankly quite creepy building that looks like this:

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_182550_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3313" class="picwide" />

The pizza was good. The fact that we were sitting, eating, in what used to be the morgue... was, well, not how we wanted to end our night. On the way home we grabbed some ice cream and had a more upbeat ending to our day back at the bus.

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_204211_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3314" class="picwide" />




## Pickens original
Just before new year's, Corrinne and the kids rejoined me at Big Lagoon. We had a quiet new year's around the fire, and then the next day we headed out to the Fort Pickens portion of Gulf Islands National Seashore. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-07_124906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3292" class="picwide" />

If St. George is the [best spot in the panhandle](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/12/christmas-cold), Fort Pickens is a close second. The beach that is. The park has a not so great vibe, but we mostly avoided that by not really doing anything other than going to the beach. The beach is a short walk from the campground, maybe 100 yards, but somehow in that 100 yards you leave all of humanity behind.

No matter how full the campground is -- and it was close to full the whole time we were there -- there's never more than a couple people, if that, on the beach. Where does everyone go? It's something I've never understood, but I'll take it. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_144135_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3283" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_150639_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3284" class="picwide" />

After a couple of cloudy, but still warm days, which we spent playing soccer on the beach and attempting to make parachutes, we hit a stretch of the kind of warm, sunny days you dream of when you come to Florida in January. For a solid week it was like winter didn't exist. We swam, played, and laid around the beach, relaxing. It really was one perfect day after another. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_171004_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3288" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_065400_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3286" class="picwide" />

The only flaw was the people running Fort Pickens. This was the topic of nearly every conversation I had with fellow campers or overheard. It was mind blowing honestly. We've been all over this country, stayed in 100s of campgrounds, including this one years ago, and never encountered anything like this. As one woman put it, "it's like everyone here is out to get you."

That sums it up well. Fort Pickens is the most uptight place we've ever been. If you go digging through reviews you can read stories of crazy experiences people have had. Camp hosts measuring rigs to ensure they're under the site limit (even if they fit in the site), camp hosts telling people they've done something wrong and then flexing their muscles to the other camp hosts, showing off their power. Wild stuff, utterly ridiculous sorts of things I never knew people did after high school. 

For reasons I can't explain, we were left alone. But some friends of our came down to visit and they ran afoul of the Fort Pickens gestapo. Their kids climbed up in a tree to read. Heaven forbid. The camp host came over and said, "I'd rather you didn't climb the tree, there could be nesting birds." Now, set aside for a moment the fact that our friend is a botanist with the U.S. Forest Service, in addition to an avid birder, and is well aware, as anyone who knows anything about birds or seasons, that no songbirds are nesting down here right now. What irked me (I was not there to respond) was that "I'd rather you didn't" bit. You're a camp host. I don't give a damn what you'd rather I do.

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-04_170306_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3291" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-12_142906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3293" class="picwide caption" />

As you might expect from a place where people feel the need to flout their petty powers, there are more rules here than anywhere else we've ever been. Also as you might expect, the condition of things at Fort Pickens is abysmal. There are bathrooms here so moldy they need to be condemned. But again, this is what you'd expect right? The more concerned leaders are with meaningless minutia, the more they can avoid looking at the crumbling big picture, and the more they hire the kinds of people who yell at children and don't do their job cleaning the bathrooms. 

Now, lest you think we had a horrible time, bear in mind that I was lying on a mostly deserted white sand beach in the warmth of a 75 degree January day idly thinking about these things. There are worse problems than this for sure. Still, reflecting on what was happening back in the campground I realized Fort Pickens is a great lesson in what happens when leaders fail.

I find leadership fascinating. When I was younger people used to tell me I'd make a good leader. I still have no idea why. At the time I barely had any idea what a leader did, let alone whether I'd be any good at it. As believer in the sanctity of individual freedom, I was pretty sure I didn't want to be a leader because that would involve telling other people what to do, thus infringing on their liberties. Not for me.

It wasn't until I was much older that I realized my understanding of leadership was essentially a Marine Corp drill sergeant screaming at people. And that *is* a form of leadership. But it was developed for a singular purpose: turning a huge swath of young humanity from all kinds of backgrounds into United State Marines. In six weeks. By all accounts it works. To make Marines. It's a poor way to run a campground though.

When you yank that sort of blunt, thoughtless leadership out of the Marines and put it in real life all you really reveal is something about yourself -- that you have no power. Your power is proportional to your ability to relax. If you can't relax about something harmless, whether against the "rules" or no, then you have no power. You cannot make your own decisions, which means you have no agency. That means you have no control. When you have no control you seek to exert control over others because it makes you feel more in control. But you aren't. This is elemental psychology. We all know this when we see it in others, but we're alarmingly blind to it in ourselves.

Chances are the camp host's boss is a bad leader. And that person's boss is a bad leader. And so on up the chain. That's a reason for the situation as it is, but that's no excuse. We all know better than to be that guy, and yet we all do it in little ways, exerting our power over other people so we feel in control. That's the opposite of control.

What's strange to me, what worries me, quite frankly, is that no one challenges the situation at Fort Pickens. Including me. Surely the grown men and women working in the campground at Fort Pickens must realize their powerlessness, at least intuitively. Why do none of the rest of us say, *hey, man, what are you doing? Why did tell that kid to get out of tree? With all the problems of childhood these days, do we need to add climbing a tree to the list? And really, is that why you were put here on earth, to keep kids out of trees?*

I'm guessing even this guy would say no, that's not his life's mission. I hope anyway. I hope he's not so far gone that he really does enjoy yelling at children. I plan to ask him if he ever tells my kids to get out of a tree. Not to be rude, but because I want to understand. I want to understand how he got to where he is. My guess is, where he is isn't a very happy place. And yet he lives in one of the most beautiful beaches in the country.

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_062727_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3285" class="picwide" />

My point here isn't that Fort Pickens sucks. I mean, it kinda does. But the larger point is that we as a culture are headed to dark places when we get this obsessed with pointless power and blindly enforcing rules, with no idea why, the *just doing my job* logic prevails well outside this campground. This is the same thinking that underpinned the rise of all the horrible despots of the 20th century. All of them got where they got with the backing of legions of people who said the four most dangerous words in the English language: I'm just following orders.

It's not just that people are following orders. That's bad, but even worse, people find a way out of their own powerlessness through the tiny bit of power they get by enforcing orders. That's the danger. What starts as a perceived necessity ends in a perverse pleasure. One people don't like to let go of.

I'm not sure how Fort Pickens got this way. Perhaps the superintendent is a bad leader. Perhaps he is taking over from a bad leader. Perhaps the land itself is tainted. Battles were fought here. Geronimo was imprisoned. The past leaves a mark on the land, colors the character of the people who live on it. 

I know, I know. More travel, less philosophy. Why bother saying any of this? Because I believe that if we don't start questioning the people who are just following orders. Not to be rude or mean. Not because we think we're better, but because it's how we snap each other out of our trances. I don't see when I'm being this way. My family confronts me. I snap out of it. If we don't do this for each other, if we don't call each other out, we'll never snap out of it. And if we don't snap out of it, well, we already know how that ends.

## Fort Pickens Final

Just before new year's, Corrinne and the kids rejoined me at Big Lagoon. We had a quiet new year's around the fire, and then the next day we headed out to the Fort Pickens portion of Gulf Islands National Seashore. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-07_124906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3292" class="picwide" />

If St. George is the [best spot in the panhandle](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/12/christmas-cold), Fort Pickens is a close second. The beach that is. The park has a not so great vibe, but we mostly avoided that by not really doing anything other than going to the beach. The beach is a short walk from the campground, maybe 100 yards, but somehow in that 100 yards you leave all of humanity behind.

No matter how full the campground is -- and it was close to full the whole time we were there -- there's never more than a couple people, if that, on the beach. Where does everyone go? It's something I've never understood, but I'll take it. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_144135_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3283" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_150639_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3284" class="picwide" />

After a couple of cloudy, but still warm days, which we spent playing soccer on the beach and attempting to make parachutes, we hit a stretch of the kind of warm, sunny days you dream of when you come to Florida in January. For a solid week it was like winter didn't exist. We swam, played, and laid around the beach, relaxing. It really was one perfect day after another. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_171004_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3288" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_065400_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3286" class="picwide" />

The only flaw was the people running Fort Pickens. This was the topic of nearly every conversation I had with fellow campers or overheard. It was mind blowing honestly. We've been all over this country, stayed in 100s of campgrounds, including this one years ago, and never encountered anything like this. Fort Pickens is the most uptight place we've ever been. If you go digging through reviews you can read stories of crazy experiences people have had. Camp hosts measuring rigs to ensure they're under the site limit (even if they fit in the site), camp hosts telling people they've done something wrong and then flexing their muscles to the other camp hosts, showing off their power. Wild stuff, utterly ridiculous sorts of things I never knew people did after high school. 

I'll confess the first time I read that stuff I thought to myself, boy, these reviewers really like to complain. Plus I know every park has to deal with plenty of problematic people. But then, the more park staff I met the more I found myself thinking, wait, why was that person so rude? My general default reaction in those kinds of situations is to think, *gosh, that person must be having a bad day, they must not be [on their path](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/01/path), that's too bad*. Still, that's just one person, I generally go on my way without another thought. But then it was two people. And then three. And then there comes a point where you realize it's not the reviewers, it's not you. It really is just totally bonkers here. As one woman put it, "it's like everyone here is watching you from behind a dune, waiting for you to do something wrong."

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-04_170306_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3291" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-12_142906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3293" class="picwide caption" />

It's no way to live. For the people working here that is. For reasons I can't explain, we were mostly left alone, but it was still a strange place. And it wasn't just camp hosts, it was systemic. From the moment you arrive here there is none of the usual "welcome to your national parks!" enthusiasm we have found at every other park. Here everyone makes you feel as if you are a burden the staff has to bear. You also get the feeling they see everyone as someone who's out to screw them over somehow. At least that's how you feel. The sooner they can catch you doing something wrong, the sooner they have a reason to get rid of you. 

Still has a great beach though.

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_062727_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3285" class="picwide" />

I'm not sure how Fort Pickens got this way, it certainly wasn't this way when we were here in 2017 and 2018. Perhaps the new superintendent is a bad leader. Perhaps the land itself is tainted. Battles were fought here. Geronimo was imprisoned. The past leaves a mark on the land, colors the character of the people who live on it. Sometimes places are like that, you just have to ignore it and carry on, which is what we did. We're just passing through, though we will be back again next month, and the month after that, so we'll see. If all else fails we'll just spend more time on the deserted beaches.

Part of the reason we didn't pay much attention to the shenanigans of For Pickens is that we had company. Some friends of ours from Wisconsin came down to visit, spending a week with us at Fort Pickens. The kids got to reunite most of the pack they ran around in all summer in Washburn and the adults got to spend the days in relative peace on the beach. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-11_145419_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3294" class="picwide" />

One of the things I think people don't understand about traveling the way we do is how quickly you can become very close friends with people. These friendships often, in my experience, prove more durable and long lasting than any other. The crucible of shared experience is in my opinion far better than shared time. I am still in touch with people I traveled with 20 years ago and feel like I know them far better than some people I've lived nearby for those same decades. The same is true for children, as far as I can tell. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-14_131258_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3295" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-14_133400_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3296" class="picwide" />

The difference is that our kids have been doing this for more of their life than I have, which has given them an ability to form friendships quickly. That's a skill I wish I had. I know some of that is just being a kid, but even then, the process has never come easy for me. Luckily, in the this case, the apples fell far enough away from the tree that I don't have to worry.

## Pickens new 
Just before new year's, Corrinne and the kids rejoined me at Big Lagoon. We had a quiet new year's around the fire, and then the next day we headed out to the Fort Pickens portion of Gulf Islands National Seashore. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-07_124906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3292" class="picwide" />

If St. George is the [best spot in the panhandle](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/12/christmas-cold), Fort Pickens is a close second. The beach that is. The park has a not so great vibe, but we mostly avoided that by not really doing anything other than going to the beach. The beach is a short walk from the campground, maybe 100 yards, but somehow in that 100 yards you leave all of humanity behind.

No matter how full the campground is -- and it was close to full the whole time we were there -- there's never more than a couple people, if that, on the beach. Where does everyone go? It's something I've never understood, but I'll take it. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_144135_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3283" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_150639_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3284" class="picwide" />

After a couple of cloudy, but still warm days, which we spent playing soccer on the beach and attempting to make parachutes, we hit a stretch of the kind of warm, sunny days you dream of when you come to Florida in January. For a solid week it was like winter didn't exist. We swam, played, and laid around the beach, relaxing. It really was one perfect day after another. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_171004_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3288" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_065400_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3286" class="picwide" />

The only flaw was the people running Fort Pickens. This was the topic of nearly every conversation I had with fellow campers or overheard. It was mind blowing honestly. We've been all over this country, stayed in 100s of campgrounds, including this one years ago, and never encountered anything like this. As one woman put it, "it's like everyone here watching you from behind a dune, waiting for you to do something wrong."

That sums it up well. Fort Pickens is the most uptight place we've ever been. If you go digging through reviews you can read stories of crazy experiences people have had. Camp hosts measuring rigs to ensure they're under the site limit (even if they fit in the site), camp hosts telling people they've done something wrong and then flexing their muscles to the other camp hosts, showing off their power. Wild stuff, utterly ridiculous sorts of things I never knew people did after high school. 

For reasons I can't explain, we were left alone. But some friends of our came down to visit and they ran afoul of the Fort Pickens dune hiders. They found something wrong with our friends. Their kids climbed up in a tree to read. Heaven forbid. The camp host came over and said, "I'd rather you didn't climb the tree, there could be nesting birds." Now, set aside for a moment the fact that our friend is a botanist with the U.S. Forest Service, in addition to an avid birder, and is well aware, as anyone who knows anything about birds or seasons, that no songbirds are nesting down here right now. What irked me (and I was not there to respond) was that "I'd rather you didn't" bit. You're a camp host. I don't give a damn what you'd rather I do or don't do.

As you might expect from a place where people feel the need to flout their petty powers, there are more rules here than anywhere else we've ever been. Also as you might expect, the condition of things at Fort Pickens is abysmal. There are bathrooms here so moldy they need to be condemned. But again, this is what you'd expect right? The more concerned leaders are with meaningless minutia, the more they can avoid looking at the crumbling big picture, and the more they hire the kinds of people who yell at children and don't do their job cleaning the bathrooms. 

It wasn't just camp hosts though, it was systemic. From the moment you arrived there was none of the usual "welcome to your national parks!" enthusiasm we have found at every other park. Here everyone made you feel as if you were a burden the staff had to bear. And chances are you were out to screw them. The sooner they could catch you doing something wrong, the sooner they'd have a reason to get rid of you. I saw it in the office where you checked in, the attitude of the people at the entrance gate (where we weren't even so much as offered a map, luckily we knew where to go, but if you didn't, too bad for you). I saw it in the way people were told which was to park their cars. I saw it in the way no one told the tent campers that the bathrooms were going to be shut down all day. I saw everywhere, all the time. One bad camp host would not be worth writing about. Fort Pickens is study in leadership failure.

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-04_170306_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3291" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-12_142906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3293" class="picwide caption" />

Now, lest you think we had a horrible time, bear in mind that I was lying on a mostly deserted white sand beach in the warmth of a 75 degree January day idly thinking about these things. The good news at Fort Pickens is that it's easy to avoid the staff. 

But I find leadership fascinating. When I was younger people used to tell me I'd make a good leader. I still have no idea why. At the time I barely had any idea what a leader did, let alone whether I'd be any good at it. As believer in the sanctity of individual freedom, I was pretty sure I didn't want to be a leader because that would involve telling other people what to do, thus infringing on their liberties. Not for me.

It wasn't until I was much older that I realized my understanding of leadership was essentially a Marine Corp drill sergeant screaming at people. And that *is* a form of leadership. But it was developed for a singular purpose: turning a huge swath of young humanity from all kinds of backgrounds into United State Marines. In six weeks. By all accounts it works. To make Marines. It's a poor way to run a campground though.

When you yank that sort of blunt, thoughtless leadership out of the Marines and put it in real life all you really reveal is something about yourself -- that you have no power. Your power is proportional to your ability to relax. If you can't relax about something harmless, whether against the "rules" or no, then you have no power. You cannot make your own decisions, which means you have no agency. That means you have no control. When you have no control you seek to exert control over others because it makes you feel more in control. But you aren't. This is elemental psychology. We all know this when we see it in others, but we're alarmingly blind to it in ourselves.

That's doubly true when everyone around us is doing the same thing. Once the leader normalizes this behavior it is very tough to transcend it.

The camp host's boss is a bad leader. And that person's boss is a bad leader. And so on up the chain. That's a reason for the situation as it is, but that's no excuse. We all know better than to be that guy, and yet we all do it in little ways, exerting our power over other people so we feel in control. That's the opposite of control.


What's strange to me, what worries me, quite frankly, is that no one challenges the situation at Fort Pickens. Including me. Surely the grown men and women working in the campground at Fort Pickens must realize their powerlessness, at least intuitively. Why do none of the rest of us say, *hey, man, what are you doing? Why did tell that kid to get out of tree? With all the problems of childhood these days, do we need to add climbing a tree to the list? And really, is that why you were put here on earth, to keep kids out of trees?*

I'm guessing even this guy would say no, that's not his life's mission. I hope anyway. I hope he's not so far gone that he really does enjoy yelling at children. I plan to ask him if he ever tells my kids to get out of a tree. Not to be rude, but because I want to understand. I want to understand how he got to where he is. My guess is, where he is isn't a very happy place. And yet he lives in one of the most beautiful beaches in the country.

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_062727_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3285" class="picwide" />

My point here isn't that Fort Pickens sucks. I mean, it kinda does. But the larger point is that we as a culture are headed to dark places when we get this obsessed with pointless power and blindly enforcing rules, with no idea why, the *just doing my job* logic prevails well outside this campground. This is the same thinking that underpinned the rise of all the horrible despots of the 20th century. All of them got where they got with the backing of legions of people who said the four most dangerous words in the English language: I'm just following orders.

It's not just that people are following orders. That's bad, but even worse, people find a way out of their own powerlessness through the tiny bit of power they get by enforcing orders. That's the danger. What starts as a perceived necessity ends in a perverse pleasure. One people don't like to let go of.

I'm not sure how Fort Pickens got this way. Perhaps the superintendent is a bad leader. Perhaps he is taking over from a bad leader. Perhaps the land itself is tainted. Battles were fought here. Geronimo was imprisoned. The past leaves a mark on the land, colors the character of the people who live on it. 

I know, I know. More travel, less philosophy. Why bother saying any of this? Because I believe that if we don't start questioning the people who are just following orders. Not to be rude or mean. Not because we think we're better, but because it's how we snap each other out of our trances. I don't see when I'm being this way. My family confronts me. I snap out of it. If we don't do this for each other, if we don't call each other out, we'll never snap out of it. And if we don't snap out of it, well, we already know how that ends.

The solution I think is to make sure the people around you feel comfortable confronting you. I know I don't see when I'm behaving this way. I'm not behaving this way, damnit. I'm right. It's fine when I do it. But then my family confronts me. I snap out of it. That's the only way to save ourselves from ourselves -- with help from others.

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_062727_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3285" class="picwide" />

I'm not sure how Fort Pickens got this way. Perhaps the superintendent is a bad leader. Perhaps he is taking over from a bad leader. Perhaps the land itself is tainted. Battles were fought here. Geronimo was imprisoned. The past leaves a mark on the land, colors the character of the people who live on it. Whatever the reason, my hope is that someday soon the right person will ask the right question and another right person will snap out of it. They'll look aroudn the way you do when someone calls you out and think, *wait, what was I thinking? I'm sorry...*

If we don't do this for each other, if we don't call each other out, we'll never snap out of it. 



## Fort Pickens

Just before new year's, Corrinne and the kids rejoined me at Big Lagoon. We had a quiet new year's around the fire, and then the next day we headed out to the Fort Pickens portion of Gulf Islands National Seashore. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-07_124906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3292" class="picwide" />

If St. George is the [best spot in the panhandle](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/12/christmas-cold), Fort Pickens is a close second. The beach that is. The park has a not so great vibe, but we mostly avoided that by not really doing anything other than going to the beach. The beach is a short walk from the campground, maybe 100 yards, but somehow in that 100 yards you leave all of humanity behind.

No matter how full the campground is -- and it was close to full the whole time we were there -- there's never more than a couple people, if that, on the beach. Where does everyone go? It's something I've never understood, but I'll take it. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_144135_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3283" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_150639_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3284" class="picwide" />

After a couple of cloudy, but still warm days, which we spent playing soccer on the beach and attempting to make parachutes, we hit a stretch of the kind of warm, sunny days you dream of when you come to Florida in January. For a solid week it was like winter didn't exist. We swam, played, and laid around the beach, relaxing. It really was one perfect day after another. 

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_171004_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3288" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_065400_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3286" class="picwide" />

The only flaw was the people running Fort Pickens. This was the topic of nearly every conversation I had with fellow campers or overheard. It was mind blowing honestly. We've been all over this country, stayed in 100s of campgrounds, including this one years ago, and never encountered anything like this. As one woman put it, "it's like everyone here is out to get you."

That sums it up well. Fort Pickens is the most uptight place we've ever been. If you go digging through reviews you can read stories of crazy experiences people have had. Camp hosts measuring rigs to ensure they're under the site limit (even if they fit in the site), camp hosts telling people they've done something wrong and then flexing their muscles to the other camp hosts, showing off their power. Wild stuff, utterly ridiculous sorts of things I never knew people did after high school. 

For reasons I can't explain, we were left alone, but it got me thinking. Whenever I see a lot of rules and people being very, well, ruley. I always think, the leadership here as failed. Good leaders don't need rules. They set a tone, they make sure the people under them understand the mission and they give those people the autonomy to make decisions on their own. None of that was happening here. This was a strict set of rules that will be enforced or else and the culture that comes from living that way, e.g. high fives when you "bust" someone sort thing.

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-04_170306_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3291" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-12_142906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3293" class="picwide caption" />

Now, lest you think we had a horrible time because of some overbearing camp hosts, bear in mind that I was lying on a mostly deserted white sand beach in the warmth of a 75 degree January day idly thinking about these things. And I didn't even think about them for more than an afternoon. But I find leadership fascinating. When I was younger people used to tell me I'd make a good leader. I still have no idea why. At the time I barely had any idea what a leader did, let alone whether I'd be any good at it. As believer in the sanctity of individual freedom, I was pretty sure I didn't want to be a leader because that would involve telling other people what to do, thus infringing on their liberties. Not for me.

It wasn't until I was much older that I realized my understanding of leadership was essentially a Marine Corp drill sergeant screaming at people. And that *is* a form of leadership. But it was developed for a singular purpose: turning a huge swath of young humanity from all kinds of backgrounds into United State Marines. In six weeks. By all accounts it works. To make Marines. It's a poor way to run a campground though.

When you yank that sort of blunt, thoughtless leadership out of the Marines and put it in real life all you really reveal is something about yourself -- that you have no power. Your power is proportional to your ability to relax. If you can't relax about something harmless, whether against the "rules" or no, then you have no power. You cannot make your own decisions, which means you have no agency. That means you have no control. When you have no control you seek to exert control over others because it makes you feel more in control. But you aren't. This is elemental psychology. We all know this when we see it in others, but we're alarmingly blind to it in ourselves.

Chances are the camp host's boss is a bad leader. And that person's boss is a bad leader. And so on up the chain. That's a reason for the situation as it is, but that's no excuse. We all know better than to be that guy, and yet we all do it in little ways, exerting our power over other people so we feel in control. That's the opposite of control.

The solution I think is to make sure the people around you feel comfortable confronting you. I know I don't see when I'm behaving this way. I'm not behaving this way, damnit. I'm right. It's fine when I do it. But then my family confronts me. I snap out of it. That's the only way to save ourselves from ourselves -- with help from others.

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_062727_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3285" class="picwide" />

I'm not sure how Fort Pickens got this way. Perhaps the superintendent is a bad leader. Perhaps he is taking over from a bad leader. Perhaps the land itself is tainted. Battles were fought here. Geronimo was imprisoned. The past leaves a mark on the land, colors the character of the people who live on it. Whatever the reason, my hope is that someday soon the right person will ask the right question and another right person will snap out of it. They'll look aroudn the way you do when someone calls you out and think, *wait, what was I thinking? I'm sorry...*

If we don't do this for each other, if we don't call each other out, we'll never snap out of it. 









But some friends of our came down to visit and they ran afoul of the Fort Pickens gestapo. Their kids climbed up in a tree to read. Heaven forbid. The camp host came over and said, "I'd rather you didn't climb the tree, there could be nesting birds." Now, set aside for a moment the fact that our friend is a botanist with the U.S. Forest Service, in addition to an avid birder, and is well aware, as anyone who knows anything about birds or seasons, that no songbirds are nesting down here right now. What irked me (I was not there to respond) was that "I'd rather you didn't" bit. You're a camp host. I don't give a damn what you'd rather I do.

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-04_170306_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3291" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2023-01-12_142906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3293" class="picwide caption" />

As you might expect from a place where people feel the need to flout their petty powers, there are more rules here than anywhere else we've ever been. Also as you might expect, the condition of things at Fort Pickens is abysmal. There are bathrooms here so moldy they need to be condemned. But again, this is what you'd expect right? The more concerned leaders are with meaningless minutia, the more they can avoid looking at the crumbling big picture, and the more they hire the kinds of people who yell at children and don't do their job cleaning the bathrooms. 

Now, lest you think we had a horrible time, bear in mind that I was lying on a mostly deserted white sand beach in the warmth of a 75 degree January day idly thinking about these things. There are worse problems than this for sure. Still, reflecting on what was happening back in the campground I realized Fort Pickens is a great lesson in what happens when leaders fail.

I find leadership fascinating. When I was younger people used to tell me I'd make a good leader. I still have no idea why. At the time I barely had any idea what a leader did, let alone whether I'd be any good at it. As believer in the sanctity of individual freedom, I was pretty sure I didn't want to be a leader because that would involve telling other people what to do, thus infringing on their liberties. Not for me.

It wasn't until I was much older that I realized my understanding of leadership was essentially a Marine Corp drill sergeant screaming at people. And that *is* a form of leadership. But it was developed for a singular purpose: turning a huge swath of young humanity from all kinds of backgrounds into United State Marines. In six weeks. By all accounts it works. To make Marines. It's a poor way to run a campground though.

When you yank that sort of blunt, thoughtless leadership out of the Marines and put it in real life all you really reveal is something about yourself -- that you have no power. Your power is proportional to your ability to relax. If you can't relax about something harmless, whether against the "rules" or no, then you have no power. You cannot make your own decisions, which means you have no agency. That means you have no control. When you have no control you seek to exert control over others because it makes you feel more in control. But you aren't. This is elemental psychology. We all know this when we see it in others, but we're alarmingly blind to it in ourselves.

Chances are the camp host's boss is a bad leader. And that person's boss is a bad leader. And so on up the chain. That's a reason for the situation as it is, but that's no excuse. We all know better than to be that guy, and yet we all do it in little ways, exerting our power over other people so we feel in control. That's the opposite of control.

What's strange to me, what worries me, quite frankly, is that no one challenges the situation at Fort Pickens. Including me. Surely the grown men and women working in the campground at Fort Pickens must realize their powerlessness, at least intuitively. Why do none of the rest of us say, *hey, man, what are you doing? Why did tell that kid to get out of tree? With all the problems of childhood these days, do we need to add climbing a tree to the list? And really, is that why you were put here on earth, to keep kids out of trees?*

I'm guessing even this guy would say no, that's not his life's mission. I hope anyway. I hope he's not so far gone that he really does enjoy yelling at children. I plan to ask him if he ever tells my kids to get out of a tree. Not to be rude, but because I want to understand. I want to understand how he got to where he is. My guess is, where he is isn't a very happy place. And yet he lives in one of the most beautiful beaches in the country.

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_062727_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3285" class="picwide" />

My point here isn't that Fort Pickens sucks. I mean, it kinda does. But the larger point is that we as a culture are headed to dark places when we get this obsessed with pointless power and blindly enforcing rules, with no idea why, the *just doing my job* logic prevails well outside this campground. This is the same thinking that underpinned the rise of all the horrible despots of the 20th century. All of them got where they got with the backing of legions of people who said the four most dangerous words in the English language: I'm just following orders.

It's not just that people are following orders. That's bad, but even worse, people find a way out of their own powerlessness through the tiny bit of power they get by enforcing orders. That's the danger. What starts as a perceived necessity ends in a perverse pleasure. One people don't like to let go of.

I'm not sure how Fort Pickens got this way. Perhaps the superintendent is a bad leader. Perhaps he is taking over from a bad leader. Perhaps the land itself is tainted. Battles were fought here. Geronimo was imprisoned. The past leaves a mark on the land, colors the character of the people who live on it. 

I know, I know. More travel, less philosophy. Why bother saying any of this? Because I believe that if we don't start questioning the people who are just following orders. Not to be rude or mean. Not because we think we're better, but because it's how we snap each other out of our trances. I don't see when I'm being this way. My family confronts me. I snap out of it. If we don't do this for each other, if we don't call each other out, we'll never snap out of it. And if we don't snap out of it, well, we already know how that ends.


## Cold Christmas Walk

After a week at Grayton we moved down the coastline to our favorite place in the Florida panhandle: St George Island. This is the wildest, least developed area I know of in the Florida panhandle. We've visited St. George more than any other spot and we never tire of it. We'd spend more time here if we could, but it's not a big campground and everyone wants to be here.

This is where we holed up for the cold front that swept across the United States around Christmas. Even down here the panhandle, where the clear tropical waters still looked inviting, the temperature dipped into the low 20s. I had to put on socks for a week and regular readers know how I feel about socks.

The problem with cold is that it tends to keep me indoors -- I have to fight a tendency to sit around in the bus that doesn't exist when the weather is warm. To avoid falling into the trap of inaction I forced myself out on a long walk in the cold. There's a trail leading right out of the campground here to a point that sticks out into the Apalachicola Bay. It's a wide sandy trail through a slash pine forest. I've been quite sure what species "slash" pines are. The name comes from the turpentine making process, which involves slashing the tree to collect the sap, but there are several species capable of making turpentine. 

Whatever the case the tall pines are popular with Bald Eagles. I saw four in the five miles I walked. Along with seemingly every yellow rumped warbler in America. I mostly stopped birdwatching while I was here, mostly because every little bird I saw flitting in the bushes turned out to be a yellow rumped warbler. Florida in winter is just yellow rumpled warblers all the way down.

Despite the cold and the wind I saw a suprising amount of wildlife out and about, even a little yellow rat snake that came out to grab a bit of sunshine and maybe a bite to eat before the freezing cold of Christmas Eve set in. 

Gap point, as the end of the trail is called, was a windy, wild place when I was out there on Christmas eve. I had the place to myself, save for the occasional circling eagle.

While I'm not fan of the cold, if it *has* to be cold, Christmas is the time to do it I suppose. It does feel right for the world to be cold on Christmas. Maybe even snow. But that didn't happen. We had a good holiday anyway.

## Birthday in Grayton Beach

After New Orleans we hightailed it to Florida, looking for some warmer beaches. Our first stop was Grayton Beach, where we spent Elliott's birthday -- in the white sands with afternoons warm enough to swim.

<img src="images/2023/2022-12-15_164430_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3246" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2023/2022-12-19_155619_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3248" class="picwide" />

The sunsets were pretty spectacular too. We'd go down in the evenings, along with lots of other people to watch the sunset. Most evenings there would be at least four or five groups of people (not campers), often in identical clothes, who had hired a professional photographer to shoot family portraits. It was funny watching photographers trying to wrangle 10 people in matching outfits into a pose while the light faded. Made me feel good about my decision to abandon photography as a career back in college.

<img src="images/2023/2022-12-19_161117_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3249" class="picwide" />
<div class="cluster">
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By the time Elliott's birthday rolled around the warm weather had retreated unfortunately, but does any kid *really* care about the weather on their birthday? A rainy birthday is still a birthday. Your sisters will still descend on you before you're out of bed, clamoring for you to open their gifts.

<div class="cluster">
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<img src="images/2023/2022-12-20_064302_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3266" class="cluster pic66" />
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We've always let the kids start their birthdays like Christmas -- giving each other their gifts in the early morning. It's my favorite part of their birthdays, watching them be kind and generous and loving to each other. Elliott's eighth birthday was no exception. He's kind, smart, fun, strong, caring, adventurous, and the best little brother his sisters could ever hope for. I am biased of course, but I know some people think kids have to stay in one place to grow up well, and Elliott (and his sisters) is here to tell those people they don't know what they're talking about. 

I am not crazy about how fast they are all growing up -- a speed that seems to be exponentially accelerating too -- but it brings me great happiness and joy to see how they've grown and I am excited to see what they have in store for the future.

<div class="cluster">
    <span class="row-2">
<img src="images/2023/2022-12-20_085141_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3255" class="cluster pic66" />
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    </span>
<img src="images/2023/2022-12-20_085921_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3256" class="cluster picwide" />
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You do have to watch him though, take one sip of tea and your whole army might get wiped out.

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<img src="images/2023/2022-12-20_092146_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3258" class="cluster pic66" />
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<img src="images/2023/2022-12-20_092205_grayton-birthday.jpg" id="image-3259" class="cluster picwide" />
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Despite my losses on the tabletop battlefield I did manage to get some cake.

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## New Orleans

After Galveston we headed north, bound for New Orleans. We broke up the drive with a stop at one of the gates of hell, located in Sea Rim, Texas. Sea Grim as we call it. Do not go there. Ever. For any reason. We had to abandon the bus there that night and retreat to a hotel. The next morning we went back, fired up the bus, and did not stop driving until we were safely over the state line in Louisiana -- successfully [escaping Texas](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/06/escaping-texas) again, but this was definitely our closest call yet.

We regrouped for a day at a little state park on a small bayou outside Lake Charles, Louisiana. It was good to be back in the bayous, swamp cypress, and most of all, warm humid air. Never thought I'd miss it, but I did.

<img src="images/2022/2022-12-06_132438_bayou.jpg" id="image-3243" class="picwide" />

We met an Australian couple there who have been coming to the US nearly every year since the early 2000s, traveling around in an older RV. It's always humbling to meet someone from somewhere else who knows your country better than you do. We were headed in opposite directions unfortunately, but we were able to save them from Sea Rim at least. I look forward to our paths crossing again one day.

---

The next day we continue on, taking the beat-up, pothole-strewn back roads through the sugar cane fields and flooded rice paddies, past where we once spent Mardi Gras, on down into New Orleans. We arrived a little too late to head into the city that day. We had to stave off our New Orleans cravings with a few crayfish sausages grilled over the fire that night.

<img src="images/2022/2022-12-07_132438_driving-new-orleans.jpg" id="image-3242" class="picwide" />

The next morning we headed over the river and into the city. 

<img src="images/2022/2022-12-13_130726_new-orleans.jpg" id="image-3240" class="picwide" />

There is something truly remarkable about New Orleans. Long time readers may have noticed that New Orleans is essentially the only city we visit. Chicago? Drove right by as fast as we could. Atlanta? We've been known to detour hundreds of miles to avoid it. We did stop in Columbia, SC, and regretted it. We have been to Milwaukee, but that's to visit friends, not because we love the city.

No, if we're going into a city it has to be a city that's alive the way a forest is alive, the way a seashore is alive: organically, miraculously, beautifully. Why waste your time on anything else? A good city should evoke the three transcendentals in you when you're in it: goodness, truth, and beauty. The only U.S. city where I have experienced those things every time I go is New Orleans.

If you were just looking at it on paper, New Orleans probably wouldn't jump out at you. It's insanely touristy. It's rough around the edges. It has a reputation for violence. And yet none of those things seem to affect the city or the people. It's a mystery, but it's not hard to see how living here you might come to think like Ignatius J Reilly when he rather famously says, "Leaving New Orleans frightened me considerably. Outside of the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins."

Picking apart what makes New Orleans great is likely as fruitless as trying to figure out how it got that way. Something about the collision of Afro-Caribbean culture, Acadian culture, French culture -- among others -- created something unlike anywhere else on earth. New Orleans is louder, more vibrant, and more alive than any other city in America and that, I think, is what keeps us coming back.

Just as we took the girls out for a [birthday around Milwaukee](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/07/hello-milwaukee), we had promised Elliott a day out in New Orleans. It started with an early lunch at a Thai restaurant. 

<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_121233_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3223" class="picwide" />

Then we went to the thing the kids have been talking about ever since we where here in 2018: the New Orleans Children's Museum. Alas, a lot can change in four years. It turned out the Children's museum had moved locations and been "modernized". The kids still had fun, though they all agreed the old one was better. The new one offered a few of the same things, but everything was new and clean and looked like it had just come off the Ikea shelf. The old museum had a rather more homemade charm about it. 

This is what passes for progress in modern America though -- taking good things, throwing them away, and replacing them with things that don't work as well and generally suck. In that sense I'm glad the kids are getting a gentle introduction to the future now. 

And maybe I am reading to much into it, but I found it interesting that much of what was missing were what you might call blue collar stuff: the exhibit showcasing what an electrician does, the sample bayou farm, the signage about lap boarding, and the example working fishing boat. Among the new exhibits were a fake laboratory where the kids could pretend to be scientists and a purely mechanical farming setup that moved crops from harvest to ship without the presence of a single human. Again, maybe I'm overthinking it, but I felt the distinct presence of a specific agenda at work when I compared the old museum with the new. 

All that said, at least the kids had fun. And the legendary (in our family) giant bubble maker was still there.

<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_140728_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3231" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_131634_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3225" class="picwide" />
<div class="cluster">
    <span class="row-2">
<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_133650_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3227" class="cluster pic66" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_133242_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3228" class="cluster pic66" />
    </span>
    <span class="row-2">
<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_134027_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3229" class="cluster pic66" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_134134_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3230" class="cluster pic66" />
    </span>
</div>

After a few hours playing with all the stuff, we decamped for the French Quarter to get crepes at our favorite stand in the French Market. This first pic is 2018, the next 2022:

<img src="images/2018/2018-02-18_145959_new-orleans.jpg" id="image-1178" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_164526_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3235" class="picwide" />

Aside from the jarring sight of my children getting older, I can't help but notice that we've shed even more vestiges of civilization... forks? Who needs forks?

<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_154738_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3232" class="picwide" />

That was supposed to be the end of our day. We planned to wander over to Jackson Square, maybe listen to some music and then head back to the bus. In Jackson Square though we came across some street performers doing some amazing athletic stuff -- standing flips, gymnastic-style flips without the padding, you have to stop and respect that. So we did. And that's when they said "we need a few volunteers from the audience". As soon as someone says that, I am volunteered. Not because I want to mind you, but because in any situation that requires a volunteer or random person to be selected, it's not random, it's me. Always. I think it's a kind of penance I have to pay for being very lucky in games of chance. Whatever the case, yes, I was selected. And I had fun dancing for a crowd with a bunch of other people who couldn't dance either.

That's not the surprising part though. The surprising part is that Lilah volunteered -- legitimately volunteered. She and another girl got up and did a similarly impromptu choreographed dance. More surprising is that the street performers gave her and the other girl $20 to keep. Naturally, since this is the most money she has ever earned in about 30 minutes, Lilah is convinced street performers are the greatest thing ever and she is going to be one. And who knows, maybe they are. Their job is certainly a lot more fun than mine.

By the time that was all over with though we were famished again. We headed over to the warehouse district to an Argentinean restaurant Corrinne had been wanting to try. A few arepas later we all felt much better. It was a long day in the city, but a good one. I still judge the success of our days by how quickly the kids fall asleep and I don't think anyone was up past 9 that night.

We spent a full week in New Orleans, mostly exploring the city, though we did have one day of running errands. I even found a reputable Volvo mechanic and took the Volvo in to see about replacing the hose I fixed with some fuel line and other scraps back in Devil's Tower. He looked at what I'd done, leak tested it with some brake fluid, and told me he wouldn't touch it unless he had to. Good enough for me. It's held up well. I did pay to have him clear out all the sensor codes and warnings though so we'll know if something is going amiss from here on out.

So often what we do in New Orleans is just wander around. It's a city that lends itself to wandering. We've got our favorite little spots in the French Quarter, some in the Garden District, some in the Marigny, some in the Treme. This time around though we decided to visit some of the museums we've never bothered with before. 

The notable one was the Jazz museum. I mention is chiefly because I don't think I have ever been somewhere quite so disappointing. Now granted, Jazz is a big topic, spanning almost 100 years now, and even if you narrow it down to New Orleans... it's a lot for any museum to cover. That said, the Jazz museum was a massive letdown. I don't think the kids came out understanding any more about the history of Jazz than when they went in. They were more impressed with the tiny exhibit about the old Mint in the basement than they were with Jazz museum. 

Oh well, we'll stick to just wandering around, listen to the jazz you hear all over the city. Maybe that's the thing, maybe you can't stick Jazz or any other part of New Orleans in a building and try to explain it. It is what it is. Maybe you have to come out here and wander around, discover your own version of the city, to really understand.  


## Galveston Sings

After a couple of sunny days at the beach we headed a little ways south, out to Mustang Island. We had an uneventful drive down and we were looking forward to some more time in the sun. Unfortunately, when we woke up the next morning clouds had rolled in, a steady drizzle was falling, and the temperature dropped twenty degrees. We were forced to put on socks -- always a sign things have gone astray. 

<img src="images/2022/2022-11-13_161813_mustand-island.jpg" id="image-3207" class="picwide caption" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-11-13_163713_mustand-island.jpg" id="image-3208" class="picwide" />

Luckily another family pulled into the site next to us so whenever there was a break in the rain, all the kids would run outside and play together. That helped break up the monotony of rainy days a little. but about three days of rain in, with 8 more days forecasted, we realized our plan to spend thanksgiving a few miles south on Padre Island wasn't going to work. 

Padre Island National Seashore, where [we've stayed before](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/01/almost-warm), is right on the beach, but there's no electric hookups. We have a 300 amp hour battery, and 550 watts of solar, which is enough power (our needs are small) that we never really think about energy. We can go 4 or 5 days without recharging, but eight days of no sun? Even for us that wasn't going to happen. 

<img src="images/2022/2022-11-14_120726_mustand-island.jpg" id="image-3209" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-11-14_121549_mustand-island.jpg" id="image-3212" class="picwide caption" />

So we decided to head north and check out Galveston. While the weather probably wasn't going to be any better (it wasn't) the State Park campground looked better than Mustang Island (it was) and there was more indoor stuff to do -- museums, old ships, and more. 

We had an another uneventful drive up the coast. Well, actually, before the drive, the fuel line cracked and was spraying gas everywhere, but I had that fixed in under half an hour, and these days, anything I can fix in under half an hour is uneventful. With some fuel hose patching the line, we were underway again, though a late start did mean we didn't get to Galveston until the sun was setting, which I think is the latest we've ever arrived somewhere.

While we had power, the weather didn't improve much. There's an episode of the show Portlandia where everyone is [chasing a single beam of sunlight](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBUxZdWJ_zE) around the city of Portland. That's a bit what we felt like in Galveston. Every now and then the sun would poke through and everyone would rush out to enjoy it.

<img src="images/2022/2022-11-20_180253_galveston.jpg" id="image-3210" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-11-26_093428_galveston.jpg" id="image-3213" class="picwide" />

We went to a couple of museums to break up the rainy days in the bus. The Bryant Museum has a ton of exhibits on Texas history, but the big draw for the kids was a diorama depicting the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive battle in the Texas revolution. There are more than 1,200 hand-painted soldiers in this scene. 

<img src="images/2022/2022-11-26_140604_galveston.jpg" id="image-3215" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-11-26_143016_galveston.jpg" id="image-3216" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-11-26_142526_galveston.jpg" id="image-3217" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-11-26_143032_galveston.jpg" id="image-3218" class="picwide" />

We also went to the Texas Seaport Museum, which is home to the 3-masted bark Elissa, which first set sail in 1877. Unlike most tall ships you can visit, the Elissa still actively sails, though not in winter apparently. We got to walk around it though and see (somewhat) what ships of that era were like.

<img src="images/2022/2022-11-30_151802_galveston.jpg" id="image-3219" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-11-30_150226_galveston.jpg" id="image-3221" class="picwide" />


There's a building just adjacent to the ship that serves a museum about the experience of the some 133,000 immigrants who entered the United States through Galveston. I had high hopes for the museum since one side of my family arrived around that time (1910, though through Ellis Island, not Galveston). Unfortunately this was the modern sort of museum, heavily reliant on digital displays, which seem chiefly concerned with collecting your email address. 

<img src="images/2022/2022-11-30_141720_galveston.jpg" id="image-3220" class="picwide" />


It was too bad, because the potential was there to have something really cool, and the kids did learn a few things, but it could have been much better. Even central premise of the experience -- that you would follow a real immigrant across the ocean and learn about their experience -- fell flat because no matter who you followed the outcome at the end was arbitrary.

Finally, one day, a few days before we were set to leave, the sun decided to get serious again and there was much happiness. 

<img src="images/2022/2022-11-27_114155_galveston.jpg" id="image-3214" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-11-26_120136_galveston.jpg" id="image-3222" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-11-23_123126_galveston.jpg" id="image-3211" class="picwide" />


## November Sun

We had an uneventful drive down from Dallas. We took it easy, making leisurely lunch stops in small towns along way. In the end it took two days, we stopping off in the middle at a place called Lake Somerville State Park. 

<img src="images/2022/2022-11-05_133349_goose-island-sp.jpg" id="image-3195" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-11-06_090224_goose-island-sp.jpg" id="image-3196" class="picwide" />

It was somewhat warmer that first night out of Dallas, but the real heat started the next day. By the time we rolled into the low country around Corpus Christi it was hot and humid. I was ready to dive into the ocean and cool off.

We rolled into Goose Island State Park in the midst of a November heat wave. Goose Island is actually on the bay side of Port Aransas, which dashed my hopes of a quick dip, but it was the only place we could get a campsite on short notice. The actual Gulf beaches were a 20 minute drive, with a quick ferry ride, away. There's nothing quite like a warm November day at the beach to make you feel like you're doing something right. Even the water temps were still in the 70s.

<img src="images/2022/DSC08506.jpg" id="image-3197" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/DSC08507.jpg" id="image-3198" class="picwide" />

Unfortunately, shortly after we arrived the girls came down with a bit of a cold, and then Corrinne got sick too. To get the kids out of the bus a little (being sick in the bus is a crowded, unhappy experience), in the evenings I'd take them over to a place near the campground called The Big Tree. 

It was a bit like [the octopus tree in Huntington Beach](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/01/huntington-beach-birds), but the kids said the trees here were even better for climbing. The namesake tree was fenced off, but there were several others around that were fair game. We'd go over in the evenings for an hour or so, watch the sunset through the trees, and then walk over to watch the moon rise over the bay, before heading home to make dinner.

<img src="images/2022/B0222465.jpg" id="image-3201" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/B0222468.jpg" id="image-3202" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/B0222475.jpg" id="image-3203" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-11-07_181356_goose-island-sp.jpg" id="image-3204" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-11-07_183606_goose-island-sp.jpg" id="image-3200" class="picwide" />

It's always funny to me how we fall into these little routines even on the road. Do the same thing three or four days in a row and it starts to feel like what you've always done. But weather like this, and sunsets like that, are a routine I'd never argue against.


## Halloween in the Big City

After a few days relaxing, and catching our breath, so to speak, out at Lake Arrowhead, we headed into Dallas to visit family. Seems like a simple thing, drive 100 miles or so. I'm at the dump station adjusting the idle on the carburetor because it was running a little high. I do this in drive because if I pull the idle screw out too much I stall at lights. I get it where I want it, then I reach over and move the shifter into park. The shifter goes into park, but the transmission definitely does not. Sigh. 

I shut it off, chock the wheels so it won't go anywhere and finish dumping. I need to get out of the dump station in case someone else comes along to use it, but I'm in gear, so I can't just start the engine. I jump the relay with a screwdriver to get it going and limp over to an empty campsite. Take a deep breath, get to work. Everyone stood around and watched as I unscrewed the shifter from the dash. 

Once I got it off the dash I could see what had happened. The cable runs from the sifter to the transmission inside a sleeve, the sleeve clamps into the back of the shifter. A piece of metal had broken and the sleeve had slipped out so that when you moved the shifter, everything moved. All we needed to do was get the sleeve to stay in place again. The kids started offering ideas on how to hack it back together to get to Dallas. It was Halloween and they wanted to trick or treat with their Aunt and Uncle. If they had to figure out how to get the bus running again, then so be it.  

After playing around with it for a bit, I found that if I held it in place with one hand, I could shift with other. Not ideal, but it would get us down the road to Halloween so that's what we did. It's an automatic, so it's not like I shift much. We made it into town without incident. I shut off the engine and we got down to the important stuff, visiting with family, and of course, carving pumpkins.

<img src="images/2022/2022-10-31_141334_halloween-plano.jpg" id="image-3183" class="picwide" />

This wasn't arbitrary carving either, there was a plan and then they went out and executed that plan.

<img src="images/2022/2022-10-31_142848_halloween-plano.jpg" id="image-3185" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-10-31_142728_halloween-plano.jpg" id="image-3184" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-10-31_182601_halloween-plano.jpg" id="image-3187" class="picwide" />

The area Corrinne's sister lives in does Halloween at a level we had never really experienced before. Decorations all over the place, crowded streets. I went in the house below and can honestly say it was better decorated than any amusement park I have ever been in. At one point later in the night it was so crowded the kids had to get in line at each house just to get to the door to say tick or treat. It was fun, but that was about when we called it a night.

<img src="images/2022/2022-10-31_185309_halloween-plano.jpg" id="image-3186" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-10-31_183857_halloween-plano.jpg" id="image-3188" class="picwide" />

"Can we do one with less drama?"

<img src="images/2022/2022-10-31_183859_halloween-plano.jpg" id="image-3189" class="picwide" />

After Halloween I got busy figuring out how to fix the shift cable. It had obviously been welded once already. What broke was a piece of metal someone else had bent over and drilled out many years before. Redoing that would have been the way to go, but I didn't have access to a welder. I ended up cutting a piece of aluminum and screwing it in on both sides. So far, so good. When we stop later this year to pull out and rebuild the engine and transmission I'll probably weld up something more secure.

We spent the week hanging out with family and visiting, lots of swimming, somehow there always seemed to be a dog or cat around for the kids to play with. I think this is the hardest trade off for them about living the way we do, they'd really like to have a dog. At least they get to visit with plenty dogs.



## Going Down Swinging

When we broke down in Lamar I kept thinking about a book I read almost a decade ago: *Shop Class as Soul Craft* by Matthew Crawford. The gist of the book is that the only way to escape a dependency on stuff is to be able to take it apart and repair it. There is empowerment in knowing how things work -- your stuff will never fail you because if it does break, you can repair it. 

Crawford calls this person who wants to fix their own stuff, The Spirited Man. Crawford writes:

>[The Spirited Man] hates the feeling of dependence, especially when it is a direct result of his not understanding something. So he goes home and starts taking the valve covers off his engine to investigate for himself. Maybe he has no idea what he is doing, but he trusts that whatever the problem is, he ought to be able to figure it out by his own efforts. Then again, maybe not—he may never get his valve train back together again. But he intends to go down swinging.

I kept staring at the bus's valve covers thinking about that line. Could I get my valve train back together again? There was only one way to find out. Still, I don't think I would have done it if Corrinne hadn't insisted that I could do it. The kids also seemed to think I could do it. You can do a lot more when people believe in you. So I decided I had to try, to go down swinging at least.

After a week of thinking it over, weighing other options, and realizing no one else was going to do it for me, I dove in. The valve covers came off.

Well, first I messaged my Uncle Ron and asked for advice before I dug in. He gave me some helpful pointers -- take lots of photos, label everything, keep track of where each rod came from, clean it all up with soap and water, coat it with a light coat of oil. Check. The best mechanics he told me are the ones that were patient and methodical -- take your time. Patient. Methodical. Check. 

I grabbed the four wrenches I'd need and started taking things apart. I pulled off the electrical components first. That's when I remembered the alternator problems I'd yet to deal with. Since I had to drain the radiator anyway, I decided to pull it out completely which would give me easier access to the alternator. I removed the alternator (the most difficult, stubborn bolt in the whole job) and had the local Napa bench test it. Dead. I ordered a new alternator. If you're going to go all the way, you better go all the way. 

Then I pulled off the carburetor and then the valve covers. I took a lot of photos, I cleaned and labeled everything. I pulled off the intake manifold (which was so much heavier than I expected), and then I took out the valve trains (the bus's are all on a long rod, which I took out as a single piece, so they stayed together nicely). Finally, the only thing left was the head. Ten more bolts and then I'd know. I won't lie, I was a little scared that I'd find a blown cylinder in there, but I didn't. The head came off and there was the gasket burnt through in pretty much the exact same place it blew last time. 

That told me something was wrong with more than the gasket. 

At Ron's suggestion I tested it with a feeler gauge, which is just a bunch of strips of metal of precise thicknesses, and discovered that the head and the block are each slightly warped in that spot. That's why we blew the gasket again, and it's why we'll blow the new one I installed eventually too. If there'd been a machine shop around I might have pulled the other head and had them both ground down, but there wasn't. Machine shops that were over 200 miles away in big cities told me it would be at least two weeks before they could get to it.

All I wanted to do was get us back on the road and keep us there for a few more months. I *do* plan to rebuild or replace the engine next year, but now that I've done the head gasket, I feel like I want to do a rebuild myself too. But I want to do it where I can work on it without being stuck somewhere we don't really want do be. In the mean time we just need to squeeze a few thousand more miles out of it. In the end I put some copper coat on the block, the gasket, and the head to help seal it a little better and hoped for the best.

Once I had everything I needed, I reversed everything I'd done, working from my notes, photos, and some videos, to get it all back together. It took me three days to get everything back in, though I imagine I could do it in two now that I have a better idea of how it all works. 

Then came the evening when I first fired it up. Deep down I knew it was going to work, but it was still a stressful moment. Especially with the amount of oil that had to burn off... so much oil... for a moment I thought we'd failed. It was too windy that day to go for a drive, but the next day after work I drove into town and filled up the tank before going down the highway for about 20 minutes. Amazingly, everything seemed to work. Well, almost everything. I must have bumped a wire somewhere because the headlights don't come on anymore, but if that's the only thing I screwed up... I can live with (and fix) that.

Two days later we hit the road south. Unfortunately we had to abandon our plans to go to Tucson. There are too many hills between here and there. We didn't want to push it. If we're going to squeeze more life out this engine as it is, we're going to have to stick to the flat areas. So we pointed south, to Texas. It was a long drive to Amarillo, probably the longest, most nerve-wracking drive I've ever done in the bus. Dead into a 20-30 mile per hour headwind the whole way, with me obsessively opening the doghouse hatch, sure I would see the telltale smoke blowing out again... but I never did. We made it to Amarillo. We checked into The Big Texan RV park and took the kids to swim at the indoor pool. It was almost like a normal day on the road for us.

With more wind in the forecast the following day we got a very early start, hitting the road when the light was just enough to not need headlights anymore. We got three hours of driving in before the wind came up hard again, but by then we were only an hour from Lake Arrowhead State Park, where we planned to spend the weekend. I managed to relax a little, I only lifted the doghouse half a dozen times on the drive. There was never any smoke coming out. So far so good. A few thousand more miles and I'll start to trust myself.

We set up camp at Lake Arrowhead State Park, which was deserted, and settled into something we haven't had in a long time: silence. There was just the wind in the trees and the sounds of the kids playing. I forgot how peaceful it could be out here. It's good to be back.



## Rodeos and Forts

Three weeks flew by in Lamar, Colorado. It took a week just to figure out what we wanted to do about the engine and find someone willing to do it. Every mechanic was booked at least two weeks out, so we had plenty of time on our hands. I got caught up on work (and this site), but we also got out to see some of the local sights, like the local end-of-the-season rodeo.

The community college in town has a rodeo team (natch) and hosts this rodeo, which pulled in competitors from all over the place -- Wyoming, South Dakota, there was even a contestant from Australia. We missed the first day, but Saturday I took the kids over to watch their first rodeo.

We saw everything from goat tying and barrel racing to bull wrestling and riding, but I think the favorite was the bronco and bull riding. There's something about watching someone try to stay on a bucking animal that I think everyone can relate to, at least metaphorically. 

<img src="images/2022/2022-10-09_111708_lamar-rodeo.jpg" id="image-3153" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-10-09_113624_lamar-rodeo.jpg" id="image-3155" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-10-09_112450-1_lamar-rodeo.jpg" id="image-3154" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-10-09_120545_lamar-rodeo.jpg" id="image-3156" class="picwide" />


It had been a long time since I'd been to a rodeo and forgot how physically brutal it is -- by the end of the day my spine was hurting from just watching those guys get thrown around like rag dolls.

<img src="images/2022/2022-10-09_121155_lamar-rodeo.jpg" id="image-3157" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-10-09_131358_lamar-rodeo.jpg" id="image-3158" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-10-09_131633_lamar-rodeo.jpg" id="image-3159" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-10-09_132136_lamar-rodeo.jpg" id="image-3160" class="picwide" />

The first day we went no one managed to stay on a bull for the full 8 seconds. We had so much fun the kids insisted we go back Sunday morning to watch the final rounds of all the events, where the top three finishers from Fri and Sat squared off. This time one young man -- and only one -- managed to stay on for the full 8 seconds and went home with a trophy.

The next weekend we headed about an hour west of Lamar to see something called Bent's Old Fort. Fort is a bit of a misnomer though, it was really a trading post, the largest on the mountain branch of the Santa Fe Trail. The only really. From the last signs of city in Missouri, to well into Mexico, Bent's Fort was the only permanent settlement.

<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_133823_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3165" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_134203_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3166" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_134406_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3167" class="picwide" />

The fort was abandoned in 1849, primarily due to a bad cholera outbreak. The original adobe structure long ago crumbled to dust, but at one point it housed a young man who recorded all the dimensions and architectural details in a journal. That was used as the basis for rebuilding the structure for Colorado’s centennial in 1976. There were only two when we were there, but much of the year it's well-staffed with historical re-enactors as well.

I am going to sound like a broken record here, but once again what made Bent's Old Fort such a great experience was the fact that it isn't all roped off. The kids could touch things, feel the furs, try on a hat, pick up the super-sharp two-tined fork, walk up to the stove, work the blacksmith's bellows and loads more. 

<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_125924_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3161" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_134702_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3169" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_130137_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3163" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_130109_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3162" class="picwide" />
<div class="cluster">
    <span class="row-2">
<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_135840_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3170" class="cluster pic66" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_130835_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3164" class="cluster pic66" />
    </span>
</div>
<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_140106_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3171" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_141930_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3174" class="picwide" />

It was quite a contrast to our other recent historical building visit, which was in Theodore Roosevelt National Park where you can walk in Teddy's original cabin and... look at all the stuff behind the plexiglas walls. That was so uninspiring I didn't even mention it. Apparently it pays to come to out of the way places if you want to interact with them.

I particularly enjoyed the kitchen, the blacksmith's shop, and the carpenter's shop for this reason. All the tools were there, or in the case of the blacksmith, the tools to make the tools. The kitchen actually incorporated the original limestone fireplace stones into the floor, which were worn smooth from years of cooks working over them. 

<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_141242_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3173" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-10-15_140241_lamar-bents-fort.jpg" id="image-3172" class="picwide" />

The spider pans and cast iron pots were mostly period correct, though I did notice a couple of Lodge brand skillets. Cast iron hasn't changed much over the years though so there isn't much difference between what they had in the 1840s and what I have in the bus right now.

The other room I found fascinating was the council room, the room you would have been taken to when you first arrived at the fort, especially if you were from a local tribe or up from Mexico. The purpose was to sit down and present gifts to the visiting traders. This was expected, though where that expectation comes from I'm not quite sure. I assume it was just how the tribes had always done business. The purpose was to establish at least a business relationship, but often, from what I have read, friendships. 

It reminded me of some of my experiences in [India](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/india/) and [Nepal](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/nepal/), and for that matter much of the world. Commerce is not just an exchange of currency for goods, but a kind of relationship. You go in a shop in India or Nepal and you will have to bargain to establish a price, and you usually bargain over tea. If the shopkeeper thinks you might spend a lot of money you might also get some bread and chutney. 

These days it's very fashionable to hates capitalism, and I am not here to defend the current brand of capitalism, especially in the form of online commerce, but I do think it's worth remembering that where we are isn't the only place we could be. The free market was absolutely the driving force behind any frontier trade (the nearest regulatory body being thousands of miles away), and yet somehow what seems to have emerged is a system of exchange that had elements of a gift economy and elements of more traditional barter. Personally it sounds a lot nicer than what we have. I'd rather sit around a fire on bear skins talking than stare at a screen, clicking buttons until a bunch of plastic crap is delivered to my home.

My contention would be that we will get back to Bent's Old Fort style trading sooner or later. The totally lack of humanity in today's commerce makes it deadening to our souls. That's usually a sign of something that's not long for the world. In some ways there are aspects of the old ways lingering in our current system. A lot of the hardware stores and auto parts stores I end up at have a bunch of older men sitting around on stools, talking. I've always preferred Napa auto parts for exactly this reason, you come in and pull up a stool. That's inviting. Except in smaller communities most of the stools are taken. There's a gathering of some kind in progress whenever I come in. Perhaps those men came in to buy some little thing, but I think mostly they're there to talk. I imagine those relationships may have started a little like the old council room gatherings at Bent's Old Fort, where there may have been a commercial origin to the relationship, but it didn't have to end there. 

Of course while musing on all this I ordered a bunch of engine gaskets from Rock Auto rather than going to the Napa just down the road. In my defense, Napa wanted almost double what I paid, and for inferior gaskets. I'm sure some traders never made it past the council room, after all. Not every deal is a good one. Still, after our trip out to the trading post, and thinking about these things, I started buying what I could locally here in Lamar, sitting on a stool in Napa. Sometimes I know I did pay more, but it was more enjoyable and if we want to find our way back to commerce with a bit of humanity, we might have to pay a little extra. I mean, who really wants to win a race to the bottom anyway?  




## Broken Down In Lamar

From Bear's Lodge we continued south, bound eventually for Tucson though we had a few weeks to get there. Unfortunately there isn't much between northern Wyoming and New Mexico. Or, let me rephrase that. Taking into account that the bus doesn't climb into the mountains, and Colorado is ridiculously expensive and crowded, there isn't much between northern Wyoming and New Mexico. 

The first night out we spent at a random fairground in southern Wyoming. The next day we drove onto to Brush, CO were we camped in a city park for the night. At that point we had originally planned to head to Trinidad to camp and then maybe take a day trip into the Rockies. As we talked about it though we realized our heart really wasn't in it. We decided to cut east and down into New Mexico that way instead.

We were just outside of Lamar CO when the bus suddenly lurched and hesitated. At this point that's happened enough that I immediately knew the fuel pump was shot. Again. I pulled over and confirmed that there was air spitting into the fuel filter. I don't know if it's poor manufacturing, the amount of ethanol in gasoline or what, but I've been through three fuel pumps in five years. These days I carry a spare. I got under the bus and half and hour later the fuel system was back to normal.

When I was changing the fuel pump I noticed the wind was blowing much harder than I thought and we were headed straight into it. According to the local weather it was blow 25 miles and hour. Still, there wasn't much we could do about that. We hit the road again.

About ten minutes later I smelled smoke, specifically the smell of burning oil. I lifted up the doghouse and sure enough there was smoke coming out the value cover vent. I pulled over again. When I opened up the air filter I found a good bit of oil, along with an oil soaked filter. I try not to jump to catastrophic conclusions, but at this point I know this engine pretty well, and this had happened once before, when we blew our head gasket.

We were about 20 miles outside of Lamar CO, but the next town was a good 60 miles away and it was already 3:30 in the afternoon. I hated to do it, but we had to turn around. We found an RV park in Lamar and pulled in for the night. 

The next morning I got up and started troubleshooting. I like to be optimistic so I started by replacing the PCV valve, but unfortunately, that did nothing. At least I have a spare PCV valve now. I moved on to a dry compression test. The results were... not good. Not only did I have two adjacent cylinders with compression at 65 PSI, which is a pretty good sign of a blown head gasket, not a single cylinder was actually at the compression it should be. As my uncle put it when I texted him the results, "your cylinders are rattling around in there like a bunch of old coffee cans."

The fact of the matter is this engine is worn down and need to either be rebuilt or replaced. 

It's been nearly two weeks now and I still can't tell you which of those things we're going to end up doing, but whichever it is we're looking at a minimum of six weeks. We couldn't even get a mechanic to look at it for two weeks. And that mechanic is in Amarillo. Currently our plan is to—if it's possible -- just fix the head gasket and keep going for a couple of months. Then this spring we can either rebuild or replace the engine.

Either way, we're stuck in Lamar Colorado for the next two weeks. Worse, when that two weeks is up we're looking at spending over a month without our home. That's stressful, expensive, and not at all what we want to be doing. This is the part of travel that your favorite YouTube stars don't tell you about (actually, the good ones do, see our blogroll for some of those), but it's part of travel. 

There are always challenges that make you think, oh god, how are we going to handle this? How are we going to get out of this? What are we going to do? Those are good questions you're going to have to answer if you want to keep going. I like to write them down and then write down answers. And then change the answers when my first ideas don't work out. And keep updating my answers until something finally works. That's all there is to it really, you put your head down and you get to work fixing things.

This particular time is proving mostly to be a test of patience. I'm not sure if it's a parts shortage, staff shortages, or what, but mechanics are slammed with business. Could I pull the heads here and put in a new gasket? Yes, I could. Maybe I should, but so far I haven't. Work has been consuming most of my time and so here we sit. 




The other temptation I am prone to in these situations is to stick my head in the sand and try to pretend it hasn't happened. I'll just take the kids to the park, make dinner, read a book, go to bed and pretend everything is normal. This is also not the way out. You have to do all that, but you also have to keep throwing solutions at the wall until you find the one that sticks. 

That time out in Colorado we threw a whole bunch of shit at the wall before we even had a hint that anything was going to stick. But it did. Wasn't the things I thought would stick, but we got out. you always do. Until you don't. and then it doesn't matter anyway. there you are. 


An alternative to the front porch culture. it think we went wrong when we became to sedentary, it made us see the world as fixed, unchanging, things as they are become things as they have always been. I think the connectedness and community that you find in people who want to create a front porch culture is the right way forward, but I don't think that a rootedness to place is what drive that. I think that's a conscious human decision. I don't think it organically springs into a being. I think people have to want it, and I think so long as there is television, the internet, screens, that will not happen. the culture from afar is too strong, to universal and too enslaving to overcome. it's not until that culture has run its course that something new will arise. that doesn't mean of course that you can't free yourself from screens, from the culture of afar. That's not too difficult. But you aren't going to free the whole of culture. 


1) find out if we can stay here without an engine, if not where?
2) find out when the mechanic can pull the engine, 
3) We have to find someone to rebuilt the engine, can they do a rush job?
4) somehow get it a crate and send it to the rebuilder or drive it to dallas
5) get towed back here into a site. 
6) wait
7) get towed back to the shop to put the new engine in.
8) leave


## Under The Bear’s Lodge


From Theodore Roosevelt National Park we headed south. Originally we'd planned to go through South Dakota and then down into Colorado, but the day before we left we noticed that if you west around the Black Hills, instead of east like we'd planned, you pass right by a place none of us had every been—Devil's Tower.

I'll confess that my chief association with Devil's Tower is *Close Encounters*. And yes, we made mashed potatoes the night we arrived. I mean, you have to right? 

Devil's Tower is either a poor translation or a deliberately wrong translation of the local name, Bear's Lodge Butte. That name comes from the fact that it really does look like a tree that bear has gone to town on, and the constellation of the bear is always nearby, above the Butte. I don't see a bear when I stare up in the sky, but then I don't think I'd see a dipper either (the big dipper is part of the bear) if people hadn't been pointing it out all my life. Constellations aren't my strong suit. Whatever the case I think Bear's Lodge is a better name for this place. It stops me from confusing it with [Devil's Postpile](https://www.nps.gov/depo/index.htm).

We'd planned to just stay a night, maybe two, but then we ended up staying a week because we liked it. It's always interesting to stop for a while in places that most people come, see the thing, and then leave. Every morning the campground would empty out, but then every night it was full again. When that happens you notice the people who don't leave, and those often turn out to be people in the same situation—people who aren't seeing the sights, but are moseying their way around the world like we do. We met a few of those and enjoyed our extra time in Bear's Lodge. 

One of the great things about living this way is the fluidity you can bring to plans. That cuts both ways. Sometimes you *have* to be flexible. Sometimes you *get* to be flexible. The flexible part is the constant. Fortunately in Bear's Lodge we got to be flexible. Though we also got a little hint of how we might have to flexible soon.

The day we pulled in I ran over to the only store around and bought some ice. I noticed the check engine light in our Volvo was on. I didn't think too much of it, it happens when you don't properly tighten the gas cap. Usually it goes away when you re-tighten the gas cap. I did that and forgot about it for a few days.

But a few days later I went to get some groceries in a town down the road and the light was still on. Damn. Well then. I stopped for gas and opened the hood to see if anything was amiss. It took me a minute, but then, next the oil filler cap I noticed a plastic hose that had broken. I wasn't sure what it did, but I assumed it was probably involved in the vacuum system somehow. 

I took a closer look when I got back to camp the plastic hose promptly disintegrated. So much for patching a crack. Now I needed to rig up some kind of temporary hose or we were stuck. I dug through my considerable collection of hoses and came up with some fuel line that fit at both ends, and then I telescoped that up to some extra PCV valve hose I had lying around. I anchored it all together with hose clamps and wedged it in place with a hose clamp at the bottom and some blue RTV gasket maker at the top. Then I waited 24 hours.

The next morning it started up fine and seemed to run, so we hit road with it, figuring I'd pick up a replacement hose at the next Napa. About 3 hours into the drive, the check engine light went off. 


## Ease Down the Road 

We set out from Washburn, bound for Arizona via North Dakota. We wanted to see Theodore Roosevelt National Park, and then we figured we'd head south and maybe catch some of the fall colors in the Rockies on our way.

It's pretty rare for us to drive more than 200 miles a day. We're not in any rush and that's about how far you can go in the bus before it starts to feel like a chore. That said, we decided to blast our way across Minnesota and North Dakota doing back-to-back 300 mile days. We spent the night at a city park in Fargo the first day and then pushed on for Theodore Roosevelt National Park. It was a lot of driving, but there just weren't many places to stop in between.

<img src="images/2022/2022-09-16_141824_drive-to-dakotas.jpg" id="image-3115" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-09-16_134205_drive-to-dakotas.jpg" id="image-3114" class="picwide" />

Theodore Roosevelt has a fairly nice campground, but we opted to stay at a more remote boondocking spot in the Little Missouri Grasslands. Although it was well outside the park, and off by itself, it was actually closer to town and made a good base for exploring the area.

<img src="images/2022/2022-09-16_151155_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3116" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-09-16_162322_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3117" class="picwide" />

The Grasslands themselves were in some ways more interesting than the national park, though if you want to see bison you have to go into the park since a fence keeps them in. The kids loved having some badlands for a backyard. They'd disappear up into the hills in the mornings while Corrinne and I worked, returning only for food.

<img src="images/2022/2022-09-16_163516_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3118" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-09-16_155612_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3132" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-09-19_194953_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3125" class="picwide" />

The kids and I hiked a ways out on a trail that runs through a petrified forest. We were mostly looking for birds since the petrified forest was farther than anyone wanted to walk. The kids had been looking over the bird list we picked up at the visitor center, deciding ahead of time what they wanted to see—the Sharp-tailed Grouse was their top pick. I gave them the usual caution that one doesn't really pick which birds they're going to see, to have patience, and so on. 

Naturally, the first thing we see, after less than 10 minutes of walking, was a Sharp-tailed Grouse. It reminded me of the time I explained to them that fishing requires patience and then less than two minutes after casting [Lilah was reeling in a fish](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/01/almost-warm). Maybe it's just me. Maybe everyone else is always seeing birds and catching fish.

<img src="images/2022/2022-09-17_002345_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3121" class="picwide" />

We're not just bird and fish people these days, we also go in for rocks. Some of us anyway. Whatever the case there's a river just over the Montana border that is the place to find eponymous agates. We made the hour long drive and came back with more Montana agates than anyone living in a 26-foot bus should really have. 

It was nice to spend a day beside the river though. The current was pretty strong, but we managed to get a little swimming in.

<img src="images/2022/2022-09-18_115628-1_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3123" class="picwide" />

And yes, we did drive into Theodore Roosevelt National Park one day. The kids like to get junior ranger badges whenever we're anywhere national, so they did that while I wandered around the visitor center. Men like Theodore Roosevelt aren't very popular these days, but it seems to me that might actually be most of our problem. We could use some leadership just now and boy it's been a while since politicians were leaders. Try to imagine one of our current "leaders" taking a bullet and then refusing to stop his speech just because he'd been shot. 

We also wanted to see the bison herd that lives in the park. Our best view though turned out to be this one, which was off by himself, standing right beside the road. Maybe, I thought while I was taking the picture, if you can't be a leader, at least don't be a follower. Maybe just stand off by yourself, mind your own business, eat grass, and stare at the tourists.

<img src="images/2022/2022-09-17_155530_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3122" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-09-20_163735_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3129" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-09-20_164453_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3130" class="picwide" />

We also made a stop at the cowboy museum in the nearby town of Medora, where the kids learned a little about rodeo culture.

<img src="images/2022/2022-09-20_104432_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3126" class="picwide" />
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Mostly though we spent a lot of time just hanging out at the campsite. The landscape here is such a stark contrast to the last few months that we were all happy to just wander around under that vast, seemingly endless western sky.

<img src="images/2022/2022-09-16_163650_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3119" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-09-18_185406_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3124" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-09-16_201159_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3120" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-09-20_215737_missouri-grassland.jpg" id="image-3131" class="picwide" />

Part of what made our campsite nice and our time in the grasslands so enjoyable was that we happened to hit a gap between storms. For five days we had virtually no wind. On the sixth day though we got a taste of what this place is like most of the time. With a 20 MPH wind blowing dust around all day, and a storm bearing down on us that promised a 40 MPH headwind for our next drive, we decided to it was time to hit the road again.

## Goodbye Big Waters 

Leaving is always a bustle of activity. We go from spending our days relaxing in the sun to frantically making lists and scrambling to get everything done before we hit the road. You'd think by now we'd plan ahead and know how to do it well, but not really. I always end up wit a task list that's far more than I can possibly do in however long we have left. I think this is my way of dealing with pain of leaving somewhere—overwhelming myself with tasks so there's no time to feel.

Because yes, there is always a pain in leaving. Heading toward new possibilities, while exciting, still means closing off old ones. This isn't something that's unique to travel, all of us are always changing, always leaving things behind. New jobs, new homes, new grades in school, something is always left behind as we move down the river of time. 

For reasons I have not completely figured out, we seemed to have sunk deeper into the life of this place than anywhere else we've stopped in our travels. In all we were here nine weeks, which is actually less time than we spent in the Outer Banks, but I felt more a part of this place. Perhaps it is the open and welcoming people of the area, the [giddiness of summer](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/07/washburn) up here, or maybe we're getting better at settling in. Perhaps some combination of these things and more.

We are making a bigger change than we have yet on this leg of our journey (which I count as starting when we left the [100 acre woods]()). For ten months now we have lived by the water—[coastal South Carolina](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/02/ice-storm), [the Outer Banks](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/05/ocracoke-beaches), and now [the shores of Lake Superior](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/08/superior) -- and now we're headed west to the plains, mountains, and deserts. 

After [our backpacking trip in the Porcupine Mountains](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/09/porcupine-mountains-backpacking) we had two more weeks in Washburn, which we spent visiting with friends we've made, hiking up to a waterfall in the hills, re-visiting Little Girl Point, stocking up on local favorite foods, and readying the bus for the next leg of our journey. 



Leaving is always bittersweet. The kids will miss their new friends, and so will we. Up here the pain of leaving is eased by the fact that few of the people we met spend the winters here anyway, so everyone is leaving soon. We will also very likely be back next summer, so this time around while we did say out long midwestern goodbyes, they were really see you next years.



## Porcupine Mountains Backpacking

There are only a few small stands of old growth forests left on this continent. I have been to couple of smaller old growth stands—one in the west, one in the south -- but I've never really spent much time in them. When I found out that the Porcupine Mountains were the second largest old growth Hemlock forest left in the U.S., I knew we had to go. 

This time I wanted to spend some time, so I put together a another family backpacking trip. We left the bus in its site in Washburn and headed up into the mountains of Michigan[^1]. Well, elsewhere they might be called hills, but up here they're mountains. 

We drove a couple of hours around Superior to the Porcupine Mountains, picked up our permit, and hit the trail.

<img src="images/2022/2022-08-30_125052_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3086" class="picwide" />

The kids were able (and wanted) to carry more weight compared to [our last trip in North Carolina](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2020/10/walking-north-carolina-woods), but of course what they think they can carry and what they can actually carry depends on the distance. 

We wanted a destination to hang out at, so we opted for the trail to Mirror Lake—three miles in from the east, three miles back out to the west. We started with the eastern portion of trail, which went over Summit Peak. We wanted to get the hard stuff over with at the start. For about a half a mile it was straight up -- about half of that was stairs -- to a tower that brought you above the tree tops for a view of Lake Superior.

<img src="images/2022/2022-08-30_130152_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3087" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-08-30_120356-1_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3085" class="picwide" />
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<img src="images/2022/2022-08-30_130547_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3088" class="cluster pic66" />
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It wasn't until we were almost to the lake that we finally stepped into the old growth Hemlock. Much of the old growth forest in the Mirror Lake area was knocked down in a storm in 1953 when 5,000 acres of old growth forest—thousands upon thousands of trees -- came down in a matter of hours. Two high school kids out fishing near Mirror Lake got caught in the storm (and lived), which must have made for an exciting morning. Wind shear like that is not unheard of up here, but that's a pretty extreme example (that is weirdly undocumented online, you can read about it at the visitor center though).

It was dark and cool in the old growth, little sun made it down to the forest floor, which was a deep bed of needles. The thing that really jumped out about the old growth though was how quiet it was in those portions of the forest. I noticed the silence before I really registered anything else. I'm not sure why, but I have never been anywhere so utterly silent. The birds were mostly gone, headed south for the winter, that was definitely part of the silence, but it was also just quieter among the hemlocks than in the younger stretches of forest we passed through. 

<img src="images/2022/2022-09-01_094641_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3104" class="picwide" />

We made it to camp by mid afternoon. I will confess I am fascinated by the modern hiking crowd who seem to love nothing better than 20 mile days. If the people I see on YouTube and Instagram are in fact representative of modern hikers. I am just about the opposite. Even if I didn't have kids... I like three mile days and lounging around camp, swimming, fishing, birding, cooking. The walking part? Meh, it's fine, but it's not why I am here. Walking is just the necessary ingredient to reach the last few spots on earth with some solitude. 

Whatever the case, we set up camp, and spent the afternoon lounging around.

<img src="images/2022/2022-08-30_153953_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3090" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-08-31_093826_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3095" class="picwide" />


I have two regrets from this trip. The first is that we did not bring the hammock. Always bring the hammock. Well, if there are trees around. 

My second regret is that we did not bring more real food. Five steaks really would not have added that much weight to our pack and would have 100 percent been worth that added weight. I am done with the whole dehydrated food thing. Some is fine when you're doing longer walks, but there's nothing like a steak in the backcountry. At least in my imagination there is nothing like a steak in the backcountry. Which isn't to say that we ate poorly, just that, well, steaks and bacon and eggs would have been better. Next time.

<img src="images/2022/2022-08-30_174525_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3092" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-08-30_173223_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3091" class="picwide" />

At least we got to have fires, something that's increasingly rare, not just in the backcountry, but everywhere. Long periods of poor forest management, combined with dry weather, have left much of the west forced to ban open fires. I am working on a longer piece about the importance of the fire, especially the outdoor fire, but suffice to say that it was very nice to have one in the backcountry. We even almost got something like a decent family photo. Almost.

<img src="images/2022/2022-08-30_184129_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3093" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-08-31_065645_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3094" class="picwide" />

The next day we did a little day hiking around the lake and little swimming when we got back to camp.

<img src="images/2022/2022-08-31_115020_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3096" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-08-31_125719_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3099" class="picwide" />
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<img src="images/2022/2022-08-31_130033_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3100" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-08-31_134317_porcupine-mountains.jpg" id="image-3102" class="picwide" />



[^1]: We originally intended to go canoeing in the Boundary Waters, but couldn't get the permits for the areas that were doable with kids (everything was booked). In hindsight, I am glad we didn't.


## Grandparents

My parents flew out to visit us in Washburn. Somehow they managed to find a rental house outside of town (there isn't much besides hotels and camping in the these parts) with a spectacular garden.

<img src="images/2022/2022-08-23_141236_parents.jpg" id="image-3076" class="picwide" />

We took them out to Madeline Island for the day, which meant the kids got a second trip on the ferry, always a popular way to spend the day. We'd do it more regularly if it wasn't so ridiculously expensive.

<img src="images/2022/2022-08-19_153339_madeline-island-parents.jpg" id="image-3075" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-08-19_123846_madeline-island-parents.jpg" id="image-3071" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-08-19_123343_madeline-island-parents.jpg" id="image-3070" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-08-19_124138-1_madeline-island-parents.jpg" id="image-3072" class="picwide" />

Mostly we had nice weather while they were here, but one day while we were parking in Bayfield it started to rain, so we ducked into the nearby Bayfield Heritage Museum. If we hadn't recently been the Milwaukee Public Museum, I'd say the Bayfield Heritage Museum is the best museum we've been to. As it is, it's pretty close, for one simple reason—the kids could touch everything. 

The woman working even came over and told the kids to open the turn of the century oven, the dresser drawers, the kitchen cabinets and the rest. That's really all it takes to make children totally enthralled by anything, just let them do what they want. 

Down in the basement there was a very detailed model of Bayfield at the height of the timber industry. There was a scavenger hunt that involved finding ten little scenes in the model. We found everything but the happy hobo, the host had to help us with the happy hobo.

<img src="images/2022/IMG_20220818_131559.jpg" id="image-3077" class="picwide" />
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One of the great things about having visitors come is it gives you a reason to do some of the things you just never seem to get around to otherwise. The Houghton Falls is less than two miles from the campground, but for whatever reason—maybe because it was too close by -- we never made it until my parents came.

It turned out to be a great little trail. Judging by the wood planks on the trail, it is probably boggy and miserably buggy in the early season—maybe it's a good thing we waited until August -- but it was dry and nice when we went. After wandering through the forest for a quarter mile, the trail drops down to the river bed which has cut a deep gorge through pre-Cambrian sandstone. The result is a wonderland of caves and pools with plenty of climbing to keep the kids busy.

<img src="images/2022/2022-08-21_112147_washburn.jpg" id="image-3081" class="picwide" />
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The namesake falls are a bit back from the lake, but there was no water anyway. The trail ends at Lake Superior, just beyond a shallow bay where the river finally empties into the lake. There's a little rock outcropping about 10 feet off the water that looked pretty good for jumping. I actually would not have gone if the kids hadn't been gung ho about it. But then they were less so after I jumped and they saw how far down it was. I ended up being the only one to jump. Next time I'll talk them into it.

## August Jottings

***August 2*:** Already I feel the end of summer heading toward us. There's a fleetingness to the warm days now, an inevitability to the cold that comes in the evenings and is slower to go again in mornings. 

<img src="images/2022/2022-08-12_054139_washburn.jpg" id="image-3052" class="picwide" />

I miss the merlins. Every morning since we arrived the first thing I heard in the morning was five or six merlin chicks shrieking and playing in the pines around our campsite. Today I heard nothing. They've gone. Or they all died. Either way the bird life here as changed. The small birds are back. Nuthatches and chickadees are the morning sounds now, with occasional crows and blue jays.

The pileated woodpeckers were through again this morning, you can never fail to notice that flaming-red crest streaking through the trees. It sounds like a jackhammer when they beat on the bark. Such a massive bird for something that spends most of it's time clinging to the side of a tree. This morning there were three. One stayed on the ground, which I had never seen a pileated do before. At first I thought it might be injured, but eventually it took off to join its fellows in the trees.

<img src="images/2022/2022-07-27_084517_washburn.jpg" id="image-3051" class="picwide" />

***August 6*:** Strange mayfly hatch this morning. The bathroom building is completely covered in mayflies. Thousands of them, inside and out. Camp host tried blowing them with a leaf blower but it didn't work, they hung on. Reminded me of [the night in New Orleans when the termites hatched](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/05/new-orleans-instrumental-number-2), (which I didn't actually write about in that post, not everything makes out of the journal). Fortunately we were far enough away this time that nothing ended up swarming in the bus. 

***August 8*:** The kids started sailing camp this morning. I picked them up at lunch time and managed to see the girls sailing, Elliott was already in. Their first day on the water and it was probably the windiest we've had in quite a while. Can't reef an [Optimist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimist_(dinghy)). I guess you just go fast. They spent most of the day practicing knots and righting flipped boats so they knew what to do, but according to them no one flipped in the stiff breezes. 

<img src="images/2022/2022-08-09_112805_sailing-camp.jpg" id="image-3053" class="picwide" />

I've been challenged to many a knot tying contest this afternoon. I have lost almost all of them. I used to be able to tie a bowline one-handed without thinking about it. Now I have to sit there and tell myself the rabbit story to get it right.

***August 12*:** Final day of sailing camp featured a sail by for the parents followed by a potluck lunch. Unfortunately there was very little wind so it was more a drift, crank-the-tiller-back-and-forth by. Still, it was good to see them out on the water, having fun and making new friends.

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***August 13*:** Heading to the country fair later today. We're suckers for a local fair, but we're used to fairs in October. Yet another reminder that cold comes early up here.

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Years ago at the [Elberton Fair](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2019/10/elberton-county-fair) Elliott was too short to ride some of the rides with his sisters. This year Olivia was too tall to ride some of the rides with her siblings. We can't seem to completely win. At least there was a lumberjack show, complete with crosscut saws and log rolling exhibitions.

***August 13*:** Cooler this morning. 54 on the gauge. Blue-gray fog bank on the far show enshrouding the hills. Crows are unhappy about something this morning. Red-breasted nuthatches seem unconcerned. 

Signs of winter are increasing. The weather has shifted, more birds are passing through. Cape may warblers are already headed south from wherever they've been north of here. On the way to the store today I saw the city had pulled out it's snow plows and was giving them a wash. Seasons remain a strange thing to this Los Angeles native. I like the idea of them, I like the transitions between them, but we are not sticking around to live in them. 

## Around Washburn
One weekend I took the kids over to Madeline Island again. The museum was have a trading post-style reenactment., and we are suckers for a good reenactment festival. 



We got to see some real birch bark canoes, and some artifacts like trade blankets, early compasses and navigation tools, even early pharmacy tools, including a pill-making board the kids got to try out, making some playdough pills.

Most of the reenactment stuff was things Voyageurs would have used in the fur trade, though there were a couple of people there representing local tribes. One man in particular was really great at show the kids various tools and demonstrating how they worked. He was so good I forgot to take any pictures, which I realized later is kind of the highest praise I can (accidentally) give.



## Ten

I was thinking the other day about some friends I haven't talked to since I left Los Angeles for good in 1999. I was thinking how astounded they would probably be to know that I had managed to keep two children alive and well for ten years now. What they would probably say is, *I think you mean your wife has managed to keep two children alive and well for ten years*. And of course they'd be right. 

Whatever the case, somehow, our twins are ten. Double digits. Decades old. And all that. 



## Midsummer
We pulled into Memorial Park Campground in Washburn, Wisconsin just before lunch on a Thursday and grabbed one of the few spots left in the campground. It was just a few sites down from where we [stayed four years ago](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/08/island-golden-breasted-woodpecker). We love a good first-come, first-serve campground, especially one with no stay limits. We unfurled the awning and settled in for the summer. 

<img src="images/2022/2022-07-08_200436_washburn.jpg" id="image-3017" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-07-08_174443_washburn.jpg" id="image-3016" class="picwide" />

For us, these days, settling in means signing the kids up for Jui Jitsu, getting library cards, and figuring out the best places to get in whatever body of water is nearby. Washburn, and nearby Ashland, provide all that and more, perhaps most importantly, reasonable temperatures all summer, little in the way of crowds, and the kind of hospitality you really only find in small towns anymore.

At their first Jui Jitsu class one of their classmate's mother invited us to a midsummer party. Summer is bigger deal up here than it is in say Florida. When something is so fleeting you appreciate it more I think. Whatever the case, we showed up and had a great time. There was music, flower wreaths, comedy, even sack races. The kids danced late into the night. It was a good way to celebrate midsummer, something I've never celebrated before.

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While Jui Jitsu, libraries, and swimming holes are all we really need, we do appreciate there being good Mexican food, and as of this summer, Washburn has that. All this corner of the world needs now is for the shifting climate to mellow out the winters a bit.

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I think if we'd been closer to Washburn in 2020 when the U.S. shut everything down, we'd have rented a place around here. But of course that's not where we were so we'll likely never know how we'd handle a winter up here. For now though, it's a pretty great place to spend your summer.



## Away From the Crowds

We would have stayed longer at Harrington Beach State Park, and we would have loved to head up into the Door Peninsula, but we were facing every full time RVer's least favorite holiday: Fourth of July weekend. Everything was booked. So, we loaded up our still-not-installed awning and headed north, where the crowds are fewer and we knew of at least one first come first served campground. 

You can't just show up at a first come first serve campground on the Friday of fourth of July weekend though. Corrinne does 90 percent of the camp planning and she, marvel that she is, found a campground somewhere in the middle of Wisconsin that was somehow not already booked for the fourth and was on our way. We had reservations the day before and hit the road Friday.

Now, you might be asking yourself, what sort of campground *isn't* full on America's most popular camping weekend? How awful is it that no one wants to go there? Actually it was quite nice. I think no one wants to go there in part because it's in a very rural area and when you have wild acreage, camping isn't really something you care about as much. At least that was our experience living in a 300-acre pine forest. Whatever the case Governor Thompson State Park was nice and we were happy to have a spot to park for the holiday weekend.

Admittedly, there wasn't much to do at Governor Thompson if you don't have a boat (it's on a lake). One fellow vintage camper owner we met ventured over to the swim beach one day and called it the saddest little thing he'd ever seen. We never went to find out for ourselves. We just relaxed, did a lot of reading, and finally had the space to get our new awning installed.

<img src="images/2022/2022-07-02_153235_gov-thompson-sp.jpg" id="image-2999" class="picwide" />
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After putting on the window awning on the other side I was dreading the full size patio awning. Fortunately for me, the installation process was different, so my fears proved unfounded. In some ways I think it was easier to install the patio than the window awning, though there were a couple of awkward moments. But now have plenty of shade to sit around and relax (and work, and play) in. 

<img src="images/2022/2022-07-03_120708_gov-thompson-sp.jpg" id="image-3004" class="picwide" />

I'd forgotten how nice it is to have that under the awning space. We used to live in that shade, but we stopped using our old awning because it was so beat up and gross. Sitting under it was not a pleasant experience the last few months. With the Zipdee we've reclaimed that space. We have a wonderfully warm yellow light bathing the bus from all angles, and we've been spending a lot more time outside. Zipdee awnings aren't cheap, but well worth the money in my opinion.

<img src="images/2022/2022-07-03_115523_gov-thompson-sp.jpg" id="image-3002" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-07-03_115524_gov-thompson-sp.jpg" id="image-3003" class="picwide" />

With the holiday weekend behind us we continued north, bound for the shores of Lake Superior. We stopped off at a place called Copper Falls for a couple of nights. It's supposedly one of the highlights of the area, but our experience was that it's buggy and there's not much to do other than hike to see the falls. They are nice waterfalls, but you can't get near them and the mosquitoes and black flies were bad enough that it would have made Yosemite miserable.

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I never like to complain too much about anywhere because it's an incredible experience to be able to live the way we do and a few bad nights for us is a tiny price to pay (and Copper Falls wasn't even that bad), but I was glad to hit the road again.

And our plan worked. We pulled into the first-come first-serve campground in Washburn WI on a Thursday morning, snagged the best site, and settled in for the summer. 


## Hello Milwaukee

The drive up to Harrington Beach State Park wasn't far, about 50 miles, but somehow that 50 miles changed everything. Once we were past Milwaukee (Harrington Beach is about 30 minutes north of Milwaukee) the last traces of heat disappeared. There were cheese curds at every gas station—a sure sign you're in Wisconsin -- and the world felt quieter, more relaxed, more natural. Even the lake seemed somehow wilder. 

<img src="images/2022/2022-06-27_151631_harrington-milwaukee.jpg" id="image-2974" class="picwide" />

Last time we were here I [wrote about the yellow warblers](https://luxagraf.net/dialogues/yellow-warbler) that were everywhere in our campsite. This time was no different, one even came in the bus to check it out.

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We came back to Harrington because it's a good place to camp and access Milwaukee. We don't spend much time in cities anymore. We avoid them actually, especially large cities. Driving into the Chicago to get the awning was a nightmare I'd just as soon never repeat. Smaller cities like Milwaukee are more tolerable, though still not our thing anymore. 

That said, we made an exception here because we actually like Milwaukee and we have some friends living here that we wanted to catch up with, however briefly. We had also promised the girls we'd get some sushi and cupcakes, and then go to a museum for their birthday since we'd be spending their actual birthday somewhere without sushi.

We started with cupcakes of course.

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Then we had a sushi lunch and popped into a bookstore that was pretty amazing, but, despite having a seemingly endless number of books, did not have the one that the girls wanted.

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The next stop was the Milwaukee Public Museum, which is such a vague name we didn't really know what to expect except that it had some dinosaur exhibit of some kind. I think that was a good way to go in, not knowing anything (the opportunity for you to go not knowing anything is about to be ruined) because now that I've been, I am still not totally sure what the Milwaukee Public Museum is, beyond, the very generic: really fun.

The specimen collection in the lobby area reminded me of [La Specula in Florence](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2011/06/natural-science), and set the tone of the place. It's a throw back the museums of old: big dioramas, lots of signs and welcome absence of any screens, or QR codes, or any of the ridiculous digital gimmicks that pass for content in modern museums. Instead it was interactive in the original sense—the kids could touch the buffalo fur and ride a penny farthing and even let butterflies land on them. 

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The natural history portion of the Milwaukee Public Museum was extensive and full of great dioramas, though I have to take some exception the tiny little section devoted to the south. The south is apparently little more than a footnote here and can be adequately represented by a banjo, a musket, a few ears of corn, and a flag none of us recognized. 

What the Public Museum does a far, far better job with is the history of Milwaukee, which is set up in a lifesize replica of Milwaukee through the ages, though most of it is done up like the late 19th century. This was by far the most fun to walk around. It was lit with the equivalent of old gas lamps so it's a very dark exhibit that you can get lost in. 



-- roughly the technological level I suspect my grandkids will live in. 



## Illinois Beach

I think it's important to remember that it's fun to do something for no reason at all. That is, not everything needs a reason beyond simply the freedom to do it. 

This is what Sir Edmund Hilery was hinting at when he was asked, *why do you want to climb Mount Everest,* and he answered, *because it's there*. Because the freedom of the will to choose and act and do, the freedom for you to do something for no other reason than you happen to want to do it, is irreducible, unassailable base on which all human delight is built. 

That has nothing to do with how we came to be at Illinois Beach State Park, on the far northern reaches of Chicago, or what we did there, but I think it's worth saying things from time to time about the meta-journey if you will and one of the key things I've learned from this adventure is that life isn't so serious as it seems, perhaps especially when it seems most serious. The universe is a whimsical place after all, how else do you explain the giraffe? Or this strange, abandoned concession center in the middle of Illinois Beach State Park looking for all the world like it was plucked out of a 1950s Soviet seaside resort and plopped here in Illinois?

<img src="images/2022/2022-06-21_065427_illinois-beach.jpg" id="image-2970" class="picwide" />

One of the things I was most looking forward to about coming back to the Great Lakes area was replicating the day we [drove out of the heat and into the wonderfully cool summer of Wisconsin](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/06/wisconsin). Alas, that did not happen this time (you can [never go back](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2008/06/you-cant-go-home-again)).

The heat wave followed us up through Chicago, where I stopped off at the Zipdee factory to pick up two awnings we'd ordered several months ago. With the giant, fifteen foot tubes on the floor of the bus, I hit the road again bound for Illinois State Beach, on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Thankfully the heat wave only lasted two more days, and we had the nice clear, cool waters of Lake Michigan to keep us cool in the mean time. Almost any day spent on the water is a good day in my book, though the temperature extremes were more than we're used to—100 in the air, 53 in the water. Stay in for more than a few minutes and you're shivering, but by the time you're out two minutes you're ready to cool back down again.

<img src="images/2022/2022-06-20_174403_illinois-beach.jpg" id="image-2972" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2022/2022-06-20_174406_illinois-beach.jpg" id="image-2971" class="picwide" />

Fortunately after the weekend the air temp settled back down to a nice 80 degrees, making it a bit for fun to sit (and play) on the beach.

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The abandoned concession stand wasn't the only odd thing in Illinois State Beach, in fact there were quiet a few oddities. My favorite was the pair of Sandhill Cranes that strolled through the campground every day utterly unconcerned with any humans that might be around. In fact they would march right up to people looking for food, I saw one sneak a hot dog off a picnic table and proceed to eat it before any of the people around noticed.

<img src="images/2022/2022-06-21_102538_illinois-beach.jpg" id="image-2969" class="picwide" />

However odd it might have been, Illinois State Park was perfectly suited to the real reason we came—to install our new Zipdee awnings and get rid of our old. No one complained about the sawing and the remains of the old one fit nicely in the dumpster. In the end rain stopped me from getting the big awning installed here, but I got our new side awning on at least. 



It keeps the afternoon sun out of the window and allows us to have the window open even if it's raining, but really we just like it... because it's there. It makes the bus a little more fun, a little more delightful if I do say so myself.

"" 

## Birding

I spent most of the afternoon today watchng a least tern fish in the waters of Hatteras island in the outer banks of North Carolina. The tern hovered, fluttering like a sheet of white paper in the wind, ducking and diving in the currents until it tucked in its wings and dropped like a rock into a wave. It was too far away to see if it got anything.

An osprey I watched was heavier, weightier in the air, purposeful until it too tucked its wings and dove. In that moment of freefall both seemed no longer in control. Only gravity was in charge at the moment. The osprey came up empty, but did something I've never noticed a bird doing before, it shook itself as it hovered over the waves, skaing and ruffling its features to shed the water it had picked up when it dove. And then with a few quick strong wingbeats it roase up, gaught and updraft and drifted down the shoreline, scan the waves for fish.

Bird watching isn't really anything more than deciding to pay great attention to birds. Bird watching is really a never ending process of turning something that is always happening in the background to something you're focused solely on. It's the process of learning that that brown and white bird likes to sit on the top of the myrtle in the morning and sing, but spends its afternoons rather silently, scratching at the ground in search of grubs and seeds. These days birdwatchers call it a brown thrasher, or Toxostoma rufum, but that there are many other names for it, the rusty mockingbird, the brown thrush. The Ojibwe call it apagaande-ikwewinini.




This process of turning your full attention to something not only outside yourself, but not even human is I think a large part of what makes bird watching so popular. I don't think we were made to live in a wholly human world, and I think much of what ails us these days has roots back in this entirely self-reflexive world we've trapped ourselves in. Birds offer a way outside of ourselves, our culture, our species. 


To pay attention to anything in great detail is a rewarding thing. This is why I like make this site, I like to pay attention to things and then I like to do something with the results of that attention. Sometimes I write things only for myself in my journal, sometimes I take photographes, sometimes I sketch something in pencil or pen, sometimes I write things and put them up here. All of these are outlets for the accumulated results of paying attention to something, be it birds, the shape and rythem of waves, the wind in the leaves, the movement of clouds or what my kids are doing around me. 

---

I know there's other reasons for the popularity of birdwatching. I'd be lying if I said there wasn't some competitive aspect to it to for me. Would I like to have a life list in the 1000s? Sure, but not because I want to have seen more than you or anyone else, but because that would mean that I'd have paid attention to over 1000 birds.




Cameras are increasingly designed to remove the human factor from the act of taking a picture. With the addition over the last several decades of features like autofocus, auto white balance, and auto light metering, the engineering effort of most camera manufacturers has gone into replacing the learned choices of the individual photographer with algorithms. These algorithms turn the act of producing a great image into something that’s no longer a challenge you must rise to or adapt to, but a series of options you can choose between. 

To repair is to join a community.

The right to repair the need to repair the desire to repair is fundamentally a communal desire it's a hierarchical desire hierarchical community of experience being handed down but it's fundamentally communal you can't get this knowledge without it being handed down to you whether that is through books through more experienced people through YouTube through any number of other means of disseminating information it has to come down 3 time from someone hierarchical a above you with more skills than you and it takes humility to become part of that system so you have humility and community and these are two things that are fundamentally opposed pictures of dominant worldview of the modern world



# essays

We saw sticker on the sign to the Henry Miller library that said, "Safety Third". This became our antidote to the endless rules of public spaces. It was a good family joke. Whenever we do something other people might frown on, one of us will invariably shout, "safety third!" before plunging ahead. But safetyism is a real problem that we all struggle with. I think you beat the safety game by playing a different one. You play the personal responsibility and risk management game. You go slow, you learn your limits, but then you keep playing. You push your limits. You do things that scare you because they also call to you. You keep expanding and growing. You can read more in the essay [*Safety Third*](https://luxagraf.net/essay/safety-third).

## Do It Yourself

It’s probably cheaper and easier to buy most things, but when I can I’d rather make things myself. What else are you going to do with your life if you aren’t making stuff? Watch TV? Stop buying stuff and hiring people for everything. Give yourself a chance to solve the problem first. Contrary to what it says on the label, professionals and experts aren’t necessary. They’ll do it faster and better than you will, but you’ll learn and improve every time you do it yourself.


## Safety Third


It seems axiomatic that fear of death is a natural outcome of materialist beliefs. If life is all there is, that is the material world is all there is, then death is the end. And no one likes endings. For our institutions and their leaders, death is the worst possible thing because it is the end. It is, from their point of view, the ultimate failure of man.

But why?

As history's many brave atheists attest it does not require belief in the supernatural to make even the ultimate sacrifice of one's life, which would imply that even if death is the end there are many circumstances where it is still preferable to life, for example the preservation of others lives.

Philosopher and writer [Charles Eisenstein](https://charleseisenstein.org/) astutely [points out](https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/pandemania-part-5), "safety mania and death phobia are signs of a **disconnection from purpose and passion**. If you have nothing more important than your own life, then preserving life is left as the only purpose." (emphasis mine)

In other words death phobia is a result of not knowing how to live. 

When you are disconnected from purpose and passion this begins to pile up because the death phobia drives the obsession with safety, which in turn makes us incredibly risk adverse, which in turn keeps us from exploring, potentially from finding our purpose and passion. On and on in a viscous cycle. 

How do you get out? If you're reading this, chances are you aren't in that cycle, but I have an idea of how we get out at a cultural level: By playing without our helmets.

If you're constantly worried about safety you can't play. If you can't play, you can't be free. Play is freedom and play does not wear a helmet. A helmet means supervision. We who play are unsuperviseable.

To play amidst a world full of rules is perhaps the most subversive act.


outside "ordinary" life as being "not serious," but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.




This I believe is how we remake the world: by playing.

I know, that's not a Very Serious Solution that [Very Serious People]() can go out and implement, but that's the point isn't it? To remake the world any other way would end up right back here eventually.






safetyism has largely displaced other moral sensibilities that might offer some resistance. At the level of sentiment, there appears to be a feedback loop wherein the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining risk appears.




Huizinga begins by making it clear that animals played before humans. One of the most significant (human and cultural) aspects of play is that it is fun.[8]

Huizinga identifies 5 characteristics that play must have:[9]

Play is free, is in fact freedom.
Play is not "ordinary" or "real" life.
Play is distinct from "ordinary" life both as to locality and duration.




Every culture passes through a materialist phase and every culture has its own form of fear or death while in that phase. You and I did not invent this, but we find ourselves living during this cultural phase, and I think it helps tremedously to remain conscious of that fact when trying to decide how risky any one thing is *to you*. 


This is why blanket rules are ridiculous and ignored. The sign that says danger, no lifeguard on duty means little if you know how to read the water to avoid rip currents and are a strong swimmer. If you aren't a strong swimmer and don't even know what a rip current is, then the message of the sign might be important, but in the world littered with such signs that one is just so much more noise. You ignore it.




I think this goes to the heart of our existence... why are we here? Are we here, as the technomedia landscape would have it, to be passively entertained and coddled from birth to death? Or are we here for something more? I don't know about you, but I don't think we're just along for the ride. We’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.

I think rejecting the world of passivity, of getting off our butts and taking matters into our own hands, of asking our neighbors and like-minded strangers how to fix things, how to build things, what's working and what isn't. All of this is on the path to rebuilding a life of value and meaning. 








While I am not a fan of dualisms, I have only ever managed to come up with two solutions to the fear of death: deny death (very popular) or accept death (formerly very popular).



don't forget evolution doesn't have a goal, it's simply a process of fitting the current environment. 


https://twitter.com/ItsGoneAwry/status/1623675932899700736?s=20&t=oo4ys3gRccV2b9mhU-2Dfw

If you're constantly worried about safety you can't play and if you can't play you can't be free. Play is freedom and play does not wear a helmet. Play I could go on at some length about how play is actually the most threatening thing you can do these days, maybe I will eventually, but 



safetyism has largely displaced other moral sensibilities that might offer some resistance. At the level of sentiment, there appears to be a feedback loop wherein the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining risk appears.




Huizinga begins by making it clear that animals played before humans. One of the most significant (human and cultural) aspects of play is that it is fun.[8]

Huizinga identifies 5 characteristics that play must have:[9]

Play is free, is in fact freedom.
Play is not "ordinary" or "real" life.
Play is distinct from "ordinary" life both as to locality and duration.
Play creates order, is order. Play demands order absolute and supreme.
Play is connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained from it.[10]




Safety is largely illusory anyway.

Oscar Wilde once said “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation”


for what it really is and it has made me afraid.



I should probably make it part of [my code](/code).







I think the safety first obession is the reason we had a worldwide panic over Covid, it's the reason so many young adults are meek and unable to handle the world, it's the reason our leaders are failing us, and it's a big part of the reason so many people are dissatisfied with their lives. 

It's also a big part of the reason we gave up our independence to ["experts."](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming). Much of the reason we are told we must rely on "experts" is for our safety. 


From that initial reaction it's been further revealed that the rules we get handed when entering public spaces like parks are insufficient. 


Clearly, since people like us have been ignoring them.

social relations and that the human being is not the center of a web of loyalties and commitments but is rather a physical fact needing technical management. Nothing, it was revealed to us, is worth risking life for—nothing. If other occasions for risk remain, this is evidently only because administration has not yet found the means to quash them. It was revealed that no danger is greater than death. It was revealed that life is sheer matter and not something else, for example, the capacity for love.
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2022/06/atoms-and-the-void-review-of-interventions-2020/
The obsession with safety is bound up in a fear of death.



Whatever one’s opinion of the response to the disease, what is undeniable is that so many people of influence took for granted that safety must always trump social relations and that the human being is not the center of a web of loyalties and commitments but is rather a physical fact needing technical management. Nothing, it was revealed to us, is worth risking life for—nothing. If other occasions for risk remain, this is evidently only because administration has not yet found the means to quash them. It was revealed that no danger is greater than death. It was revealed that life is sheer matter and not something else, for example, the capacity for love.
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2022/06/atoms-and-the-void-review-of-interventions-2020/
The obsession with safety is bound up in a fear of death.

The true warrior is not the one who is willing to kill. That doesn’t make a warrior. The true warrior is the one who is willing, if need be, to die - Charles Eisenstien




Because our civilizational answer to “Why are we here?” has unraveled, many of us individually have trouble answering that question too, for the individual story draws from the collective.

OK, I realize I may have risen to too high an altitude for the practical purpose of preventing the next bout of pandemania. So I will end with this: We can reduce our general susceptibility to fear-mongering by reducing the levels of fear current in society. A society ridden with fear will acquiesce to any policy that promises them safety. How do we reduce ambient levels of fear? There is no single answer. Besides, each one of us already knows how.

https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/pandemania-part-5


I think this goes to the heart of our existence... why are we here? Are we here, as the technomedia landscape would have it, to be passively entertained and coddled from birth to death? Or are we here for something more? I don't know about you, but I don't think we're just along for the ride. We’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.

I think rejecting the world of passivity, of getting off our butts and taking matters into our own hands, of asking our neighbors and like-minded strangers how to fix things, how to build things, what's working and what isn't. All of this is on the path to rebuilding a life of value and meaning. 


Greek Proverb which says, “A society grows great when the old people plant trees, even when they know they will never get to enjoy their shade.”


---

## Everything is a Practice

There is no finish line. There is no winning, no losing.

**Everything is a Practice.**

A practice is the disciplined repetition of what you know with enough experimentation in that repetition to unlock those things you don't yet know. It is ever-accumulating, and never-ending. It is sometimes painful, but that is the way.

Individual projects may come to an end, but the practices that made them possible do not. You may finish writing a book, or reach the end of a run, or understand how to fix an engine, but there is no point where you've written enough, you've worked out enough, you've learned enough. The practices never end, which means you get to keep improving.

The practice leaves a path behind you to show you how far you have come and carves out a path ahead of you to show you where you can go.

The practices of your life *are* your life. They form the path you follow, they are how you become what you want to become, they make you who you are and who the world wants you to be. You are not solely in charge of your practices or the path they form. The world gets a vote too. In the end that's part of the practice too -- adjusting to feedback from the world, your body, your life, your family, your friends. All of these things are part of the practice, all of them inform it.

The practice also informs the experimentation that expands it.

The trick is to follow your curiosity. That often forgotten part of you that society tries to get you to repress. That voice that says, what would happen if... This is the way. Follow it. Follow it knowing you will likely fail, knowing that you're probably doing it the wrong way, but you're going to try it anyway... you'd be surprised what works. I've fixed loose battery wires with a bit of nail, held hoses on with zip ties, and countless other things that should not have worked, but did, at least for a little while. There's plenty of failures along the way of course. Those people always telling you it can't be done -- whatever it might be -- are sometimes right, but wouldn't it be better to find out for yourself? 

Now there are reasonable limits to this... I wouldn't go trying to repair a $4,000 lens on your first attempt at lens repair. I wouldn't pick a rare, difficult to replace engine for your first rebuild. Learn to manage risk. When you know you're headed off the map to experiment, pick things to experiment on and situations to experiment in where you can keep the risk level low. Whether that means using something cheap, or doing it at low speed, or making sure the water is deep enough before you jump. Whatever the case, learn to manage risk so that your lessons learned aren't so painful -- financially, emotionally, physically --- that you forget what you learned and remember only the trauma of the learning.

In this process though you will become a better human being. You will get better at living. You will have less pain down the road. Your path will be smoother. You are building real world skills that you can use over and over. Every skill that you pick up transfers to other things too. Your practice will expand and keep growing.

The experience you gain using a multimeter to untangle the rats nest of wires under the dash will come in handy when you need to figure out why the fridge suddenly stopped. That method of troubleshooting, following wires, testing voltages, making sure resisters are working, and so on, that method of inquiry you learned working under that dash transfers to other things. It's the same method of inquiry needed to figure out what's happening with anything electrical. There will be some differences between the fridge and the dash and the dishwasher and the vacuum, but the basic method is the same. From one small repair you gain an insight that makes countless future repairs that much easier. But only if you do it yourself.

In this way everything you do is always building your skill set. You're always expanding your practice. This makes the path that much easier. You are that much more proficient at being human. The journey become easier, you are less reliant on others and you free up resources to focus on life's more interesting things. That way when the fridge dies at anchor in the San Blas, two days sail from the nearest repair shop, you don't worry. You fix the issues and get on with the dive you were planning to do that day. 

Skills transfer in unexpected ways too. It isn't all just troubleshooting methods that transfer. The experience you gain struggling at terrible sketches of birds will come in handy when you start staring at the engine, trying to make sense of what's gone wrong -- you've trained your mind to pay attention to the little details of feathers, which is not so different than paying attention to the little details of how a machine is running or how the wind and weather are changing. It is all connected.

I should probably stop here and point out that I am a miserable hack with very few skills. I am not a repair expert or wunderkind of any sort. I can barely fix my way out of a paper bag. I am writing this not because I have mastered it on some long journey of experience, but because I have lived a couple of these examples and when thinking about it later, realized, oh, I made that connection because of this other things that I didn't see as related at the time, but then it turned out it was. 

I am writing this because I have seen other people who can do this at a level I know I'll never get close to. I am writing this because you may be younger than me, you may have more time to learn. By the time you get to my age, you might be where I wish I was. Where I would be if I'd been paying more attention earlier on in life.

I write not as an expert, but as a cautionary tale. Learn more than I did. Experiment more than I did. Expose yourself to more adversity than I did so that you learn to overcome it, not in theory, not by reading on the comfort of your couch, but in practice, at the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere, when it really counts.

And now a little practice I wish I'd run across when I was much younger.

---

How do you find *your* practice? I don't know what you need to do or where you ought to go, but I can offer some places to start, some questions to think about. 

The Webster's 1913 dictionary definition of practice includes as examples, "the practice of rising early; the practice of making regular entries of accounts; the practice of daily exercise." That's not a bad place to start: get up, get moving, and keep track of where your money is going. That can take you far. None of that is revolutionary. Ben Franklin is famous for saying roughly the same thing. You can find similar quotes going back to the very edges of written history, but it's still a solid place to start. Get up and get going. 

What I think gets lost in our time -- [the time of The Experts](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming) -- is that there's not a single path, not a set of practices that work for everyone. We've been conditioned to look for prescriptions that fit everyone and that's just not how life works. You and I are different. You have to experiment and find what works for you. It might be nearly the same as what works for me, but it also might be totally different. I know people who are very much on their path who are vegans and do their best work late at night. You have to find your own way.

That said, I do have a suggestion on where to start: start with touching your nose.

I know, that sounds stupid. If you're into making some kind of huge change in your life the last thing you want to hear is that you should start by touching your nose. What the hell is that going to do? The answer is: it's going to train your will.

If you were out of shape, unable to do a single push up, but desiring to be able to knock out 100 push ups in two minutes you wouldn't start with 50, you'd start with one. But even then, there is a high risk of failure because the effort it takes to get from zero push ups to ten is more than it takes to get from ten to 100. There's a very good chance that you're going to give up before you get to ten -- not because it's too hard, but because you aren't accustomed to forcing yourself to do things. You are not in control of your will.

It's not your fault. Unless you happen to have enlisted in the armed forces, practice a martial art, or have monastic religious training, you have very likely never even been taught that you can train your will, let alone how to do it. That's okay. 

The good news is that, unlike the hypothetical arms in the push up example, the will is not weak. Your will is as strong as it was when you were a baby starting to crawl and you willed your entire body to do something it had never done before. If your will feels weak it is because it's divided against itself. The power of the will comes from disciplined focus. When you can focus your will on a single thing, and only that thing, you can do remarkable things. 

Getting to that point is the hard part. That is the practice of the will. This is where all practices start. This is the metapractice that enables all the other practices to come into being. The will, directed, is the thing that enable you to turn words into ideas, ideas into action, action into skills. The will is what opens up the path in front of you and enables you to move forward. 

When you say "will" though most people think of some miserable thing where you grit your teeth and bear some suffering. That's not the will, that's you fighting your will. When your will is focused following it is effortless, in fact you can't not follow it, you are directing it after all.

The problem is that most of your life you've been told to do things you didn't want to do. School is the primary culprit here for most of us, though there maybe other things in your life. Schooling in the United States is almost universally designed to damage the will and leave you unable to do much of anything save serve the will of others. This is why most of us leave school and get a job. We literally go out to serve another's will. Our will has been so damaged we think that the thing we fight against when we "grit our teeth" or "just do it" is our will. 

That's not your will, that's your will divided. Our wills know a bad deal when they see one, even if we don't. And so they fight it -- they fight school, they fight our pointless jobs, they fight our uninspired cities and all the rest. And we fight our will. And we become convinced that this struggle against ourselves is what it means to direct our will. We become convinced that we're weak. 

That makes for a ton of emotional baggage wrapped up in our divided will. That why every New Year's when we vow to hit the gym and do those push ups, we fail. We spiral downward, further convinced we are weak.

This is compounded by the fact that your will is the source of most of your emotions -- when your will succeeds in the world, you are happy, when it fails you are miserable. If you have a lot of miserably emotions locked up in your will and you try to focus it... it doesn't work. By the end of February it's been two months since you went to the gym.

That's why you start with touching your nose. This is a variation on what every religious training manual (and some of the better secular ones) I've read advices doing. Something silly. Something that doesn't matter. Something that you have no emotional attachment to. Something you will not fail to do because of years of damage to your will. Touching your nose is easy and has no emotional baggage for most people. 

So do it. Right now. Wherever you are sitting, reading this. Use your left hand and touch your nose ten times, returning your hand to your side or lap each time. Do it now before you read any further.

Congratulations, you unified your will and succeeded. This is the beginning. This is how you train yourself to use your will deliberately. 

Now you need to do that every day. Write "touch your nose!" on a piece of note paper and put it somewhere you will see it every day, ideally multiple times a day, ideally somewhere other people won't bother you about it. Then every time you see it, touch your nose ten times with your left hand.

Congratulations. You have a new practice in your life. No, not touching your hose. The habit of doing something because you chose to do it. Not because some authority told you to or some unnoticed compulsion drove you to -- you chose to do this. You do it. You direct your will. 

That is the beginning of the practice.






*Note: Some might object that I have told you to do this and therefore it is yet another example of you yielding your will to another. This isn't true. It doesn't have to be your idea to do something, you just have to choose to do it. That's your will, you are choosing what to do.*
We are all in the process of maturation. Both as individuals and as a species. None of knows where this all goes, but I think we all know that the current stories don’t wash and it’s time for something new. I don’t know what that looks like for you, but for myself, for us out here, it looks like this. It looks like walks through primordial forests, long afternoons on windswept beaches, evenings around the fire.

I believe that you’ll know when you are on the right path. You’ll feel it. Life will begin to feel like what it is, a gift, an adventure, a joy. You’ll feel connection, fulfillment, that deep sense of satisfaction at the end of the day that comes from knowing there is nothing else you would rather have done that day. That is the path. And if you manage to find it, don’t stray. Do the work. It isn’t always easy. It isn’t always beaches and campfires. Sometimes it’s engine repair and frustration and despair. But these moments are fleeting, they are the necessary growth, the twists and turns that reveal. Stay disciplined, stay focused, stay on the path. Let go of control and just walk the path. It will reveal itself slowly, only as much as you need to see, just keep on it, and see where it leads you. That’s adventure. That’s living.





What do you care about?

Who do you want to be?

What matters most to you?



What are the most important things in your life?



Who are the most important people in your life and what do they need from you?










Your higher self is the part of you that continues from one incarnation to the next, that was around long before you were born and will still be aroung long after your current body dies. While you’re alive, unless you’re engaged in very intensive spiritual practices, your higher self is basically asleep and dreaming, and your life is its dream. The great secret of the higher self is that it’s you — the real you — and the personality you think you are right now is like the personalities you sometimes have in your dreams at night. When your current body dies, you’ll wake up out of the dream and say, “Wow, that was interesting,” and then go on to other things.

David BTL, nope. The mess that is your psyche is exactly what it should be: the raw materials you have to work with, the pieces of the kit you need to assemble. It just looks screwed up because you’re beginning to glimpse what it can become once you fit all the pieces together where they belong.

[^1]: The world in this case consisting of both material and other realities.







The One True Dictionary defines practice as:

    > Frequently repeated or customary action; habitual
      performance; a succession of acts of a similar kind;
      usage; habit; custom; as, 


The three examples happen to all be practices I pursue

Not in human terms anyway. Individual projects may come to an end, but the practices that made them possible do not. Most things worth doing do not have a stopping point. There is no point where you've written enough, you've worked out enough. Everything is a practice. Embrace it. The practice is never done, which means you get to keep improving.

[^1]: This would be a good example of 

## No Cavalry -- what to do?




Once you accept that there is no cavalry coming, or perhaps more conservatively, that you don't need a cavalry to come, or, at the very least make the decision that you want to life your life in such a way that you don't *want* to need a cavalry, the question arises: what then do I do? How do I get from where I am, to that state of mental, physical, and spiritual security? 

Another way to put this would be: How do I begin to take responsibility for and become accountable for myself, my family, my world?

I have no idea. Which is to say that I know what I am doing for those things, but I don't know what you should do -- that's for you to figure out. If I told you what to do you'd just be dependant on me, no better off than being dependant on the cavalry. 

No one can tell you how to get on the path to self-dependency because no one other than you knows what your path to self-dependency looks like. You have to find it. And you'll know when you have. Find it is the fun part. Don't worry if it takes a while. It took me the better part of two decades. But I know people who figured it out much quicker.

So I am not going to prescribe some recipe for how you can take responsibility for your world, but I am going to tell you something that might help you figure out your own path: you first have to reclaim your time. One of the things that keeps us dependant on the cavalry is our perceived lack of time to do anything about it. How are you going to learn how to rebuild your leaf blower motor when you work 9-5 and spend an hour on each side of that commuting? From 8-6 you have no time for leaf blowers. Throw in breakfast and dinner and suddenly from 7-7 you have no time for anything else.



How do you find time to build relationships with your neighbors when you spend 12 hours (or more) of your waking day working?  


In the first essay on this subject I suggested that you stop using money to meet all your needs. That is, begin to build relationships with people such that you can begin to meet some of your needs by offering something of yourself to others. I don't know what that might look like for you, but here's a quick example: when we lived out in woods in South Carolina much of the land surrounding our house was leased to a hunt club. In exchange for keeping an eye on the area, we were free to hunt. Actually we were offered other people's deer, though we had to decline for lack of freezer space. 

If you live in Manhattan this scenario isn't going to come up. But if you start trying to meet people, to listen to them, you will build relationships that lead to things like this. Perhaps not free food, perhaps it will end up being chess lessons or tk, but it will be something and your life will be richer, and slightly, ever so slightly less dependant on the system of The Machine.

This will also give you agency. You are the one with the connection to others, nothing is mediating that. This is agency. Agency reduces stress. It helps you to see bad things, bad situations for what they are: bad situations. When you have agency and the self-confidence that it, along with experience, give you, you begins to see that with sufficient resources -- time, effort, knowledge, money, etc -- any problem can be solved.



## The Cavalry Isn't Coming

The Cavalry isn't coming. This is the lesson 21st century America is trying to teach us. We are going to have to re-learn how to depend on ourselves and on each other. There is no one else. That's okay. We don't need anyone else.

Self-reliance backed up by tight community bonds used to be the norm. You depended on yourself, your family, your community, because who else was there? So far as I can tell from reading history this was most people's outlook until roughly the middle of the 20th century. That's when a number of things happened that changed how people saw themselves and their communities.

Around then things began to centralize and as they did the solutions people had always relied on weren't suddenly found wanting. Self-appointed experts stepped in to tell us how things should be done. How we should eat. How we should live. How we should love. Sometimes the experts had good ideas. But often they did not. And even when their ideas were good, there was an unintended consequence to listening to the experts: communal bonds were weakened, people were deprived of skills, people questioned their instincts. Soon people believed they needed experts for everything.

The world according to experts is a world that depends on those experts, the cavalry. The people we mean when we say "they'll think of something."

Except that as we've all witnessed in the last twenty years, they won't think of something. They're out of ideas. Worse, the old ideas don't work anymore. The world of the expert is collapsing all around us. The cavalry isn't coming because the cavalry doesn't know how to ride anymore.

For four years we've been driving around the United States, passing through all its unique regions (except New England and the Pacific Northwest) and I've noticed not only the experts are failing us, but that there are some places where that has had little to no effect on life.

It took me a long time to figure this out because this shift, from the local community as the hub of life, to there being no hub, happened long before I was born. That is to say, the disconnected lives we all lead, depending on experts to tell us everything from what to eat to how to fix our cars, was normal to me. It was the water I lived in and I never noticed it. What I did notice pretty early on was that some places were decidedly different. Northern Wisconsin. Okracoke. Parts of the Florida Panhandle.

We were drawn to these places and continue to return to them in part I think because they resisted the shift to expert authority that happened everywhere else. Self-reliance, independent businesses, and close knit communities still thrive in these places. These places somehow escaped the chain-storification of the world. It was refreshing. It was different. These places felt like what I wanted the future to be.

I have read enough books of the American road to know that everywhere used to be like this, but I never gave much thought to how or why that changed. I assumed that chain stores took over. And they did. But I think there's considerably more underlying that simple observation, and I think understanding how it happened, how we got into this mess, is going to help us get out of it.

I think it happened because not enough people resisted it. We were swept along and did not stand up to it. It's hard to avoid shopping at Walmart. So we did. And so on, until the old ways were swept aside. We prized newer bigger better because we lost sight of what life is really about. 

Singular cause and effect cannot explain how an entire culture shifts, that's a subtle and multifaceted process, but it begins and ends with the choices of individuals. Millions of individuals, all of whom have different beliefs, different desires, different wills. It's important to keep this in mind because the kind of thinking that says "here's the problem, here's how to fix it" is the kind of thinking that made the problem.

And now here we are, waiting for the other shoe to drop. We're a bit like Wile E. Coyote when he's run off the edge of the cliff but doesn't realize it yet. Ignorance of his true situation keeps him from plunging down right away, but there's always that moment when it starts to sink in. The cartoonists let his ears droop just before he confronts his situation and falls. That's about where I see modern America just now. Our ears are drooping and we know what's coming, but no one knows how high we are or how hard we'll fall. 

That is a pretty dismal place to be. But I believe we can still exercise some control over that descent. We have to fall, but there are branches we can grab onto, things that can slow us down. Not as a culture, but as individuals. We can descent gradually and with some degree of grace perhaps. 

Everywhere will be different, and the solutions will be different for everyone. That's what five years living on the road has taught me. There is no collective anything. There is just you and me and the rain. When I say we have to figure this out without the cavalry, don't mistake me for some alternate cavalry. I don't know what you need to do. I know some of what I need to do, but you are different. You have your own path. We need to work together, help each other, but work together and help each other down our own paths. The balance between individualism and community that has been lost, we have to restore it one person at a time. The good news is that I think we still have a chance to land at the bottom of that descent without too much damage. To understand what I mean, let me tell you a little story about an engine.

---

At the end of 2017, after we'd been traveling in the bus for about nine months we were [climbing up Tehachapi Pass](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/12/terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-week) to get out of California's central valley. About halfway up the incline there was a loud bang from the engine and the smell of burning oil. The leaking head gasket we didn't know about had leaked enough that one piston shattered and we were dead in the water. I didn't know that at the time. All I knew was that something was very, very wrong. 

I called a tow truck and we were towed over the pass down to Mojave, CA, where we spent three weeks and over $6,000 replacing that piston and head gasket. We had no choice. While I knew how to fix some things, I was a long way from knowing how to take apart an entire engine. But, when I was signing that credit card receipt for six grand, I decided, never again. Whatever happens from here on out, I am going to fix it or we're going to sell it and find some other way to travel. 

The bus has never been to a mechanic since. This is not meant as a slight of those mechanics who have worked on it over the years. Some did good work. Some did not. But none of them love this engine the way I do. Why should they? It's not their engine. If you love something you learn how to take care of it yourself. 

So I set about trying to educate myself on how to repair a Chrysler 318 LA engine. This was not easy. The aspirated 318 with LA heads hasn't been in a production vehicle since the late 1970s. Even mechanics in their mid 50s might never have actually worked on one. Slowly though I began to stumble across people working on them. The [Mopar A-body forums](https://www.forabodiesonly.com/mopar/) have been helpful, and several YouTube channels have taught me a ton, especially [Uncle Tony's Garage](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9SzQNYLqsPQGY_nbHogDDw). 

But while strangers could provide some framework and theory, which it comes to figuring out what's wrong I've mainly turned to my uncle Ron who has an uncanny knack for being able to diagnose problems over the phone with very little to go on. Without him I would not know half of what I know today (which is still disappointingly little, but enough to get by). 

Somewhere along the way I started to wonder what was driving me. It was partly curiosity, partly necessity, but also partly something more. Matthew Crawford's *Shop Class as Soul Craft* articulates this something more far more eloquently than I've been able to. Crawford sees the need to be capable of repair as more than just a desire to fix things. He sees it as a desire to escape the feeling of dependence on stuff. The more I began to work on the bus the more I understood what Crawford meant. There is empowerment in knowing how things work. Your stuff will never again fail you because if it does break, you can repair it. Empowerment in this case means removing the expert between you and your stuff. Your stuff is more yours, you are more in control of your stuff.

Crawford calls the person who wants to fix their own stuff, the Spirited Man. In his book this figure becomes the antidote to passive consumption. Passive consumption displaces agency, argues Crawford. One is no longer master of one's stuff because one does not truly understand how stuff works. "Spiritedness, then," writes Crawford, "may be allied with a spirit of inquiry, through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance."

Crawford writes that the spirited man "hates the feeling of dependence, especially when it is a direct result of his not understanding something. So he goes home and starts taking the valve covers off his engine to investigate for himself. Maybe he has no idea what he is doing, but he trusts that whatever the problem is, he ought to be able to figure it out by his own efforts. Then again, maybe not—he may never get his valve train back together again. But he intends to go down swinging." 

In the time since I read that I have literally done exactly that. I have decided I'd rather go down swinging, taking apart my valve train, rather than seeking the help of a professional. It’s not just me. YouTube and other sharing sites are littered with people teaching each other how to fix stuff. Then there are the thousands people without social media who are quietly working in their yards, in their garages, at the side of the road. Shade tree mechanics. Tinkerers. Spirited men and women who want first and foremost to understand, to expand their understanding of the world around them, to know how to use the tools we toolmakers have created for ourselves.

I think this goes to the heart of our existence... why are we here? Are we here, as the technomedia landscape would have it, to be passively entertained and coddled from birth to death? Or are we here for something more? I don't know about you, but I don't think we're just along for the ride. We’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.

I think rejecting the world of passivity, of getting off our butts and taking matters into our own hands, of asking our neighbors and like-minded strangers how to fix things, how to build things, what's working and what isn't. All of this is on the path to rebuilding a life of value and meaning. 

---

We eliminate our dependence on the cavalry by becoming the cavalry for ourselves, for our families, and for our neighbors. *Être fort pour être utile* *. Be strong to be useful.  

Eliminate the central conceit of modernism—that there is a group of people you need to save you from... the world, yourself, your shortcomings, your neighbors, your neighbors' shortcomings and on down the line -- by taking responsibility for yourself and the expanding that responsibility outward to your family, to your community. 

The message of modernism is that you're helpless and you need saving. If you want to dig deep into the psychology of this I'd say it's about what you'd expect to get when a culture takes the gods out of its religion and replaces those gods with administrative systems. We're not the first. The Romans went down this path, so did the Chinese. Read Oswald Spengler or Arthur Toynbee if the history interests you. All you really need to know though is that there's a long history showing it doesn't work. Look around you, is stuff working? No, no, it is not.

Everything requires high specialized skills and knowledge. This is a choice. Things don't have to be built this way. Culture doesn't have to be arranged this way. It didn't use to be this way. Even 100 years ago there were very few "experts" telling you how to live. Now even lightbulbs have to include instructions on how to change them. 

Once you needed to be able to do a bit of everything yourself—help your neighbors build their homes, raise and butcher animals, preserve your food, fight fires, fix stuff, pull a tooth, deliver a child. All the things Robert A. Heinlein famously suggested a human being out to be able to do: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

Prior to the coming of the machine age, we were able to do this stuff. It was no factor.

But I know, I know, industrialization relies on specialization. Specialization means highly trained workers. Professionals are better than self-taught amateurs. Their skills can develop everything to increasing levels of complexity. And look, there are aspects of this that are good. It would take me years to learn how to machine a camshaft. I'm happy to let an expert do that because their expertise has allowed them to develop better tools and using those tools requires skills that only those experts have. Not everyone had a mill at their house. Not everyone could forge a great blade. There has always been specialization. It's the degree of specialization that's the problem. Our problems are the problems of overspecialization.

The problem with the specialization model isn't so much the specialization as the exclusion. As Christopher McDougall so eloquently puts it in *Natural Born Heros*, over time, "a subtle cancer spread: where you have more experts, you create more bystanders. Professionals did all the fighting and fixing we used to handle ourselves; they even took over our fun, playing our sports while we sat back and watched."

When was the last time you played baseball? When was the last time you watched it? I know I listened to a game last week. The last time I played was in the previous century. That's sad really. I like playing. Life is playing. Not watching. What are we here for? To play or to watch? I think that will become central question of our age, at least for those that haven't found their gods. 

I believe the disconnection that comes from watching life instead of participating in it is responsible for just about all our problems. Our mental health problems, our physical health problems, our cultural problems. All these things stem from being disconnected from life, from each other, from ourselves.

How did we get here? We got here because we allowed other people to tell us what was good for us. And they were wrong. From diet and health to design and visions of the future, they were wrong.

It's time we stopped listening to them and went back to fixing stuff ourselves, taking care of each other, taking care of ourselves.

---

The question becomes, how do we get back to where our grandfather's were?

There isn't one answer to this. I am not here on high telling you how to find your path because that top-down model is what caused the problem. I'm not even going to tell you what I am doing because even in that I think there's a tendency to see it as a recipe.

I would suggest that the first and most important thing is the realize that no one else is going to figure it out for you. The top-down, expert provides a solution system *is* the problem. 

I would suggest that reclaiming control of your life, your community, your world is actually easier than you think. You are already more skilled than you think. And you are surrounded by skilled people. Find something that interests you and get better at it. Connect with other people who share your interests. 

Early drafts of this had a few suggestions on specific things you could do, but again, I don't want to give you a recipe. That said, there is one thing that I think isn't intuitive, but will really open doors for you: **stop using money to meet all your needs**. 

Find one problem, one thing, that you pay for now that you can either make/do yourself, or, even better can be borrowed or done with help from friends and family. The goal is to find something that puts you in a debt of gratitude to someone else. This is the basis of community—gratitude. When you are grateful to the world, you become more helpful to the world. Gratitude is a powerful motivator. It subverts one of the most powerful outside, centralized structures that we're eventually going to have to do without: currency.

Your great grandparents fixed things for people, made things for people, and were grateful to receive the same from others. This formed much of the basis of community that held life together before the coming of centralization. It isn't the only thing, but it's a place to start and that's what we need to do. Start. Remember, we don't want to change the world, that's the top down thinking that got us in the mess. The goal here is to change the only part of the world you can: you.


etc etc. suggestions

Trust yourself.

Get outside

Talk to your neighbors

Start walking

Find religion


















The solutions being proposed by the people who champion this idea are the same as they've always been: more technology, more bureaucracy, more centralized control (and not coincidentally more jobs for more experts).

We know where these ideas get us and we're done.

It's popular these days to say that politics is downstream from culture, which is to say we get the politics of our culture. But as John Michael Greer often says, "it needs to be remembered in turn that culture is downstream from imagination." We have the power here because we are limited only by our imaginations and our bodies' ability to make our imaginings true.


https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2019/11/land


---

Virtues require cultivation, but our culture has left us with somewhat untended gardens. We have undisciplined minds, undisciplined debates, and undisciplined media consumption habits. 


---













I'll be honest, I don't have a lot to add that you can't find in the writings of Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Lewis Mumford, Neil Postman, Wendell Berry and others who've been trying to warn us for over a century now (I also think Tolkein's Lord of the Rings is an overloked, very subtle critique of technological society that's well worth reading from that angle). If I do nothing else than inspire you to read them, I will call that success. However, I think that I'm in a somewhat unique position to observe things in a variety of places and make connections that others might not be able to see, and so here we are.





People in the United States ignore such proposals because we tried that experiment and found out just how badly it worked. In 1961, the new presidential administration of John F. Kennedy set out to improve US foreign policy by staffing the State Department with “the best and the brightest,” which meant in the context of the time a bevy of intellectuals fresh out of Ivy League universities, full of the latest fashionable ideas in international relations. Those experts promptly led America straight into the quagmire of the Vietnam War, while loading the military with a flurry of contradictory demands that made victory impossible and withdrawal unacceptable.

One of the precepts of the last couple of centuries is that there is one answer to every problem and it is the right answer and it is the answer you are going to choose like it or not. This is more or less the central premise of what is generally called liberalism or later, when people tried to distance themselves from the failures of liberalism, neo-liberalism.


I want to connect the story of taking apart the bus to the individualism and closed community of the west to the idea that we have to depend on ourselves and each other, not outside help coming from on high. The old order is collapsing and those of us farthest from its center are going to lose it first. The new world starts out here on the edges, the fringes the forgotten corners of the country where the old order has never held much sway.

I recently told a story about my decision to replace the bus engine's head gasket. It was a small thing really, when you consider the realm of human possibilities, but for me it was a big thing. Still, I didn't really want to do it. 

In that piece I made a somewhat flippant comment about no one ever stopping to help us when we're at the side of the road out west. That's been true, but it doesn't mean no one has helped us. It helps to remember that the west was built on deceit. The original inhabitants were decieved with treats that have not been honored, the people who came after them were decieved by the government and the railroads who needed them to farm in a country both knew well would never support farming. They recruited people from all over the world, people to whome the notion of living alone in a vast landscape was appealing and then, when those people turned out to want to do their own thing, not what the government wanted them to do (shocking that these independant spirits who surviced out here didn't want to do anyone's bidding) they were deceived again. And again. Perhaps the most eloquent recounting of these desceptions is the book Bad Land. I think it is important to remember these things when you are out here.

That is I think, why no stops to help us. First and foremost, we are outsiders and in the current west there is more distrust of outsiders than anywhere else we've been. Justifiably I'd say. 


## Rules for Screens, Part One

I have a strange page about [technology](/technology) buried on this site. Still, people find it. Something must link to it? I'm not sure how or why, but it seems to get a lot of traffic. Or at least it generates a fair bit of email. About a dozen people a year take the time to email me about the first line of that article:

**The less technology your life requires the better your life will be.**

I get a mix of responses to this ranging from the occasional "who are you to judge me, how dare you tell me not to play video games" (which I don't usually respond to), to the more frequent, and thoughtful, "hey, I feel the same way but I can't seem to get technology out of my life". 

In crafting a response to the most recent person who wrote some variation of that comment, I accidentally wrote a massively long post I am breaking into a three-part series, retracing how I came to use screens so little, despite editing photos, writing for this site, and working for an online publication, all of which do in fact require a screen. I use screens when it makes sense to do so, but the rest of the time I avoid them.

We're going to start with the basic stuff. I did most of the steps in this part back in 2016 when we were getting ready to move into the bus. This is actually all the hardest things to do, because these will free up enough time that you'll find yourself staring into the void for the first time since you were a kid. Don't worry, it's good for you. Anyway, on with it.

**Luxagraf's rules for screens, part one.**

---

## **Rule One: Throw Your Television in the Nearest Dumpster**

Yup, we're going to start with the hardest one. You'll notice that I am more sympathetic to not going cold turkey with other things below. Not this one. This is the absolute requirement. Kill your television. Now. Tough love people.

But... but. Look. Here's the thing. You have this gift of life for, on average, around 73 years. 73 YEARS. You won't even last as long as the average hardwood tree. And you're going to spend that precious time watching television? No. No you're not. Not anymore. You're going to live. Find a dumpster. Put your TV in it. 

Okay, you don't want to put your $1,200 TV in the dumpster. Then find an old sheet or blanket and cover it up. Put some low-tack painters tape on there, make it hard to take off. That'll work for now. But get ready to eBay that thing. Or find a dumpster.

Now cancel Netflix, Hulu, or whatever other subscriptions you had. If you subscribe to two streaming services, that's just under $30 a month. That's $360 a year. That's $1,800 every five years. That's crazy. But now you have about $30 a month you can either save or spend on something you want. Something tangible. I mean, reward yourself if you really do this. At least buy some ice cream. 

---

## **Rule Two: Make Something**

If you watched television for 3 hours in the evenings, congrats you were already watching less than most people—and you stop doing that you have just reclaimed 15 hours a week. FIFTEEN HOURS! That's enough to get a part time job somewhere. It's enough time to do, lord, there's no limit to what you could do really. Start a business, write a book, read the entire canon of Russian literature. The paradox of choice can get you here and you'll end up watching YouTube for hours on your laptop. I know, I've done it. 

You have to start creating something. I strongly suggest you create something real and tangible. Something you can hold in your hands. Cook yourself a fancy dessert if you like. Yeah you can even look up a recipe on a screen, don't worry about it. The internet is incredibly helpful for learning things. That's another idea. Find something you really love and learn more about it. Read everything you can about agates if that's your bag (it's my wife's bag). But do it by checking books out from the library, not by reading on your phone.

Do what you want, but do something. Deliberately carve out some time to make something. And I know everyone says, I'm not a creative person, I don't know what to make. Start small. Write a card to your closest relative. Write a postcard if a card is too much. Make dessert for your family, your significant other, yourself, whatever. Just make something. Except maybe don't make a fancy dessert every night. That won't end well. If all else fails, just go for a walk. 

---

## **Rule Three: Delete Social Media Apps**

Yeah, now we're getting real. I know it's going to be hard. But you know what, take easy, start small. You probably have Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, a bunch of stuff in other words, on your phone. Just pick one and delete it for one week. You can always reinstall it so it's not like there's too much to lose here.

But we're not done.

Get a piece of paper and a pen. Fold the paper up so it's small enough to fit in your pocket. Put it in your pocket, or otherwise keep it on you. Now, every time you feel like checking whichever social network you deleted, instead of checking it, pull out your paper and pen and write down why you wanted to check it. It doesn't need to be an essay, just write like "wanted to see what Mark was up to" or whatever the source of the urge was. 

Do that for one week. At the end of the week look back over what you wrote down and decide for yourself if those things you were planning to do are worth your time. If they are then re-install that app and be on your merry way. If they aren't, or more likely, if you aren't sure, do the experiment for another week.

If you decide that this wasn't the best use of your limited time on earth, repeat this process with the next social app on your phone. When you've deleted all the unnecessary apps from your phone you're done with this step. 

Oh, and the ones you keep, don't feel bad about those. If you're feeling a sense of guilt about them still it might be worth repeating this experience, but if you really do enjoy them then don't feel guilty about them.

## **Rule Four: Track What You Do When You Use a Screen**

Far to much of our lives are lived in a kind of automated mode. Think back over everything you did in the last five minutes before you started reading this. If you're like me, you probably struggle to remember what it was you were doing or how you ended up precisely here at this moment. Some of this autopilot living is a good thing, especially, I've found, morning routines, but I do it far too much.

So I started keeping closer track of what I was doing and why. I'm not suggesting you do that. That's actually advanced level stuff, what I am suggesting is very simple: every time you use a screen, remember to do it consciously. Don't judge yourself for it, just note that hey, I am using a screen. That's all. Now if you're somewhat obsessive like I am you might want to write down whatever notes you can, about why you're using a screen. 

Unlike the steps above, this is not really a rule. It's a process. It's an ongoing process that will probably never end, at least in my case. I like to be conscious of when I use a screen, so although I started this years ago, I still do it today.

That brings me to the final point I will leave you with: everything is a process. To paraphrase Alan Watts, you are not a thing, you are a happening. Which is to say, all of life is a never ending process, there may be goals, there maybe markers along the way, but it's not like you get to place where you never have to do anything again. The goal, at least at this very basic level of using less screens, is to build systems and processes that will help you do things other than stare at a screen. 

Now go kill your television.



## Rules for Screens, Part Two

Last time we hurled our televisions out the window into a dumpster. If you actually did that, like I did once in college, you know that the sound of that crunch and exploding screen was awesome. Well maybe not, CRT screens aren't around anymore. Anyway, if you didn't actually hurl it out a window, well, hopefully you at least sold or gave away your TV. Remember, you can have a television or you can have a life.

Televisions are not the screen everyone wrings their hands over these days though. That's a little odd to me because according to statistics on screen time, that's where most us spend our time. But the evil de jour is phones. You phone is doing all kinds of things to you and will probably eventually be a direct contributor to the collapse of western culture if you believe everything you read. Which is sign you're using your phone too much.

I don't love phones, and I do think we should all use them less. If you've feel addicted to your phone, well, um, you're right. You are. Everything about the design of the apps on your phone is engineered to create dopamine pathways that make sure you experience physical withdrawal when you go without them. That's addiction pure and simple.

But. Did you know that culturally we've been wringing our hands over the distractions in our lives for centuries? Meister Eckhart, writing around 1307, calls "distraction" the second most powerful thing preventing communion with God. In 1550s Swiss scientist Conrad Gessner worries that the printing press will worsen the problem of distraction with a "confusing and harmful" amount of data "unleashed on the unsuspecting." To pick a more recent, and revealing, example consider writer Italo Calvino's 1983 account of [his daily newspaper habit](https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2027/the-art-of-fiction-no-130-italo-calvino):

> Each morning I already know I will be able to waste the whole day. There is always something to do: go to the bank, the post office, pay some bills... always some bureaucratic tangle I have to deal with. While I am out I also do errands such as the daily shopping: buying bread, meat, or fruit. First thing, I buy newspapers. Once one has bought them, one starts reading as soon as one is back home—or at least looking at the headlines to persuade oneself that there is nothing worth reading. Every day I tell myself that reading newspapers is a waste of time, but then... I cannot do without them. They are like a drug.

Note the use of the phrase, "like a drug," which we're still using today to describe our latest and most powerful distraction, phones. 

I point this out not to downplay the addictive, attention-steal nature of screens, but to remind you that being distracted is not new. Think of it slightly differently, the desire for distraction is not new. All that's happened over the last century is we've created ever more engrossing mediums to distract ourselves with. This strongly suggests that if we just reduce our exposure to the current symptom without addressing the underlying desire for distraction we're just switching one thing for another, like alcoholics chugging coffee and chain smoking at AA meetings[^1].

And I bring up AA in part because I think that phones are a problem partly for the same reason alcohol is a problem: they're culturally acceptable. No one pulls our a syringe in the middle of four star restaurant and shoots up heroin, but no one bats an eye when someone orders a bottle of wine in the same situation. Both are addictive, destructive drugs (arguably alcohol is much worse on your body), but one is culturally acceptable and one is not. This makes a world of difference when it comes time to stop. You don't have to work hard to avoid heroin, but you'll run into alcohol, and screens, at every turn.

Our phones aren't just addictive, they're also completely culturally acceptable in the west. No one cares if you pull one out in the middle of dinner. Well, I will. You might. But the cultural message seems to be that it's okay. In some places and some situations the cultural message might even be that you're an oddball if you're *not* staring at a screen.

Let's assume though, that, like people who email me, you want to use your phone less. Here are some tricks to help with that, most of which I used to cut back on my own screen use. 

**Luxagraf's Rules for Screens, part deux.**

## Rule Five: Know Yourself

If you want to use your phone less, you need to know how much you use it. There are some tools to figure this out built-in to both iOS and Android, but I never bothered to figure those out because I had already downloaded and used Your Hour ([Android App Store](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mindefy.phoneaddiction.mobilepe)). Space appears to offer similar features and [works on iOS too](https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/space-break-phone-addiction/id916126783). The app isn't really important, just get something that records how much time you spend and how often you unlock your phone.

That will give you a baseline and let you know how much you use your phone. Personally I disabled tracking for maps and music/podcasts because although I'm using my phone, I'm not really staring at the screen. There's an element of gamification to these apps that's easy to get sucked into. I had Your Hour on my phone for about a week before I got pretty obsessed with how little I could use my phone in a day. 

## Rule Six: Adapt to Yourself

If, like me, you discover that you use your phone to check the time throughout the day, consider getting a watch. Or, if you hate wearing a watch, and live in a small bus with your family like I do, just encourage everyone else to wear a watch and ask them what time it is.

The point is, most likely Rule Five will reveal some habits that you can break, but are too idiosyncratic to you for me to solve for you. My general advice is, if you have some behavior that involves the phone that could involve some analog thing, like a watch for instance, replace those screen checks with a watch. Not a smart watch or fitness tracker, just a watch.

A few things I have heard of people doing include, putting your phone in a bag to make it more of a pain to pull out and use, using it as a coaster so you can't pick it up, and using a pen and paper to make notes rather than using your phone. 

## Rule Seven: Turn Off All Notifications

I think the reason we are bothered by how much we use our phones has to do with agency. We like to think we are the rulers of our days and are conscious of all our decisions and actions and phones are stark reminder that we are not that guy/gal. The best way to grant yourself back some agency is to get rid of all notifications. 

Notifications are really just little serotonin agitators. Check your email when you feel like it, not when a notification badge agitates your serotonin level past the point of resistance. Turn them off, all of them.

## Rule Eight: Practice Doing Nothing

This does not mean meditating. It means doing nothing. Or at least do nothing productive. When you were a child you were probably happy to lie in the grass all afternoon doing nothing. At most you might pick out shapes in the clouds, but you were fine doing nothing. Or at least if you're over 35 and actually had a childhood then you might remember doing nothing. If not. Well, learn. Practice.

Of all the rules in this list, this is the hardest for me. I have this need to always be making something. I am ill at ease doing nothing. I read a good bit, I also practice discursive meditation, but neither of those qualify. The only time I really do nothing, is lying in a hammock, so I make sure to get some time in the hammock at least a couple times a week.

It might take some time to figure out the way you do nothing the best. If you do get stuck on this one, I highly recommend a hammock.

## Rule Nine: Record Your Practice

Write down when you do nothing. Write down when you don't do nothing. Write down how you miss notifications if you do. Write how you overcome your strange screen habits and most of all, write down when you still use screens. Don't judge yourself for it, step back, detach and just record what happened, what you did, and for how long. Try to be a disinterested observer of yourself, this will be much more helpful than berating or congratulating. 

## Rule Ten: Get After It




[^1]: This is not meant to disparage AA or anyone struggling with alcoholism. Most AA members I know are fully aware of the irony of swapping one addiction for another, but when alcohol has taken over your life to that point, it's not a bad trade to make.

## Rules for Screens, Part Three

Did you know there's a Reddit for people who want quit staring at screens so much? Also a true story. 



## Buying Used

I can't recall the last time I bought something new. We almost always buy electronics used, mostly off eBay. We also rarely buy new books. We generally pick up books at used bookstores around the country, but when we can't find what we want we use Thriftbooks.

Buying used has several advantages over buying new. The obvious one is that it's almost always cheaper. But beyond that there are other appealing aspects. Buying used means you're not contributing as much to the waste stream of modern economies, and you're (potentially) removing things from that waste stream by finding a use for them. Used items, especially electronics, tend to be functionally superior to new ones[^1] both because they are farther back on the curve of [diminishing returns](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/law%20of%20diminishing%20returns) and because they have stood the test of time. There are exceptions of course, but buy and large last year's model is as good, and sometimes better, than this year's model. 

Buying used also enables you to take advantage of little curiosities of time. For example all the really good low-noise sound recording devices seem to have been made between 2007-2016. Why? No idea. But everyone who needs low noise recording seems to agree, and high end recorders from that era sell for more than they did when they were new. Which is to say that buying used isn't always cheaper, but when it's not it generally means you're getting something superior. And not something that the manufacturer thinks is superior, but something the people using it the most think is superior.

This is why the only affiliate links on luxagraf.net lead to either eBay or Thriftbooks, my two preferred marketplaces for buying used stuff. 

Anyone using affiliate links is trying to sell you something—that includes me—and you should always be suspicious about that. I know my motives are simple, to make some money to pay for this website and maybe some tea for myself, but you have every right to skeptical. Really though, I don't want you to buy anything you don't need. But if you do need something, please buy it used. And if you're going to buy something I've recommended based on my experiences with it, then the affiliate links will help support this website.

[^1]: The odd mixture of capitalism and our culture's worship of "progress" means that new things must constantly be released, but the law of diminishing returns suggests that newer/bigger/better/faster eventually fails to deliver any meaningfully improvement. This is most obvious in software, where the most feared phrase in any software user's heart is "please restart to update", but this lack of improvement over previous versions is increasingly painfully obvious in hardware as well.
## Essay on Will

If you want control over what you consume, you're going to have to strengthen your will. So long as you are surrounded by signals that are trying to get you to spend money on crap, it is going to be an uphill battle. If you can I strongly suggest removing yourself from the signals—think about where your attention is going and how you can redirect it to craft rather than stuff. 

but there are things more powerful. The most important of those is your will. 


If, like most people, you can't pick and move to foreign country for a month then you're going to have to try to change in the midst of the battle so to speak. While possible, this is much much harder. And again, while I like to think I have mastered this, my spreadsheet says otherwise, so take this advice with a grain of salt. Chances are good that this actually much harder than you or I think and you're going to need to put in more effort than I'm suggesting.






The most important thing is to develop your will. I am serious. Start doing exercises to develop your will. For example, force your self up out of the chair right now, turn away from the computer and walk to the nearest wall. Touch it. Come back and sit down. Repeat this at random during the day. Is it pointless? Absolutely. So is lifting weights. The principle is the same. So choose a deliberately pointless thing to do, and do it. Then do another one. Then do the same thing every morning for a week. 

One will-building exercise I do periodically is what I call, for lack of a better phrase, micro travel. It works like this: pick a place at random in the city you live, somewhere you've never been. Choose a time and make an appointment with yourself. Now go work out all the details of getting there, if possible use public transit or walk. Then meet yourself there and make sure you're there on time. Now enjoy a few minutes exploring the area and head home.

I'll leave thinking up other exercises to you, but the point is to develop your will, to have control over your life. It takes a little time to see and feel the effects of this, it's quite subtle, but it will cascade throughout your life in a number of interesting ways, I promise. One will be better control over your impulses. When you walk into, say Target, to buy a new toothbrush your newly developed will will make it easier to walk past everything else and only buy the toothbrush. 

Eventually your will may help you recognize that stores that have everything are too much for your will. It would be cleverer to buy that toothbrush at a smaller store with fewer things, because it's easier to remove temptation than resist it. Think of it like dieting. If you're trying to eat less ice cream it's much easier to not walk down the ice cream aisle at all than it is to walk down it and without buying anything.

This also leads into my second suggestion for buying less stuff: change your habits. It's convenient to go to Target and get everything you need in one place, but chances are you're going to spend more than you intended without realizing it. In fact the entire experience of being in Target has been engineered to increase the chance you'll spend more than you intended. Every time you enter a store you are entering a hostile environment designed to extract your life energy from you. 

Oh sure it's all abstracted so you don't have think of it that way. Still, strip the abstraction and relationship is pretty clear, you trade hours of your life for shit you buy at Target. You get up the morning and go to work. That's a day of your life you just traded for paper tickets. Why do you need those tickets? To put a roof over your head and food in your stomach. Pretty much everything after that is not strictly necessary. So once those basics are met you're in th realm of swapping your existence on earth for stuff. 

The less stuff you buy, the less you need to work. By extension, the less time you spend in places designed to extract money from you, the less of your life you'll have to trade for stuff.

That's a habit you can break—going to all-in-one-place stores—but there are other habits you can build that will help immensely as well. 



One of the things I've been at pains to avoid is making it sound like we don't like the United States. In fact we do very much, it's one of the most beautiful places in the world and has some of the wildest and safest wilderness you're ever going to enter. 

Unfortunately, the United States is not the best travel value for us. Without an income we'd have to dip heavily into savings to travel the states in the bus. 



# Birds

## Carolina Wren
I have so many Carolina wren stories it's hard to know where to start. 

If you're ever in the eastern woods and you hear a bird singing and you think *that's beautiful, what bird is that?* there's a good chance it's a Carolina wren. 

These little gregarious, brown, slightly hook-billed birds are champion singers and, insatiably curious. According to my kids we've had about ten birds come in the bus in five years of traveling.  Nine of them have been Carolina wrens[^1]. Several of them have ended up having to be rescued by hand.

<img src="images/2022/wreninhand.jpg" id="image-2792" class="picwide" />

Before that they used to come in our house in Athens from time to time. This one would sit on the corner of the roof singing every morning for years. 

<img src="images/2022/bird-feeder_2015-01-10_112302_01.jpg" id="image-2774" class="picwide" />

Well, it seemed like the same bird, but who knows. Birds do have individual songs, especially Carolina wrens, so if I had been paying attention I might know if it really was the same bird, but I didn't pay that much attention back then. Life before the road tended to run together, I lacked focus and attention. Which isn't to say the days don't sometimes run together on the road, or that I live in a state of constantly heightened awareness, just that there are more markers by which to measure on the timeline of our travels.

To tell the truth I didn't pay much attention to Carolina wrens until we started to travel. They were so ubiquitous I found them overwhelming. I've always thought of wrens as the more solitary creatures of the desert southwest, where canyon wrens are a familiar sound in the red rock country of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado. But they're a familiar sound you usually hear by itself, not a chorus like you get with the Carolina wrens.

It wasn't until they started flying in the bus that I really started pay attention to the Carolina wren. 

[^1]: Regardless of the actual number, only one has not been a wren, that much I know. It was a chickadee. For whatever reason, all these happened on the east coast. Perhaps western birds are more wild?

- tree swallow
- black capped chickadee
- cedar waxwing
- kingbird
- that hawk on the ground
- willet
- gold crowned kinglet
- blackthroated green warbler



## Quotes

Almost every article you'll ever find on attention will at some point repeat Simone Weil's statement that "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

"It seems to me that we all look at nature too much, and live with her too little." -Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

The average person spends 87% of their time indoors and another 6% in enclosed vehicles https://indoor.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/lbnl-47713.pdf



# Notes 
## rules

   1. Stop buying stuff you don't need
   2. Pay off all your credit cards
   3. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in your house/apartment (storage lockers, etc.)
   4. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit on the first floor of your house (attic, garage, etc.)
   5. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in one room of your house
   6. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in a suitcase
   7. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in a backpack
   8. Get rid of the backpack

## beauty

I used to think I traveled to learn about different cultures or broaden my perspective.

And those are certainly nice ancillary benefits to travel. But I’ve realized that the real reason that I travel is for the brief glimpses of beauty. Whether it’s playing soccer with kids on the beach in Mozambique or spotting my first Orca in New Zealand, my travels have provided me with these perfect moments that will hang in my memory forever. No price tag can be assigned to them, no photo can capture them – but those moments are waiting out there and every time I travel I seem to stumble into a few. That’s why I keep doing it. That’s why I’m in love with it.

http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/10-02/how-i-travel-steve-bramucci.html

## estuary time

In nature, an estuary is the wide mouth of a river into which the tides flow, an area where the fresh water of the river and the salt water of the sea mix together. “In an estuary,” Lopez observes, “nature creates a set of organisms which are not from one side or the other, but completely different. In the same way, people who live on the Tijuana border have this kind of estuarian time. It’s not a Mexican time. It’s not an American time. It’s a different time. 

from geography of time, robert levine p206 note: [[rn The Geography of Time]]

## Storms

The night I was born there was a huge storm. At least if my parents are to be believed. My mother still claims that the storm, and a broken window in her hospital room are the reason she can down with ppnemona the next day. All I know is that I have always loved storms, not just sitting and listening to them -- though I like that too -- but getting out in the them, or just before them, when the lightening is still a ways off, flashing the horizen and the dark thunderheads have obscured the light of day, the wind is starting to pick up, it's as if the world were waking up, finally coming alivve with something massive and important to say, you can literally feel it in the air, electricity and ozone are a potent mix, they smell something like freedome to me.

A good storm is my favorite time to get out in nature -- camping, hiking the high country or swimming in the ocean. I've been surfing as hurricanes approached, swam in Mexico while lighten struck the sea in front of me and I still love to be out on the shore when storms arrive. 

I've been thinking about storms. It's the time of year to do that here in the American South. More than stormms though, I've been thinking about what 


I'm not a huge fan of torrential downpours. Snow is fun for the first three days. Torandos are so far outside anything I've experienced they remain unfathomable to me. I've been through two relatively minor hurricanes and I'm not sure I'd enjoy the full frontal assault, but a good thunderstorm is beautiful thing.

It's one of the things I love about the American south. Nearly every afternoon in the summer you can count on some sort of storm. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it's just lightening and thunder off in the distance, but the sky nearly always delivers around here. Occassionally it over delivers and destroys the roof of your porch, but that's how life goes, you have to accept of bad with your good, it's inevitable. And hey, now we can grow full sun plants on the porch.


## recognize what is lost

To recognize that what has been lost is a part of what remains, however, still leaves questions of scale and character. How large an absence are we talking about? Where do we see it's effects? What is the complete inventory of the missing? The answers to these questions not only shape the way we measure the world around us, but also help reveal the character of nature itself--including human nature.

## manifesto:

walk
take the stairs
turn of the air conditioning
Light a fire in the fireplace
That which is old and useful has proven itself (like cast iron)
That which is very old may contain wisdom.
That which is very old may be utter bollocks.
everything you know is wrong. including this.
You are responsible for what you put into the world.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

Note: I have never designed a building, butchered a hog, comforted the dying or died gallantly


## Travel Cheaper
:travel:finance:
Ways to reduce travel spending:
    * better planning means more boondocking and less money on camping 
    * change of diet from mexico means less on food
        - no more sausage for breakfast
        - more tortillas, less bread for lunches
            + bread is special occassions
        - use oat/rice flour from bulk bins for pancakes
        - shop mexican markets, asian markets
        - go meatless twice a week
        - drop organic/grass fed, eat less of it
    * having propane fridge would mean less trips for ice, longer away from money spending opportunities
    * doing bucket laundry to get by, with full laundry once a month would do the same (again, fewer money spending opportunities)
    * no more lenses, amazon orders, ever.
    * use local libraries
    * have corrinne get meds down here.
    * start with forays into mexico, but gradually reverse—here becomes our home base with forays into the states
    
    * how much less? Don't know but I think we could do 
        - $1200/month groceries
        - $500/month camping (if we go over, better hole up and boondock)
        - $400/month gas (if we're headed over, better hole up)
        - $500/month repairs and incidentals
    * So at reliable $3000 a month we can get by pretty much anywhere
        - Need the ability to take a serious breakdown and keep going, what does that look like?
        - maybe $5000- $8000 savings for repairs

## Systems
:design:philosophy:
Complex systems are inherently fragile. The optimization that makes the system "easy" to use, also generally eliminates the redundancies and graceful degadation that makes a system resilient.
## Midlife
:philosophy:
I think there are two major tasks to be undertaken in the middle of your life, one is coming to terms with the reduced possibilities of the future, letting go of the ones you are sure aren't happening to focus on the one's that could still happen. I will never make the U.S Olympic rowing team and rather than have that missed goal rattling around somewhere in the back of my mind going, I have to address it. Rather than sitting around mumbling about how I could have been a contender I have to accept that no I could not, I tried and literally could not, and let that go so that other goals become more feasible.

The other major task in midlife is to recognize the cyclical nature of, well, nature.



## No Reason At All
:freedom:
"It's fun to do something for no reason at all because freedom is the foundation of all human delight... freedom of the will, the capacity to choose and act and attend for no other reason than that we happen to want to." 

## Margins

You learn to live your life on the margin, that strange zone between what is known and what is not. There are some answers here, but not many, and you have to make that place your home.

The margins are where you want to be though, this is where everything happens, it's where life is, where growth is. Go deep in the forest and everything gets soft and quiet, but come out to the edge and you'll find the berries and the birds and the deer and all the rest of life—inhabiting the margins. In ecology this is sometimes called a liminal zone. It's where life is in transition and biodiversity is greatest. It's where the action is and it's where you want to be.

I've learned that the future will get here at the same steady pace as it always does whether you worry about it or not. 

There's a third principle I'm still meditating on, but my suspicion is that the first principle of not changing the environment around you, extends well beyond you and your immediate environment to encompass, well, everything. The ripple effects of any action are significant and we spend very little time considering them, and this is troubling.

The less you alter the environment of you, the less you need to alter the environment of your home. The less you need alter the environment of your home, the less you need to alter your neighborhood, and so on. I suspect that this cascades in positive ways far beyond just turning off the air conditioning. At the same times, I suspect it cascades in negative ways as well, which is why I am still thinking on it.

I saw, and still see, living in the bus as a first step in a transition away from life as a "consumer". In the bus we consumed much less, that's good, but I've come to think that it's not good enough. I think I can (and should) go much farther than that. What that looks like is still taking shape, but one thing we all have right now is plenty of time to sit and think.


## Sustainable vs regenerative



sustainability is about keeping things as the are, regeneration is about making things better than they are.







## Close 

Y'all are going to be very close.

That's what an inspector said to me once when we were selling our house and I told him what we were doing after it sold. That comment stuck in my head the whole time we traveled because he was right. Spend twenty-four hours a day every day with someone and you will be close. And we are.




I want to be tested in ways I can't imagine and try to be ok no matter what happens.

I looked forward to disasters, I looked forward to having to get out of tough situations. 

Now, mind you, "ok" doesn't mean happy as a clam, totally unaffected, no bad feelings ever. On the contrary, it means letting go of the reigns, opening myself up to the unknown and trusting that I had the ability to see myself through it. That's basically welcoming a whole heap of tough stuff to happen to ya. And it has. And I'm ok. Heck, I'm more than ok. I'm better than before. This whole endeavor, from the word go, has done nothing but affirmed my suspicions that we are stronger and more malleable than we ever give ourselves credit for. And no matter what, we will adjust and find a way to be ok. ⁣

Cycles. Loops. Close them where you find them. For example, heres an energy loop: sun, plants, animals, waste, plants animals, waste. Find yourself in that. For example, the sun helps plants grow, hogs eat some of those plants, hog get slaughtered and made into bacon, I eat the bacon, I crap out the bacon into a composting toilet that eventually becomes soil for the plants that grow so the hogs can eat them... this is a minimally wasteful loop. I don't want to call it closed because there are variables (water, sunlight, not having a plague of locusts decend on your plants, etc), but it is robust on scale that swings from robust to totally batshit crazy, which would be the cycle that puts bacon in a package you buy from the store.

## Alt Medicine

A while back someone at work mentioned wanting to write about how there is little to no regulation in the realm of "alternative" medicine and its rife with scams. I volunteered to write a rebuttal, because I'm glad alternative medicine is not regulated. I did not elaborate and I forgot all about it until someone brought it up again, this time specifically asking why I was glad there were no regulations.

I will likely never write a rebuttal because for one thing it would be publishable as anything other than Op/Ed. I am not scientist by training and, lack credentials, not allowed into the debate on equal footing. 

I don't hold this against science as a method of inquire, but I do very much hold it against scientists, who have become a modern priesthood controlling public discourse, just as the Catholic church did through the middle ages, the high priests of Set did in ancient Egypt, and so on through any other culture you want to cite. 

There is always a priesthood setting the limits of acceptable discourse, what matters is how that priesthood (and the culture more broadly) handles dissent. How much room is there for discourse outside the acceptable? We're very fortunate to live in a culture where for the most part there are no limits placed on dissenters. I can write this, publish it where anyone can read it, and there are (currently) no consequences. I will not be burned at the stake, exiled or any number of horrible things visited on those with "unacceptable" ideas in various cultures throughout the ages. There is some risk of publishing these opinions and having them come back to haunt me at some point in the future of course, but ultimately all I am advocating for is that we continue to not punish, or censor people who hold opinions, beliefs, customs, what have you, that are considered unacceptable to the current priesthood.

## Present

How do I make this while still being present. Here. Right now. In this bus, on this night, feeling this feeling?

This turns out to be a very difficult problem to solve. 

Writing inherently pulls you out of the moment. It has to all reflective thinking is, well reflecting on something rather than something. So there's that. But I accept that. I've been writing for so long now I've long ago forgotten what it would be like not to always be compising things in my head. There may be some negative consequences to this habit, but for me, it was what it is and I am okay with it.

I am less okay with the performative aspects of creating things based your experiences. This enters a peculiar gray zone in which one must be very careful. For me, it is fine if the desire to write about something drives me to go to a place that I might not otherwise have gone to. For example I doubt I would ever have gone to tk, except I wanted to write about it. But wanting to write about it is a kind of wanting to go.

The danger lies in pulling yourself out of the experience of being there by performing for the imagined audience. I try to avoid this. It works for some people. Some people are able to think about getting a great image while still enjoying themselves. I am not. I have to lose myself in those moments or whatever I try to produce from them suffers. 

Which is to say I almost universally miss the great shot because I am too busy watching whatever it might be unfold. 


Things need edges, edges are a kind of contract with things. The book ends when you close it. Begins when you open it. In between there is no contract. Or not much of one?

I think we have our edges wrong. Things that should have softer, indistinct edges, like our homes, have hard edges that divide us from the world. Things that should have hard, distinct edges, like tools for communicating, have no edge at all, the loops are always running, never closing off.

Adding edges to the loops closes them.

----

Solutions I have seen work, and that I am experiementing with: 

All communication happens in loops, you say something, there is a response, you respond to that response and so on. This is the communication loop. How long is the loop? I find that the longer the loop is, the better the thing I am able to produce. So where instagram has loops measured in minutes, maybe hours, maybe at the most days, I find that loop overwhelming and short. The most I can do there is put something out, I can't and don't partake in the loops there.

A website I control is an infinite loop potentially. Or rather I have to create the loops, I have to set the pace. And I generally do not do well at that.



Consolidate data on a schedule, publish one thing on a schedule.


## Step Back, Detach, Ask Better Questions
The consumer education system has conditioned you to think in terms of products, you need to step back in ask bigger questions to find more interesting and sustainable answers. For example, the question, *should I buy this camera?* has no good answer without first asking *how to I create photos that make me happy?* It may be that some particular camera really does help in that quest, but more likely, it doesn't. More likely what you need to learn is technique and acquire skills like composition and reading light.


##From Ben Falk's book:

•	104 nuclear reactors in 31 states, operated by 30 different companies. Every single one “temporarily” storing high-level waste that will be lethal for 10,000 to 24,000 years

•	40,000 to 80,000 (exact number unknown) chemical factories producing or processing materials with multiple “compounds known to be carcinogenic and/or mutagenic”

•	More than 40 weapons-testing facilities and 70,000 nuclear bombs and missiles

•	104,000,000 cubic meters of high-level radioactive waste from weapons-testing activities alone

•	925 operating uranium mines

•	20 to 30 times the average historical background rates of mercury in rain

•	2,200 square miles of excavated valleys and leveled mountains in Appalachia alone

•	478,562 active natural gas mines in the United States in 2008, with 1,800 expected to be drilled in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania alone in 2010

•	18,433,779,281 cubic feet of trash per year, or 100,000 acres of trash one-foot deep per year, or about 250 square miles, with trash 400 feet deep



## Novelty and place

It's one Barry Lopez spends some time on in *Artic Dreams*, noting that for natives of the Arctic Circle, "land does... what architecture sometimes does for us. It provides a sense of place, of scale, of history." Architecture has never done much for me, but I've been known to try constructing a cathedral of words to describe simple things, the way a blade of grass bends in the wind.

Lopez's thought jumped out at me because I catch myself telling stories the wrong way these days. More and more I notice how much of the stories I tell are not what happened, but where it happened. I have developed a need to locate the past in space as well as time. I have to watch out for this because I've noticed many people find it annoying. I can watch their minds wander as I talk. I lose 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. All that grass doesn't matter, that one part where it's novel, that one part where there are no shadows when there should be shadows. That's a lion. Novelty is bad in that sense. 

Now the evolutionary threat is largely gone though novelty becomes useful. It a grindstone sharpening your experience of place until it comes to the foreground. You notice what was not there yesterday. It's not a lion anymore, but still you notice.

## Maps

“Some for one purpose and some for another liketh, loveth, getteth, and useth Mappes, Chartes, & Geographicall Globes.”—John Dee, 

source: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2019/oct/20/the-perfect-combination-of-art-and-science-mourning-the-end-of-paper-maps


## Immersing yourself

In his book, <cite>Written in the West</cite> Wim Wenders talks about improving photography by completely immersing yourself in what you see, "no longer needing to interpret, just looking." I find that it's not just photography that can be enhanced this way, but all of life. All you need to do is let go and look. Let go of any agenda and just walk (or sit) and watch the world around you. The world is endlessly fascinating. Even the parts you don't like, like Texas. Step back from the  things you want, the things you think you need, the things you think you should do, and a new range of possibilities opens up. 

## travel with kids

"As with any thing, the needs of small people are different, and the same, as big people.  They thrive on novelty, on the right amount of ease and challenge, and struggle with boredom.  They find it hard to regulate when hungry or tired.  These needs are simply scaled down.  Adults, especially adults who have been around a bit, like to see what is between two mountains by viewing it from all sides.  Little people and their minds are content with seeing the two mountains via their emissaries, the little rocks which have fallen off into the valley in between.  Little people almost do well getting outside and having an adventure, again, today, but once things proceed much beyond a few miles the wants of the little become subservient to those of the big.

Which reminds us that adventure, especially in the internet age, is always found in the mind anyway.  There is nothing more adventurous than trying, really trying, the impossible task of understanding another person.  Is this task more weighty with progeny than with a spouse?  Your answer tells everything.

Understanding the two of them at home is simply easier, if by easier I mostly mean more predictable.  With answers readily accessible.  Beyond that, after deciding have we the adults sufficient energy, sufficient motivation, sufficient bravery to take everyone and everything important out into the woods this weekend, it becomes a question of matching big person ambition and rules to little person energy. " - https://bedrockandparadox.com/2019/08/31/the-veneration-of-lameness/ 

## Universal Druid Prayer 

It appears in several forms; the one most often used in AODA runs like this: 

Grant, O Holy Ones, thy protection
And in protection, strength;
And in strength, understanding;
And in understanding, knowledge;
And in knowledge, the knowledge of justice:
And in the knowledge of justice, the love of it;
And in that love, the love of all existences;
And in the love of all existences, the love of Earth our mother and all goodness.

And yes, it's a good intro to any sort of communion with the deities.

## difference between in the streets and closed door cultures

> Go to Africa, Latin America, the backwoods of China, SE Asia … it’s easy to make friends: all you need to do is walk down the street with your head up. These are “in the streets” cultures. Europe, on the other hand, is a “closed door” culture. That doesn’t mean that people are not nice. It’s just that they don’t have the social avenues that allow for on the fly engagements with people they don’t know. Talk with someone there and they ask the question, “What does this guy want? Why is he talking to me?” Start talking with someone you don’t know in Haiti and it’s just something normal and ordinary — everybody is talking with everybody anyway. -Wade Shepard


## Octavio Paz quote

> Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the maze of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed. <cite>&ndash;Octavio Paz</cite>

## Stopping travel

Full time travelers who stop traveling, regardless of how long or why, tend to feel like we've failed somehow. Which is silly, but I'm no exception. I feel it anyway. I have been feeling it lately. 

I like living on the road for two main reasons. One, we spend more time outside. There is nothing so valuable as spending all day outside. Two, it satisfies a pretty basic curiosity: what does it look like around that bend? What is the view like from the other side of the hill? What does the river sound like down in that valley? What is like to wake up in middle of the desert? How does it feel to fall asleep in the sand listening to the sea? How does it feel sitting in the shade of a sandstone overhang where someone else sat thousands of years ago? What's the scent of an aspen forest in a downpour? How does the sandstone feel on your fingertips after the thunderstorms pass? 

So to answer that question everyone keeps asking me: yes I miss living in the bus. And to answer the follow up question, yes, we're going to get back to that eventually. At the moment we're in San Miguel.


We were going to spend the winter down here, stay warm, improve our Spanish a bit and go back to the bus when it warmed up a little. Then we were going to spend spring traveling the southwest desert, see some areas of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah that we hadn't seen yet, and then head up to Wyoming, Idaho and Montana when it got hot, and spend summer at higher, cooler elevations. Good plan right? Well.

When we parked the bus last year we knew that before it went much further it was going to need some work. Significant, time and money-eating work. To get to the places we want to get, we need more power and less worry. The only way I've come up with to get to that point is to either drop in a bigger engine, a 440 or the like, or rebuild the 318 to get better compression, which means boring out the engine, new pistons, maybe new manifolds, probably a new transmission and quite a few other things that are not cheap. It's all doable, but it takes time and money. There's also the possibility we could move to a different rig[^1], but that again is time and money. 

Time and money we don't have right now. 

I think now that true sweetness can only happen in limbo. I don't know why. Is it because we are so unsure, so tantative and waiting? Like it needs that much room, that much space to expand. The not knowing anything really, the hoping, the aching transience. This is not real, not really, and so we let it alone, let it unfold lightely. Those times that can fly. That's the way it seems now looking back. 

[^1]: I have never liked driving with a trailer, but it probably makes more sense for the way we travel. We like to set up camp and then spend a few weeks roaming an area. Certain things about trailers make them better for this, like the ability to haul out your black water and go fetch fresh water without breaking camp. The other marked advantage of the trailer and tow vehicle is that when you do need a mechanic's help, you don't lose your house. But pretty sure my family would abandon me if I tried to sell the bus.


## Bird watching as a way to get out


"Looking for birds, in this case, means seeing the private gardens of the brightly-colored houses in a small mountain town, with their fiery pink and orange blossoms, their mango and papaya trees, and their tangled blooming vines. Birding gets you to places you can’t otherwise go, or never thought to see. It gives you access to new foods and flavors. For example, birding gives you unparalleled access to taste rare fruits and other micro-local foods." - https://www.notesfromtheroad.com/neotropics/tapir-valley.html



I don't want you to be like me. I want you to figure out who you are, how to think your own thoughts and maybe, if you're lucky, figure out what you're supposed to be doing. One of the easiest ways to get the kind of perspective you need to figure these things out is to travel, particularly outside your own  culture

## Failure of materialism

I have become increasingly dissastified with the scientific materialist view of the world. I don't disagree with it, I just don't think it's the whole story. Which is to say that science provides a wonderful toolkit for exploring one of the worlds we live in, but it's a terrible toolkit for exploring the other worlds we live in. Now you could say, but we don't live in other worlds. But you're wrong. Imagine for a moment your favorite place, the warm sand of a beach, the wind through the pines on a ridge of mountains, the still heat of an afternoon in the desert, what have you. See it clearly in your mind. Hear it, the waves crashing the shore, the wind in the pines, the crunch of shoes as you walk through the gravel of the desert. Smell the salt, the pines, the sagebrush. Make it real in your mind.

What world is that? It's not the world scientific materialism describes. Add a unicorn to your favorite place. See, easy. Easy because it's a different world. It's the world of imagination. There are other worlds too. Depending on which tradition of thought you find best describes your experience there might be three worlds, or five, for ten. The model that's always made the most sense to me happens to have five world, but it's just a model. 

Borges said the map is not the territory, and, while that's true, it should bear some scaled down resemblance to the territory otherwise it's not going to make a very helpful guide to the territory.



## On Writing

What I love most about writing is the thinking that happens first, it frees your mind from itself, it gives your mind something to turn over and over, it becomes like an old friends. You look at it this way, you look at it that way, you try to figure out why it's there. For a long time it's just there. It's there when I'm putting the coffee in the moka, it's there when I stand in the shower, feeling the water on my back, it's there when I walk up the hill, threading my way around concrete telephone polls and women selling nopales and tortillas. 

And then some part of it, suddenly you know why it's there, you know where it leads, you know what that bit is going to do and you move on to the next part. 

Some times unfortunately it can take years to figure things out, which makes it hard to feed a family writing. I have done it, but I have done it by writing terrible, terrible things. Book summaries for something like Cliff's Notes, which would have been a find job if it had paid more than $.03 a word, to blog posts for people trying to get people sliding down some slimy mailing list funnel. It was all unpleasant work, but in some ways it made me a better writer. Not at craft, but at volume. If you want to feed your family using words, plan to use a lot of them. One month I wrote 80,000 words. I averaged 60,000 for an entire year and nearly starved to death.

You have to love to write, and you have to have the disciple to write even what you don't love. If I were you, I would get a job. If anyone had hired me, I would taken a job, but no one ever did. So I kept writing.

## Work

"Well, it depends on how much you love your work. 

After all, we’re really dealing with two separate things: 

The purpose of work is to create. It is to fuel your soul.

Whereas the purpose of earning money is to have enough of the stuff. How much is enough? Whatever you need to max out your happiness potential. After that, more money will not make you any happier."—MMM


Greek Proverb which says, “A society grows great when the old people plant trees, even when they know they will never get to enjoy their shade.”


## An Invitation


In 1993 I headed off to college to a quiet little town called Redlands, CA, which had a college of the same name. It was at the base of the mountains and edge of the desert. At the time all I wanted to do was spend as much time hiking, climbing and skiing as I could. Redlands was a good base camp for all that. It was also one of a handful of colleges around the country that allowed you to write your own major. I originally went because I planned to write a major that was half studying photography and half writing about nature. Basically this was when I concieved luxagraf, I just had to wait ten years for the technology that would make it possible to become widespread.

Before I dropped out of Redlands, which I did after two semesters, my advisor mentored my first class in my self- written  major, which was a kind of Nature Writing 101, reading and reacting to authors I'd mostly already read and reacted to, all the usual American suspects, Thoreau, Abbey, Dillard, Lopez, Stegner, and so on. My professor was more knowledgable about this area than me though and he threw a few authors I did not know on the list. The one that's relevant now is one that remains largely overlooked by the canon of American nature writing, Mary Hunter Austin.

Austin traveled and lived in the Mojave desert for 17 years, studying native life, as well as spanish-american immigrant life in the region and writing defenses of both long before anyone else. But she is probably best known for a book called <cite>The Land of Little Rain</cite>, her <cite>Walden<cite> with the Mojave desert playing the role of Thoreau's pond. 

It's a good book, one that made me appreciate the Mojave much more than I did at the time. Since I lived in Redlands, not far from the Mojave, I was able to go out and explore quite a bit of what she wrote about. Recently, in searching for new books for the kids I discovered that Austin also wrote a children's book, called simply <cite>The Trail Book</cite>. Imagine Night in the Museum, but with Native American tales and you've got the idea. Finding this sent me off searching for more Austin, and somewhere in the early hours of the morning, bleery-eyed and half asleep at the keyboard, I ran across a digital copy of a collection of Austin's short stories called <cite> Lost Borders</cite>. What caught my eye was the dedication, "to Marion Burke and the Friends of a Long Year." 

Who were the friends of a long year? What were the friends of a long year? When were the friends of a long year? It's hard to tell from the typesetting if Austin capitalized Friends of a Long Year or not, but I like to think she did, I like to think it was some kind of club. I did a little research before I dragged myself to bed and dreamed of a the friends of a long year.



## Hard Times


It was a hard time. My wife took a job teaching English to Chinese five year old. It was a degrading business for someone with a master's in education, dancing like a monkey (I mean that literally) for tech companies whose "training materials" had more typos than a teenager's messaging logs. It was a dark time, but one you have to put somewhere else so your children don't realize how thin the line between having food and not can be because that's stress you try to keep your children from, even if you ultimately can't. Better your child be hungry than be hungry and have to wrestle with why. There's a surface level of why, the obvious, the because we have no job, that's easy enough to explain and we did, what's harder is to look the whole system in the eye and consider it, this thing humans have built where in fact there needs be nothing of the sort. Why force people to earn paper tickets, really electronic tickets these days, not even real tickets, that can be exchanged for food, shelter, etc. Why allow such a small number of humans to own all the land? Why allow anyone to own the land at all? These are much harder questions for children to face, for anyone to face. The rest of us have time and effort already invested in ignoring these questions, in pretending that the way things are is the only way they could be, that we don't have to face them the way children do, we simply look the other way and hang our heads and dance like monkeys for the foriegn kids and collect our digital tickets and buy food for our children, or try anyway.

The stupid thing is we know this isn't the only way. The status quo only seems inevitable if it's all you know and we, creators of a culture that is obsessed with past cultures, know for absolute surety that there are other ways. Pretty much any tribal society for instance—which is a huge negative value judgment in that phrase that I'll be coming back to --




## Meditation

Like many people who practice meditation, it has been transformative for me. I don't talk about it much because who the hell wants to hear their friends talk about how meditation has been transformative? Even I don't want to hear that. But I'll put it here for total strangers on the internet. Weird. But anyway.

I have experimented with many different forms of meditation, Vipassanna, mindfulness, zazen, transcendental, and others, but the one that actually did something for me, and which I continue to practice today, is discursive meditation. This is different than the mind-emptying meditation popular in the west just now. It's not mind-emptying, but rather focused, purposeful thinking (usually the full systems of thought from which the mind-emptying meditation techniques have been lifted have this sort of meditation as well, often under the name "contemplation" or similar).

Discursive meditation does not require anything, but a comfortable place to sit, which might be part of the reason it's not very popular in this gear-obsessed age. A nice wooden chair works well for sitting, but anywhere you can get comfortable and relaxed works. I live in RV and don't have a nice wooden chair, so I can tell you with some authority that you need nothing more than a comfortable place to sit. No expensive retreats, no fancy buckwheat-filled pillow cushions, no special pants. Just sit down, breathe and call up whatever image or theme you're meditating on.

What you meditate on varies by tradition and person. I recommend using some form of established tradition in the beginning, this will give you a place to turn when unexpected things happen. And they will. Eventually. The tradition I follow is that of hermeticism, which includes spiritual, ritual and other components as well, but discursive meditation was once [a big part of Catholicism](), and [druids](http://aoda.org/publications/articles-on-druidry/discursivemeditation/) practice it as well, which should give some idea of the range of appeal.

The ability to think deeply and purposefully is one of those skills that, once you have it, you'll wonder how you ever got by without it.


## family in mexico


I've never lived in a culture that was so hard working an so devoted to family. These are things that I grew up hearing people talk about—hard work and family—but I've never actually seen it like I see it here. Which is not meant to denigrate people in other places, hard work is not a zero sum game, but here work and life flow together with no real strong boundaries like you'd find in the States, for example.

My favorite example of this is bus drivers. In the United States if you drive a bus, you wear a uniform and, aside from your face and body shape, you are largely indistinguishable from whomever is driving the next bus. Chances are, when you get off you park the bus and go home. It's not in any meaningful way, your bus or even your work, you are by design an meaningless cog in a profit wheel where most of the profits go to someone other than you. I could make a good case that this is an awful way to live, severely limits your humanity, leads to depression and dissatisfaction with your work and life, and is one of the more profound and overwhelming problems in American culture, but we won't get into that here.

Instead consider the Mexican bus driver. His bus is his bus. Her bus is her bus. The dashboard is given over to shrines of La Virgen de Guadalupe, or whomever their patron saint might be, along with photos of family, friends, wives, children, what have you. Usually there's a crucifix and some pithy quotes about god, country and most importantly, family. Mi familia, Mi Trabajo, Mi Vida, was one I saw. I don't know where the buses get parked at night, but I do know that the next day the same person is driving the same bus. Mi familia, Mi Trabajo, Mi Vida. 

For me this helps to make sense of 





## doing nothing

I'm not going to pretend to know what Wallace Stevens was referring to by the Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is, but it has always reminded me of the fact that there are myriad complex worlds around us to which we are wholly ignorant. Not because we don't pay attention, though that may be part of it, but because we can't pay attention. There are vast existences too small to see with the naked eye. Ponds full of pond scum that have their own version of stressful jobs, political and social situations, and whatnot just as we do. They're just having it all on a very different scale, from us and happen to use chemicals instead of words to communicate. 

For all you know that puddle you didn't even notice on your way into work this morning is home to a population of microbes undergoing an extremely stressful existence which they would desperately like to escape just as much as you would desperately like to escape your cubicle. 

By the same token, the nothing that is has also always reminded me that it's entirely possible, likely even I would argue, that there are some beings out there to which our existence is about the same as the pond scum. Not insignificant or unimportant, just too small to really pay any kind of meaningful attention to. After all, pretty much everyone and everything has its own set of problems to worry about.


Staring at nothing isn't doing nothing. It so happens that watching the world in silence isn't something our culture considers valuable and so you and I have been trained to casually dismiss it as "doing nothing". But the more I've done it, the more I realized that sitting, "doing nothing" is actually, possibly, the secret of the world so to speak. Whatever it may be, I can say from experience that it's incredibly valuable to me now and has helped me grow by leaps and bounds as a person.

I also think it offers a practical, easy way out of many of the social messes we've created for ourselves.

There's a lot of windbags out there criticizing the internet, especially social media, for fostering narcissism, consumer culture, intellectual bullying, and whatever other social ill gets their particular goat as it were. But it's rare that said windbags have any good ideas on how we can counteracting these forces beyond turning off the TV and internet. 

To be fair, that does work. Especially turning off the TV. Few things will improve your life so dramatically as throwing your TV out the highest window you can find (making sure there's no one below). 

The internet though is more neutral in my view. It can be good, it can be bad, it all depends on you and how you use it. In my case I have to use it, it's how I make money to live this way. And sure I can say oh I'm only going to look up whatever technical thing I need to look up to solve a particular problem, but that ideal is very different from the messy relaity that the internet is full of interesting stuff to stare at. 

\l

Observing nature is not nothing. 

Which is to say all the things we as a culture don't want to talk about right now.

You and I find ourselves born into a declining culture. A culture that is what Spengler would call the end of an abstraction phase that will soon start swinging toward 


is a bit more complex than that. If you want to still use social media, try first developing humility. One easy way to do that is to create an active practice cultivating humility, for example, pending time in quiet observance of nature. Spend some time realizing that most of life care not at all what humans think, say or do, is helpful in 

seems like it would require an active practice.

## quotes borrowed

“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” –William Arthur Ward

people have been talking to gods and demons for far more of human history than they have not. - Terrance McKenna http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/mckenna_terence/mckenna_terence_tryptamines_consciousness.shtml

Because if you don’t build your dream, someone will hire you to help build theirs. https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/1b7dfe34fced

In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates. -- Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, 1967

“It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.” -Steve Jobs (quoted in Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, 1987)

The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate. -- O. Henry

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." T. Roosevelt

“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” -- David Foster Wallace

"The wilderness should be preserved for political reasons. We may need it someday not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism, but also as a refuge from authoritarian government, political oppression" -- Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity, and am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune have not one place to hit me - Sir Thomas Browne Religio Medici

"You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough." --William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

But as we struggle through this crisis of legitimacy, what is left over when the abstractions start to wear thin? When I decide I don’t want to become an opiate addict and need to find something else? What about when it’s more serious than just a headache – what if it turns out to be cancer, and I don’t want to follow the standard ‘cut, poison, burn’ protocol? For me, it sometimes feels like there’s only a smoking crater where my brain should be. My mind often feels like it’s just a collection of Other People’s opinions and regurgitated sound bites. Even if I do try to pay attention to my own experiences, what I am able to perceive is limited by my analysis of the information coming in to my brain, which is itself conditioned by the habits of thought I learned from other people and my society. I filter out the information to which I am exposed. So there really is no objective truth out there! -https://www.ecosophia.net/the-truths-we-have-in-common/#comment-17128

It’s when you realize that most of your opinions and ideas belong to other people that you can begin the central work of an age of reflection — the work of learning how to think your own thoughts, and assess other people’s opinions and ideas and your own with a set of critical tools that don’t depend on checking their fit to some collectively approved set of abstract generalizations. JMG

palm fronds, whirls, fans, crisp browned tips, peeling trunks as if the whole tree were some giant alien flower, other with trunks smooth and stalk straight leading up to bunches of fronds that look like pineapples on stilts. The can be so absolutely still when the ind doesn't blow.. The slash pine mixed in, it too has a very stright trunk, shedding its lower branches as it grows so that the long, delicate needles grow in tuffs and clumps of needle fans near the top of the tree. Here and there an oak, never a big one in the palm-dominated areas, but vaguely sickly looking oaks scratching out an existence in this sandy soil.

Twilight is soft yellow that gradually fades up to a cool white that gets cooler and cooler blow as it climbs up the sky until it reachs the rich coblant I see up through the faint waiving of pine tops in the wind, the deep rich blue of twilight, the spirit who guides the stars into the night. The sand looks gray and soft when the sun is gone, the coean grows dark and seems to settle it's restlessness a bit as the light disappears.


Moo Krob Nam Ma Prow

having grown up in mid-twentieth century suburbia — and then escaped! — I have a very low tolerance for the kind of boring world that comes from excess conformity and obedience to authorities. As for ways to sort through the abstractions — ah, we’ll be getting to those. - ecosophia, greer


> In a home I need walls, roof, windows, and a door that can be opened and closed. I also need a place to cook, a place to eat, a place to sleep, a place for a guest, and a place to write. More space is not better... more space attracts more stuff which eventually means less space. 

> Some things make life easier, but more things do not make life more easy. More things mean more things that can break down and more time spent fixing or replacing them. 

> Comfort is freedom and independence. Comfort is having the sweat glands and metabolic tolerance to deal with heat and cold. It is not central heating or air conditioning which may fail or be unavailable. It is not plushy seats but a healthy back. Luxury is not expensive things. It is a healthy and capable body that moves with ease with no restraints because something is too heavy, too far, too hard, or too much. It is a content and capable mind that can think critically, solve problems, and form opinions of its own.

> Success is having everything you need and doing everything you want. It is not doing everything you need to have everything you want. If so then you do not own your things, instead your things own you. I do not need to own a particular kind of vehicle. I need to go from A to B. I do not need fancy steak dinners, rare ingredients, or someone else to prepare my meals whether it is a pizza parlor, a chef, or an industrial food preprocessor. I need food to live. Food to fuel my body and brain. Luxury is not eating at 5 five star restaurants. Luxury is being able to appreciate any food. Comfort is eating the right kind and the right amount of food. Not whatever I want. Eating and moving right prevents diseases, pains, and lack of functionality. I am what I eat and I look what I do. Everybody is. It is the physiological equivalent of integrity. To say what I mean and mean what I say. This too makes life more comfortable. Money is opportunity. Opportunity is power. Power is freedom. And freedom means responsibility. Without responsibility, eventually there is no freedom, no power, no opportunities, and no money. More importantly, freedom is more than power. Power is more than opportunity. Opportunity is more than money. And money is more than something that just buys stuff. It is simple to understand but hard to remember, but do remember this if nothing else.

http://earlyretirementextreme.com/manifesto.html

The Labyrinth of Solitude
Juana Inés de la Cruz. Her superb book "Poems, Protest, and a Dream"
Mariano Azuela's "The Underdogs"
## Podcasts

podcasts are great because you can do other things while you listen right? Like you can be doing the dishes or gardening or working on your car and listening to a podcast and that's like giving you that time that you would have spent in a book or video and now you can spend it doing two things. Now is that divided attention as good as the focused attention? probably not. so for me, I tend to combine two low lift things. I listen to a podcast on tk when I'm doing the dishes but something that requires a good bit of focus I might save for a drive. But either way this opens up a way to kind of double time your life. You want to learn about something new, but you need to weed the garden right? Well, now you can.

## Monohull must haves
Here are *my* must haves for a monohul, if you want to live aboard for extended stays:

Head and galley right down at the companionway.
You don’t want to go halfway through the boat, let alone pass through cabins to reach their ensuite head, with dripping wet oilies in a heavy seaway. It has to be right at the bottom of the stairs.

If you like to eat in the cockpit, it’s very nice to be able to pass food directly from the galley without walking around with it.
Also, the area in front of the companionway is usually the most stable one of the boat. Best for cooking at sea.

A separate shower stall.
Usually we like to wash from the stern but when anchorages are crowded or the weather is a little cooler it’s very nice to be able to wash inside without splashing all over the head and the sink.

Seats 4 at the indoor table without having to unfold table leaves or hampering mobility inside.

All lines, especially reefing, lead aft to the cockpit so you can do the heavy weather sailing without ever leaving the cockpit.

Walk through transom to facilitate boarding from the dinghy with your hands full of groceries. Also the nicest way to take a swim, or for washing yourself as mentioned above.

One of the smallest boats corresponding to the above whilst sporting 3 cabins, is the Beneteau Oceanis 361 that I’ve owned and loved very much. Crossed the Atlantic twice with it. You may want a Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 40 from around 1999 (the 3 cabin - 1 head layout) for a bit more payload and space in the forward cabin and twin cockpit wheels that facilitate mobility to and from the walk through transom. Otherwise a very similar boat. These are two ‘budget’ options, which seem to be the prudent choice given the description of your means. Better spend far less on the initial acquisition cost than you think you can afford. 

### Forward Wind Scoop 

Forward wind scoop: a bit of triangular canvas strung over a forward hatch between two scasions, sloping down to the deck as you move aft with a tension line to the rigging above to keep it taunt. Doubles as forward windshade and forces air down into the hatch to keep below decks cool. Keeps the air moving through. Saw this on Allied Seawind 30 on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRHskbdRFFs
## CC

When I first saw you I was just trying to get a cup of coffee. But then I decided I'd rather have you. 
That proved more difficult that I thought. Once You sat in my lap once at Jason and Christy's house
but I was pretty sure you were dating someone else and I was positive I was so that didn't go far
but I found I rather enjoyed you in my lap. Another time we went to prom and you made out with me
I know I was dating someone else then too but I didn't care. For years I made you many a spinach salad with salmon on it,
even when you were eating with someone else. Then you became a picture on my refrigerator for 3 years. 

Once when I try to meet up with you you ditched me. Then you decided to marry someone else I went traveling the world for years 
I didn't think about you very much for a while, but when I got back I met you again at Nancy's house
I spilled Sangria on your dog but still you said it could be okay for me
to visit you in Charleston. We ate lots of seafood without going far
We went skinny dipping in your pool, in hindsight I'm surprised you did it.
the first night was a little rough, I had to fight the dog, she didn't want me, she wanted you.

And then I considered once what I would do without and found I could not imagine life without you.
As Donne wrote, "All joys are thanks to you" and somehow I convinced you of it
I might redo them now, those standard vows we read, or listen to out back of our house
If I could do it over I'd tell you I'll love you forever, forever ever, years,
even beyond death, for I've walked many of the happy roads that take you round the world and far
away and have found them good, so long as you are with me.


---


From "Valentine" by John Fuller

The things about you I appreciate
May seem indelicate:
I'd like to find you in the shower
And chase the soap for half an hour.
I'd like to have you in my power
And see your eyes dilate.
I'd like to have your back to scour
And other parts to lubricate.

I'd like to find a good excuse
To call on you and find you in.
I'd like to put my hand beneath your chin,
And see you grin.
I'd like to taste your Charlotte Russe,
I'd like to feel my lips upon your skin
I'd like to make you reproduce.

I'd like you in my confidence.
I'd like to be your second look.
I'd like to let you try the French Defence
And mate you with my rook.
I'd like to be your preference
And hence
I'd like to be around when you unhook.
I'd like to be your only audience,
The final name in your appointment book,
Your future tense.

---


Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

# Pages
## Technology

The less technology your life requires the better your life will be. 

That's not to say technology is bad, but I encourage you to spend some time considering your technology use and making sure you *choose* the things you use rather than accepting everything marketed at you. 

This is not my idea. I stole it from the Amish. The Amish have a reputation for being anti-technology, but they're not. Try searching for "Amish compressed air tool conversion" if you don't believe me. The Amish don't rush out and get the latest and greatest, that much is true. They take their time adopting any new technology. They step back, detach, and evaluate new technology in a way the rest of us seldom do—they're arguably more engaged with technology than you and I -- and this allows them to make better informed decisions.

That's what I try to do. I take my time. There's very little latest and greatest on this page. And I am always trying to get by with less, if for no other reason than this stuff costs money. There's no affiliate links here, no links at all actually. I'd really prefer it if you didn't buy any of this stuff, you probably don't need it. Again, I could get by with less. I should get by with less. I am in fact always striving to need less and be less particular about what I do need.

Still, for better or worse. Here are the main tools I use in building this site and living on the road.

## Writing

### Notebook and Pen, Pencil and Paper

My primary "device" is my notebook. I don't have a fancy notebook. I do have several notebooks though. One is in my pocket at all times and is filled with illegible scribbles that I attempt to decipher later. This one I mainly write in pencil, and I stick post-it notes into the actual notebook so that I can then move the post-it notes to the larger notebook where I write them in pen. This larger notebook is a mix of notes, as well as a sort of captain's log, though I don't write in with the kind regularity real captains do. Or that I imagine captains do. Then I have other notebooks for specific purposes, meditation journal, fiction notebook, and so on.

I'm not all that picky about notebooks, if they have paper in them I'm happy enough. I used to be very picky about pens, but then I sat down and forced myself to use basic cheap, black ink, Bic-style ballpoint pens until they no longer irritated me. And you know what? Now I love them, and that's all I use—any ballpoint pen. Ballpoint because it runs less when it gets wet, which, given how I live, tends to happen. Pencils are a more recent development for me. I adopted the Pentel P209 with .9mm lead because someone on the internet said the led didn't break. This has proved true, so I've stick with it.

### Laptop

I recently retired my trusty Lenovo x270. I still love it, but it just wasn't up to editing video. I ended up getting an HP Dev One, which I generally like, though the screen is a little glare-prone. This computer is probably overkill for me, and it costs $1,000, but I use it for work so it ends up paying for itself that way.

The laptop runs Linux because everything else sucks a lot more than Linux. Which isn't too say that I love Linux, it could use some work too. But it sucks a whole lot less than the rest. I run Arch Linux, which I have [written about elsewhere](/src/why-i-switched-arch-linux). I was also interviewed on the site [Linux Rig](https://linuxrig.com/2018/11/28/the-linux-setup-scott-gilbertson-writer/), which has some more details on how and why I use Linux.

## Photos

### Camera

I use a Sony A7Rii. It's a full frame mirrorless camera which makes it easy to use the legacy lenses I love. I bought the A7Rii specifically because it was well suited to using with the old lenses that I love. Without the old lenses I find the Sony's output to be a little digital for my tastes,

The A7 series are not cheap cameras. If you want to travel you'd be better off getting something cheaper and using your money to travel. The Sony a6000 is very nearly as good and costs much less. In fact, having tested dozens of cameras for Wired over the years I can say with some authority that the a6000 is the best value for money on the market period, but doubly so if you want at cheap way to test out some older lenses.

### Lenses

All of my lenses are old and manual focus, which I prefer to autofocus lenses. I am not a sports or wildlife photographer so I have no real need for autofocus. Neither autofocus nor perfect edge to edge sharpness are things I want in a lens. I want, for lack of a better word, *character*. I want a lens that reliable produces what I see in my mind.

One fringe benefit of honing your manual focus skills[^1] is that you open a door to world filled with amazing cheap lenses. I have shot Canon, Minolta, Olympus, Nikon, Zeiss, Hexanon, Tokina, and several weird Russian Zeiss clones. 

These days I have whittled my collection down to these lenses:

* Minolta 50mm f/2
* Minolta 55mm f/1.7
* Minolta 100mm f/1.7
* Olympus 50mm f/1.8
* Olympus 100mm f/2.8
* Pentax 35 f/3.5
* Pentax 20 f/4

Yes, that's a lot of lenses. I used to keep the Minolta 50 f/2 on there about 90 percent of the time, but these days I actually shoot with all of these pretty regularly. None of these lenses are over $200.

I also have a Tokina 100-300mm f/4 which happens to be Minolta mount so I use a Minolta 2X teleconverter with it to make it a 200-600mm lens. It's pretty soft at the edges. That's a nice way of saying it's utter garbage at the corners, but since I mostly use if for wildlife, which I tend to crop anyway, I get by. I also have a crazy Russian fisheye thing that's hilarious bad at anything less than f/11, but it's useful for shooting in small spaces, like the inside of the bus.

## Video

In addition to the photo gear above, which I also use for video, I have GoPro Hero 10. I mostly use it while driving the bus and have yet to actually make a movie out of any of the footage I shoot. But it piles up on my hard drive and I keep telling myself, one of these days.

## Audio

I like to record ambient sound. I use an Olympus LS-10 recorder, which has the lowest noise floor I can afford (it was $100 on eBay). I use a couple of microphones I made myself and occasionally a wireless Rode mic.

---

And there you have it. I am always looking for ways to get by with less, but after years of getting rid of stuff, I think I have reached something close to ideal.

[^1]: If you've never shot without autofocus don't try it on a modern lens. Most modern focusing rings are garbage because they're not meant to be used. Some Fujifilm lenses are an exception to that rule, but by and large don't do it. Get an old lens, something under $50, and teach yourself [zone focusing](https://www.ilfordphoto.com/zone-focusing/), use the [Ultimate Exposure Computer](http://www.fredparker.com/ultexp1.htm) to learn exposure, and just practice, practice, practice. Practice relentlessly and eventually you'll get there.

## Code

Driving gives you plenty of time to think. Somewhere in that thinking I decided I needed to clarify my basic approach to life. To know what I was doing and why. I hesitate to call these rules because it's not like I know what I'm doing and I modify these all the time as I learn and adapt. Anyway, this is mostly for me, but I mentioned them in a post once and someone asked me to write them down. So here they are.

###1. Everything is a Practice

There is no finish line. There's no winning, no losing. Not in human terms anyway. Individual projects may come to an end, but the practices that made them possible do not. Most things worth doing do not have a stopping point. There is no point where you've written enough, you've worked out enough. Everything is a practice. Embrace it. The practice is never done, which means you get to keep improving.

###2. Do It Yourself

It's probably cheaper and easier to buy most things, but when I can I'd rather make things myself. What else are you going to do with your life if you aren't making stuff? Watch TV? Stop buying stuff and hiring people for everything. Give yourself a chance to solve the problem first. Contrary to what it says on the label, professionals and experts aren't necessary. They'll do it faster and better than you will, but you'll learn and improve every time you do it yourself.

###3. Adapt to Your Surroundings

No matter where you go you will not fit in when you get there. The climate will be different, the people will be different, the food will be different. Don't expect the place to adapt to you and don't get bent out of shape when it doesn't.

One great way to do this is to simplify your life. Depending on a lot of stuff makes it hard to adapt. My favorite practical example is air conditioning. If you depend on air conditioning you aren't able to adapt to climate changes as well as someone who doesn't. As Jakob Lund Fisker [succinctly puts it](https://earlyretirementextreme.com/manifesto.html) "Comfort is having the sweat glands and metabolic tolerance to deal with heat and cold. It is not central heating or air conditioning which may fail or be unavailable." 

###4. Make Something You Like Everyday

In the world as it once was I think this need to create was fulfilled by hunting and to some extent farming. With those gone we're left with kind of a void[^1]. I have found that filling that void with creative endeavors is very satisfying. Other people find that studying something in detail fills that void. For me it's making stuff.

Digital stuff (like this site) is okay, but I prefer to make tangible stuff most of the time. Could be a delicious meal, could be some little thing around the bus, could be a paper airplane for the kids. *What* doesn't matter so much as the practice of making things. See also, rule 1.

###5. Retain Agency

Retaining agency means rejecting the passive. In some ways this is what you get when you practice rules 2, 3, and 4. You are the driving force behind your thoughts and actions, do not outsource them to others without carefully considering what you're giving up.

Agency is not control though, it is not bending the world to your will (see rule 3), it is merely ensuring that one's ideas and tools are one's own[^2].

###6. Avoid Waste

The only thing in short supply on this planet is time, do not waste it. Fuck entertainment, it is a waste of time. You are not on earth to be entertained. 

Similarly, fuck stuff. Make good financial decisions and get by with as little stuff as you can because money takes time to earn, and that is time you will never get back.

Waste is not natural (read up on ecology if this idea is new to you), avoid it in all things.


###7. Prefer the Analog

I find that the digital world isn't very satisfying. I have a rather outlandish theory about why. I think it lacks the rhythm of the natural world. I believe your body and spirit know the difference between the rhythms of the world they evolved in and the more recent additions. Don't get me wrong, I love the rhythm of a piston-driven engine, but I also think that the truly great engines are the ones that manage to mimic natural rhythms. 

###8. Don't Report Stories, Live Them

I have no training as a journalist. I studied philosophy, religion, and literature, but somehow I ended up writing for journalism outlets. I have no real problem with journalists -- the few left who actually do journalism, almost none of whom are published by major publishers -- but I also have no desire to be one.

The stories I tell are ultimately about me because that is what I know. The idea that you can tell other people's stories seems fundamentally wrong to me. They are not your stories, let other people tell their own stories.

###9. Novelty Wears Off, Routines Carry You Through

The novelty of new places, new people, new food, new whatever doesn't last long and ultimately isn't that exciting. It has an addictive nature too. If you always need the new something has gone astray I think. I think the novelty of travel lasts about two years, and then you look around and start thinking, well, now what? 

My experience has been that the answer to *now what* means reaching back to your old life and finding the things that made you happiest there and bringing them on the road with you. Doing your thing becomes your routine that you bring to a new place, and now you have something to offer that place: you. You're no longer just traveling to see the sights, you become, in a small way, for a short time, a part of that place.

###10. Live Small, Venture Wide

I stole this line from Pat Schulte of [Bumfuzzle](https://www.bumfuzzle.com/). The basic idea is that I am happiest owning very little and living in small spaces, which makes it easier to move through the world. 


###11. Try Everything Twice.### {: #twice }

As the Aussies would say, "have a crack at it." There are two parts here though. The first is a call to experience. Try it. But recognize that some things suck the first time you try them, so you might want to have a second crack at it.

[^1]: To borrow some ideas from Jacques Ellul et al, humans need goals, they need to put forth some effort in pursuit of those goals and they need to at least occasionally attain them. Ellul, and later Ted Kaczynski, have fun splitting hairs about what should fulfill these needs. I don't see much point in that, but I am going off personal experience here and, again, you might find otherwise.


[^2]: Matthew Crawford's *[Shop Class as Soul Craft](https://bookshop.org/books/shop-class-as-soulcraft-an-inquiry-into-the-value-of-work/9780143117469)* very much influenced my thinking on this subject. Crawford digs into why people like to repair things and concludes that this need to be capable of repair is part of a desire to escape the feeling of dependence, to reassert their agency over their stuff. He calls the individual who prizes his own agency the Spirited Man. This becomes a kind of archetype of the antidote to passive consumption. Passive consumption displaces agency, argues Crawford. One is no longer master of one's stuff because one does not truly understand how stuff works. "Spiritedness, then," writes Crawford, "may be allied with a spirit of inquiry, through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance." Exactly.
# SRC
## Scratch

I know several people who take tech holidays. I understand this urge, probably it's the only solution to what I think is the central problem of modern times—distraction and the inability to do deep work. That said, I am going to try other things to tame the beast.

I don't think this is an entirely new problem, I'm not even sure it's any worse than it ever was, it's just that anyone in any age facing this problem is daunted and it somehow makes one feel better I think to fall back on the belief that it's worse than ever, even if perhaps it is not.

Whatever the case, whatever the diagnosis may be doesn't really interest me. I am most interested in a cure that works for me. That's not to be overly selfish, but to recognize that what works for me isn't going to work for everyone. I am writing it down mainly in case it does prove helpful to you.

The first step is to eliminate your ability to multitask.

I used to be a fan of browser tabs, but lately I have come to think that the tab model, the conception of their being other stuff right there on the screen next to what you're trying to focus on is actually a huge distraction. I stumbled on this idea quite by accident. I was on Ocracoke Island for a while and the cell reception was awful[^1]. I struggled to load page. Like type in a URL, go boil water for tea, make tea, come back and the page still hasn't loaded.

At some point I thought I wonder if I could at least get the text gist of what I'm after by loading the page in w3m, the text-only cli-based web browser Linux users like us install out of habit but rarely use. At least I rarely used it. But I opened it up and low and behold, it worked. It rendered the text I needed, and it didn't take long using the exact same connection that wouldn't load in a graphical browser.  

That's not surprising I know, but yet it *was* surprising. 

The downside to w3m was that I didn't have a clue how to use it. In particular I didn't know how to open links in the background, something I've relied on in the browser for who know how many years? I typed man w3m and started reading. I quickly discovered that like Vim, w3m uses the concept of the buffer. While it does support tabs, I've never felt the need for tabs in Vim so I thought maybe I don't need them in w3m either. I like the buffer concept. It's like a stack of things, where only the top thing is visible. To find the other things you have to call up a list and read through it. As far as I know while typing this, this document is the only one open in this application. That's a powerful way to focus. There is nothing else on the screen to distract me.

Here's a screenshot of what my desktop looks like when working this way with Vim:

This way of working helps my focus on the task as hand. There is nothing else anywhere on the screen and that's how I find I do my best work. I can quickly and easily call up a list of all the other files I've edited recently and see something like this:


But all that information is not visible to me the rest of the time.


[^1]: With the 3G spectrum shutdown this is increasingly the case in remote locations like Ocracoke.

I still use them. I keep open some tabs for the stock market because those are really applications running the browser. 

## Intentional computing. 


"We want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We wanted to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very things we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hold in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.

"Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought. Now the order of thought is to begin with ourselves, and with our author and our end. Now what does the world think about? Never about that, but about dancing, playing the lute, singing, writing verse, tilting at the ring, etc., and fighting, becoming king, without thinking what it means to be a king or to be a man.

"I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." - Blaise Pascal

#############

I believe that screens are a distraction from life. 

There is no life in a screen. Life is what happens when we look away from this screen at the actual world around us. Perhaps it is strange to say this on a screen. Still, it feels like a truth we all know. We all used to know. At least, anyone over 35 knows. It is our task to carry this memory through. I am writing this for other people who want to spend less time staring at screens and more time not.

## Rules for Screens, Level Two

### Rule One: Prefer the Analog.

Here's the basic idea: only use a computer when you absolutely have to. Every time I reach for my laptop or phone I force myself pause and think—do I need to do this right now? Yes? Okay, but could I do whatever it is I am about to do *without* a screen? Quite often the answer is yes. So that's what I do. I use some analog tool instead. 

I write for a living, so when I am going to open my laptop chances are, I am about to write. For work, I do write on the laptop. There's too much to reference and link to not use a laptop. When I'm writing for myself though, I prefer to write things like this in a notebook with a pen. 

### Rule Two: Batch Your Queries

Writing is as least as much research as it is actual typing, and this tends to be where I really get sucked in to the endlessness of the network. In an effort to cut down on the amount of time I spend "researching" stuff that I probably don't really need to research, I now write down questions on paper instead of immediately typing them in duckduckgo. Only later do I set aside some time to go back to this list and actually look things up.

From this I have learned something important: I am not a very good judge of what is important to me. 

A lot of the things, *a lot*—like almost all -- of the things I go to look up on the internet are utterly trivial things I don't really care about once the two seconds where I did care have passed. I am forced to confront this every time I go over my day's list of stuff to look up later. Of all the things I write down in my notebook to look up later, I actually end up looking up maybe one in twenty. Probably less. I have no real way to catalog how much screen time this has saved me, but it feels like it must be ages.

Once I've exhausted all avenues of analog deferment I still give myself one more ultimatium that I call the Outkast ultimatum: forever ever? Is it really really that important? Right now? Really, really? It might pass. It will probably pass. No? Okay then.

## Rule Three: Single-Task Computing

At the end of the day.What greets me when I open my laptop is an entirely blank screen. Well, actually it's a gloomy, slightly blurry picture I took a long time ago somewhere deep in the lagoons of the Florida panhandle. The point though is that I don't leave any applications open, ever. This encourages what I call single task computing: open an application, complete a task, close the application and then the laptop. The task is done, the last page has been reached so you shut the book, so to speak.

This is the opposite of how we approach computers much of the time, but I find that trying to multitask on a computer ends up with me distracted by all things shiny and next thing I know an hour has gone by. Single task computing prevents this, but you have to be vigilante. Applications encourage the opposite—especially web browsers, where the tab essentially functions as an ever expanding task list.

Here's where I will suggest something heretical: hide your tab bar. Go into the browser's View menu and disable the tab bar. One tab, one task.

To understand how this can be powerful I have to take a technical detour. The application I do my writing in is called Vim. It is very old. Old enough that it predates the idea of a tab. Instead it has something it calls buffers. They're similar to the tabs in modern applications, but with one important difference: a buffer is a stack of pages with *only the top one visible*. 

Tabs are always visible. Tabs are a todo list you don't need. Tabs will will steal your attention. Buffers will not. To change buffers requires a conscious decision and effort on your part. You have to call up a list of buffers and then switch to one. You will never accidentally switch to another buffer. I have used this to my advantage as a way to focus when writing for years. 

You know that expression out of sight out of mind? That's buffers. For example I am typing this right now on a screen that looks like this:

That is about as uni-tasky as I've been able to make a screen. 

What I've really done here is recreate the typewriter, and no one has ever accuse a typewriter of stealing their attention.

**Rule four: Use The Machine Lest It Use You**

The reason for single task computing is to make sure you always have a task when you sit down to your laptop. Do not use the machine if you don't need to. When you do that the machine is using you. There is no such thing as entertainment. Entertainment is a word designed to hide the truth: you are poring precisions hours of your life into the machine. Why does the machine want your life? I have no idea, but observation suggests it does. Don't give your life away.

**Rule 5: Balance the digital with the Analog**

This started as a throwaway ending, but in the months since I started experimenting with this I've come to believe that this is the most important rule: every time you interact with the digital, make a point to spend the same amount of time not interacting with the digital. If I edit photos for this site for 30 minutes, then I go and either make something tangible, write in a notebook, draw a postcard, whatever it may be for 30 minutes. If you don't feel like making something than go for a walk or play with your kid, or lie down in your yard if you have one. Read a book in a hammock. Just do something that does not involve a screen. And do it for the same amount of time you spent on the screen. 

When I started doing this I found myself at a loss for what to do with myself, which was kind of terrifying. Was I really that used to mindlessly staring at a screen that I had nothing else to do? What did we use to do before we had screens? This is the advantage of being part of an analog generation—the last of those for a while -- you can think back to the pre-digital era, retrace your steps as it were. This ended up unlocking a whole flood of memories that I walked through in great detail in meditation, most of that is not relevant here, but one thing that came back to me was that we used to publish zines. Now that's one of the things I've been doing with what I think of as "my analog time". Another things I did was type, on a typewriter. I'm on the hunt for a good super compact model. Yeah, I know it's like the worst hipster cliche. I don't care. I'm craving that analog pounding of the keys. The sound of something happening in the world.



In order to tell you how I have managed to reduce my screen time it helps to look at the bigger picture. Let's start with the book.

If the screen is a distraction from life than so is a book. A good book is every bit as hard to put down and distracting from the shared human existence we call life as a screen. And yet the book feels less problematic. I think this is because a book has borders. I has hard limits. 

A book is a single world. The boundary of its world is well-defined. A book ends on the final page. Its depth is limited. We known our way in, we find our way out just as easily.

The story on the screen offers unlimited depth. A world without beginning or end. There is no final webpage. This is why we fret over the distractions of screens and never worry about books. 

Two things started me on a path to less screen time. One was the birth of my children, which were a kind of sledge hammer reminder that nothing on a screen matters. None of it actually exists and none of it matters. The people in front of you, they matter. Not just the people though, the tangible world, the world of artifacts you can hold in your hand. This is what matters. I have not watched a television show or movie since they were born. That screen was easy to stop.

The other thing that really changed my relationship to the screen world was moving into the bus. This was another sledge hammer reminder that the physical world is what matters. Given a choice between staring at a computer screen at night and sitting around a fire, staring up at the night sky, is, well, not even a choice.

These two things greatly reduced how much time I spent using a screen. But then we left the road and rented a house for a year and something happened. I went back to staring at the screen way too much. All that distance I thought I had created? Gone with single change of behavior. I slid right back into those old habits of tucking the kids in and sitting down at my desk to stare at a screen. 

I could defend myself and say that I wrote a novel in that time, but that only really accounts for maybe half the time I spent staring at that screen. And now that we're back in the road, I've once again had to wean myself off. I still pick campfires over screens, but like most of us I imagine, I still spend way to much time on a screen.

So how do you stop yourself from getting sucked into a world without end? 
I want to spend less though, and so I've been working at this for some time, finding ways to not just get off the screen, but handle the things that I used to do on a screen, without needing a screen. This time I don't want to relapse should I be away from life on the road for some reason. 

To lessen the time I spend using a screen I realized I needed to turn it into a book. I needed to put boarders on it and make sure it has a last page. In order to defeat that time sucking endless form of the network we're going to have to put some endings in place.

What I've done is to create many endings. Endings for every beginning. The best ending in this case is the beginning that never begins. Here are my five rules for avoiding the digital.

























I have no way to measure how much time browsing in a single window with buffers bidden away until I need them has saved me, but again I believe it is significant.














Now I do leave some background tabs open, mostly investing related tabs because I am a fairly active trader and I like to run through my charts every morning. But the rest of the day, I don't see those tabs.

I got to thinking about this recently because I was out on Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks for a while where the cell reception was awful[^1]. It was a struggle to load a webpage. I would type in a URL, go boil water for tea, make the tea, come back and the page still hasn't loaded. It was bad enough that I pulled out w3m, the text based browser that started life in 1995 and hasn't changed much since. I opened it up and low and behold, it worked. It rendered the text I needed, I got the info I wanted, and it didn't take long using the exact same connection that wouldn't load in a graphical browser.  

Enthused I set out to figure out how to use w3m. How, for example, did I open a link in a tab? Well, you can do that, but before I figured out how I learned that w3m uses the concept of buffers, much like Vim. Because I am lazy and familiar with buffers from Vim, I just configured a shortcut to show the w3m buffer list and I was on my way. I never open links in a new tab anymore, I know that all the previous tabs I've visited are there in the buffer list.

Now buffers might seem like tabs in some since, and perhaps like browsing history in another sense. They're actually neither for a variety of reasons, but the most important difference is that a buffer is a stack of pages with *only the top one visible*. Tabs are always visible. Tabs will steal your attention, buffers will not unless you choose to view the list of them. You know that expression out of sight out of mind? That's buffers. I have no way to measure how much time browsing in a single window with buffers bidden away until I need them has saved me, but again I believe it is significant.


prefer analog over digital
batch your queries before going digital
single task computing
    buffers are better than tabs
    get in and get out.



single task computing. open an application, do a task and then close it. I think this is ostly a web browser problem for most people, bug for me it's a terminal problem as well, there is always something I could be doing in a terminal, there is always one open. Just like there is always a browser windows open. But what if I worked differently, what if I close out that windows when the task was done? What if I put an edge on it? Gave it a shape that also meant an end to it? Would that just be more beginnings and endings, or would that maybe mean a greater space between myself and the machine?



Fail gracefully when possible (an elevator is still stairs even when broken mitch hedburg joke)

Complex systems are inherently fragile. The optimization that makes the system "easy" to use, also generally eliminates the redundancies and graceful degadation that makes a system resilient.


Much ink was spilled, many hands wrung, many complaints lodged about our addiction to screens. All this worry though, about what? I think the answer is distraction. This is what western philosophers—and ordinary people like you and I -- have worried about for centuries. The only difference to day is the degree for distraction. Why distraction? I think distraction bothers us because it keeps us from attending to the adventure of human existence.

At least I for one, want to spend more time attending to the adventure of shared human existence than I do screens. Screens are ultimately both addictive and boring. 

Interestingly though, what's true of a screen is also true of a book. After all a good book is every bit as hard to put down and as distracting from shared human existence as a screen. And yet the book feels less problematic. I think this is because a book has borders, has hard limits, has edges. 

A book's distraction from life is much less consuming than a computer screen. It is a single story. Its depth is limited. A book ends on the final page. The boundary of its world is well-defined. We known our way in, we find our way out just as easily.

## Back to X11

Earlier this year I upgraded my Lenovo laptop with a new, larger SSD. Video takes a staggering amount of disk space. In the process I decided to completely re-install everything. It had probably been at least five years since I've done that.

Normally I would never say anything about this because really, the software you run is just a tool. If it works for you then that's all that matters. However, since I once disregarded this otherwise excellent advice and wrote about how [I use Arch Linux](https://luxagraf.net/src/why-i-switched-arch-linux) and [Sway](https://luxagraf.net/src/guide-to-switching-i3-to-sway), I feel somewhat obligated to follow up and report that I still love Arch, but I no longer run Sway or Wayland. 

I went back to X.org. Sorry Wayland, but much as I love Sway, I did not love wrestling with MIDI controller drivers, JACK, video codecs and hardware acceleration and all the other elements of an audio/video workflow in Wayland. It can be done, but it's more work. I don't want to work at getting software to work. I'm too old for that shit. 

I want to open a video and edit. I want to plug in a microphone and record. If it's any more complicated than that -- and it was for me in Wayland with the mics I own -- I will find something else. Again, I really don't care what my software stack is, so long as I can create what I want to create with it.

So I went back to running Openbox with a Tint2 status bar. And you know what... I really like it.

Wayland was smoother, less graphically glitchy, but meh, whatever. Ninety-five percent of the time I'm writing in Vim in a Urxvt window. I even started [browsing the web in the terminal](https://luxagraf.net/src/console-based-web-browsing-w3m) half the time. I need smooth scrolling and transitions like I need a hole in my head. 

That said, I did take all of Sway's good ideas and try as best I could to replicate them in Openbox. So I still have the same keyboard shortcuts and honestly, aside from the fact that Tint2 has more icons than Waybar, and creating "desktops" isn't dynamic, I can't tell much difference. Even my battery life seems to have improved in X11, and that's why I switched to Wayland in the first place, was the better battery life I was getting. Apparently that's not true with this laptop (a Lenovo Flex 5, as opposed to the X270, which does get better battery life under Wayland).

pnyway, there you have it. X11 for the win. At least for me. For now.

## How to Get Work Done on a $75 Tablet

Turning a Fire 10 Tablet Into Something Useful

Fresh out of the box Amazon's Fire tablets are useless. They're just firehoses designed to shove Amazon content down your throat. That's why Amazon sells them for as little as $55 for the 10-inch model. Technically it's $150, but it frequently goes on sale for around, and sometimes under, $75. The time to buy is major shopping holidays, Prime Day and Black Friday/Cyber Monday are your best bet. 

To do any work you'll also want the Finite keyboard. The tablet-keyboard bundle typically runs about $75-$120 depending on the sale. It's $200 not on sale. Don't do that, it's not worth $200.

For $75 though, I think it's worth it. Once I strip the Amazon crap out and install a few useful apps, I have a workable device. The price is key for me. This is what I take when I head out to the beach or into the woods or up some dusty canyon for the day. It don't want to take my $600 laptop to those places. $75 tablet? Sure. Why not get it a little sandy here and there? So far (going on a year now), it's actually survived. Mostly. I did crack the screen, but it's not too bad yet.

It lets me work in places like this, which happens to be where I am typing right now (picnic tables in the middle of nowhere are rare, but I'll take it).

<img src="images/2023/2023-04-11_152857_st-george.jpg" id="image-3587" class="picwide" />

A Fire HD 10 is not the most pleasant thing to type on. The keyboard is cramped and there's no way to map caps lock to control, which trips me up multiple times a day. Still. After a year. But hey, it enables me to get outside and play and still get a little work done when I need to. 

For anyone else who might be interested, here's what I do.

First you need to disable all of Amazon's crap apps. Before you so that though, you need to make sure you have a new launcher and a new web browser installed, because if you turn off Amazon's defaults before you have new ones you will have nothing and you'll be stuck. There are millions of browsers and launchers for Android. I happen to like Vivaldi as a web browser, which you can download from UptoDown.com (which is officially supported by Vivaldi). For a launcher I like [Nova Launcher](https://nova-launcher.en.uptodown.com/android).

Once you have those it's time to start shutting off all the Amazon apps and services. To do that I use [these instructions](https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/guide-no-root-remove-amazon-apps-on-fire-10-hd-2019.4009547/) from the XDA forums. You need to install the adb developer tool, connect that to your fire, and then run a series of commands. The commands themselves are a touch of of date in the XDA article, so to disable some apps on newer tablets you may have to search for the new app names. 

Once you've eliminated Amazon from the Fire HD 10, you have a base on which to build. Over the years I've purposefully built a workflow based around very simple tools that are available everywhere. If it can run a terminal emulator, I can probably work on it. On Android devices, the app I need is Termux. That and a web browser and I can get by. All of those work fine without the Google Play Store installed. If you do need apps from the Play Store I wrote a tutorial on [how to install the Google Play Store](https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-install-google-play-store-on-amazon-fire-tablet/) for Wired that you can use.

For writing and accessing my documents and other files I use Termux, which is available via F-Droid. I write prose and code the same way, using Vim and Git. I track changes using Git and push them to a remote repo I host on a server. When I get back to my laptop, I can pull the work from the tablet and pickup where I left off. To make everything work you also need the Termux:API, which for some reason is a separate app. 

To set things up the way I like them I install Termux and then configure ssh access to my server. Once that's setup I can clone my dotfiles and setup Termux to mirror the way my laptop is setup. I can also [install git annex]() and clone my documents and notes folders. I don't often access these from the tablet, but I like to have them just in case. The last thing I do is clone my writing repository. That gets me a basic setup, but there are some things I do to make life on Android smoother.

First install the termux-api package with:

~~~
pkg install termux-api 
~~~ 

This gives you access to a shell command `termux-clipboard-set` and `-get` so you can copy and past from vim. I added this to my Termux .vimrc and use control copy in visual mode to send that text to the system clipboard:

~~~
vnoremap <C-x> :!termux-clipboard-set<CR>
vnoremap <C-c> :w !termux-clipboard-set<CR><CR>
inoremap <C-v> <ESC>:read !termux-clipboard-get<CR>i
~~~ 

That works for updating this site, but some sites I write for want rich text, which I generate using [Pandoc](https://pandoc.org) and then open in the browser using this script:

~~~
#!/data/data/com.termux/files/usr/bin/sh
cat $1 \
  | pandoc -t html --ascii > /storage/emulated/0/Download/output.html \
  && darkhttpd /storage/emulated/0/Download --daemon --addr 127.0.0.1 \
  && termux-open http://localhost:8080/output.html
~~~

I saved that as rtf.sh, made it executable with `chmod +x`, and put it on my path (which in my setup, includes `~/bin`). Then I run it with whatever file I am working on.

~~~
~/./bin/rtf.sh mymarkdown.txt
~~~

That'll open a new window in my browser with the formatted text and then I can copy and paste to where it needs to go. Note that you'll need to install [darkhttpd](https://github.com/emikulic/darkhttpd) (a very simple web server) with `pkg install darkhttpd`.

####Issues and Some Solutions

There's no `esc` key on the Finite keyboard, which is a problem for Vim users. I get around it by mapping `jj` to escape in my .vimrc. 

The one thing I have not solved is the capslock key. I am so used to having that set as both Control and Esc that I hit it several times a day and end up not only not running whatever keycombo shortcut I thought I was about to run, but also activating caps lock and thus messing up the next commands as well because they're now capital letter commands not lowercase. I've considered just prying off the key so it'd be harder to hit, but so far I haven't resorted to that. 

I've tried quite a few key remapping apps but none of them have worked consistently enough to rely on them. Such is life. It's $75, what do want really? I get by. I write and edit in vim, copy/paste things to the browser. That's all I need. Again, part of the reason I can work on a tiny $75 computer is that I have chosen to learn and rely on simple tools that work just about anywhere. 

That said, this thing is not perfect. The keyboard is prone to double typing letters and also not registering a space bar press. I end up spending more time editing when I write with it. I also constantly reach for the trackpad that isn't there. Also, sometimes I get to the middle of the woods and realize I don't have the latest version of the document I want to edit. Git comes to the rescue then though, I just create a new branch, work, push the branch to the remote repo, and then merge it to master by hand when I get back to my laptop. 

If you don't do everything in a terminal you might be able to still get something similar set up using other offline-friendly tools. I'm sure it's possible I just have no need so I haven't explored it. Anyway, if there's something you want to know, or you want me to try to see if it might work for you, feel free to email me, or leave a comment.


## Git Annex Piece

I rarely have access to fast internet. What little speed we get my wife uses to tutor her clients over Zoom. There's no way around that bandwidth.

I on the other hand can make do. I don't need fast internet. Or internet at all really. 

The fact that I don't need fast internet is not by chance or circumstance -- it's the result of technological choices made with the end goal of not needing bandwidth, or regular access to the internet, in mind. Despite our situation I manage to work remotely, record, store, and backup, gigabytes of audio, video, and photos, and have lived this way for six years now. 

I have discovered in this day and age of always-on internet and constant silent background updates that this way of living is somewhat anomalous to people. A few of them emailed me to ask how we do this. Rather than respond just to them, I thought I'd write it up here.

The question was something like, you are often in places with little to no bandwidth, but yet you advocate having three backups and store tons of data, how do you do that?

Well, secret to my system is a little program written by someone who also understands what it's like to live on limited bandwidth. That would be [Joey Hess](https://joeyh.name) and his program [git annex](https://git-annex.branchable.com).

If you are not a nerd and don't know what git is, nothing beyond here will make any sense to you, nor will my solution work for you. Sorry. If you do know what Git is, git annex is a wrapper around git that makes it possible to store large files in Git. 

That's nice, but that's not the power of git annex. The power of git annex is in the concept of remotes.




# School Bus Notes

32-35 ft school bus 
    6.6 duramax (chevy)
    buy from a desert area. direct from school district. tucson.
    re-register to RV
    SD have to show photos and fill out horse trailer conversion form
$8000 for build, $5000 for bus
have diesel heater
get bus with storage lockers already on it
Use mini split for air???
Roof storage with sitting area, nice for mornings
   have storage on left to avoid trees which will mainly be on right
repurpose applicances from scrapped RVs
- rear master bed on platform over engine if rear engine.
- Kids beds forward of that, two bunks, one with storage under
compost bin, separate wet scraps from dry.
- Shower/sink separate from toilet 
- large but not huge propane fridge.
- 3 propane canisters
wood burning stove maybe
1000 watts solar/ 400 Ah batteries
3000 W inverter to power strips
Shore power 30amp cord to aircon and battery charger
Diesel battery charging.
- 120 gallon water tank
- 120 gallon grey tank
- composting toilet https://separett.com:80/en/en/urine-dirverting-toilets
- These are the best way to splice wires and make branches: https://www.amazon.com/Wago-221-413-LEVER-NUTS-Conductor-Connectors/dp/B017NQWDY4/

- seal rust with chassis saver. $110 a gallon, but one gallon can do a 40ft bus
- SUBFLOOR MATERIALS:  
    1) Chassis Saver paint on rusty but clean floor.   
    2) 11:24 Owens Corning Foamular 250 NGX Extruded😊 Poly Styrene insulation sheets, 4 x 8 x 2” thick X 2 = 4” thick. (This is very dense. Not to be confused w/ Expanded Poly Styrene which has little balls like styrofoam.)  
    3) 16:05 Advantek Engineered OSB, 4 x 8 x 3/4”. (This is tight and highly weather and warp proof. Not to be confused w/ cheap flaky OSB.).  
    4). Everything is glued down w/ big tubes of Loctite PL3X. One tube per 4 X 8 sheet.  (Dries much faster and is stronger than Liquid Nails.)
- run 12V wiring external to walls as much as possible for access. ceiling lights are the exception.
- slat beds to keep mattresses dry
- inset shower pan in subfloor to give head space. still might want to make siting show instead.
- insulate with kilmat as vapor barrier, then foam board
- frame with 3/4 ACS plywood cut into 2 inch boards and run lengthwise to mimimize contact with steel frames. Double up if you want super strong points to hang stuff from https://inv.vern.cc/watch?v=codc32FDTZA
- frame with teks self-drilling wood to metal screws.

## Good YouTubes:

Backroad Purpose, okay, but wrong on some stuff. nice guy though: https://inv.vern.cc/channel/UCwVN4CujNmNSIf5xKxVMqXg
Chuck Cassidy, seems like an ass, but has experience and good tips: https://inv.vern.cc/watch?v=AGAKyXwfhYE&listen=false
Slow Road Stories, almost good. if they went more Erik Normark they'd be onto something, but they talk: https://inv.vern.cc/playlist?list=PL4B8jhs0NoPwZc68LS1WblBqDuSwkAJPx

## Engine research
DT466 NO E. No electronic injectors
or cummins 

cummings 8.3 engine in a 36 foot pusher.
Allison transmission

Cummings 24 valve 5.9L straight 6 turbo deisel

Alison MD 3060 -> possibly best transmission you can get (has overdrive, actually double overdrive if you get it unlocked by an allison dealer -- can help MPG).

Also sounds good: International 466 or 466e

## storage ideas

baskets for wall storage: https://www.amazon.com/mDesign-Portable-Farmhouse-Organizer-Entryway/dp/B08234PYXC

piping video: https://inv.vern.cc/watch?v=g0Y8bZjRhQQ